She’s an absolute legend when it comes to understanding your child’s learning style, how to make the best educational choices, why more than ever you need to be involved in your child’s education and so much more! Cynthia Tobias is Julie Lyles Carr’s AllMomDoes podcast guest today and she shares how to help your child be a confident learner.
Show Notes:
Find Cynthia: Online | Book: Reclaiming Education: Teach Your Child to Be a Confident Learner
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Find AllMomDoes: Online | Instagram | Facebook | X
Transcription:
Cynthia Tobias:
The children in our elementary-age grades, the early primary grades, are getting ulcers and migraines because of the stress. And again, it’s forcing them into this mold and this pattern that if you don’t conform, if you don’t do a particular way of learning, there’s something wrong with you. No, I object. I firmly object. There is not something wrong with you. God created us to be so unique. He created every single child for a purpose only they can fulfill.
Julie Lyles Carr:
I’m Julie Lyles Carr, and you are listening to the AllMomDoes Podcast, part of the Purposely Podcast Network. Get ready for some great inspiration for the life you’re living, the kids you’re raising, the marriage that you’re nurturing, and the faith walk you’re walking, right here on the AllMomDoes Podcast.
Today on the AllMomDoes Podcast, I’m Julie Lyles Carr. I’m your host. And you get to meet someone who has been speaking into my life even when she didn’t know it, or even back when I had my first kids, and her wisdom and wit and insight and research has informed me all the way through kid number eight, when it comes to education, when it comes to learning style. We’ve had her on before. I’ll have Rebecca be sure and put that show in the show notes, but I am so excited to welcome back Cynthia Tobias. Cynthia, thank you for being with me today.
Cynthia Tobias:
Oh, it’s always great to be with you, Julie. Thanks.
Julie Lyles Carr:
You’re just the best. And I’ve told my listener before that I remember listening to you talking about learning styles and how it just was so important as I was considering, particularly with my oldest kids, what on earth we were going to do for school, and hearing you unpack learning styles. One of the books that I have loved of yours is The Way They Learn.
And, of course, I also love The Way We Work, all of these places where you help us understand how God is in this together in ways to learn differently, hear differently, experience things differently, study, intake information, work. And the honor that you give those individual characteristics has truly been a very important philosophy in a lot of my parenting, education, and work. So I thank you so much for that legacy that you have been working on through the years. So thank you.
Cynthia Tobias:
Well, thank you.
Julie Lyles Carr:
I’m excited, because you have a new lens through which you’re looking at education today. And I know for my listener, who is trying to navigate and make the best choice for their kids on what to do when it comes to school, this is going to be such a timely conversation. You’ve been talking about reclaiming education, and helping our kids become confident learners. I want to hear what inspired you to start looking at education through this lens.
Cynthia Tobias:
Well, if you get back to the basics, when you figure it, you send your children to school to learn, but they don’t automatically know how to do that. And so, wherever they’re getting taught, whether it’s at home, at a Christian school, at a public school, the teacher doesn’t have time or thoughts of how to help them learn. It’s simply, “Here’s what you have to do.” And in order to do it, if you’ve got a class of 31 or a class of 25, you just want them to sit down and be still and listen. It doesn’t work very well anyway.
But in 2020, parents got a real wake-up call, a true wake-up call, when the classroom moved into the living room, and they got to see firsthand, “Whoa, wait a minute. What is this? We always thought they’re putting the kids first. Education is neutral. They want the best for our kids.” And we found out it’s not necessarily true. In fact, often it isn’t true. And so much shifting went on. There was a huge spike in homeschooling. There was a big rush to figure out, “Ugh, how are we going to cope? Why is this child driving me crazy? He’s a fine student. Why isn’t she just cooperating?”
And so, as we grappled with that, I think a lot of parents came to terms with, “How are we going to do this? How are we going to get these kids to really learn if I don’t feel equipped to teach them, and where do we start?” And so, I wasn’t really planning to do another book, I’ll just be honest with you, because The Way They Learn, this is kind of its 30th anniversary. It’s still pretty strong. It’s still all true.
But my editors last… about 2022, they said, “Hey, The Way They Learn is going great. We love it, and it’s been wonderful. But we wondered, do you have another book like that in you?” And I said, “I was really kind of thinking I’d sort of ease off and relax a little and not…” They said, “Well, would you pray about it?” And oh, boy, “You know what that means?” I knew what that meant. I knew that if I prayed about it and God said, “Do it,” I would do it. I mean, what else would you do?
And so, sure enough, I mean, I really feel like, and I don’t want to over-spiritualize, but I really feel like He called me to do this book for such a time as this, for saying, “Look, there are some things that you need to know are out there, parents, that you may not have realized are as serious as they are. And there are some challenges for your children that you don’t even know about that they have to grapple with, and it’s getting harder and harder, and they’re getting further and further away from a biblical worldview that you instilled in them depending on where you send them to school.”
So that was sort of birth of the book. And then, what I did is I kind of negotiated, and Focus on the Family was very cooperative with this, but I said, “With this book, I think we not only should inform, but I want to put a free workbook along with it so that we help equip the parents immediately, so that it’s something the kids can answer questions to kind of figure out themselves. The parents can have a workbook for every single child, from preschool through adulthood, and it doesn’t cost them anything. And they can copy it, as long as they don’t add to it or take away from it. They can make all the copies they want, a Christian school teacher, a public school teacher, make a classroom set of these workbooks, 22-page, full-color workbooks, and have the kids work through it and talk to them about their learning style.”
And it’s one of my very favorite things about this book, is it’s a quick, compelling read, because I don’t like to write long books, and I write them quickly and practically. But at the end, in the very back of the book is a QR code. And when you click on the link in that QR code, instantly, this workbook will appear, and you can either… It’s PDF-fillable, so you can fill it in on a device, a tablet, a computer, or you can print it out and have kids fill it out.
And especially when you do it together, you have a lot of ahas and a lot of really interesting conversation and discussion, because, once again, we do go through the learning styles. We’ve kind of honed them down into something very understandable and very practical. And so, I’m very pleased to be affiliated with Focus on the Family and Tyndale Publishing. They were hand in hand with me on this one, even though at the beginning, it was a bold… They were going, “Whoa, this seems kind of bold. You’re getting kind of out there with some of this, but okay, we’ll do it.” And that’s how it happened, and here it is. The book is out.
Julie Lyles Carr:
You bring up something that I think, in many ways, we struggled with, which is the understanding that we have ownership of our kids’ education. And I get why we have arrived at that place. I think some of us have felt very unequipped. I mean, one of the top questions I had when I started looking into different ways to educate my kids was, “Well, how are you going to do this? You don’t have the specific training in this way or you don’t have that,” or there was the assumption that I didn’t.
And in some ways, we talk parents out, we talk ourselves out of understanding the level of ownership that we should have when it comes to our kids’ education. I see this happen, too, even in church circles. We somehow sort of go, “Well, I guess the youth pastor’s going to take care of my kids’ biblical education and discipline and discipleship. That’s on the youth pastor.”
And I myself have had to sit myself down again and go, “No. I need to be at the table with my high schoolers and talk to them, with Bibles open, about what my journey’s been and answer the questions they have.” That is still on me. No matter how robust and well-intentioned and all the things, the programs I have available to me through my local church are, the same is true in our educational systems that, at the end of the day, we, as parents, are the ones who truly have the responsibility and ownership, and the people in whom we entrust our kids’ education are people working for us.
And I don’t mean that in any kind of diminishing way. I mean, we are the ones who are tasked with making sure we’re in the right situations and equipping our kids in a way that is best for them. I love the subtitle of this book about teaching our kids how to be confident learners. One of the things that I definitely noticed through the years, with several of my kids, within my own experience and education, is the challenge when you learn differently or you approach content and information differently than what seems to work well for the other, say, 45% of the classroom, and how it can make you feel like you’re the dum-dum. You’re the one who can’t figure it out.
We had a family myth for a long time, Cynthia, that, “Julie was bad at math.” And this was the family joke for a long time, except when my brothers and I went for a standardized testing to get into college. And yes, I’m going to say this in a very self-aggrandizing and redemptive moment, and I scored higher than both my brothers, and I was able to test out of all my college math requirements in my premed degree.
But I would’ve told you, because of my experience in the traditional classroom in math, that I was terrible at math. I had no confidence in it, Cynthia, because I just didn’t intake the content the same way that most of the other kids did. What do you see are some of the ramifications of the efficiency of the larger classroom, I get it, and teaching models that work for the majority? But what happens to those kids who take on learning in a different way?
Cynthia Tobias:
Well, and the thing is that the majority, it doesn’t work for. One of the things I mentioned in the book, Horace Mann, we consider the father of education, his model that he came up with 175 years ago was, all children of the same age are in the same grade. They learn the same way at the same time, same length of time. And we take the subjects and we divide them all up into hours, to be taught separately, and to be tested with a test, and that’s it.
Well, first of all, we know all children don’t learn the same way, and we know all children the same age don’t necessarily belong in the same grade. And so, the other thing, the kicker is, Horace Mann died two decades before Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. As far as we’ve made technology advance right now, we’ve done nothing, nothing, really, to change this in the way that we work in the classroom.
And the Dell futures report came out just a few years ago saying the kids that are in K-12 right now, 85% of them are going to end up in a job that hasn’t been invented yet. They said, “Please, while you’re teaching them, teach them how to keep learning, because what they learn in school is going to rapidly change. It might even instantly change.”
Julie Lyles Carr:
Might be obsolete. Yeah.
Cynthia Tobias:
Oh, and Julie, we lack confidence. I mean, let’s face it, we do lack confidence. No matter what your college degree is, there’s an area of weakness where, if I had been homeschooling my children, I would’ve said, “There’s no way I’m going to teach them history or math or advanced science. I lack the confidence.” But what we have to remember is to go back to, we’re partners with our kids in learning. We find out where do they best learn. How do they best learn? Would it be at home? Would it be in a hybrid situation? Would it be in a Christian school? What can we afford? How can we do this?
And we have to take into account more than just simply, “The child is this age and needs to know this amount of learning.” It’s too important to consider worldview. And I think what happened, Julie, in 2020 was the whole worldview thing came into sharper focus, and we figured out, “Wait a minute, wait a minute. They’re teaching our children from an entirely different worldview than we believe.” There’s nothing in the secular humanist worldview that really gets along with our biblical or matches our biblical worldview at all.
So at the very least, we do need to be instilling in them a very strong foundation in that biblical worldview. But we need to be equipping them to say, “I’m going to have to do some hard things, and I’m going to have to figure out, what if I run into something I don’t understand? What if something’s hard for me? How am I going to do it?” No teacher out there has time to teach that to 20 or 30 kids.
Julie Lyles Carr:
It’s probably one of the number one questions I get being a mom of eight kids, and that question is, what on earth are y’all doing about college? And I can tell you, with eight different kids, eight different learning styles, eight different ideas about what the kids want when it comes to their careers and all of the rest, college has been a big topic of conversation around here.
Well, there is a university that I want you to know about, because it just hits so many of the things that are really important when it comes to considering your kids’ college education. George Fox University, it’s the number one private school in Oregon. It’s a Christian university. It’s located in the heart of the Pacific Northwest. And what’s so great is, in addition to a top-notch education, students have the opportunity to grow and deepen their faith, and they can learn in this really pivotal time in their lives who God made them to be.
I mean, let’s face it, we need more people coming out of our universities who know how to be leaders and how to be leaders with character. And George Fox University offers more than 60 academic majors, and that includes a nationally recognized engineering program, a nursing program. It allows your student to pursue their passions and prepare for the calling that God has for them. And let’s not forget about fun when it comes to college. George Fox University students have a great student life. There are weekly campus events. There’s chapel. There’s service opportunities. There are 23 NCAA Division III athletic teams.
Here’s something that is important to me. There’s a study abroad opportunity. So if your student wants to go and experience life somewhere else for a semester, they can do that. There’s outdoor recreation, because, of course, we’re talking about Oregon, so gorgeous. George Fox University could be just the perfect fit for your student as you are looking into college, career, and all that goes beyond. George Fox University, where your student will learn and thrive in the center of it all.
That became one of the real heartbeats of our educational journey with our kids, was my goal, if I can help make them autodidactic, if I can help them realize that they can teach themselves anything that they really want to learn with the number of resources that are out there. And I have to say, in this lab of the Lyles Carr household, that has actually worked well for my kids who have launched. There is a confidence in knowing that you can learn something if you want to learn it, and you can learn it all on your own, and you can learn it in your way, and you can learn it in the way that suits best the way that God designed your brain.
I love how you bring up Horace Mann and educational theory, because one of the things that he did that I still think is a crossover that is so different than a Christian perspective and worldview is, in that segregating to specific ages by age date, he created a community base for us. And I don’t think this was his intention when he did it, but he created a community base for us where, oftentimes, we are only hanging out with people who are our age and in our season of life, and I see it replicated in the church all the time, Cynthia.
And believe me, I have loved the groups that I’ve been part of, the small groups, the Sunday school classes, whatever, where we were all in some of the same ages and stages of life. There is that affinity that’s really great. However, even that is not a Christian view of community. A Christian view of community was very much that you should have people who are older than you and people who are younger than you, and we should all be sowing into one another’s lives. And so, in that way, I think we can even see where educational theory has permeated some of the ways in which we experience community at the church level. We feel the necessity to segregate out by age.
I know one of the things that I have found to be really powerful in our educational journey was making sure that my kids had access to people in different ages and stages of life, including other students, because sometimes the thing that I might be struggling to get my kid to care about, they cared about more when the kid they looked up to in their dance class was working on her chemistry lesson, and they were like, “Ooh, she is pretty cool, and I like her, and I want to see how she’s doing what she’s doing.” Sometimes that was really inspiring.
Cynthia Tobias:
Right.
Julie Lyles Carr:
How can we make that part of our experience in education where we’re not so siloed in terms of just a specific age or grade, meaning you’re only hanging out with these people who were born between this date and this date?
Cynthia Tobias:
We give a great example in chapter 10 of the book of a wonderful hybrid model up in Everett and Bothell. I think they have something like 600 kids, many, many families together. And they have one class, one day on Monday and one day on Wednesday, where the kids can come up, and it’s almost like it’s all elective classes. So they’re mixed with a whole lot of ages of kids.
And the other thing that needs to be mixed though, I think, Julie, is that… And when you think about what struck me when I was doing research for this book, the Department of Education and how greatly increased the Special Education Disabilities Act has been, and how attention deficit hyperactivity disorder has now been classified as a psychiatric disorder, and how there’s no way to really tell that this… When you say a child has an attention deficit, my first question is always, “Well, what were you asking her to pay attention to? Because that really makes a difference.”
Julie Lyles Carr:
Right.
Cynthia Tobias:
And some of the shocking statistics, according to the American Psychological Association, one in 10 preschoolers in school right now, one in 10 preschoolers has had thoughts of ending their life. And the children in our elementary-age grades, the early primary grades, are getting ulcers and migraines because of the stress.
And again, it’s forcing them into this mold and this pattern that if you don’t conform, if you don’t do a particular way of learning, there’s something wrong with you. No, I object. I firmly object. There is not something wrong with you. God created us to be so unique. He created every single child for a purpose only they can fulfill.
And I was just with a group of parents this last week, and one mom raised her hand, and she said, “Well, how can you just decide what their learning strengths are?” And I asked the group, I said, “Well, do any of you have kids that are irritating you right now, annoying you?” Lots of hands went up. I said, “The chances are good. It’s because they just don’t do it like you do it.” I mean, let’s just be honest. The kid who talks and talks and talks and talks and won’t shut up and talks and interrupts, well, okay, it is annoying, but it’s also pretty highly auditory, which means he’s probably trying to learn. The auditory who needs to learn by hearing needs to learn by hearing themselves. Right?
So until he hears his own voice say it, he’s not going to get it and remember it, because he doesn’t have a chance to talk about, versus the visual kid, like me, who I’m just trying while you’re talking to picture what you’re talking about. So if all you’re doing is talking, I’m clutching at straws trying to figure out, “What do you mean? I can’t even see that in my mind, and I look like I’m daydreaming. I look like I’m not paying attention. Well, I just don’t get it.”
And that kinesthetic child, who’s constantly, constantly, constantly moving. Well, there’s a really good reason she’s moving, speaking on my own behalf, a kinetic too. If I can’t move in order to learn, and I can’t move, my body’s only thinking about one thing. My body’s screaming at me about one thing. What is it? Moving. So as long as my body is talking that loud and says, “If you don’t move, you can’t listen,” then until I can move a little, even if I’m just turning in my chair, my body goes, “Okay. You can go ahead and pay attention now, because you’ve got to let me move.”
I was recording my audiobook a couple, three weeks ago, just in this tiny little studio. And so, I was holding very still, because it’s important with the microphone. And she had to stop me a few times. She goes, “You really do move a lot, you know.” And I said, “I do?” I mean, because I had really-
Julie Lyles Carr:
“I’m holding still. This is my version of holding still.”
Cynthia Tobias:
She said, “Well, yeah, you lean back and then you lean forward, and you’re turning in your seat.” And I said, “I don’t even know I’m doing that, because I’m so focused on the task.” But she’s focused on, “You have to sit still. You cannot have your body moving and bumping into things.” So sometimes there’s a simple explanation, and the practical doesn’t always win out in a classroom, but you have a chance as a parent. You’re their first and most influential teacher.
So when you have them at home with you and they’re working, and they’re trying to figure out and they’re bored, or they want to do it a different way, this is your golden opportunity to help them figure out, “Ugh, why is this hard for me?” And one of the questions in the workbook is, if you could go to school between 6:00 AM and noon and get out, or start at noon and get out at 6:00, which one would you choose?
It’s about 50/50. I mean, some of them just go, “Oh, I would definitely go. I’m happy to be there at 6:00.” And some parents would be going, “Oh, no way could I do it.” But awareness is half the battle. And that’s why I’m excited about this book, where you can actually give your kids that awareness and talk about it with them, and they can feel… Every single child has potential for success.
And it might look different for them than somebody else, but they can be successful, and it doesn’t have to measure up to exactly what it looks like for everybody else. And that’s when you really get this empowerment, not only of, “Who I am that God created me to be,” but, “What do I need when I get in new situations and circumstances, and they don’t match what I naturally am? How do I cope? What do I do? What do I know about myself that I’m going to need that can help me cope?”
Julie Lyles Carr:
Right. I think that’s such a beautiful way to wind that around, because it is going to be difficult, even in a homeschool environment, Christian school environment, hybrid environment, whatever the environment is. It’s not always going to exactly match, even with the best awareness, what each individual kid might need. I even know in our homeschool experience, believe me, I was doing backflips trying to do what I could to accommodate as best I could the different learning styles in our household, and then there were simply times just for survival. I needed everybody to line up and do it a certain way-
Cynthia Tobias:
That’s right.
Julie Lyles Carr:
… for my own mental health.
Cynthia Tobias:
And that’s an important key, because one of the things that we do with this book and with teaching your kids about it is you’re shifting responsibility to them for their own success, because when they’re involved in finding solutions for their own success, when they leave you, they’re practiced at it. We have a formula for success in the book and the workbook: know your strengths, you figure out what you need to succeed, and then you prove that it works, because the accountability is there.
But just like you’re the perfect example, you’ve got eight kids learning eight different ways. And there are times when, “I’m sorry, we have to just all do it this way. And then when you’re going to go do your homework on it or you’re going to go do your activities, you can choose your own way, but there are times when you won’t have a choice. So what will you do when you don’t have a choice?”
And then if they know… Well, I know if I could have movement, or I give the classic example of, if I had known then what I know about myself now and my parents could have afforded it, if they could have gone out and bought a booth at a used restaurant supply and put it in my bedroom, I would’ve been happy as a clam. Productive? Oh, you bet. I got snacks. I got drinks. I got a comfortable place to sit. I got a little music. I got people that could come and go.
It’s just a matter of knowing myself well enough, and then I’m confident. Well, I’m confident that this isn’t because I’m stupid, but it’s obvious that I’m not at my best in the afternoon. So you build the confidence in your child two ways by teaching them about their strengths, and then by having them recognize what to do when the strengths don’t match the situation.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Right. Those workarounds. I love that you bring up the restaurant booth, how that would’ve been a powerful educational tool for you. I have said with a couple of my kids, the most important educational tool we had, and still have to this day, is our treadmill. I have a couple kids-
Cynthia Tobias:
Oh, is it?
Julie Lyles Carr:
… that you throw them on a treadmill, if they are struggling to be attentive to something, if they’re stuck, if they are getting fidgety, or if they just want to go learn it while they’re on the treadmill, they just do better when their body is in motion. And now, Cynthia, I see all these people, and I can easily be in that same crowd, that we’ve got our standing desks and we’ve got our walking pads, because we’ve come to understand how much more productive and focused we are in those situations. And yet, we’re typically not providing those kind of opportunities for kids in the classroom just yet, even though we-
Cynthia Tobias:
That’s right. Absolutely.
Julie Lyles Carr:
… as adults understand, “Hey, sometimes I need a little shot of caffeine. Sometimes I need a little walk around the block. Sometimes I need that walking pad. Sometimes I need my noise-canceling headphones so I can’t hear anything.” And yet, we expect our kids to somehow be able to work and work at a premium in less-than-ideal circumstances. Part of what I’ve always loved in your work is your boldness to disconnect learning style from imagined behavioral issues. It took me a long time to get this, Cynthia.
I had a couple kids who truly, it would not look like they were listening to me at all. They would be standing on their heads and playing with LEGOs. And yet, when I would say, “So what did you hear me say about the Greek general so-and-so?” they could repeat it back to me, understand it, ask questions that made sense, even though in the visual space, most people would’ve thought they were not paying attention. Why do you think we’ve gotten to a place where we have such a strange and rigid expectation for what we think attentive behavior looks like?
Cynthia Tobias:
I think it’s because we want control. If you think about the control that a teacher wants in the classroom, on a grander scale, the control that maybe even some political pressures, the control they want to exercise. Back in 2022, there was a tweet, and I put it in the book, from the National Education Association that said, “No one knows better than your educators what your child needs to thrive and be loved.”
Well, I’m sorry, that’s not true. No one knows better than my parents what I need. And you want to control the classroom, and it’s natural. I taught in public school. It’s natural, because you can’t have everybody go on every which way while you’re teaching them. So it does take more effort, and it does take more discipline on the child’s part as well, but the way in which we teach it and how they stay intact in their self-esteem and their self-concept that says, “Okay. I’m not stupid, but I definitely am going to have to really do something drastic to get through this class. So what can I do?”
And again, it comes all down to that practical aspect that says, “How do we make sure our children still know that they are fearfully and wonderfully made when sometimes the whole world is telling them, ‘If you don’t conform to this, you have to take special medication. You have to take special measures. You’re not normal. You’re not like everybody else’?” The Bible doesn’t want me to be like everybody else. The Bible wants me to be like Jesus. Yes. But as far as having to be like everybody else in my learning, I was created uniquely, and that’s what we need to get across to them.
Julie Lyles Carr:
My in-laws were lifelong educators. Both ended up becoming principals, were the exact people you absolutely would want for your kids, teachers and principals. They loved, loved, loved kids, were the best grandparents I could have ever asked for, and I will say, particularly my mother-in-law, knew how to, in a very benevolent way, rule a classroom and rule it well with a great deal of efficiency and organization, and yet somehow still be able to honor kids in a unique way.
It didn’t mean she was always able to make accommodations for every learning need. It didn’t mean that she was trying really out-there kind of stuff, but she was very much, and my father-in-law too, very much wanting kids to succeed. And we may have parents who, they say, “I recognize that maybe everything’s not great in my kid’s classroom. And yet, at the same time, we’re with good people. We’re trying, and everybody’s trying.” It may be that a parent is saying, “There is simply not the kind of lifestyle choices that we would need to make right now in order to do something that’s a little more customized for my child.”
But in all of it, in whatever modality and in whatever season and whatever resources God is giving you right now for your child’s education, how do we motivate our kids in their desire for education? I found this to be an interesting conversation with other parents. I recently saw a meme that I thought was hilarious. There was a close-up shot of someone’s license plate, and it said, “2.1 GPA.” And you’re thinking, “Why would somebody put that on their personalized license plate?”
And then the broader shot was, it was on the back of a Maserati. You’re like, “Oh, okay.” So we have a lot of statistics that are flying at us that only 27% of people who graduate from college actually end up working in their major. We hear other stories of people who say, “I only got this far in school, but I was able to build XYZ.”
And on the other hand, I come from a parent line where my dad knew that education was his way out of a difficult economic upbringing, and he preached education to us constantly. He just knew that it was the key to being able to access more of our dreams. How do we motivate kids today to both understand the importance of their learning and yet not to completely shift their identity to their academic and scholarship achievements?
Cynthia Tobias:
Well, again, I think it comes back to switching our focus to, “What’s the point?” Look, the point is, we do need to understand this, and I just saw a meme the other day that have a woman who said, “The GPS obviously overestimates my ability to know how far 600 yards is. I’m making all these wrong turns, because she says, ‘In 600 yards, turn left.’ I don’t even have any concept of that.”
I mean, getting practical concepts across, but also, when they have to do difficult things to practicing, “Okay. This has to be done,” why do you think this is frustrating you? What do you think would make it easier for you to memorize this? Not necessarily questioning that you need to do it, but giving some thought and consideration, and shifting some responsibility to, “Okay. This is going to be hard.” And that’s good, because doing hard things gives you a great sense of accomplishment.
So if you’re going to do a hard thing, where do you need to be? How do you need to approach it? What’s going to help you get through it? And they have to start learning for themselves how to get themselves adjusted, because once they leave us, nobody will be around asking them those questions. So this is the time to help equip them.
There’s no magic formula, as you know, from motivation either. But once you get a taste of success in learning and in doing hard things, it’s pretty irresistible not to do more of it, because you see what you want there and you see, “Oh, I could do that if I did this. That’s all I have to do.” And so then, you just put your mind to it, and there you go.
Julie Lyles Carr:
I love those thoughts on motivation, because it is so individual. But you’re right. When we have failure after failure, we’re creating neuro-pathways that make us feel like we can’t do it. But if we can have little micro-successes along the way, and I think that’s part of what’s important for me as a parent too, is maybe we do want the kid to come home with the 100 on the spelling test. But we have to acknowledge that in their learning style, this really straightforward spelling test, do it this way, it may not be a fit.
So for that kid to come home and to have gotten, I don’t know, four or five out of 10, that could be amazing, and to be willing to celebrate that win for the purpose of creating those better neuro-pathways to say, “Oh, well, I got to four or five, right? Maybe next time I can get six,” instead of trying to work against the other direction, going, “Why can’t you do this?” You’re only solidifying for that kid an even more difficult learning curve to try to have to overcome, because now they’re associating it with failure. I really appreciate the idea of how to build that in.
Cynthia Tobias:
My favorite recent story… I was doing a radio interview with Mornings with Carmen, and she was saying, “Well, tell me what learning style this is.” She said, “Kindergarten Carmen. That’s me when I’m five. I come home from kindergarten, and I have a paper with an F on it. I got an F.” And she said, “My mom took the paper, and it had my name at the top and nothing underneath.” And she said, “How could you get an F? Why did you get an F?” And kindergarten Carmen said, “She told us to write our name and then to write it five times. And I wrote it right the first time, so I’m not going to write it five more times.”
Julie Lyles Carr:
Yeah. See, I think that’s success.
Cynthia Tobias:
“What’s the point?”
Julie Lyles Carr:
What’s the point?
Cynthia Tobias:
“You gave me an F, but I think I was successful, because the whole point was to write it right the first time.”
Julie Lyles Carr:
Correct. I love that. That’s amazing.
Cynthia Tobias:
Yup.
Julie Lyles Carr:
I think that kindergarten Carmen and I probably have a lot in common, actually.
Cynthia Tobias:
Yeah. Me too.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Well, Cynthia, I am so excited for the reader to get ahold of this and to be able to also experience the amazing PDF that you’ve included as part of this book so that they can get that workbook and start working with their kids, begin to answer some questions, learn more about their child’s learning style, find out more ideas from how their child actually perceives what their experience is like in the classroom, and not just base it on a GPA or what looks like is working, to really get granular with their kids. Where can the listener go to find out more about the book, find you, all that stuff?
Cynthia Tobias:
Cynthiatobias.com is the easiest way to do it. You can read an excerpt of the book. You can click and get the book ordered, even an autographed copy sent to you right away. That’s probably the best and fastest way.
Julie Lyles Carr:
All righty.
Cynthia Tobias:
And if I could say one more thing, Julie, I would say this: The most important thing to remember from this is don’t put your child’s education on autopilot and expect and hope for the best. You have to be involved one way or the other, however much or however little you can possibly be. The more you can be involved in your child’s education, the more successful they will be.
Julie Lyles Carr:
I love that, and such a great note to end on. That’s right. We got to take it off. We got to take it off the autopilot. We have to be willing and involved and engaged when it comes to getting these kids across the line when it comes to their education. Well, Cynthia, as always, I feel like I’ve just gotten to sit at the feet of a sage with all kinds of great information, wisdom, and lots of years of looking deeply into all of this, helping equip kids and their parents. Thank you so much for all that you do.
We’ll make sure and get all the places where you can find Cynthia’s new book, Reclaiming Education: Teach Your Child to Be a Confident Learner. We’ll make sure those links are in the show notes. Rebecca puts those together each and every week. Hey, come over and see me, usually on Instagram, julielylescarr. You can see me there at julielylescarr.com. And check out AllMomDoes, allmomdoes.com, allmomdoes on the socials, because that’s where we like to hang out. You’ll find a great community of women who are in the same seasons of life you are, asking the same questions, looking for the same inspiration.
Be sure and check out, too, God on the Go. We’ve been rolling for a few months now. It’s a podcast. It takes just about five minutes once a week. You can listen to it with your kids when you’re on the way to the soccer practice or sitting in the school pickup line. It’s there to help you make the minutes matter, to have conversations about God and about different topics that your kid is experiencing. It’s just a great place to launch into some of those really important mom-kid conversations. And I’ll see you next time on the AllMomDoes Podcast.
