American education has traditionally been built around the harvest seasons.  It made sense when it began, children were to go to school when they could be afforded to be gone from the home.  These were the days of survival for the fittest. If you didn’t sow the seeds well, you didn’t eat the next winter.   Today’s educational reform could learn a lesson from the necessity of the harvest, except this time the future of our children is based on making sure the desire to learn and passion for creating is harvested, not the potatoes.

Children Love the Benefits of Learning

As a young public school teacher who always signed up for summer teaching for additional income I learned a valuable lesson.  Children don’t want to stop formal learning and friendships three months of the year.  It’s absolutely true.  Schools in West Texas where I began my teaching years had year round school calendars.  Teachers typically taught for six or seven weeks then had  five to ten day holiday, then we returned to school year round.  No one wanted to be away from that school…we loved the community of non-traditional learning we had created there. Hands on, creating, expectations high, failure allowed when trying, messy, fun learning that sparked our minds with hunger for more.

These days I’m a home school mom of our youngest, who is thirteen.   As much as it took me a few years to learn to “unschool” my expectations for homeschooling, being a six and a half hour planned to the second former teacher, I embraced teaching her the way she learns and she began to love learning. Gone forever were the tears, boredom, and frustration over spending days in a system that didn’t work at her speed or level or method for learning. Personally as a public school teacher I came home kicking and screaming, “24/7 in solitary with a 8 year old continually?” We have four children, the others had fared very well in schools, public and private…but each child is different.  After five years I am so regretful that I didn’t share this experience with all four of our children.

Learning With Passion Doesn’t End When School Does

This weekend we were at a tech conference with some of the brightest minds in America.  Why? Because I wanted her to hear men and women excited about creating. Our friends at the conference were passionate about their lives. I wanted my teenager to see that in action.  I could not have written a better script for my teen to hear when each and every speaker talked about the progression of brilliance.  Prepare for success: work hard, learn as much as you can, study, experience everything, learn new roles in your life, , listen read to other who do what you’d like to, take part, explore, involve yourself, play with your ideas, create messes…..go after the learning that excites you. Impressive when the men and women involved were the tops in their field of technology development.

She knew them as rawk stars of her video games, iphone applications, and books she’s read (Rework, Linchpin, New Leadership) but she listened to them as learners who had discovered the joy of learning.  She has been walking on air for 48 hours now, aware in a new way that her dyslexia is just a thing, not THE thing where she is concerned. Miracle of miracles, no less than 5 of her new heroes had found her and in casual conversation shared with her that they struggled with dyslexia in school, but it hadn’t halted them once they found their passion….they just took a different route to learn.

What are you learning with your children this summer? How can you engage the creativity and passion that is within you and your child together? What would you learn if you chose to?