Never Graduate From Preschool
Image by fredy martinez enamorado from Pixabay
Remember when you were curious and self-motivated to stop and study things more closely? What happened to that and when did it happen?
We are all born learners and we’re wired to do it well—until adults invade our space with notions of efficiency and batch processing. I’m not talking about mayhem reigning in a catastrophic classroom. I am talking about the way in which curiosity and wonder are strangled by imposing the acquisition of facts as the dominant characteristic of kindergarten and elementary school curricula.
Facts fall into their rightful place as part of the answers to questions that children care about. If you’re honest, that’s also your preferred (and most effective) mode of learning also.
Dr. Laura Whitmore, a homeschool mom caught herself (and public school educators) imposing a curiosity destroying regimen on her children. She mentions two helpful resources that are linked immediately below. Following those is an approximate transcript of our podcast discussion.
Podcast with Dr. Laura Whitmore:
[00:03] Mike Gray: Doctor Laura Whitmore homeschools her four children using the insights of deep and durable learning. But it wasn't always so. The default for Laura, like most home educators, was to emphasize the efficient acquisition of a fact base. It didn't work. Join me today as we discuss optimal learning at home. Well, we welcome today, Laura Whitmore, who is a student from years ago and married Scott Whitmore, whom you heard from in a previous podcast this season. Laura, you and your husband Scott went through graduate school together, but you were acquainted long before graduate school. So good to see you again and to chat with you today. Thanks for joining us on the podcast.
[01:07] Laura Whitmore: Yeah, thanks for inviting me. This is great. I'm excited.
[01:10] Mike Gray: So, you both through a convoluted journey that may come up as we talk here, but you both received your PhD degrees from University of Iowa. Is yours in genetics like Scott's or what?
[01:25] Laura Whitmore: It is not. My PhD is in molecular and cellular biology, but all of my research from my masters on was really focused on innate immunology and inflammation. So, my degree is more broad, but my research has been fairly focused on innate immunology.
[01:43] Mike Gray: And right now, you're not involved in that kind of research unless squabbles between children count as part of inflammatory responses. So what are the ages of your children?
[01:59] Laura Whitmore: Our oldest is nine, so she's in third grade and then our next is seven. He's in first grade. We have a five-year-old in kindergarten and then a two-year-old who is our major distraction at home. So.
[02:13] Mike Gray: But he is learning.
[02:14] Laura Whitmore: He is learning so much.
[02:17] Mike Gray: So, with your academic background, take us through the path that moved you out of the research world and into the homeschooling decision for your four children.
[02:32] Laura Whitmore: So, I grew up in a military family, and I was in three public schools by fourth grade. And at that time, we lived overseas. And my parents decided when I was in fifth grade to pull us out and homeschool us because we knew we'd be moving overseas again in a year. And so, I was then homeschooled from fifth grade through 12th grade. Scott was homeschooled for kindergarten, but then went to the same private Christian school from first grade through 12th grade. So very different experiences growing up. But we had experienced public school, private school, and home school for a number of years. So, we felt like we knew the pros and cons of our situations. But of course, each of those is also different, whatever private school you're attending or public school or what you want for your homeschool. So, when our oldest was approaching kindergarten. We really took time to sit down, think through it together, and we went and visited the public school, talked to the principal. We went to the private school, took a tour, talked to that principal. We sat down with some homeschoolers. We actually didn't know very many homeschoolers at the time because we don't have a lot in our church setting, but we sat down with some, and we appreciated what they were doing, but we didn't feel like they were able to very clearly articulate why they were homeschooling. It was just more of, this is a matter of convenience for our family, but it might change next year. So, we really thought through it, and in the end, we decided to actually send our daughter to public school. I was still working as a research scientist at that time, half time, and we had a great childcare situation that involved my parents and a good friend of ours. And so, we felt like we had a good balance going on. So, we were like, oh, we're going to send Katie to our local public school. And so, we enrolled her in February of 2020 to start that fall. And then, of course, we had the pandemic. And so that just greatly altered what her school experience was going to be like that first year. So, in the fall of 2020, the whole school was starting their class online. So as a kindergartner, she got sent home with a laptop, several textbooks, and really hands on, fun looking packet of science materials. And so, she was very excited to start school that fall. And so, they would sign on each morning and greet their teacher, and then they would go on to their lessons. And so, it was just, it was kind of a unique opportunity because I could really have, you know, close range view of what she was learning and how she was learning it. And even though I would have been trying to volunteer in the classroom, you wouldn't have gotten the same look at what they were doing in that classroom setting.
[05:21] Mike Gray: Was that eye opening for you? I mean, there has continued to be, since 2020, a surge in parents making the call to homeschool their children because of what they observed, either how their children were being taught or what they were being taught, including what they weren't being taught. So. New York Times this week is kind of celebration is not the right word, but recounting stories of people early in the pandemic and the way they got hit one way or another. But was this revelatory in positive ways or negative ways, or how did it land with you?
[06:09] Laura Whitmore: I think both. I think Scott and I, when we made the decision to send Katie to public school thought that at some point we’d pull her. It would be because maybe we didn't agree with either what she was learning on the playground from fellow students or from content or something. And it wasn't that at all that we ended up pulling her for. So, the first year, she spent all of kindergarten online, and she at first was very excited. But the teacher, after the greeting, would give about an hour of direct teaching on math, and then they'd have a short break, and then she would give an hour of teaching on how to read. So, they're just at the point where they're learning to read, and then they would take a break, and then they would have many worksheets to do to try to help them practice what she taught and for her to be able to assess what they were learning from a distance because she wasn't in a classroom with them. So, I'm sure some of this would have looked different in the school setting, but by the end of the first year, Katie didn't want to do the worksheets anymore. We started first grade online as well. We had a brand-new baby at that point, and I was feeling a little overwhelmed with everything. So, she started first grade online, but within a week, it was just clear that she was an avid reader. We'd find her off hiding behind a chair, reading instead of sitting on the computer trying to circle every word that started with J. And so she was, she was bored and she was not wanting to do anything that she thought at that point was school. And so, Scott and I had to sit down and have a discussion about what we were going to do. And we had about 24 hours to decide because of deadlines that were closing. And so, we made a decision in those 24 hours to homeschool and try that for a year, see what it was like. And then we could reevaluate the next fall. And I, having been homeschooled myself, it was in the upper grade. So, I actually felt more comfortable, I think, if I would have been teaching high school than teaching a kindergartner, a first grader. Now, what she needed to know, I really felt like I don't know what she needs to know for first grade. So, I did a lot of reading and a lot of learning that year.
[08:24] Mike Gray: Yeah, we have some parallel experience there. People who've listened to this podcast over seasons, now the eighth season, know that the pandemic actually pushed my wife and I to do preschool homeschooling of one of our grandsons from when he was a little over two years old until he was five and a half. So, I never viewed myself as a preschool educator, but there were a lot of things about that that were eye opening, about seeing what works and what doesn't work. And one of the things really was just revisiting the reality of how intense small children can be about learning things. Their curiosity. There are comic strips that talk about the inability to walk around the block in any kind of a timely fashion because your child is transfixed by things that, you know, in your mind have always been there. They're part of the hardware of the neighborhood. So, I think among the many lessons, one of them was the curiosity, the innate desire to learn, which really didn't have to be artificially arrived at in any way. You didn't need to manipulate a child to make them curious. And I think that's true of children in general. So, I think that's a reality that needs to be respected by people who would educate our children early in life, whether preschool or kindergarten age in particular. But I think, and part of this may have to do with class sizes, although I'm not convinced that's the only reason for it, I think it's often disrespected or disregarded. So, is that your experience?
[10:33] Laura Whitmore: Definitely. All the children are born curious and eager to learn. They obviously are born using all their senses to take everything in that is going on around them. And so, they want to learn what is going on. And I think that's why Katie was off reading a book somewhere, is because she has that curiosity and that interest. And what she was being taught right then wasn't respecting that curiosity. I think for younger children, from the time they're young, they're able to understand and make a lot of connections way more than they are able to articulate at the time. And so, I think to respect that, we have to give them things to learn that are interesting. And I think math can be interesting. I think learning to read can be interesting. But I think that a lot of times we, we go beyond what their attention span is at the moment. And so, we're giving them this hour of teaching on this stuff, and we're losing their attention right away, which is teaching them that really their full attention isn't necessary because they're going to hear the thing repeated over and over. So, we oversimplify what we're teaching them. We over repeat it, and then that just makes them tune out and not listen anymore. And so, and then I think what I also saw was she was like, oh, well, the teacher is the one who knows what I need to learn. And so, these are what I need to learn. And I can kind of tune into just that. And then I can tune out everything else and think, oh, she's not going to say anything else that's interesting or pertaining to me when maybe later she would. So, she just learned, I think, to tune out. So, I think that that really does them a disservice because they're then looking to the teacher as being the source of knowledge. And if the teacher, what they're communicating isn't interesting to them, then they kind of start to lose that interest. Some students, I think it means they want to learn the minimal amount possible to just be able to get the good grade. And I think I was sometimes one of those students that was like, I just have to learn to be able to get my A and then I can forget everything. And I don't think that's how they're born. They're born wanting to learn. And so how can we help them experience that? So, I think we need to really present them, not just with school means, oh, we're going to sit down and do math for an hour. School means we're going to sit down and do learning to read for an hour, but actually give them things in school that capture their imagination. So yeah, teach them to read, but then also read to them, read them things that do capture the imagination and help them think beyond where they currently are thinking. So, give them art, give them poetry, give them music, and mostly take them outside. And I think that is one thing that bringing them into the classroom, especially earlier and earlier. Now as preschoolers, we are dampening their ability to be able to use their senses, all their senses, to explore. When we do that, when we just bring them inside, sit them down at a desk and make them sit there for an hour listening to the teacher.
[13:50] Mike Gray: So, I'm hearing that learning is pretty much all of life for the kid. And we're trying to, we're sending a message that it's really just this little package, whether it's a half day kindergarten or whatever it is. And you have to put up with that because that's how everybody else got equipped to function in society rather than that structured environment is a subset, ideally, of what it means to explore your interests and opportunities in your environment writ large.
[14:30] Laura Whitmore: Yes, I think that as I was going into teaching four years ago, I hadn't really sat down and thought about what is the end of education, what is my goal? And I think if you would have made me sit down at that point of time, I probably would have said, well, for education, there really should be a body of content that the child needs to learn so that when they're done with high school, they can go on to a job or to college. So, they need this body of content. They also obviously need some character formation. And if you're Christian parents, you need to be teaching them about Jesus. But I think that as I've gone on, I have seen it as a much more integrated learning process where all these things are together. But more than a body of content, I want to give them the potential to lead a very full life by training them to maturity. So, they're already born with the ability to understand so much, but they're immature, and they need to be trained to maturity, both spiritually, mentally, and physically. And that's kind of our role as a parent and as an educator who either is the parent or needs to come alongside the parent. We should be looking at them much more holistically.
[15:47] Mike Gray: So, you know, we talk about. People often do, but kids, when they're very young, about being sponges, like, they soak up everything, and the idea seems to be like, you just provide them with more facts to soak up. And isn't it cute that this kid can recite back things that they probably don't have any idea what they're talking about? But, yeah, they could jump on top of this. I remember my wife and I taught two-year-olds back when I was in graduate school who taught two-year-olds for Sunday school, and we had them, as two-year-olds, to memorize psalm 100. Okay. And their parents were blown away that these two-year-olds could learn to say Psalm 100. But I think the acquisition, although I’m not against scripture, memory per se, but if we just generalize that, like, we could have a two-year-old learn the Gettysburg address, it's not outside of the realm of possibility, but learn is not really the right word there. What we're talking about is repeat the Gettysburg address. So, in general, when we talk about the sponge, which is well known, the idea that we're going to fill the sponge with facts should be replaced. How, in your mind?
[17:12] Laura Whitmore: So, kids are excellent memorizers, but I think for long term retention, those things really need something to stick to. And I also think that just because they're good at rote memorization doesn't mean that that should be the primary focus of their education. I think in a way that would be like saying, you're good at baking bread, so you should bake bread all the time, and that should be the primary part of your diet, you know, when really, they need a much more balanced experience. And what I found is that children are good at memorizing things, but they're very good at making connections between ideas. And when they do that, they can recall things even better later. I read a great book called Map Making with Children by David Sobel, where he talks just about this, where there was a child in their neighborhood who had learned to memorize the names of the planets. And so, she was in, I think, early elementary school, maybe first grade, and she could whip off all the names of the planets in a row. And her parents just thought that was great. So, she did it for the neighbors and everything. But then, like a week later, she said, Mommy, what planet is Mexico on? And so, she really had no concept of what planets, in a way, even were, let alone how they are, like, spaced, how far apart they are. And so, she really had no concept of these things. And I think that this is so different than when we have our child look outside and say, where is the sun this morning? Where is the sun this morning for a week? And they realize, oh, the sun is in the same place each morning. And then we say that place is called east. The sun rises in the east, and it sets opposite in the west. And they can observe that and watch the sun go up in the east. And then we can walk to the park, and they realize in the morning we're walking towards the park, and that direction must be east. Church is in the opposite direction. That must be west. And then they start to realize, you can navigate using the sun, and these are all concrete things that they can experience, but are drawing all these connections in their mind that just memorizing the names of the planets in a row isn't going to do for them. They don't really even need to know that until they are able to make those connections in their brain or they're not going to stick. And I think that's sometimes clear when we then say, oh, Saturn is which number of planet? And they have to start there at the beginning and work their way through because they don't know it. Apart from just saying it in this kind of way, that shows that it's rote memorization and they haven't made these connections between places and what that actually means.
[19:57] Mike Gray: Yeah, and you mentioned several important ideas that we'll circle back around to in a few minutes, but you mentioned having a concept of something as opposed to a memorized fact. You talked about making connections. You talked about recognizing patterns and all those are crucial ingredients that hardly ever get any play time in talking about learning. But let's talk about one other element that's well known about children. So that it’s clear. We're talking about real children, not hypothetical children that adults are inventing somehow. So, the sponge we talked about. But the other thing that anybody who has experience with young children has experienced is their intense questioning that they, in fact, go through a period of several years where without any provocation, they ask questions. And usually, the question starts with a why, sometimes with a how, but more often with a why. So, I think we're again talking about respecting the way the child is designed, I think, divinely to learn. What's the motivation for those questions? Do you think so?
[21:17] Laura Whitmore: I think that they are truly curious. They have observed something, and they want to know how that thing came to be. They have realized just by observation that effects do have causes, and so they want to really, truly understand the cause and be able to link it to something that they already know so that they can figure out, well, if that's the case, then suddenly they see something maybe similar, and they can draw the connection between the two. I mean, so they are trying to make sense of the world around them.
[21:53] Mike Gray: Yeah. So, they're dealing with learning as manifested in the environment that they frequent and the kinds of things that occur to them partly from an internal thought life that may not be directly accessible to an adult, but they do have a thought life. They're not, like, inert. And that causes them to ask questions about the kinds of things that are coming to their minds as addressed by provocation from things in the environment, primarily physical things, but occasionally emotional states: ways in which they perceive somebody's unhappy or angry or something else. So that's, I think, a crucial piece. And adults usually respond to the why question with an answer.
[22:49] Laura Whitmore: Yep. Yeah.
[22:51] Mike Gray: So, I don't think that's usually the best response. It's the quickest way to get the child satisfied for the moment. But very often we experience, it's not very long before there's a follow up question or maybe multiple follow up questions. So, what would be better than just the answer to the question as we perceive their ability to absorb our answer?
[23:21] Laura Whitmore: Yeah. So, I think a great thing to do when the child asks a question is to actually ask them one in response, but maybe one that gives them a little bit of direction in the way they're thinking or try to get into their thinking more. What asking them a question does is it shows them that you're interested in what they're interested in, and it fosters discussion, and so you can kind of give them the next step and help them think. But maybe you shouldn't even always answer the question right away. I loved a few years ago, our son observed that the water was going down in our fish tank. And he asked my husband, he says, where is the water going from the fish tank? And so, Scott looked at it with him, and Scott said, where do you think it's going? And he said, on the floor. And Scott said, well, is the floor wet? And so, they're able to directly observe, is the floor wet? And he's like, no, the floor's not wet. Maybe it's going on the wall. And Scott said, is the wall wet? And he said, no, the wall's not wet. So, Scott said, why don't you think about it, and when you know the answer, come back and tell me and think about clouds. And so, we'd actually kind of forgotten about this discussion until three weeks later, we're sitting at the breakfast table, and our son looks up, grins at Scott, says, I know where the water goes from the fish tank. And he says, it goes into the humidity. When it rains, the water comes down, and then it goes back up, and it's humid. I know about clouds, too, that clouds get enough water, and then it rains. And Scott says, right. We call the water going into the air or the humidity evaporation, and when the temperature is right, the water comes together to make clouds. Then he said, we don't get clouds in the house. Well, sometimes we do. When do we get clouds in the house? And our son thought for a minute, and he says, when we bake. And he says, yes, sometimes steam comes out of the oven when we open it, and steam can come from a pot when it boils. And so, when Scott and I were processing this later, he had mentioned, you know, if I had merely answered the question and given him the term, he wouldn't have thought about this for himself. He wouldn't have made those connections, and he wouldn't have necessarily even done the learning. So often I think we're trying to do the thinking and the learning for the students when they are very capable of it, and all they need, maybe, is another idea to connect it to, or a little time to sit and wonder. I think even that process of just wondering about something instead of just getting the answer right away helps their brains contemplate the problem and figure out what connections they are able to draw, even if we need to fill it in and help them figure out the correct answer if it's not correct in the long run.
[26:17] Mike Gray: Yeah. And even in a formal classroom, this period of time, to think about how to answer a question as opposed to answering the question almost immediately. It's well known that in educational circles, when a faculty member asks a question, they usually answer their questions in less than 2 seconds. Yeah, and you're not going to get a quality response in 2 seconds to a question that's anything except a fact recall question. And for those kinds of questions, the student either remembers the fact or they don't remember the fact that as opposed to something that requires them to, as you say, make connections to potentially pull something together because of the question that is not immediately accessible. But they realize, maybe from a skillful environment, that, oh, we're putting two things side by side. We're not explicitly connecting them because I'm waiting for the student to make that connection, but I'm purposely bringing those two things on board in a timeframe that invites them to start finding parallels.
[27:36] Laura Whitmore: It's kind of funny because Scott journaled this experience, and that's why I have it so clearly written down. But he actually wrote in his journal when he did this several years ago that this is what he wrote. “This is what W. Michael Gray calls a principle. And the principle goes on to explain a lot more than simply how the water leaves the fish tank, because we could have given him the word evaporation, but that word wouldn't have meant that much to him even, I think, if you had given him the answer of, oh, it leaves by evaporation. And this is what evaporation is. It's water going into the air.” Making him draw those, bringing those two ideas close together and then letting him draw the connection, I think, is just a very valuable part of learning.
[28:19] Mike Gray: Yeah. So, you're talking about him developing for himself the idea of the concept of evaporation and what powers evaporation and what.
[28:33] Laura Whitmore: The results of evaporation and water going down. Yeah.
[28:37] Mike Gray: As opposed to a vocabulary term, which is the way this thing is usually dealt with. So, I think every adult recognizes the term concept, but maybe not so clear on, if I could say it this way, the concept of a concept, because a concept is nothing less than an idea that involves a pattern regularity that people have perceived over time. I mean, it's not going to help if my concept is totally alien to everybody else who uses the same label. And we have some of that problem in our society where people are using a term to mean very different things. And that's a recipe for miscommunication. I've talked, for instance, on a previous podcast about how useless, in my mind, at least, the term organic has become, because it can mean a whole host of things when it had a reasonably precise meaning at the outset. And we've simply adopted that term for whatever reasons. We might explore that at some point in a different podcast. But, you know, it's got warm and fuzzy associations these days for something to be organic, when, you know, biologically, we're organic beings, and we always have been warm and fuzzy or not. So, the concept, the idea involves something that we're trying to communicate shorthand instead of the long version of my concept of evaporation. We assume, and sometimes wrongly, that the other person has that same recognition of what's embodied in that concept. So, if we were being very precise, we would talk about heat energy, we would talk about changes in the state of matter. We would talk about the definition of a gas. And conceptually, what is a gas, and how is it different from a liquid? There's a lot going in there. So, it's a nice short way to leverage a label to invoke in somebody else's mind or evoke in their mind the concept that the idea comes up, and we share that concept, and we can be economical and communicating, as opposed to, we have this catalog of vocabulary terms that we have memorized definitions to years ago. And I remember in high school, that was the approach that the way you improved your vocabulary was they provided you with some words, and you looked up the definitions, and you used them in a sentence that you wrote out, and somebody, yeah, that's an appropriate way to use that term. And so somehow you built your vocabulary. And I think what I'm arguing for is building a vocabulary does not necessarily mean I'm building the underlying structure of a conceptual framework. And it might be then very, very surface. And if we probe a little bit, there's nothing under that other than the memorized definition and my sense of when it's appropriate to throw that label out there. So maybe we can be really concrete here. A concept is a category that we agree on labeling with a language label, because that concept, that category involves some kind of shared attribute, at least one, and maybe a whole group of attributes. So, I happen to be a tea drinker. I'm not a coffee drinker. I like the way coffee smells, but I'm very disappointed with how it tastes. And my wife has trained all of our children to be coffee drinkers. So, I'm in a category one. In our family, tea is a concept I know about a little bit more about teas, having drunk them for years. Black tea, green tree, white tea. I also know if we're going to be purists, there is no such thing as red tea. Although I've had rooibos tea before, it's not really a tea. And we could get really technical. Like, if it's not a tea, which is a particular kind of plant, processed in various ways to give us different kinds, then the proper term is a tisane. Okay? So that's going to lose most people, and who cares. And, you know, that's when you're some kind of a grammar Nazi or whatever, when you insist that this is not tea that we're drinking. You know, it's chamomile leaves or something else, and it's not. Or flowers, and it's not. It's not really a tea. But we have some sense of why you could be very precise or why you might be more forgiving. Because a tea is a type of infusion. Well, that's another term in most people's minds. Doesn't have anything much behind it, like, okay, you just lost me. I'm not quite sure I understand what an infusion is, but that's a conceptual category. That's broader than the conceptual category. Tea, which is really technically quite limited. Infusions are involved whenever we take plant or animal material, and we heat it with, usually, water. And so, we end up with soup and all kinds of other things. You know that that's an essential part of cooking, is to use hot water to extract flavor components as well as to tenderize what we're about to consume. So, every young child is in the process of doing that with every physical item they encounter in their environment. Over time, they start with physical, and then they move to more sophisticated things. But what they're really looking for is, is this an instance of that? They're trying to group things in a way that makes sense, that's not arbitrary. So that encounter then invites them to place that item, that encounter in some kind of a network of categories that they've already created and think that we had a previous podcast about what's called childhood amnesia. But the reason we don't remember past a certain point in life, even though we were mentally functional, is we didn't have our conceptual categories worked out. So, we had no labels that made sense because we weren't yet at the point of processing encounters that we had the means to work out a memory of a particular event. So that indicates, I think, the importance of concepts. Let's take milk. So how would you distinguish between the concept of milk and the way in which we would, and the child ultimately would link milk with other things in their environment? Because, of course, kids often, typically, unless they have an allergy, they start out drinking milk.
[36:37] Laura Whitmore: Yes. Yeah. So, I mean, a kid's first idea of milk is probably going to be a white cup or a white liquid in like a sippy cup. And they're going to hand it to them and say, here's milk. And if they ask for milk, they're going to be asking for this white liquid that tastes a certain way that you're going to hand them. And they're probably going to expect it to be cold and whatever. So, they're going to start with this very small idea of milk, and they're going to be watching to see where the milk comes from. They're going to say, oh, it comes from a jug in the fridge, you know, so that's going to be, oh, well, if I want milk, mom walks to the fridge, gets the jug. That's where the milk comes from. Then later they're going to realize the jug comes from the grocery store. And then they're going to say, oh, well, they're going to be learning either by watching if they're on a farm or by listening or by reading that milk probably for them, is coming from a cow as they get older. And that extends, maybe they realize milk can come from different animals. It can come from, maybe we talk about sheep's cheese or, but that's getting, you know, to cheese already. But they realize milk can come from a whole host of animals. And later, when much later, probably when they learn about mammals, that's something that's going to distinguish the category of mammals is that they make milk. But as a child, they're just going to watch where it's coming from. And then they're also going to recognize, well, maybe sometimes milk has flavors, and they're going to say, oh, I want chocolate milk, when they realize it's a brown liquid now, so they know it's related, but it tastes different. It might feel the same, but they're going to be like, oh, there's flavors, there's chocolate milk, or we can put honey in the milk. Or sometimes my children like cinnamon in their milk. And so, they're going to get ideas of sources and of flavors. And then as they get older again, the flavors are going to go back to, well, cow milk might take taste different than sheep milk, which might taste different than goat milk. And then they're going to realize, oh, well, milk can be used as an ingredient in other foods and to make things. So, they're going to be like, there's certain foods where milk is the primary ingredient, like yogurt or ice cream, and there's others where milk is more of a secondary ingredient, since there's in muffins or in waffles. And so, they're going to be putting all these things together, and then they're going to learn that there are certain things we call milk that aren't produced by mammals, such as soy milk and almond milk. And other people might drink those because there's something in milk that their body doesn't tolerate. You know, so there is suddenly lactose, and there, this friends maybe doesn't make enough lactase to digest that lactose. And so, then they start thinking about the composition of milk, and they start thinking milk has, they probably hear the parents say, drink this because it has calcium, it will make your bones strong. And so, they're gonna be putting all these different ideas of milk together in their brains, and they'll be linking those. They'll realize that we make cheese out of milk, and goat cheese has different flavor than sheep cheese, than cow cheese. And we might, you know, if they could become a good chef or cook someday, we might want to use a certain cheese because it has a certain flavor, because it came from a certain source. So, all this processing is what they are building in all their experiences, both drinking milk, listening to conversations about milk, observing where milk comes from. So, this is how they're really building that concept in their brain as they grow.
[40:11] Mike Gray: Yeah. So, it's part of life experience. It's part of how they're imposing order.
[40:16] Laura Whitmore: Yes.
[40:16] Mike Gray: On a whole universe of opportunities to, you know, we can't handle them one at a time. We, the brain is not going to deal with all of these as specific particulars that we need to keep creating categories that we can reference, and we could break them down further if we need to, as we understand why we put them in the category to begin with. So, I'm hearing that this process really is intrinsic, but we've been talking about young learners. Do you think that this is an extensible way of approaching learning across all of life? In other words, do you do this? Did you do this as a graduate student? Do you continue to do this as a mom raising kids looking for ideas?
[41:18] Laura Whitmore: Absolutely. I think I actually recognize it, that I do it more the older I get. And recognize it in my children. So, for instance, I had thought about teaching, but I had thought about teaching probably at a university or college level. As I'm moving through undergrad into my master's degree, into my PhD, into my postdoc, I thought, well, maybe I'll teach, but it will probably be, at this point, higher level. And then, you know, God changes some circumstances. And I'm at home teaching my children. And I'm suddenly realizing that a lot of the ways I was taught in college and a lot of what I've thought about higher education is actually very applicable to my young children. And I'm starting to make connections between, oh, this is how I was learning. I learn by reading interesting books and discussing those with other people and then making a connection to something else. And it's the same thing my children are doing. But I think one of the key things, too, is that that really has to be modeled to the children. There's certain things that we can teach them, but there's also certain things that we have to model, such as an interest in learning. And then an interest, I think, too, in making connections between different things. So, for example, I think if I read a book and they see me reading, they're going to say, oh, Mom enjoys reading. But if I read a book and then I discuss that, and they hear me discussing that with Scott or with a friend or with them. And often what that leads to is I'm connecting ideas to this and to this and to this. And this is why I think it's so interesting. They want to do the same thing. And so, they read something, and they come to me and they want to discuss. And I think often through discussion and talking, it is how we get clarity in those ideas and make more connections that we weren't thinking about. And suddenly somebody gives you a little another tidbit, and you like, oh, wow. Now, I can connect this to something completely different that I hadn't thought about. But this conversation has done with that. And so, I think throughout life, I've seen the way that I've built concepts, and I've seen ways that I've faltered in misconceptions, such as, you know, K through 12 should be learning this body of content, which I think was a misconception. I have that I have been since trying to connect to other ideas of children are good at making connections, and we need to be giving children true, interesting topics. But I think building conceptual categories really aids in our understanding of what's going on. And ultimately, that understanding also leads us to care about the things we're learning about. I think too, it promotes further curiosity. If I'm linking it to other things, I want to go back to those. And then that promotes further exploration and more questions. And so, it kind of naturally sets you up to learn more when you are connecting your knowledge into these concepts. And I also think that it's in recall. You know, we talk about memorizing rote facts, but if we have things in this concept, often, if we hit on one point of that, we start to recall things, and that's where our memory is truly showing that we have retained these things and we can link them together to draw us to what we're trying to remember at the time.
[44:59] Mike Gray: And if anybody doubts out there, like, oh, it sounds like the way a PhD's brain works, but maybe my brain doesn't work like that. I don't try and draw connections and look for analogies. I would point out the unfortunate emergence of an epidemic of conspiratorial thinking, which is nothing less than putting a bunch of data points, if we can put it that way, together as a pattern that speaks of dark, sinister intent, etcetera. And we've got a society that creates these over and over and over again. And very seldom does somebody say, yeah, that was a ridiculous thing, but I constructed that probably because I had these notions, preconceptions, we would say, before I even had a conceptual category, like I was trying to look for things that belonged together, and I erroneously pulled things together. Very seldom is there that kind of humility with conspiratorialists. But I think it should be clear that you don't have to be educated to do that. So, it takes some humility to recognize I had a misconception about this, or maybe even more humility: I have, present tense, a misconception about this. So conspiratorial thinking is one unfortunate result of having a misconception. But in general, because we learn by making patterns, invariably some of our patterns are going to be flawed. We're going to include things in a category that don't all belong in that category. So, what are the unfortunate results of inventing, personally a misconception? And we may say when we talk about somebody who we think is a little skewed that they're operating under a misconception. So, since we've all done that at one time or another, and there's always some danger when we lump things together and there's no quality control, check. We come back around to quality control in just a minute, because I think there is, and we've actually already talked about it. What are the results of having a misconception?
[47:45] Laura Whitmore: So, in one example I can think about, recently, we were reading the second book of the Pilgrim's Progress, and Matthew, Christiana's son has to eat. He eats this fruit that he shouldn't eat that's going to lead to death unless they give him a medicine and he purges it from his system. And so, my daughter heard this, and we talked about purging means he's vomiting out of his system. And then a couple weeks later, I was getting texts from my aunt on my phone because she was moving. And my daughter's like, why is she sending you pictures of puzzles and things? And I said, well, she's purging because she's moving. And my daughter just, you could. I looked at her and she, I could just see the wheels turning in her brain as she's trying to put together these ideas. And something you could see. And I was like, oh, this is a different kind of purging there. She had a misdefinition that was going to lead to a misconception, unless. But it didn't make sense in her brain. And she was able to say this. I can't put together the purging of vomiting with moving. And so, but she's trying to make the connection in her head. I could see the confusion. So, I think, one, it can lead to confusion in their thinking, and just, it doesn't make sense. And so, they feel confused and kind of, maybe kind of helpless, like, why are these things not connecting the way they should be connecting if they have a misconception? I think misconceptions, too, can often lead then to more misconceptions. Right. If we're making the wrong linkages, we are easily able to make then more linkages to things that don't make sense, which is how you get to conspiratorial thinking. I think one of the main consequences, though, I thought about, is that misconceptions about God can really affect how we think about him. And I was even thinking about this when I was sitting, not at the church we usually attend, but I was sitting somewhere in a children's thing, and they were talking about following others who follow Christ. And the person gave the example that when he came into the room, some of the children were sitting still and looking forward and listening, and others were like whispering with each other. And then the child who was trying so hard to sit still starts whispering with another one. And I think he was using this as an example of, well, we shouldn't be following the people who are whispering because they're not following Christ. And the children, if I looked around the room, it was very clear that the ones who are sitting still and looking forward were the little girls and the ones who were whispering were the little boys. And so, you could get several misconceptions if you look around and think, well, the girls must be better followers of Christ than the boys are. Or also that just because you're whispering in class automatically means you are not following Christ. And so, I think that those types of misconceptions can be especially damaging and, like, really set us up for how we think about God. And then also, this could also extend to how we think about other people. Right? So, misconceptions that if we're making connections that we shouldn't be making can give us misconceptions about people. It can give us misconceptions about God and about the creation. And so, again, misconceptions can lead to more misconceptions. So, I think we really have to think carefully about what are the consequences of not building these proper linkages from an early age.
[51:21] Mike Gray: Yeah. So maybe in closing, let's just talk about how you root out a misconception, because in general, I think the way it gets unseated is by asking questions. In your daughter's case, it was. I don't see how these two things can coexist under this one label, she felt free to ask the question, and that would be a healthy learning environment where somebody, every time there's this cognitive collision, feels like, just a second, I'm not ready to just uncritically absorb it just because you said it. I'm having this kind of noise in my head. But by the same token, you talked about, like, discussing a book. Well, that gives the chance for your thinking to be out in the open and for a healthy discussion to include questions that maybe are not ones that you thought about. We talk about somebody pushing back, which can be done gently, but pushing back usually involves asking a question. So, I think we're circling back to that early period in childhood where questions were the dominant mode of interacting with the environment, with, and I would say questions. Question posing attempts to answer questions, or, if you will, the quality control mechanism that continues to test and approve things that, quote, unquote, make sense and to reject things that don't appear to have a justification, or if they don't, if they're not absolutely wrong, it's just, it seems awfully shaky to hold on to that based on what I've been exposed to so far. So, I think what we're talking about, and I've used this phrase, which is not original with me, but I've used it before, that most education consists of providing answers, we could say factual answers to questions that nobody's really asking. So, it's not provoked by my own curiosity, my own desire to know. This doesn't add anything to me, but I need to write it down because there's some kind of accountability, there's some kind of a reward system or demerit system that will hold me accountable in the short term. But there's not this motivational factor, and it doesn't answer any question that's compelling to me at this moment. So, I think the answer orientation also completely bypasses the questioning model, which is intrinsic to the curiosity and wonder model and the utility of being able to solve problems, if I could understand this. So it's a package deal, really, you know, and I think there's so much that has been, by dint of tradition, a lot of it formed before we had textbooks where we've got this expert and write down everything that he says, or if you don't have anything to write with, memorize it, because there's no other way to record it. And that's become the operational approach to education. And there are lots of reasons for that. One of them is control. There's a reason why educators often talk about classroom management more than they talk about the logic of the curriculum. So how would you summarize the features of an optimal learning environment as you've encountered them through educating your own children and maybe reflected on adults and the way in which there are strong parallels?
[55:32] Laura Whitmore: I think the optimal learning environment is going to be an atmosphere where first the child is accepted as he is because he is loved by God, and he is valued and respected. And it's going to be one where he doesn't have to prove himself by feeling like he has to make a certain grade or something, but it's going to be an environment instead, where because he is valued and loved, his questions and ideas are welcomed and encouraged and discussed. If he feels like he has something valuable to contribute to the discussion or a question that is going to be answered seriously and help him with his learning, then I think he's going to be much more likely to want to do that thinking and that learning. I think as far as the physical environment, there's even ways that we can encourage that willingness to discuss and that where we can prompt ideas. I read something where they kind of defined ideas versus fact, as ideas are things that promote discussion and interests and involvement. And so, I think we can do that by really providing him the best that can be explored. And so that is lots of outdoor time because that's going to fuel his natural curiosity, but then also giving him an environment that's rich in the best we have to offer of books and music and art and poetry that are going to foster ideas and connections and curiosity and questions. So, I think that those really are the things that I can think of that the optimal learning environment is going to include. And it's all going to come back to then fostering that curiosity, that exploration, and helping him come up with good questions. One book I love, and it's just, I mean, it's not really an educational book, but it's John Muir Law's nature journaling book. And in it, he suggests that you write down for each thing. You know, I see, I wonder, and it reminds me of, and that's what I have written in the beginning of my nature journal. And my kids make an entry each day. And that really, when you aren't, when you're thinking, how can I start on this process of, you know, fostering my own curiosity and in my children, I feel like the prompts, I see something I wonder, and it makes you think, I wonder why that plant is leaning over towards this direction. Well, maybe, is it facing the sun? Is it getting knocked over by wind? And something it reminds me of, because what that's doing is it's helping you think, what is something where I can draw a connection between the things I already know. So, I feel like that is a very helpful way to get started on kind of this pathway of curiosity and exploration and coming up with questions that really help you develop concepts in you and your children.
[58:34] Mike Gray: And the curiosity will never be satisfied if you really are paying attention. So, I'm remembering the words of a well-known Christian hymn which says, “tThis is my father's world. And to my listening ears, all nature sings, and round me rings the music of the spheres.” So, fan your curiosity and go to the right places to get the answers. Thanks, Laura, for joining us today.
[59:02] Laura Whitmore: Thank you.
[59:08] Mike Gray: Join me in two weeks as we consider how to recognize teachable moments and maximize their impact. Recognizing the needs of the learner at these moments of openness is a key ingredient. Teachable moments can be orchestrated. You don't have to wait for random lightning bolts. See you soon.