by Daniel Yordy
Science and math are typically taught and learned in a vacuum, as numbers and diagrams from the pages of a workbook. But project-led learning gives an entirely different approach in which science and math become almost a sideshow, essential building blocks in the creation of something of great value to the child.
When I build a house or a set of kitchen cabinets, I enjoy the tools that I use. I work with them, and I know how to use them to do their part in the creation of this beautiful thing I am making. But the tools I use are never the main thing. I do not build a house for the sake of using tools. I use tools for the sake of building a house.
Science and math are tools; they are never the real reason for doing anything. In the classroom, lab experiments or math problems are given to the child only for the sake of learning “science” or “math” and never for the sake of the project itself.
Not so with project-led learning.
Let me explain with the Photography Project Guide I just completed. Photography is a lot of fun; especially with today’s digital cameras that allow a child to take an unending number of pictures and to see what works and what doesn’t immediately and without development costs. But since there are contests to be entered and great pictures to share with others and even to sell, your child finds a personal interest in making the best pictures possible.
Now, when you look through the best books on photography, books written, not for “learning science,” but for learning how to take great pictures, you quickly see how much “science” fills those books. In order to take great pictures, your child learns light and color, spectrum and lenses, all essential parts of physics. But, although the child will gain a working familiarity with this science, he or she will never see it as “science,” but as a means to an end – outstanding photographs.
Math especially, during the middle years of a child’s education, ought to be no more than a tool, a means to an end. By the time your child begins seventh grade, he or she has learned the basics of math. When they are sixteen or so, they are much more ready to endure the rigid requirements of higher level mathematics. But in the middle years, a child needs to know how the world works. They need to get their hands dirty, to build things, to fix things, to grow things.
Math at its core is logic, and logic does not come from memorizing numbers. Logic is learned inherently by the human mind from the transfer of measurement from mind to hand to object, and back through the eyes to the mind. In other words, when I draw lines on paper and assign measurements to those lines, then – go out and build with my hands what those lines say, seeing with my eyes what those measurements actually mean and whether the lines I drew on paper actually fit, and how they fit, in measuring, shaping, and fitting objects with my hand – by that means I learn logic.
You have a young man, a pile of boards, a hammer and some nails, and a gloriously large and well-branched tree in the back yard, and you have the perfect opportunity to learn math, not as numbers on paper, but as reality of space and definition in his mind. Show him the possibilities. Teach him to dream big. Promise him the biggest, baddest tree house in the neighborhood – but first, he has to figure it all out on paper – with measurements. This is how he learns math. So what if he misses the repetitive boredom other kids his age endure; when he does go back to the math text in later years, his mind will automatically comprehend the reality being presented and he will have insight that the students around him do not share.
Science and math become real to a middle school child not by having it beat over his or her head how “important” this will all be when they are “older,” but by being nothing more nor less than the essential tools picked up by that child to build a fort or to make a garden grow.
Daniel Yordy has worked with teenagers for over thirty years, both on the job, doing a wide range of activities with young men and women from construction to woodworking to gardening to milking cows, and in school, public, private, and home school. While obtaining his Masters Degree, he pondered the difference between the dictates of “modern education” and the practical reality he already knew produced far superior learning results than anything contrived in the modern (pretend) classroom. The result is Project-Led Learning, a weaving of the objectives of education into the actions of real-life, personal projects that contribute to a young person’s life and family.
Out of the philosophy of Project-Led Learning, Mr. Yordy has devised a series of Project Guides in ten different categories of learning. You can find out more about these exciting Guides at http://www.yguideacademy.com/ProjectLedLearning.html
Science and math are typically taught and learned in a vacuum, as numbers and diagrams from the pages of a workbook. But project-led learning gives an entirely different approach in which science and math become almost a sideshow, essential building blocks in the creation of something of great value to the child.
When I build a house or a set of kitchen cabinets, I enjoy the tools that I use. I work with them, and I know how to use them to do their part in the creation of this beautiful thing I am making. But the tools I use are never the main thing. I do not build a house for the sake of using tools. I use tools for the sake of building a house.
Science and math are tools; they are never the real reason for doing anything. In the classroom, lab experiments or math problems are given to the child only for the sake of learning “science” or “math” and never for the sake of the project itself.
Not so with project-led learning.
Let me explain with the Photography Project Guide I just completed. Photography is a lot of fun; especially with today’s digital cameras that allow a child to take an unending number of pictures and to see what works and what doesn’t immediately and without development costs. But since there are contests to be entered and great pictures to share with others and even to sell, your child finds a personal interest in making the best pictures possible.
Now, when you look through the best books on photography, books written, not for “learning science,” but for learning how to take great pictures, you quickly see how much “science” fills those books. In order to take great pictures, your child learns light and color, spectrum and lenses, all essential parts of physics. But, although the child will gain a working familiarity with this science, he or she will never see it as “science,” but as a means to an end – outstanding photographs.
Math especially, during the middle years of a child’s education, ought to be no more than a tool, a means to an end. By the time your child begins seventh grade, he or she has learned the basics of math. When they are sixteen or so, they are much more ready to endure the rigid requirements of higher level mathematics. But in the middle years, a child needs to know how the world works. They need to get their hands dirty, to build things, to fix things, to grow things.
Math at its core is logic, and logic does not come from memorizing numbers. Logic is learned inherently by the human mind from the transfer of measurement from mind to hand to object, and back through the eyes to the mind. In other words, when I draw lines on paper and assign measurements to those lines, then – go out and build with my hands what those lines say, seeing with my eyes what those measurements actually mean and whether the lines I drew on paper actually fit, and how they fit, in measuring, shaping, and fitting objects with my hand – by that means I learn logic.
You have a young man, a pile of boards, a hammer and some nails, and a gloriously large and well-branched tree in the back yard, and you have the perfect opportunity to learn math, not as numbers on paper, but as reality of space and definition in his mind. Show him the possibilities. Teach him to dream big. Promise him the biggest, baddest tree house in the neighborhood – but first, he has to figure it all out on paper – with measurements. This is how he learns math. So what if he misses the repetitive boredom other kids his age endure; when he does go back to the math text in later years, his mind will automatically comprehend the reality being presented and he will have insight that the students around him do not share.
Science and math become real to a middle school child not by having it beat over his or her head how “important” this will all be when they are “older,” but by being nothing more nor less than the essential tools picked up by that child to build a fort or to make a garden grow.
Daniel Yordy has worked with teenagers for over thirty years, both on the job, doing a wide range of activities with young men and women from construction to woodworking to gardening to milking cows, and in school, public, private, and home school. While obtaining his Masters Degree, he pondered the difference between the dictates of “modern education” and the practical reality he already knew produced far superior learning results than anything contrived in the modern (pretend) classroom. The result is Project-Led Learning, a weaving of the objectives of education into the actions of real-life, personal projects that contribute to a young person’s life and family.
Out of the philosophy of Project-Led Learning, Mr. Yordy has devised a series of Project Guides in ten different categories of learning. You can find out more about these exciting Guides at http://www.yguideacademy.com/ProjectLedLearning.html
