There are two lasting bequests we can give our children. One is roots. The other is wings. (J. Hodding Carter)
As parents, let alone as teachers, we want to nurture the independence of our children. Today’s blog, on Ontario’s Family Day holiday, celebrates independence in teaching and learning. I have duly added independent instructional strategies to Page 1 and created a new Page 2. which begins to collect my own favorite historical and contemporary quotations on education.
The essence of independent learning is discovery—finding out something by ourselves. Yet one of the strangest things about learning independently is how much one's learning depends on others. We might forget that the memorable independent study projects — our very own model of the medieval castle in Grade 5 or research essay on Hamlet in Grade 13 — received the help of parents, teachers, and peers. But we continue to remember that special teacher who gave us an independent skill for life.
My greatest teachers appeared to favour traditional models of direct instruction; however, their ultimate purpose was to sow the seeds for independent learning. While Ms V. used drill and after-school remediation to teach us the art of précis writing, she did so in order to prepare us for the daily note taking and essay writing she knew we alone would be responsible for in college and university. While Mr. L. used top-down metric analysis to teach the patterns in poetry, he encouraged us, as the final test of understanding, to apply them to our own poems. He believed that this would allow us to take a lifelong pleasure in our creations.
As I now enjoy the luxury of learning, independent of institutions, I thank such taskmasters for their rigour. We need both roots and wings, indeed.
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