20150907 UPS AND DOWNS:

We do not learn all the time.

I have little sympathy to parents complaining about schools being too demanding. One of such complaints is that schools teach too fast. Like, every child learns at his or her own pace (which means, mine has a right to learn slow), etc.

Even before the recent dumbing down, schools were teaching too little and too slowly. And you know what, there is not much value in knowing that everybody else knows anyway. Let's leave the school alone and teach on our own. My only real complaint has always been that schools waste so much students' time just to keep their staff employed, and they are always hungry for more.

The notion of slow learning probably has to do with one-time programming. Kids get loaded with knowledge at school, and use it for the rest of their lives. Do I have to say that this is simply not so? Fighting for the student's right to be a slow learner the parents risk to leave she or he permanently falling behind. School actually tries to take care of those who are not catching up. The life does not.

There is another aspect though. It's well familiar to those who understand control, and practically unknown to many others. Once I noticed that my student was living through circles, or waves. A period of intellectual activity was followed by a "vegetative state", so to speak. This ups and downs were pronounced enough to disrupt learning, but I don't think they would qualify for cyclothymia. Even if they would, cyclothymia, like most of such "conditions", is nothing but a money sucker. We just got to learn to live in ourselves. I did.

It looks to me that school doesn't take such things into account. Returning to the previously taught topics, they assume that they have been learned. They just want to refresh the student's memory. In high school they mostly do it to prepare for the test (well, all their teaching is a preparation to the tests). Unfortunately, a "vegetative" period is more or less like a blackout. Given the cumulative nature of the teaching and the inevitable frustrations, this alone can make a good student bad.

The parents who teach their kids can discover the cycles (keeping records is essential) and take measures to prevent derailing at school. They just need to understand what's going on.

Here is another scenario. TLG wanted a pet. After understandable resistance, her mom suggested a bird. TLG was swept away. She was talking about birds, daydreaming, reading books, watching movies, and in the end of this period - which was rather short - I found that she completely forgot everything I taught her in the last couple months. Well, educations is as much about forgetting as it is about remembering, but imagine this happening while your child is attending school and supposed to be learning.