#13 Carrotless Learning – Series of #21 benefits of #OpenLearning

Chitra a mother sharing, “Yesterday Zohar and I were working on English…he told me he wanted to work by himself and ‘compose’ something as mama does on her email …then he said…words can be boring I will make it more interesting for myself…ok I said and waited…sharing what he worked on…he really enjoyed himself I could see him sitting with a smile and ignoring whatever was going on around him for almost 20 mins…What was interesting for me is the discussion we had after he shared this with me…I was consciously trying different ways rather than praising…I was not in a hurry to respond to it…I read and reread, we discussed his lettering style esp the word scattered where he has scattered the alphabets and the word big which he has made bigger size…then we talked about the idea of throwing our garbage into a black hole as a solution for earth’s garbage problem, and went into a tangent of a video game about garbage and black holes …then we went in another direction about his use of double quotes in the last line, which he has seen me do in my work as an editor, and he brought many of his books to show me that some use single and others use double quotes marks…then we spoke about pollution for a very long time….in all this time I realized I had not once said to him the good job or wow or anything (though of course as mom and writer I was delighted with his composition!) And we didn’t focus on the actual writing as an English assignment but still, we both ended up spending almost an hour after he shared this, just talking about it and discussion from many windows with really no effort on my part…by the and I felt we had covered English, science, geography, social awareness, and whatnot. Yes, for me the big a-ha was that If I had just praised the writing, we would have missed out on such a wonderful conversation and not even know it! “