Academics Can Be Play

I recently started rereading a book I remember reading and having mixed feelings about, It's OK Not to Share by Heather Shumaker. 

The title especially is probably my biggest disagreement with the book. I do think some people take making kids share too far, and children should have some things they never have to share, but the situation she describes of a child in a daycare choosing to play with the same toy all day and other kids being discouraged from interrupting that play seems to violate the Golden Rule she lays out: "It's OK If It's Not Hurting People or Property". I'd argue watching a peer play with a shared toy all day and not getting a chance to play with it at all that day is hurtful.

But another area of disagreement I have is that she buys into the false dichotomy of academics and play. It seems like far too many people act like those are inherently incompatible. Some, like Heather Shumaker, come down on the side of play, and others, like the preschools she toured and hated, come down on the side of academics. But both her and her opponents are fundamentally making the same mistake, in my opinion. And whether you make that mistake at 3 or at 7 (which is when Heather Shumaker recommends starting academics), it's still a mistake.

In my view, academics are not incompatible with play, and teaching them in playless drudgery is harmful at any age. Even for adults! (I've seen this firsthand among second language learners especially.)

My daughter learned to count and do basic addition through a mix of watching Numberblocks, playing with MathLinks cubes, counting everyday objects, and other joyful activities she actively chose to do. She's been tickled and fanned by hiragana flashcards and sees flashcards as just another kind of toy rather than something that requires drudgery and focus. She's jumped around imitating hiragana bouncing off a train in an app, and I've patiently waited for her to do that before gently encouraging her to touch the one the app wants her to find. She's watched Alphablocks and Veilig Leren Lezen, and stamped letter stamps all over paper and used lettered paperclips to match letters with a word family flipbook.

I started formally teaching and tracking academic goals with her at 21 months old. I'm sure Heather Shumaker would be horrified to hear that. Even most of those preschools that make 3 year olds sit most of the day with workbooks would be horrified, probably.

But my daughter wasn't bothered by it in the slightest. In fact, she has repeatedly indicated her enthusiastic consent to academic learning activities. In fact, if she indicates disinterest or outright dislike of a learning activity, we stop doing it immediately, so the very fact that we have done academics at all with that rule in place proves that she's not opposed to academic learning. Not only is she not opposed to it, she outright asks for it - for example, yesterday she requested we play Snakes and Ladders (which practices counting and addition to 100). We played about half a game, and then she decided to do something else.

I think most people nowadays would agree that a 21 month old should be learning through play, and many, like Heather Shumaker, would also say a 4 year old should be learning through play, too. But the idea that academics can't be playful inherently puts a deadline on learning through play. It implies that while learning through play may be appropriate for a small child, eventually, kids will need to put the games away and pull out the workbooks full of drudgery. I don't want that for my daughter.

When I was 12, I had to leave school to save my mental health. Mostly that was because my classmates were verbally and physically abusing me and my teachers ignored it even when they literally disrupted class to do so, but as my parents began trying to homeschool, they realized that conventional schooling, even when not accompanied by outright abuse, did not work for me. The school sent home assignments for my parents to give me, and I had meltdowns whenever they tried to make me do them.

So my parents realized that wasn't working, and pivoted to helping me teach myself by doing the things I actually enjoyed doing. In other words, play-based learning - just scaled up for a preteen instead of a preschooler or toddler.

For me that meant reading tons of books and Googling my every question about the world. It also meant listening to Rocking in the Free World and having my mom explain what the lyrics meant, and reading Shakespeare aloud with my dad and trying to put emotion into our lines, while he occasionally stopped to check my comprehension. It meant reading medical case studies in medical journals and then making up fictional stories about characters with the same disabilities as those case studies. It meant trolling forums meant for parents of kids with rare chromosome anomalies to infodump the genetics behind their children's disabilities to them. It meant going to a pet store and reading everything they had on their animals, Googling to learn more, and also spending a long time just getting to know the animals in-person.

As a kid who spent ages 5-12 being formally educated in a school, I didn't realize how much I was learning, and in the back of my mind, I had a fear that I was falling hopelessly behind (but I was even more afraid of doing schoolwork). When I was 21 and enrolling in university, we tried and failed to come up with a portfolio to prove how much I'd learned in homeschooling, and I decided to take the SAT. I got SAT prep books and then realized that I already knew most of what those books recommended to learn academically, and the main educational value of those books was in explaining the structure of the test. I ended up getting a pretty good score, even though in retrospect I needed disability accommodations I didn't think to ask for.

In university, I got to pick classes on topics that interested me, taught mainly by teachers who were passionate lifelong learners and communicated their passion for their subjects as they taught. And I flourished, even though I struggled with the bureaucracy of the system many times.

And even when I'm not in university, I'm still learning. I actively seek out opportunities to learn in joyful ways. I'm teaching myself Japanese, Dutch and Vlaamse Gebarentaal (Flemish Sign Language), and improving my stagnated French skills. I watch educational YouTube videos on topics like history, reptile husbandry, and paleontology. I model what being a lifelong joyful learner looks like to my daughter every day.

And as she gets older, I'll never pivot to giving her formal assignments and consequences for not completing them. (Only assignments with consequences will be responsibilities she chooses for herself, such as if she signs up for a team activity or project with a deadline.) I'll never tell her "spend the next hour reading this chapter of this textbook and doing the corresponding worksheet I printed out". Not because textbooks and worksheets won't be in her learning environment - they'll be there as options if she wants to do them - but if she'd rather learn probability by figuring out if her D&D character is better off wielding a weapon with 1d12 damage or one with 2d6 damage, that's what we'll do instead. Pretty much everything can be learned in multiple ways, multiple contexts and in different orders, and she will have the freedom to direct herself to the learning she's ready and interested in.

And when I'm gone, I hope she'll still be seeking out opportunities to learn new things.