On Optional Lessons
Oakland LEARN’s guiding principle is that all lessons are optional. This does not mean that all subjects are optional. All students are required to set goals for math, reading, and writing for each semester, and students in 1st grade and up are required to set goals for science and social studies. But it means that if any particular lesson isn’t working for a student - whether it’s too easy, too hard, too boring, or just less interesting than playing kittens in the playroom or reading a book in the library - the student is always allowed to walk out and go do another non-disruptive activity. If a student is continually avoiding a particular subject, we take this as feedback and attempt to offer new material or a new approach in that subject.
The big thing people want to know is - does that work? If you give kids the option, will they really choose to work? Won’t they instead choose to play all day? Honestly, when I started the school about a year and a half ago, I really wasn’t sure. I probably would have given about 50/50 odds that we would have to change tack.
The answer, it turns out, is that it depends a bit on what you mean by “work” (and depends somewhat, but less than I would have thought, on the child). Will the students sit at their schoolbooks all day, avoiding drawing, reading in the library, or playing in the playroom whenever it’s not dedicated recess time? Of course not! Most will spend at least half their time on play activities, as they should. Almost every kind of lesson will be skipped sometimes, even if there’s nothing wrong with it, because sometimes, the child most wants to play kittens with their friends, or wants to finish the novel that they’re lost in.
But will the students do enough work to proceed on grade level, and in some cases much faster? In my experience, yes - but only if you take their refusal as feedback, and come back the next day with something new, building up a larger and larger stable of ways to teach everything.
Obviously, the specifics vary from child to child - all of them love playing, but some of them set ambitious goals for themselves and work hard to achieve them whenever time is set aside for them. Some will reject the lessons given, then return three hours later and demand that I teach them a harder lesson of their own devising. And some, of course, prefer playing so much that they usually choose it, unless your activity really wins them over. But even these children, in the final accounting, have so far done enough work to remain on level or a year or so ahead, when presented with enough options and enough opportunity to learn on their own terms.
For example: today we had a workbook lesson for two of the younger students on skip-counting and number patterns. One of the two responded to the call; the other decided to keep playing. The one who responded worked hard for ten or fifteen minutes, which was all they needed to complete the two-page assignment, even though thirty minutes had been allotted for it. They ran off after, and happily spent the next fifteen minutes playing.
Five or ten minutes later, the student who had passed on the lesson came out of the playroom and saw the other one’s completed assignment. They were shocked and devastated to realize that they were now behind the other student by one assignment. When I told them that that was how skipping classes worked, they started crying and justifying the decision - they were just having so much fun!
I told them that I didn’t think they had made the wrong decision. Playing can be the right choice, if you’re having a lot of fun; that’s part of why children are allowed to skip lessons. But if you choose to skip the lesson, you won’t have done it. Sometimes - for an activity, a lecture, or a project that needs adult help - the lesson is lost forever, so you need to think carefully before you skip it. But this was a workbook lesson, and there was no reason whatsoever that the child couldn’t complete the lesson now that the game was over.
The child dried their tears, but began complaining that the lesson was too easy for them. I said, all right, can you show me whether you can do the next one?
And they could. They turned to the next two pages, and had a marvelous time coloring in different skip counting patterns on grids of 100 numbers.
Obviously, not every day is like this. Children do choose to skip lessons that are appropriately leveled for them, and some of those lessons are lost forever. Children do, occasionally, go all day without doing any work, though it’s rarer than I expected when I started doing this, and rarer than it was when the school first started, too. Children do sometimes avoid whole subjects, and it can take as long as a few weeks to find a new way of progressing that the child is happy with and willing to work with. And even when the children do agree, sometimes they agree because we resort to bribery - stickers and small 25¢ prizes for tackling lessons in their hardest subjects, and points for all schoolwork, which can be redeemed for votes on classroom extras or on educational videos watched after lessons are completed.
But they do learn, and they do it willingly, as more and more active participants in their own education. Do I think that every child is like that? Probably not every single one. But it’s a lot more kids than I would have expected when I started, and I never would have realized this if I hadn’t given them the opportunity to show me.
