Creator Spotlight - Tim Rutherford

Interview with a member of the Soaring Twenties Social Club with keen interests in education and mathematics

Jan 02, 2023

Today’s Creator Spotlight features Tim Rutherford, a UK based member of the Soaring Twenties Social Club who works as an educator with a particular passion for mathematics. His newsletter, Musings on Self-Directed Education, is a thoughtful look at education with a particular focus on (wait for it) self-directed education.

Here’s Tim!

When you were a teenager, what did you want to become when you grew up?

I don't really remember wanting to be anything specific when I was a teenager. I really enjoyed football but never dreamt of that being what I did as I played at county level and whilst I realised I was good, I also had the opportunity to realise that that was relative and there were plenty of good players who were better than me. At school I was quite good at numerous subjects. I think I would have imagined that I would take mathematics or French going forward to University if pushed, however, I distinctly remember thinking about doing French at University when I was about fifteen maybe and there was never any thought of what that would mean passed University, what that would lead to.
My parents believe in God and my father's particular life's journey meant that there was always a belief in us (my siblings and I) that we could be whatever we wanted to be; and along with that an indifference to pressure and presupposing how that might end up. Which was a freeing experience of teenagerhood quite at odds with many of my friends who had much more intense experiences at the end of their schooling as exams and "the future" became somewhat overbearing.

Do you prefer writing by keyboard, do you prefer pen and paper, or do you have another favorite method?

All of my essays relate to the one central question of: why do we relate to children the way we do? And I guess each article concludes with that question if not directly then as a subtext for the reader to go away and ponder on. As a father of self-directed children and someone who works in a self-directed education setting most of the things that I write about come from my personal experience of relating to children and reflecting on that as a practitioner, obviously reading too but also conversations with other parents of self-directed young people.
I don't drive and therefore walk a lot and find that most of my writing is done in my head on walks alone as I bring my thoughts together.
I have two methods of writing these thoughts down however. If an essay comes to me mostly fully formed then I like to jot it down using pen and paper and then I move to the laptop to write it up. If an idea comes to me less formed, I maybe know what I want to say roughly, how I want the first and last paragraph to go but the middle is a bit of a blur then I prefer to start with the laptop and then just let it take me where I want to. I often find with those essays that over the course of the next few days I will think of things whilst walking that I want to say and when I get home I will write those down using pen and paper first to capture them. I write almost exclusively early in the morning before anyone else (my children) wakes up and so can't always take an idea from a walk to the screen at the times that would best suit me.

What's one thing about being a writer that most people don't understand?

My education specialism is mathematics and plenty of people comment to me that maths is just hard work and not fun. I obviously work with young people and there is always the potential for a little bit of that, will it just be hard and not that fun, about anything unknown that they are contemplating learning. That which we do not know is often mysterious and mystery in part implies a challenge maybe not worth having.
I write essays that can be three, four, five thousand words long and most people's experience of having to write that much comes from being forced to for their education. I think their perception of what that might feel like, probably a slog, quite tiring and a little bit tedious, however, for me I feel the opposite when I write, alive, a fire burning in my belly. I think, plugging self-directed education for a second, this is the difference between writing because you have to and me writing essays on something that I am so passionate about it hurts sometimes.

Do you do any writing exercises or other work to further develop your writing skills?

Currently I don't have any particular writing exercises that I undertake. I guess each essay in itself is a practice for me. I know I am still learning my craft but prefer to do so with an open book approach. I am reminded of a story of a man in England who wanted to learn to play the violin so he went to the middle of town every time that he wanted to practice and from day one started busking, earning money from the very first minute he started learning. It is in this spirit that I approach writing essays. It should also be said that homeschooling two young children is a time intensive endeavour and currently I can only carve out enough time to write what my heart is singing about that week.

Can you provide us with a summary of what your unschooled masters project is about and why you are doing it?

I can't claim the idea myself, an unschooled masters comes from UK unschooler Sophie Christophy. And I think that we might have slightly different reasons as to what value it serves. For me it is about questioning whether the value we place on institutions is valid and offering up playful ideas on what decentralisation of education might look like. Also, it is an opportunity to give myself some accountability to be more disciplined in my research and reduce the scatter-gun approach, which I feel is a tendency for those pursuing autodidactic methods of learning.
Henrik Karlsson has written a Substack post entitled A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox, which pretty much explains itself. As I have been writing more myself I notice that the arguments he makes are valid. I think of it in terms of push and pull. As I push essays out I pull information in, sometimes like Henrik that is from other people as my network expands, but also in the moment of writing as I really get deep in the details of something it is that I need to pull more and more sources towards me to clarify what I am trying to say. I wrote an essay about work recently and doing so finally drove me to buy The Anthropology of Learning in Childhood, an absolute classic anthropological text on childhood, but I also chased down quite a few of the sources in the book as I got deep in the details.
In the 1970's Ivan Illich, in Deschooling Society, called for the deinstitutionalisation and decentralisation of education and posited the idea of learning webs, informal networks of learning. The good thing about Universities, and I think they have great value in this, is that they have strong network effects, that is why people go. You insert yourself as a node in this established network and in doing so signal that you are seriously ready to learn. But as Illich and Karlson point out informal networks of learning exist and can be strengthened. I see the unschooling masters project along the same lines as a blog post searching for people and information but on steroids. As a node in an existing network of people who are fascinated by the same things as me I am signaling to them that I am serious about learning this, I want their input on it, I want to converse with them about it, I want them to share that that is the case by retweeting or sharing my blog and therefore bring other people from their network into mine. I want to pull people towards me to help me learn and I want to pull more sources towards me in a systematic manner to help me learn more deeply and resist the urge to flit from one interesting subject to another.
So over this year I am looking at the innate conditions that young people are born with for learning. The Alliance for Self-Directed Education calls these four drives playfulness, planfulness, curiosity and sociability. These are the basis for my four modules. My plan is to study them for around three months each and then to write a 10,000 word essay on each of these drives. My first module is on planfulness and in the spirit of university students everywhere I have sadly been procrastinating, but this question has reminded me I need to get back on the horse!

Very interesting that your educational programs focus on teaching agile methodology to young children: is the thinking behind this that it's going to become a dominant form of work activity when they become adults?

We actually use a variety of tools from different methodologies but we use agile learning tools mainly for their advantages in projects. The thought patterns of intention and reflection coupled with the highly visual systems for watching projects move around and progress through time are really useful for understanding how our inputs affect our outputs.
I don't think we use this because this is how we envisage work in the future, though there will be plenty of instances where people will be working with these tools at work. I would say that the main motivation for using them is to allow the young people the opportunity to internalise the idea that projects require time, effort and reflection to succeed. These tools are tools for life if they can help young people to understand that whatever they are working on, be it hobbies, work, redecorating a house, an unschooled masters, most things will just flow better if some time is spent working out how best to complete that beforehand, and if it is a big project to spend some time whilst undertaking it to keep checking in with the question of how best to complete this. It is the internalised reflection process not the tools themselves which is key really.

Have you ever tried speech to text tools with your writing as a means to capture first drafts? Any thoughts on these tools?

Only once. I have written some poems with young people at our learning community and sometimes we co-create them with the younger ones and write them together on a large whiteboard. I then wanted to keep a record of them and tried doing so using the software that came free with my phone but it was awful and was more work trying to fix every other word that was misheard than just copying it directly myself. I am not sure how I feel about them. I assume that there are ones that actually work out there that I could buy but I am somewhat resistant to technology as a default.
I don't feel I could write essays using text to speech software and at the same time be able to critique my partner for their overreliance on the satnav, and as this is one of my favourite hobbies I think that I will probably not look into it further. I prefer the moral high ground over any ease of use.

If you have a long term plan for your newsletter would you share some details with our readers?

I have written quite a bit about various aspects of unschooling so far in the last four months, but the one thing that I have not touched on, which I am probably most qualified to write about is self-directed maths. I am a maths teacher by training and I have given talks and run workshops at education conferences on the question: How do you unschool maths? I have been chewing this around my mind recently and I have a lot to say about this. I don't know whether it is going to come out as one mammoth essay or a series, but I have a lot of things that I want to say that I have said in the past, but a few new thoughts and some things I also want to play around with as a facilitator first before I am ready to start writing it.
I find that when I talk about self-directed education and maths people are really interested mainly because culturally we have such a math-phobic society that people find it hard to believe that all children can genuinely be interested in maths. And my ideas of what maths is are much broader than what most people think which surprises them further.

How did you discover STSC and what led you to join?

Ah the STSC. I found Tom's essays probably over a year ago now and really enjoyed reading them. The first one I read was On Walking. To find someone else roughly my age who doesn't drive, has never even had a lesson and believes walking is as fundamental to humans as language, well, I thought, that is a kindred spirit.
I heard whisperings of the club for quite a few months before I decided to join. The promise of getting off the internet and creating more was intriguing. I don't really do the internet that much anyway, but creating art sounded potentially exciting especially as it seems many people joined not expecting to do so and then ended up doing so. I don't know quite why I joined, what I thought I would get out of it as I had not written anything for years. But my interest was piqued enough and I genuinely thought Tom's essays were some of the best I was reading on the internet so thought I would give it a shot, reasoning that if the Discord was not that good I was still supporting someone's art which I valued.
I joined and did not write anything for a further six months and then one day I just started writing a thank you to the exercise channel in the discord as I had finally joined a football team and started running. It got longer and longer and in the end I wrote a 5,000 word essay and started my substack.

Pretend you wake up one morning and discover that the Internet has been destroyed. What's the first thing that you do?

This is a great question. First, definitely a deep belly laugh, probably waking everyone up doing so as well. I would put the kettle on and make some coffee. I only work three days a week so if it was a work day I would get out two mugs, but if I wasn't working I would probably forgo coffee and celebrate by having an early morning cider.
During lockdown we moved our sofas around to face each other so that we could have conversations over coffee directly facing each other. So I would settle into my sofa and let my partner take hers and I would laugh as we compare the effects on our lives. There is a bit of a difference between going to an acre of woods to work with young people and going to manage a hospital, without email, without Teams, without google calendar, without google maps on the satnav so she might not even get there. I'd probably have to stop laughing pretty quickly though and comfort her as I can't imagine running a major hospital without the internet would be fun.

Thanks so much to Tim Rutherford for agreeing to this interview!

Previous STSC (Soaring Twenties Social Club) member interviews: