Schooling Diaries

In the fall of 2019, I started a quest for optimal and affordable schooling for my 10-year-old son. He was about to enter the 6th grade, having studied for the previous 5 years at private schools organized per British educational system and run by British expatriate staff. The search for new options were triggered by the coincidence of two reasons, one banal and the other - more profound. The first one was that my personal income had suddenly dropped and I had started having doubts about continued financial sustainability of private schooling. The seeds for the second motivation, however, had been planted over the previous 2-3 years and my concerns had been growing. This was related to what appeared to be full impregnation of the schooling content and activities by left-wing globalist tendencies. I had also been growing increasingly sceptical about the values of multi-culturalism and secular ethics and felt that Christian kids should at least be given a chance to get acquainted with the Bible and Christian spirituality. Finally, one day, when I learnt that the kid's private British school was organizing a "learning" activity which was about staging a mock protest in the street, in the style of the Extinction Rebellion, my mind was made up. I decided to cut with it and start with home schooling, while exploring what else I could do to aid the education of my child. So, below are the resources and approaches, in crhonological order, which I employed in this pursuit.

Mathematics

• Khan Academy is a great platform for learning math. Its video explanations and exercise are superb and badges and other motivational items are effective. The kid loves it and is making great progress. His effort and results are fully recorded and auditable, which is also a great advantage.
• Learning via computing - I found that learning math and computer programming in parallel can significantly enhance mathematical cognition. I first heard this idea in a podcast from comuter scientist Allen Downey and then saw its effectiveness first-hand as I started applying the method with my son. For example, learning and practicing with variables and functions in the (Python) programming context gave the child a natural and engaging introduction to algebra concepts.

English language

• Reading - I buy books (Kindle version) appropriate for the child's age on Amazon. Every day, he reads 1-4 chapters (depending on chapter lenght), following which we review the content and new vocabulary. I also make him read a page or two out loud, to exercise his diction. Kindle is very handy, as he looks up unknown words in the online dictionary, highlights passages he likes for future reference, etc.
• Quizlet

Computer science

This is the field the current education system is probably most outdated in. With the on-going automation of knowledge work (aka Artificial Intelligence), kids will be at a great advantage if computer science and hands-on coding skills are taughtfrom early age.

• Some computer science theory - Khan Academy proved very useful again. Its short How Computers Work series, presented by Bill Gates and other real-world practitioners, is an excellent and fun introduction to the unverse of computing.
• Navigating an operating system - Some time ago, my brother-in-law presented my son with a Kano device, which is a Raspberry Pi based tiny computer, running on Linux operating system and packed with lots of entertaining educational software. Kano came very helpful now, as it contains a great game-style interactive tutorial on Linux. Thus, the kid learnt how Linux is organized and how to interact with it through the command-line interface. Any computer scientist or software developer will tell you that this skill is foundational for any subsequent endeavors in the world of programming.
• Coding - I decided to teach programming to the kid using the Python language. This is due to the language's 'interpreted' nature, syntax human-friendliness and widespread practial use. I purchased the book Python for Kids, which does a reasonably good job at teaching programming fundamentals in a fun and hands-on way. I set up the tooling on the cloud (Jupyter Notebook running on a small EC2 instance on AWS), to start familiarizing the kid with the cloud ecosystem. I think this was the right decision - it took very little effort on my part to set it up and the child understood basic concepts of elastic, on-demand virtual machines running off large data centers and learned how to 'ssh' into a remote machine and do 'local port forwarding' so he could open interact with remote notebooks through his local browser. It took me a lot of time and pain to understand the new paradigm of cloud computing and even more pain to pick up the relevant hands-on techniques. All this came naturally to the child, as he had no other prior paradigms in his head. He's really excited to own and work off a remote computer in Frankfurt (it happens to be in that AWS region).

Christianity

My child was born to Christian parents, in a predominantly Christian country and was baptized as a Christian. Therefore, it is my duty to at least expose him to Christian spirituality. Given the current hegemony of the left-wing globalist trend in Western education, where Crhistianity is neglected or even frowned upon, I believe the onus is on the Crhistian parent to instruct the child in the domain of faith.

On the more reasoned side of why Crhistian instruction matters, I find pure simple truth in words attribtued to G. K. Chesterton - When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing — they believe in anything. I know kids and adults around me believing and advocating various post-modern left-wing collectivist causes with the zeal of unhealthy religous fanaticism. Sad. I want to do everything I can to prevent my child go the same way.

I also find amazing Jordan Peterson's analysis on the importance of religion's "dreamlike structures" and the spiritual sickness that results when our articulated knowledge is dissociated from our dreams. It's in this youtube video from minute 6:40 to minute10:00.

• The Children's Illustrated Bible - this book presents key narratives and actors from the Old and New testaments, with nice illustrations. The child has been reading and pondering over it quite keenly.

At the beginning of the year, I came across this article from Forbes and it felt like a sign - Amercians Rank Google Internship Over a Harvard Degree.The title speaks for itself. According to the survey, when asked what they believe would be most helpful for a high school graduate to launch a career, Americans overwhelmingly recommend an internship at Google (60%) over a degree from Harvard< (40%). The study also states that there are very few believers in the work readiness of college graduates. Only 13% of U.S. adults, 11% of C-level executives and 6% of college and university trustees strongly agree with statements about the work readiness of graduates.

While the above study concerns post-high school education, it is also instructive for early schooling. I believe one cannot go wrong by teaching a kid, as early as possible, things that can be applied in real life and that can earn them money. Thinking hard about what I could teach my son in this spirit, at this stage, I decided to intensify his instruction in computer science and computer programming. Here are some additional resources and approaches, in addition to those mentioned in the earlier section, that I employed in this pursuit:

• Python Projects for Kids - is a reasonably good set of hands-on assignments and projects, progressively teaching Python programming basics. My son embraced it quite eagerly. I think the prior instruction (see previous "term") had whetted his appetite for and prepared him well for it.
• I mentioned Allen Downey earlier, in the context of math instruction. I am fascinated by his "computing-first" method of teaching conceptual matters such as math, probability and statistics, computer science. I reviewed his free books and set myself an ambitious and perhaps, preposterous, objective to use some them for the instruction of my 10-year-old son. On the one hand, these books are fairly advanced and look appropriate for high school or college students. On the other hand, they are built off first principles and are written clearly. The computing exercises in the books appear accessible. Therefore, I think I will give them a try. The way I intend to do it is to digest each book topic by topic and chapter by chapter and relay the content and exercises to my son in a way that he can understand and tackle. Thus, it will take significant time and effort.