Skeleton Key to the Treasure Chest

On a classical list I am on, someone asked about what your "bare bones" priorities would be if you could only homeschool, say, half time or less. Hey, that is what my homeschool has been like regularly ever since we have started. I should have some sort of graduate degree in crisis homeschooling.

Anyway, here is what I wrote --posting it here because it fits in a bit with recent posts:
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Interesting topic because we used to have to do this cutting back at least once a year (pregnancies, new babies, medical crises) and even now when things are smoother I find it helpful to regularly consider what's essential to me and what's not.

• Math -- because it's the hardest to learn naturally for my kids at least, and it's of key importance
• Latin -- same as above and also it incorporates most formal language arts --grammar, vocabulary, logic, and composition/narration/copywork. For younger ones (primary) it would be phonics rather than Latin.
• Literature -- which is a broad enough category to include history and science and religion as well as the childhood fictional classics.

You already mentioned spiritual training -- which would include religious instruction and character formation and some incidental vocational training, I suppose.

Harder to describe for me but important-- setting an example for "how and why to learn" -- (I guess this is where my unschooly side comes in) -- discussion, stories about family culture, modeling research skills, strewing resources and reading materials and reading aloud to them. This would fit in odd corners of the day.... this is not formal ... basically I would call it "discipling" or "mentoring" or "enculturation" -- simply making it a priority to share what I am and what DH is and the "keeper" parts of our family and cultural heritage. Some moms do that enculturation naturally; I have to think about it and be aware of its importance.

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Sites I find helpful for my minimal liberal arts educational method:

• Robinson Curriculum
• Ambleside Online Emergency Lesson Plan
• Ruth Marshall's site -- particularly her review of the Robinson Method, but there are many more articles and helps on simplifying, and homeschooling a wide age range.
• Trivium Pursuit: Ten Things to Do with Your Child Before Age Ten

I usually go back to these whenever I'm feeling mentally cluttered or overloaded.

• Once I did this interview about Homeschooling Through a Crisis with some strategies for dealing with difficulties.
• Also, I just wrote out this Checklist of Priorities for my learning notes site.
  

What You'd Do Differently

At the Real Learning board, a mom with young children asked what older homeschooling moms would do differently if they could it over again.

Really, I have few categorical regrets about what I did or did not do. Yes, I made plenty of mistakes — but mistakes can be fruitful. I learned something from every mistake. Yes, I sinned plenty of times, and sincerely hope to do better in the future, but that is not something that I would “do differently” in that sense. Those are waters under the bridge.

The only thing I sometimes regret is that I did not educate myself more before my kids were born and when they were little. I wish I’d read more of what I planned to have them read. Even now, every iota of liberal arts education I possess is of great value. My father paid a pretty penny for my college education, but it was worth it, even though I never got a job in my English literature major. It really was, Dad. I only wish I’d treasured it more at the time. So was every second of reading I’ve done just prior to, or alongside of, or just after, my kids. My mother read to me and bought me classic books, and I’m glad every single day that I can remember reading Treasure Island and Robin Hood and Anne of Green Gables and Heidi when I was still little.

This all pays off every single time I talk to my kids or read to them or think about their education.

What would you have done differently, if anything?

Writing Methods

I am trying Novel in a Month once more. I think this is the third year. My goal isn't to get up to 50K words -- if it was, I would be pretty discouraged right now (though if I counted in all the word-intensive blogging I've been doing recently, I might be closer than I think). Rather, I am on my never-ending, quixotic quest to keep up with our family Story Society.

I don't want to publish the story. I just want to write it, adequately enough to not be disgraced in comparison to my three oldest children who are all better story-writers than I am, though as a teenager myself I used to pride myself on my fairly decent fiction writing skills.

My oldest son is home from college right now, along with a stack of stories he is annotating from his college story club. He also asked me to comment his story in progress, and I gave him some of my story to critique, as well. We are to have our traditional story meeting tomorrow, before he returns to college. This has inspired me and I actually got some more of my story written, so I thought I would quickly write out what is working right now. Maybe I can finally vanquish the dreaded Writer's Block Dragon (or find out it is a windmill, or something).

• First of all, it seems to help to plan to spend some time "wasting time" -- not really, but sitting down and dinking around with my story as it presently exists, changing a word here and there, thinking about different ways to make that scene happen, even annotating someone else's story (if I run out of stories in my own family, maybe I'll start rewriting Muriel Spark or Walter Van Tilburg Clark -- hee hee, not really, but you get the picture).
• Second, it seems to help to give myself permission to try different things out and "see if they work".
• Third, if I write down plot possibilities and ideas for techniques on a side page while I'm writing the story, it helps me remember them. Otherwise I forget.
• Fourth, it is not really essential to have a completely free block of time. Anyway, that never exists in my household of nine. Yesterday I sat and wrote on the sofa with Aidan bouncing all over me. I can honestly ignore any amount of chaos -- I learned to do this in 17 years of formal schooling. In college, I always used to go to a cafe to write my essays because I could think so much better that way. I am training my children to do this even better than I could -- they can do algebra with toddlers running around and their dad reading aloud from the sports page and the dog barking at the UPS man, and so on.
• Fifth, it helps to keep a writer's notebook and jot down things as I think of them. I don't even really have to look at the notes again. Just writing them down helps.
  
• Sixth, it helps to have some plan, but not invent it ahead of time... rather, work my way into it by the practices listed above. So that's what I'm doing right now : ).
  

I guess that's all for now, but I noticed while writing out the notes for this that this is my preferred method for almost everything I do. It works for housekeeping (though you'd never know it from the way the house looks now); it works for figuring out parenting issues and personal issues; it works for lesson planning; it works for blogging. It even works for things spiritual -- devotions. I think Ignatius refers to something similar as remote, median and proximate preparation; then considerations, affections, and resolutions.

Just in case it helps someone else! I know I'm not the only one out here who brings their novel out of the closet every November.

Following the Compass

The Lost Children: A review of Hold On To Your Kids by Jen at Et Tu? HT: The Cates at Why Homeschool?

She quotes the authors of the book:

As children grow, they have an increasing need to orient: to have a sense of who they are, of what is real, why things happen, what is good, what things mean. To fail to orient is to...be lost psychologically -- a state our brains our programmed to do almost anything to avoid. [...]

What children fear more than anything, including physical harm, is getting lost. To them, being lost means losing contact with their compass point. Orienting voids, situations where we find nothing or no one to orient by, are absolutely intolerable to the human brain.

We discussed the topic of teenage mutation at Real Learning a couple of weeks ago. Another book that is interesting to read in this regard is A Tribe Apart. I wrote a tiny review of it here. The book starts by describing several kids in about 5th or 6th grade -- pretty much normal kids interested in baseball and Barbies -- and traces their lives until their graduation from highschool. The transition is remarkable. Generally speaking, the kids "come through" on the other side, but there are tragic exceptions, and even the survivors have battle wounds.

Some homeschoolers "mutate" (for lack of a better word), and some kids who go to school don't, of course. My thought is that peer dependency is much more the source than simply the fact of homeschooling or not -- you can have peer dependency AND homeschooling, and you can have schooled kids who stay away from peer dependency, whether because their families are strong, or their interests are bigger than the system, or perhaps the school itself has a strong healthy culture of its own that counteracts the tribalism. Temperament plays a part too.

Plus, there are kids who take on some of the trappings of the tribe, but only as a sort of game or adaptive trait. It is part of their natural development to try out new things, to explore and experiment and grow in understanding of different ways of life. This is not the same thing as peer dependency itself. To me, dependency means what Catholic doctrine calls "attachment" -- something that has the symptoms of an addiction.

Homeschooling can preserve a culture, though, that works against peer dependency. By taking the kids away from the age ghetto, spending time with them, discussing things with them and allowing them time and space to develop talents and skills, you give them opportunity to develop longterm qualities and skills, not the transitory ones generally valued by the peer culture. You give them some margin so that they can stand a bit apart from the follies their peers rather than accept and practice them devoutly. I wrote about this once before, in Enculturation, not Indoctrination.

There is still a sort of dependency, I suppose. As Neufeld says above in the quote, kids have a need to orient themselves; they are not able to develop in a void. This is his very case for developing a family culture. An imperfect family is better than an immature peer culture, though of course most dysfunctional families are so precisely because they share the competitiveness, co-dependency and immaturity of the peer culture. Perhaps it should be noted that most of the parents of this generation are products of peer dependency themselves. (To me this seems to have something to do with the amazing vitality of the constant question What About Socialization?)

I think sometimes the State and those who believe in the effectiveness of "experts" cringe a bit when they think of parents actually being allowed to influence their kids. Isn't that a sort of child abuse? What if they mess up? What if they inculcate doctrine that I happen not to agree with? What if they raise young adults that thrive outside of the cultural mainstream, who have a strong ethnic or religious identity? Doesn't that mean the society will be fragmented?

One of the victories of the state over the parents has been a rhetorical one; accusing the parents of indoctrination so that school becomes "freeing".

"Every child in America entering school at the age of five is insane because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It's up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well--by creating the international child of the future." Dr. Chester M. Pierce in an address to the Childhood International Education Seminar in 1973

HT Dana at Simple Pleasures.

Reading stories like this one at Why Homeschool give me a further sense of WHY kids form peer dependent bonds -- for they don't do it arbitrarily, of course. They do it because their psychic survival seems to depend on it in some way; it seems like a solution. When the grownups seem crazy, weak, fearful and arbitrary; and the peers seem to have strength and talent and offer some hope of a kind of safety, no matter how contingent.... well, there it is. Orienting voids, indeed. And I think that the more the system tries to take over the function of parenting, the more follies like this will crop up, because parenting is essentially personal and organic, while systems are not. Systems are not safe; they have gaps where individual, unique people fall through.

To quote Jen's quotes of the authors of Hold On TO Your Kids, again:

No wonder, then, that "cool" is the governing ethic in peer culture, the ultimate virtue...It connotates an air of invulnerability. Where peer orientation is intense, there is no sign of vulnerability in the talk, in the walk, in the dress, or in the attitudes. [...]

Peer-oriented kids will do anything to avoid the human feelings of aloneness, suffering, and pain, and to escape feeling hurt, exposed, alarmed, insecure, inadequate, or self-conscious. ...

Why Hold On?

The Lost Children: A review of Hold On To Your Kids by Jen at Et Tu?
HT: The Cates at Why Homeschool?

She quotes the authors of the book:

As children grow, they have an increasing need to orient: to have a sense of who they are, of what is real, why things happen, what is good, what things mean. To fail to orient is to...be lost psychologically -- a state our brains our programmed to do almost anything to avoid. [...]

What children fear more than anything, including physical harm, is getting lost. To them, being lost means losing contact with their compass point. Orienting voids, situations where we find nothing or no one to orient by, are absolutely intolerable to the human brain.

We discussed the topic of teenage mutation at Real Learning a couple of weeks ago. Another book that is interesting to read in this regard is A Tribe Apart. I wrote a tiny review of it here. The book starts by describing several kids in about 5th or 6th grade -- pretty much normal kids interested in baseball and Barbies -- and traces their lives until their graduation from highschool. The transition is remarkable. Generally speaking, the kids "come through" on the other side, but there are tragic exceptions, and even the survivors have battle wounds.

Some homeschoolers "mutate" (for lack of a better word), and some kids who go to school don't, of course. My thought is that peer dependency is much more the source than simply the fact of homeschooling or not -- you can have peer dependency AND homeschooling, and you can have schooled kids who stay away from peer dependency, whether because their families are strong, or their interests are bigger than the system, or perhaps the school itself has a strong healthy culture of its own that counteracts the tribalism. Temperament plays a part too.

Plus, there are kids who take on some of the trappings of the tribe, but only as a sort of game or adaptive trait. It is part of their natural development to try out new things, to explore and experiment and grow in understanding of different ways of life. This is not the same thing as peer dependency itself. To me, dependency means what Catholic doctrine calls "attachment" -- something that has the symptoms of an addiction.

Homeschooling can preserve a culture, though, that works against peer dependency. By taking the kids away from the age ghetto, spending time with them, discussing things with them and allowing them time and space to develop talents and skills, you give them opportunity to develop longterm qualities and skills, not the transitory ones generally valued by the peer culture. I wrote about this once before, in Enculturation, not Indoctrination.

There is still a sort of dependency, I suppose. As Neufeld says above in the quote, kids have a need to orient themselves; they are not able to develop in a void. This is his very case for developing a family culture. An imperfect family is better than an immature peer culture, though of course most dysfunctional families are so precisely because they share the competitiveness, co-dependency and immaturity of the peer culture.

I think sometimes the State and those who believe in the effectiveness of "experts" cringe a bit when they think of parents actually being allowed to influence their kids. Isn't that a sort of child abuse? What if they mess up? What if they inculcate doctrine that I happen not to agree with? What if they raise young adults that thrive outside of the cultural mainstream, who have a strong ethnic or religious identity? Doesn't that mean the society will be fragmented?

One of the victories of the state over the parents has been a rhetorical one; accusing the parents of indoctrination so that school becomes "freeing".

"Every child in America entering school at the age of five is insane because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It's up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well--by creating the international child of the future." Dr. Chester M. Pierce in an address to the Childhood International Education Seminar in 1973

HT Dana at Simple Pleasures.

Reading stories like this one give me a further sense of WHY kids form peer dependent bonds -- for they don't do it arbitrarily, of course. They do it because their psychic survival seems to depend on it in some way; it seems like a solution. When the grownups seem crazy, weak, fearful and arbitrary; and the peers seem to have strength and talent and offer some hope of a kind of safety, no matter how contingent.... well, there it is. And I think that the more the system tries to take over the function of parenting, the more stupid decisions like this will crop up, because parenting is essentially personal and organic, while systems are not.

To quote Jen's quotes of the authors of Hold On TO Your Kids, again:

No wonder, then, that "cool" is the governing ethic in peer culture, the ultimate virtue...It connotates an air of invulnerability. Where peer orientation is intense, there is no sign of vulnerability in the talk, in the walk, in the dress, or in the attitudes. [...]

Peer-oriented kids will do anything to avoid the human feelings of aloneness, suffering, and pain, and to escape feeling hurt, exposed, alarmed, insecure, inadequate, or self-conscious. ...

The Role of Retrieval

I thought this article from Eide Neurolearning -- When Knowledge, Creativity, and Retrieval Diverge ---was interesting.

Information retrieval is not as catchy a notion as attention these days, but it is a distinct process in the brain, and it what you are asking students to do when you ask them to repeat back what they learned in class or from their homework. ....

....although a student may be very good at synthesizing information (parietal), he can also be quite weak or slow at retrieving stored information from memory (prefrontal). This in fact is more the norm than the deviation for high IQ kids. Their prefrontal lobes are slower to develop.

Charlotte Mason appears to have placed quite a bit of emphasis on retrieval, without using the term, because narration and the exam process are both examples of two different types of retrieval -- short term and long term. Several of my children have disliked immediate calls for retrieval (narration) but have fared better with a longer-term form of retrieval.

I read that Waldorf, for instance, has the child listen to a "main lesson" one day, retell the next, and produce something the day after. In other words, knowledge/retrieval/creativity are separated into three distinct processes. The Ignatian method has the prelection/review/demonstration of mastery paradigm (sorry for the jargon, it just slips out) which probably is a way of ensuring that retrieval is built into the process. To put it in English! the Ignatian method explicitly sets an example for retrieval. I think that Charlotte Mason might possibly think this too "teachery" but I can see a place for it, particularly for those children with a very rich interior life who have trouble bringing it up to the surface.

Some of my children have been quite blank when asked to give a narration on a particular book, but later have shown that the book was pivotal in their development. The example that comes to my mind is my daughter and St Thomas Becket. We studied him when she was eleven. At the time I remember being discouraged that there was almost no visible impact. Years later she could narrate the whole study and reflect on how it shaped her ideas.

HomeschoolJournal is down presently for maintenance, but Ragamuffin Rosie has a post called Just Breathe which is her musings on how this process works in her family.

And JoVE recently blogged on Testing in response to my post on exams. We are both interested in the "organic" aspect of the testing situation -- how it can be helpful in the natural learning life of a child (rather than being an invasive, artificial ranking system, as it so often becomes in institutional schooling systems).

Tribe of Autodidacts wrote about testing too (I am collecting these as I come across them on my Google Reader)

Another philosophical post, when I am really supposed to be writing my story! and around the USA at least, everyone is probably sitting back and relaxing after Thanksgiving....sigh.

A Map back from the Island

Now, about the island that I was trying to get to in my earlier post about classical unschooling:

About a year ago, I was getting restless with the kind of unschooling we were doing. So were the kids, though in a different way. It felt like drifting or worse, like we were following the wrong map and getting too far off our course. I finally figured out it was because I was trying to do "unschooling" like school; in other words, trying to do it someone else's way, following various rules I didn't really understand or in some cases agree with.

Of course, there is some value in taking things on faith sometimes, when one is reasonably convinced that it is a good thing to do so. It is one thing to reach beyond one's comfort zone -- that can be very worthwhile. For a long time, unschooling was productive for me in this way. But it's another thing to work against one's own intuition. It's difficult to describe the difference, but it reminds me of the "good pain" you feel during an intense workout, vs the "bad pain" when you are injuring yourself and ought to stop before it gets any worse. You usually recognize the difference if you allow yourself to do so.

I also realized that to my kids, there wasn't such a line between "school" and "not-school" as there was for me. For them, the division was more between what was boring, meaningless, too hard and what was OK, meaningful and challenging and enjoyable. If I am going to respect my own intuitions about "good pain" and "bad pain" I need to pay attention to the same thing in my kids, too. I find that it gives me more freedom to explore and try new things with them if I am prepared to drop it if for some reason it isn't "taking". The things that aren't working can be easily replaced with something else or approached in a different way.

To get past the "schooly" and "unschooly" divisions that were causing the problem, I started trying to picture how I would raise the kids if we somehow got stranded on a deserted island or on a distant planet or something (the Robinson Crusoe Curriculum, or Lost in Space model of education).

If you want to try it, I recommend the exercise. How would you educate if everything else was out of the way? It is so easy to get overwhelmed by all the choices and requirements out there. I notice that the most difficult temptations for me are fear ("You must do this, or else this will happen....") and greed/wishful thinking "If you think through/do/buy this, then everything will turn out great." Other people may have different issues -- perhaps pride ("I want to produce super-kids, because I can"), perhaps false humility ("There is no way I can do that, so I may as well not even try...").

So, now picture the deserted island, with no hope of rescue in the near future. What then?

• Well, our first priority would be gathering, organizing, developing skills and constructing shelter so we had some confidence that we could deal with eventualities. In other words, physical security.
• At the same time, it would be a priority to maintain a level of human dignity in our treatment of each other. ...kindness and justice, acceptance. Both emotional and physical safety and belonging (see Maslow's Hierarchy of needs) are prerequisites for the leisure, the space necessary, for learning to take place. It is hard to learn in unstable, unsafe environments.
  

So now, let's say the basic needs were met, and the bulk of the work was now to do with maintenance and preparation for inevitable contingencies, rather than sheer battle for life. In other words, now we have some leisure, the garden soil for learning. Now what would I do?

I found that question remarkably easy to answer, considering how much I sometimes agonize between this method or that. When it comes to this, I would find it quite natural to:

• Instruct the children in the truths and practices of their faith, through discussion and example.
• Tell them stories: family stories, funny stories, stories from history, stories of heroes, precautionary tales from my own life and from the lore of our culture.... all the stories I could remember or make up. I will include songs in this category too.
  
• I'd teach them how to read and write and cipher, even if there wasn't much immediate purpose to these skills. But once lost to a generation, these skills are extremely hard to regain. Besides, they are worthwhile in themselves for the reflective and categorizing abilities of the mind.
• I'd observe nature with them, and learn alongside them. I'd rely on their observations and judgements on the world around us. I'd tell them about nature in other regions not familiar to them, in order to expand their understanding by comparison and contrast.
• To sum it up, I would want them as conversant as possible with the distant civilization they came from, both its dangers and its treasures, so that if they ever returned, they would have some familiarity with it.
  
• I would learn with them how to adapt to our present conditions -- in this aspect of our life, we would be much more like colleagues.

• If I had books -- say, a Bible -- I would make sure they internalized its contents, hearing my commentaries and over the years developing their own internal commentary.
• If I didn't have books, I would try to use whatever materials were on hand to develop some sort of written culture -- writing down some of the cultural stories and also keeping a written record of what was going on.

• I would try to teach the older children in such a way that they would be able to teach and provide an example for the younger ones.

• As time provided, we would try together to add some beauty and ingenuity to our basic standards of existence.
  
• We would build some traditions and family customs and jokes.... a domestic culture unique to us.
  
• I would model and teach problem-solving and flexible thinking so that when inevitable difficulties arose we would have some resources to deal with them.

None of what I imagined here has anything to do with school, except that "school" is a means by which some of these things are sometimes accomplished. In past days, parents planned the education of their children according to their means, their manner of life, and the abilities of their children. Their goal was two-fold: enculturation into a heritage, and preparation for adult life. Of course, the limitations were many, too. Educational resources were not readily available; survival took the bulk of many peoples' time and energy; and so on. Schooling arrangements often made quite a bit of sense in these circumstances, though these had drawbacks too -- inadequate materials, corporal punishment, prejudice and so on.

Now back from my imaginary deserted island, my family is blessed with a fairly secure existence, and access to countless educational resources. My kids can easily learn things that I don't know; there is everything from other people, to books, to DVDs, to exploration and trial and error. They can learn things I would like them to know, but written or said in the words of the best thinkers of all times. This is the blessing of our society. Education is everywhere. You don't have to go to school to find it.

The downside of course, is that there is plenty of trash and trivia available too. It can obscure what is important. There is also the tendency to specialization, and dependence upon "experts and "entertaining" education, that seems to work against general competence.

That means that it is a priority to ensure that my children acquire the "tools" (as Dorothy Sayer says); to be able to locate, evaluate and properly employ information -- to discard the trash and put the trivial in its proper place, while holding fast to the good and true. We are on a different kind of island, with slightly different dangers, but in many ways the task is the same: to transmit and protect a cultural heritage that is at some risk, in this case both from exploitation and from neglect.

So that was what came up from my journey to the deserted island. It doesn't HAVE to be a deserted island: I could substitute an Irish hedge school, or homeschooling up in the Alaskan bush where I lived for a few years in childhood, or the Israelites by the rivers of Babylon.

That is my form of unschooling. I think it is still unschooling, because it's independent of the modern school assumptions and objectives, though it doesn't spring from the same source as some other models of unschooling I have seen. You can see what it has in common with some classical and Charlotte Mason ideas. It has an element of the subversive, because I agree with Gatto and the hedge school teachers and Karol Wojtyla that education and culture are revolutionary(in a good way) -- educational endeavours ought to be inextricably tied to to freedom and independence and reform. (Heraclitus said you can never step in the same river twice, and I think it's the same thing with civilization -- you need to continually renew and revise your efforts in every new generation)

But education is also an inheritance, tied inextricably to competence and responsibility and tradition. (In a way the river is still the same river, though the water has all changed). Tyrants fear true education and anarchists attack it before almost anything else. It is a call of "Mon Joie~" ... a "freedom for excellence...the power to act freely with excellence and perfection".

Advent School

This post started over at Schola et Studium but I think perhaps it fits better over here.

Faith at Dumb Ox Academy wrote about her plans for Advent School. I liked that title even though I'm not really a schooly type, so I'm borrowing it! I immediately had a visual image of a purple file folder. I know, that is strange, but rather typical for my rightbrained, global thinking mind -- to think of a colored container right away. : ). Anyway, I'm going with the purple folder idea to contain all the things I want to do this Advent.

(Right now I have a file folder organization system where there is a plain manila folder for each week and each month. For each season there is a colored folder, and for the "transition week" (almost every month changes over in the middle of a week) there is an orange folder which is really helpful for me as a visual reminder to get things in order for the next month). So the purple idea works nicely for me to set apart the month as different from the rest of the year.

Some general context:

• Helen at Castle of the Immaculate has compiled a bunch of Advent Dreams and hopes.
• Here is TeachingMom's great Advent Calendar.
• And here is a compilation of Christmas units at Real Learning.
• Here are some Christmas printables and other information.

All the possibilities are overwhelming, of course. I thought:

For organization of Christmas prep

• Flylady's Holiday Control Journal. (I was looking for a different Christmas checklist that I used last year, but I can't find it right now -- anyway, what I did was to write the different tasks on green index cards, and divided them into weeks, and every day I would try to make progress on the different tasks).

For academics

• Most of the stuff will stay the same, but I thought I would have Kieron read Geraldine MacCaughrean's Jesse Tree and go over Madeleine L'Engle's Glorious Impossible.
• He can also do the Snow lapbook. ...maybe now or maybe in January, depending on how the other things go.
• The littlies -- I will try to get a list of craft-y type projects for them --which Kieron can do too.
  

For liturgical year/family life:

• I think Helen's post is a great place to start (see above) -- so organized, with all the feast days, and beautiful, too.
• I found this December calendar in pdf with various secular occasions contained.
  
• And here is the Catholic Culture December calendar, too.

The theme -- preparing for Christmas and a New Year, and giving to others.

Details remain to be worked out. But the sick children have been on my mind.

Note:

Advents in our family tend to be "lived" rather than celebrated because almost every December we have a child in the hospital. (See Christmas Vigil and A Bit More on Advent for the 2005 and 2006 ponderings on this) Plus, I'm not really a home-decorating or practical-life type person. And I come from a very devout but slightly austere Christian tradition. My mom's efforts, admirably, were bent towards simplifying rather than elaborating Christmas. I remember hymns, once-a-year fancy cookies, beautiful Christmas classical missae on the stereo, an Advent calendar and a simple creche. That sufficed.

For all those reasons we tend not to have built up very complex Advent celebrations. Which is fine, of course -- it's not an obligation of the Faith -- but I think it would be nice, if we don't have a medical issue this year, to reflect upon and contemplate the season, and some simple activities and traditions can be conducive to that.

More resources and thoughts:

• Last year I started a simple Liturgical Year cyber-notebook. It didn't go much further than starting it and adding some links, but I am hoping to go back through it and pull out some of the things that we didn't get around to last year. (Here is a link to the paper Lit Year notebooks I made last year -- I still have to get them out this year) .
• Here's a bunch of Christmas booklists I collected... including a list of our Christmas bookshelf. (We have a few more books than that, and I collected a couple more last year, but that's a partial list).
• And Cay's idea for an Advent Grab Bag. This is one possible way to work through all the immensity of resources out there without getting too overwhelmed.
• Two more from Virginia Knowles: Advent Family Nights, and Christmas Treasury.
  

This post is getting away from me so I had better close now. Today is the day Liam, my oldest, comes home for Thanksgiving break. Off to prepare, and rejoice!

Classical Unschooling: Education on an Island

Ever since I started adding a bit more structure to my homeschooling, I have been trying to figure out how this can be reconciled with my commitment to unschooling. Am I still an unschooler? What are the parameters of unschooling? If I support and facilitate my child's interests for 22 hours out of 24, 7 days a week, and 24/7 for about 3 months a year, am I still an unschooler since I still "impose" some structured mom-directed learning for about 10 hours a week? Or does the imposed stucture invalidate the whole thing? If the kids don't mind the structure and in some ways seem to value it, is that denial on my part or does it fit in with an unschooling commitment? I couldn't really figure out a philosophical answer to that, so I just moved it to the back burner. But I struggled with it, because I really do like my philosophy to be a bit coherent.

For the time being, I've decided that education is to do with practical intellect, like prudence or art. In other words, thinking about education can be done purely speculatively, but educating someone will always come down to doing (and in corollary, "not-doing") -- active and passive methods.

Benjamin Franklin said that while one person is standing indecisively between two educational methods and trying to decide which is best, another person will have time to use either or both and actually cause something to happen. Marva Collins said: Anything works if the teacher does. That sort of sums up the active part.

As for the passive part -- passive has a bad rap nowadays of course, but it has a legitimate pedigree. It means the receptive side of activity. For example, the reference to Jesus's "Passion" doesn't refer to how He was feeling when He was crucified, which is what I made of it when I was a small child and heard the term, but to the undergoing of something.

Charlotte Mason talks much about masterly inactivity, and "despising not, offending not, hindering not" the children, which is so often done in the name of "educating" them. There is a season to stand back, to receive, to respond, if you want to be effective in action.

Either way, "active" or "passive" can both be supportive of education. The educator's role is secondary to that of the learner though; almost every effective means of education makes mention of that essential truth. Cicero says:

Natural ability without education has more often attained to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.

That is, I think, why pure unschooling CAN work (ie result in a well educated child who is prepared to live a reflective, reasoned adult life) but pure teacher-directed education almost never works. Indeed, it doesn't exist. There are always corners in the day where the child can be free with his own thoughts and actions. That is to say, there is always an unschooling component, but it is rarely acknowledged by the modern institutional method or considered as the foundation for academic learning that it really is.

Cardinal Newman says (speaking of modern-method schooling):

Nay, self-education in any shape, in the most restricted sense, is preferable to a system of teaching which, professing so much, really does so little for the mind.

So lots of times mechanized schooling, by not acknowledging the primary role of the learner, actually hinders learning. (If you want to read more about that, The Wundter of it All by Richard Mitchell and Against School by John Taylor Gatto are interesting to read, and so is John Newman's Knowledge viewed in Relation to Learning)

Of course, unschooling doesn't work if it is conceived as complete liberty for the child. That too is impossible. No one lives in a vacuum; everyone is influenced by the time and place they live in. But I have never heard a thoughtful unschooler proclaim that she provides a vacuum for her kids or that this would be a good thing. Even (or especially) the most radical unschoolers don't claim that; almost the opposite. See the article Mindful Parenting by Ren Allen and Sandra Dodd, and there are plenty of others.

Real unschooling is about acknowledging the child's primary role in his learning process, and respecting that and supporting that. But it's only part of the picture, because really, unschooling in that form is parenting. ... trying to parent reflectively and lovingly and personally, rather than relying on ingrained reflexes, or rules designed by someone else, or one's own less honorable impulses. The other truth connected with that is that there is so much more to life and learning than "school" or "schooly subjects". If you read The Three Stages of Unschooling, you see that for unschoolers, "schooly" stuff starts taking a back seat. You no longer have to cram little bits and pieces of daily life into boxes that say "math" or "language arts" (something I hate), because you realize that learning is a genuine and inevitable part of living as humans -- as Cicero said:

Our minds possess by nature an insatiable desire to know the truth.

Aristotle says something similar:

ALL men by nature desire to know.

I was going to bring in the island, but if I do this post will go on forever. So that part will have to wait.

Now a Word from my Inner Geek

When I was visiting our friends this week, I fell in love with a teaching resource. This happens so rarely that I can count the occasions on one hand, I think. I use educational resources, but usually with some pain, like wearing a shoe that almost fits but not quite. The ones that really really don't fit, and they add up fast, I put in the box or give away. What I really love about homeschooling is primary resources -- living books and cultural things. -- art, music, drama. And friends, and imaginary play, and conversations, and nature, and the truths and seasons and practices of our Faith (not in that particular order, of course). Those are the essential things, and the rest is the "tools" -- what gets you there, so to speak.

So many educational resources, I find, seem to hinder rather than help on that journey. Charlotte Mason speaks of too much teaching and little learning. I have to step out of my own way all too often, actually, and could stand to do it even more. But so many teaching resources, particularly in my family, have to be kept firmly in their place. If allowed, they start making learning painful and overly busy, like Martha in the Gospel story.

Anyway, the resource was Spell to Write and Read along with its companion, the WISE Guide to Spelling. How prosaic that sounds, of course. You were expecting something very thrilling, and instead you get spelling. But let me try to explain a bit.

I can't describe the books (which come as a "Core" package) thoroughly enough to do them justice, since I don't have them yet, but they are the kind of resources that put you "behind the scenes", so to speak. The program gives you the big, integrated picture AND the nitty gritty details, the "scope" and the "sequence". It isn't just teacher-speak, a pragmatic "how to", though it has lots of practical bits of advice. It has theory, but applied and explained. They are wonderful books. You can use them for years, and they are non-consumable. Unfortunately, I only have four kids who still need any kind of help with spelling/word analysis, but on the bright side, if I had bought the program for my older set, it would have been largely unnecessary (they were natural spellers and readers) and I would have bought the OLD version, which would have had to be replaced anyway, probably.

I admit that I am a language geek -- my other romances with teacher's resources have been with the progym (in general -- specifically, I like Classical Writing: Aesop), Latin (Henle), and analytic grammar (Whole Book of Diagrams) --plus Charlotte Mason's books and my Ignatian Implementation manual, both of which put the main educational emphasis on the use and understanding of language-- so that is probably part of it. I've had WRiting Road to Reading for years and have gotten a fair bit of mileage out of it. I have heard about SWR/WISE, which is based on the WRTR method, many times through my homeschooling years but was put off by the price and figured it was unnecessary since I was able to use WRTR pretty well, apparently unlike most of the people who bought SWR.

But after looking through the program for several days and taking piles of notes in spare moments, I decided it was worth the price (though OUCH -- I still would much prefer collecting10-15 wonderful living books to buying one curriculum, no matter how great I think it is).

So I bought the manuals, and I just can't wait till they come so I can dive in. Even if I never actually sat down and used them directly with the kids, I think they would be worth it to me just for the boost they would give my own personal understanding of why and how we teach the basics of spelling, writing and reading. I bought them mostly for ME. If they work out nicely with the kids, that is just a side benefit.

OK! I'll stop now!

Paper Trails

(This started out in the middle of my post about dragons and unit studies, but it didn't really fit, so I'm putting it in its own post in order not to set a bad example for my kids with disjointed thought processes)

From Cindy (an organized unschooler : )) -- see this post and this one and this one -- I got the idea for an "idea notebook" where I put things that we might just get to, whether the kids are interested in it, or I think they might be, or I want to share with them because I think it's neat or valuable. But blogging is the best way I've found to keep track of these plans (I do keep rough notes jotted down in a bound index card pad, as well, but those are more to help my mind function, and are usually so messy I can hardly read them).

Going off on a trail about organization, now -- Dawn has a visual of her clipboard (also a compilation on organization). That reminded me that I have been keeping a clipboard for a few weeks now. In my case, I got the idea from Mother Auma -- from an old Ambleside post of hers, I believe, about how she trains herself and her kids to follow a new schedule in a new term. She said that she carries around a checklist on a clipboard of her daily routine until it becomes second nature. This is so exactly the sort of thing that I wouldn't think of doing on my own, but it works beautifully for me. I keep the boys' weekly checklists on the clipboard now, as well. It's easy to find and accessible and easy to glance at.

A Father's Academy has a post about simple solutions for homeschool logistics. Complicating things used to be a problem of mine -- not quite so much anymore, now that I've acknowledged it and acknowledged Charlotte Mason's principle of education, that only parts of the books and ideas are going to be assimilated by a given child, and not the same parts. I think it is a bit the same for any kind of method, including organization. It isn't going to be a perfect glass bubble; it isn't going to solve every possible problem. It is going to be contingent. The Ignatian manual on education that I have been referencing lately says that methodology is important, but as a means to an end, not an end in itself. I try to keep thinking that way, but sometimes I need reminding -- that I shouldn't evaluate my schedule or method by how perfectly I keep to it or by how wonderfully rigorous it is, but by how well it functions as a secondary goal, a MEANS to my accomplishing what needs to be accomplished.

For that, Mother Auma has, on her sidebar, a good reminder about the limitations of my strategeries (a neologism my husband likes to use -- with Rube Goldberg-type gentle irony).

Our little systems
have their day;

They have their day
and cease to be:

They are but
broken lights of thee,

And thou, O Lord,
art more than they.


--Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Dragons and Trails

Kieron (age 11) is quite interested in dragons right now, so I was ransacking our library system for books about dragons that I thought he would enjoy (Amazon is a great partner for this kind of search because the reviews and booklists usually give me an idea of what kind of book it is and who would want to read it).

Anyway, while searching online, I found Chicken Spaghetti's list of dragon books and resource ideas (including Theresa and Superboy's Dragon Notebook)

I am in planning mode, you see; it won't last forever, but it's fun while it lasts. But I like to have more ideas than I can actually use.

I've (finally)found a way to deal with unit studies that works for me and my family. My husband, kids and I all tend to have a few interests going on at the same time -- moving from one to another. We don't usually focus on just ONE. What is more, we usually tend to be focusing on a couple of skills or methods at the same time. For example, I just read three modern fiction books in three days. But before that, the last fiction book I read was two or three months ago. Also -- we like to follow a "golden thread" through an interest, rather than plan it out all ahead of time.

But while I feel a bit claustrophobic if I follow a unit exactly or just follow one unit at a time, the rich treasurehouse of unit study plans that are out there CAN provide a sourcebook of possible ideas and activities and booklists, and so that is what I've been getting out of unit studies recently. Lightbulb moment! (As my 11 year old said dryly about his 4 year sibling, "He should dress up as Captain Obvious for Halloween." Well, me too. Sometimes it takes me a long time to get to an idea that everyone else has figured out immediately)

So with units---- I find that if I have a few thought out a bit, and we move from one to another during a given time frame, it works better than just focusing on one at a time. This is how we worked with Giotto/Shakespeare last term. We never did get to the architecture (but there's still 2/3 of a year left..).

For me, it also works well if I have a theme. Not just a topic but something to think about with regard to the topic. This is difficult to explain, though I tried a bit in my post about Literature Themes. It seems to help me keep on track -- this year, the theme is about exploration and discovery -- there is a wide field, indeed! but when I am planning and sorting, I am looking for ideas to do with exploration and broadening horizons. And so that is somewhat the method I am using too -- trying to explore, and keep lots of options so there is an abundant choice.

One more thing that works for me -- tacking unit studies onto Everything Else, not vice versa. I know that I read a lot of unit study books and articles that say that units should incorporate Everything Else. But for me, units become painful if they are academic vehicles. For me, they work better as occasions of delight, that we can feel good about doing for variety or enrichment or family closeness, but drop without hesitation if they are not going anywhere. In this regard, I like the way Andrew Campbell explains Non Multa sed Multum :

Does this mean that students will go through thirteen years of schooling never cracking an English novel? Are we denying our children the pleasure of floating down the river with Rat and Mole, bursting with excitement when Almanzo wins first prize for his milk fed pumpkin, or pushing past a row of old coats to step into the Narnian winter? Of course not. What it does mean is that we apply the principle of multum non multa in selecting schoolbooks. The streamlined classical curriculum leaves plenty of time for other pursuits, including reading for pleasure and discovery. It is in these hours that students can sail the seas to Treasure Island, sit in the drawing rooms of Austen and Trollope, thrill to the daring escapades of the Scarlet Pimpernel, march with the Roman legions in Eagle of the Ninth, circle the globe with Phileas Fogg, or experience the angst of modern dystopias in 1984 and Brave New World.

To say it briefly, my family and I have decided that if we are going to float down the river with Rat and Mole, we want to ...float. Not necessarily study vocabulary words, or estimate how many miles they floated, or research the water habits of rats and moles (though I could see how any of these COULD become a delight-directed project; I'm talking here about artificially dragging in all the cross-curricular connections just so the unit can be a comprehensive academic experience).

With the dragons, I have in mind to strew the books and see which ones he would like to do, and I bought a Sculpey model kit with a dragon and knights that I expect this particular 11 year old will delight in. But there is a point, difficult to define precisely (since some kids might hate sculpey kits while others might enjoy writing a dragon story using their vocabulary words or something that my kids would hate) where it would not be just "floating" but be a confusion between utilitarian and liberal.

In that way, I feel very much as Charlotte Mason did (summarized by the DHM at the Common Room in a Charlotte Mason Tutorial; the words are the DHM's)

And if I might insert a suggestion- excepting the historical connections, do not try too hard to otherwise correlate the books one with another in a unit study approach. Charlotte Mason really isn't a unit study. In fact, she didn't care for them much. She thought that children should have a _wide_ variety of material to stir their interest and keep it sharp. She felt that too much of a muchness would sort of dull their interest. If everything they study for weeks at a time is all about apples or Robinson Crusoe (two hilarious examples CM used), they rather quickly tire of it.

The idea with a CM education is that the parent/teacher spreads the banquet, and then does less so that the student can do more- the student discovers and builds her own connections with the material. This is lovely to see.

Two More Books

I've read two more books in recent days: The Ox Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, and The Natural by Bernard Malamud. I guess both have been made into movies but I haven't seen either of them. Both in different ways are about the inadequacy of simple decency in moral crisis. ... or at least, that is something I got out of both of them.

I loved The Ox Bow Incident. It had everything -- pace, power, characterization, serious theme. And it's set somewhere just over the Sierra mountains from us (in Nevada). Every scene and detail builds cumulatively.

Van Tilburg Clark wrote in the introduction to this edition of the book (a reader asked if the lynchings were intended to be symbolic of the three crosses) that he would be glad if the situation evoked the shadow of Golgotha, yet a rope is not a cross and the Sierra Nevadas are not Judea. This I thought a very sensible answer, much in the line of what Tolkien would say when asked if this or that element of Lord of the Rings was meant to be representative of this or that religious truth.

The Natural, I am still thinking about. The main character had sort of a space around him, and there was a similar diffuse feeling to the incidents, though the main trajectory of the plot was just as remorseless as in the OxBow Incident. Though the book does go into the main character's mind, it does not really "discover" him as an individual. The focus seemed to be on how fame, American fandom and baseball luck interact with each other. Some of the scenes, for example the love scenes and the eating scenes (!), seemed to be more random and disconnected than not, but perhaps that was the point. I supposed both expressed a kind of hunger and craving, as indeed the other details of the story did as well.

The OxBow Incident had a first person narrator, but there was a space left between him and the reader, too. He would describe people and actions and speech, but his "presence" was sort of neutral, it seemed. Perhaps this was in order to allow for the "it could be me" feeling that you get as it goes on.

Both had sort of a legendary, iconic American setting -- I guess because one was a western and the other was set on the Field of Dreams, so to speak. This made each incident and detail in both books seem to cast a big shadow of meaning.

Just a few notes... I wanted to put them down while the stories were still on my mind.

Memento Mori

"Remember that you must die."

I just finished reading Memento Mori by Muriel Spark. It has a retired detective, a parlor investigation, a murder and sinister telephone calls, but it is not a detective mystery except in the deeper sense that it is concerned with the mystery of death. As the retired inspector says:

"If I had my life to live over again, I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death . I would practise, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practise which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs."

"....The words, 'Remember you must die.' It is, you know, an excellent thing to remember this, for it is nothing more than the truth. To remember one's death is, in short, a way of life."

"To come to the point---" said Godfrey.

"Godfrey," said Charmian. "I am sure everyone is fascinated by what Henry is saying."

I enjoyed the book much more than I thought I would. It concerns the lives and secret, tangled pasts of a group of elderly English people, and their dealings to avoid or confront the thought of death. I found that I could identify in bits and pieces with the more "touchstone" characters, but even those are kept at a distance. There was a purgatorial, discomposed air to the episodes. The style was what I think they call "mordant" (I've always wanted to use that word somewhere).... precise, lowkey, with an edge to it.

Muriel Spark was Scottish, and a convert to Catholicism, according to Wikipedia. Evelyn Waugh encouraged her to write, Graham Greene enjoyed her writing. Penelope Fitzgerald, a novelist and contemporary, said that she:

"had pointed out that it wasn't until she became a Roman Catholic ... that she was able to see human existence as a whole, as a novelist needs to do." ......

Spark said of her conversion and its effect on her writing:

"I was just a little worried, tentative. Would it be right, would it not be right? Can I write a novel about that — would it be foolish, wouldn't it be? And somehow with my religion — whether one has anything to do with the other, I don't know - but it does seem so, that I just gained confidence…"

Term Examinations in the Homeschool

(This is an article I wrote several years back and since we are doing some examinations this term -- see here for first day) -- I thought it might be a good time to post it. Also, Day Two is up here and the gif versions are here)

Whether Term Exams Can Be of Value in the Homeschool

When I first started homeschooling I gathered the impression that regular examinations were of little value in a homeschool. Among the points I read or heard were the fact that a homeschool mom can keep track of a child's progress as a teacher of a class cannot, so testing is unnecessary; that students tend to study hard for an exam and then forget the material quickly afterwards, so testing is ineffective; that test results don't always reflect how capable the child actually is and how well he knows the material, so testing is inaccurate.

All these things are partially true, but incomplete. It is true that a mom can assess her child's progress informally simply by discussing concepts or seeing how the child does in a subject. But while this kind of assessment is important and a wonderful advantage of the homeschool, it does not serve the same purpose as an exam. An exam takes a wider view and invites the child to display long term retention of ideas and apply them. It trains memory, a sense of discrimination between what is high priority and what is less so, and the ability to use language thoughtfully rather than just parrot the textbook. Lots of students can catch on to a math or grammar concept quickly and apply the learning to an exercise with great success, but then forget it almost immediately if it is not reviewed. Other children catch on more slowly, but retain the information better. Regular tests and exams give each kind of child a chance to show long-term acquirements rather than just quickness or lack of it.

The second point, that exams are an encouragement only to "cram" for a couple of days and then forget the material promptly when the test is over, might be true in some cases but ought not to be the case in a homeschool. In fact, this criticism points to one of the main positive benefits of regular examinations. Examinations are an incentive to the "self-activity" and mastery that are so essential a part of the Ignatian education. When a student is working well in a subject, he should be reviewing continually during the term by studying vocabulary words, thinking about what he is reading, making connections between one area and another, and applying his understanding. If he is doing this, pre-exam review and study should be a consolidation of what he has learned, not a quick strenuous effort to patch up the lacks in his study up till then.

So the fact that regular exams are part of the curriculum makes the student accountable. If I, the teacher, do too much teaching and helping and don’t specifically teach study habits, and the children don't do enough work on their own to internalize what they are learning, this fault tends to show up on examinations. Exams make "study skills" an immediate and practical necessity. A younger child can do oral presentations and recitations during the term, or make visual displays in the form of captioned posters or little illustrated books; an older student, in addition to those things, can also learn to take notes, to make vocabulary cards, to recite quietly or into a tape-recorder in order to really learn material thoroughly. The responsibility for guiding and teaching independent study belongs to the homeschool teacher, but the actual responsibility for making the mental effort belongs to the student.

The third point, that some children don't test well, is also partly true but in a homeschool can be addressed directly according to the reasons for the under-performance. Some children get nervous and stressed in a test situation. Frequent practice by short quizzes, trial runs plus a low-key, supportive environment will probably help over time. Some children have fine motor problems and can't write quickly or fluently. It is possible that these children could test orally or using a word processor, and then work on their fine motor skills over the next term or year. Some children have short attention spans or a habit of guessing wildly. They can be given breaks in between tests or parts of tests, for them to get some exercise or for the mother to make sure that they aren't getting too far off track on their answers merely to "have it over with". All these problems are quite natural for children to have, but they can all be minimized and compensated for, and remedying this kind of difficulty will keep it from becoming a handicap to the child’s academic success in later years.

Finally, in a homeschool, review and exam weeks can be a nice change of pace and a way to clearly see progress as well as discern areas that need to be worked on in the future. I keep an observation log detailing what I notice about my children's learning habits, making the kind of informal assessment I mentioned at the beginning of this article. I also keep a list for brainstorming ideas for changes to make in the future. This is also a good time to fine-tune and rethink the daily schedule, the chore system, or make plans for activities the toddlers can do during school hours. I usually get a little more time to spend organizing the house during these two weeks too.

I hope all this doesn't give you the idea that examinations in a homeschool have to be intense or stressful. If they are prepared for, and modified to the family and students' situation, they should be a challenging but basically positive experience, giving everyone a chance to display what they have learned, and vary the routine of the school year. You could plan a short break from school, a field trip or some kind of celebration to mark the finish to the past term and the prospect of a fresh start in the new one.

Ignatian Education revisited

My revived interest in classical education and the progym has led me back to my old fascination with Ignatian education.

Twelve or so years ago, my oldest was in 4th grade. We were in our second year of homeschooling. I was looking for a Catholic curriculum, since at the time I did not feel confident enough to just wing it. Serendipitously, my husband had been donating money to a small classical Catholic day school in Napa, California called Kolbe Academy. When we found they had a homeschool program as well, it seemed like the best thing for our family to enroll. And indeed, Kolbe has been a huge benefit to our homeschool, though I tend to use the principles and method more than the actual curriculum choices in some years.

My husband ordered the booklet called Implementation of Ignatian Education in the Home. I found it difficult reading, but browsed through it again and again, fascinated by the proposal of an integrated, challenging classical Catholic education. The "Final End" or goal of the method was to produce a fully formed Christian capable of, and willing to, live and act and think "for the greater glory of God" (Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam).

The means by which this would be accomplished, the "tools", were described as (from the summary at Kolbe's site):

• 
  
• Self-activity: forms the habit of independent study and interest in scholarly pursuits
• Mastery: tackling progressively more difficult through learning, repetition and memorization builds confidence and motivation to keep learning
• Formation: emphasizes development of the whole person--mind, body and soul--to help the student learn to make wise choices in line with the will of God
• 
  

My first online writing ever was enthusiastic posts to a Catholic classical group (which I now moderate) about the Ignatian method as described in this little book.

I described the book this way back in 1999, paraphrasing some of the introduction:

The Ignatian Philosophy and Method of Education was developed by St. Ignatius of Loyola , and has been developed further and refined over the last 450 years. It can be used by anyone and is especially adaptable for use in the home. The fundamental goal of Ignatian education is to help parents lead their children to the knowledge and love of God. We must help those in our care to become responsible human beings, so that they will be able to cooperate with the Holy Father in his mission: *Instaurare Omnia in Christo* (To restore all things in Christ).

To do this we must train the student's memory, understanding, and will. The root of any person's failure is in the will, not the intellect! The overall goals of Ignatian-directed education are to train the student to speak, to write, and to act.

To reach these goals, students are encouraged in : self-activity, mastery of progressively more difficult material, and formation of the will through conscientious application of study habits. Lessons are developed with focus on just a few main points: prelection--- repetition -- recitation -- emulation-- memorization -- examination.

The Jesuits focused on secondary and tertiary education. (St Ignatius of Loyola formed the Society of Jesus, which flourished for 2 centuries before being suppressed in the 1770's; the society has been revived in recent times, but suffers sorrows at the hands of some of its very adherents)

The Ignatian method of education, called the Ratio Studiorum, corresponds in several ways to ST Ignatius's classic "Spiritual Exercises". One example: the Prelude and Points before each meditation in the Spiritual Exercises are analogous to the Ignatian "prelection" which is intended to help the student collect himself and turn to focusing on the academic material or skills to be learned.

There are more comparisons between the Spiritual Exercises and the Ignatian method of education in this PDF document: Reflections on the Educational Principles of the Spiritual Exercises.

I have an Ignatian education page, Multa et Multum which contains articles I wrote in past years about applying the method in the homeschool (in pdf form).

Here are two prayers by St Ignatius that sort of sum it up:

Take, Lord, and Receive Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will. All I have and call my own. Whatever I have or hold, you have given me. I restore it all to you and surrender it wholly to be governed by your will. Give me only your love and grace and I am rich enough and ask for nothing more. St. Ignatius' Prayer for Generosity Lord, teach me to be generous. Teach me to serve you as you deserve; to give and not to count the cost, to fight and not to heed the wounds, to toil and not to seek for rest, to labor and not to ask for reward, save that of knowing that I do your will.

Of course Ignatius, and the Society of Jesus, did not think that education could make you a saint. Far from it. But they did think that education could cooperate with, or work against, the effects of grace. And they did believe that education should train more than the intellect; it should train -- or rather, perhaps, aid in forming -- the will and the heart as well.

Since this blog is my thinking board, I wanted to get this out here as a sort of introduction since I hope to be talking more about implementing Ignatian education in the future and I am sure it would be confusing if I just jumped in.

November is for Composition

I let my learning goals lapse for a while, I realize. I think it was the chickenpox, then Alaska, and the football, that derailed me. Come to think of it, I should have devoted a month to Athletic Games and one to Medical/Therapy, since those are certainly ongoing themes in my family. I just updated the goals accordingly. I also added a Domestic Church category, which falls nicely into December -- this will be the month to focus on the liturgical year, continuing old traditions and planning enrichment/development for the future.

This month, November, has quite naturally evolved towards a language arts focus. Specifically, the progymnasmata is the focus (here are some posts on planning the progym on my other blog). It is not Charlotte Mason -- rather more classical -- but I do think that Charlotte Mason must have used/revived some elements of former progym theory in her ideas about copywork, dictation, and narration.

Penny Gardner's site has some quotes from CM about reading and writing for older children:

“He must generalize, classify, infer, judge, visualize, discriminate, labor in one way or another, with that capable mind of his, until the substance of his book is assimilated or rejected, according as he shall determine.” -- School Education, p. 179

“But this [narration] is only one way to use books: others are to enumerate the statements in a given paragraph or chapter; to analyse a chapter, to divide it into paragraphs under proper headings, to tabulate and classify series; to trace cause to consequence and consequence to cause; to discern character and perceive how character and circumstance interact; to get lessons of life and conduct, or the living knowledge which makes for science, out of books; all this is possible for school boys and girls, and until they have begun to use books for themselves in such ways, they can hardly be said to have begun their education.” --School Education, p. 180

Here are some notes from Lynn's CMason High School page: on the Junior High School English Transition. Here is one passage:

Now, the written narration vary in style. In the beginning you will allow him to write in any way he pleases, and you should expect they will be very similar to his oral narration style (though shorter). He does write on whatever he is reading, in every area. For example, in History he might be reading Virgil, and would write to you about one of the battles. However, at this point you begin to select HOW he writes. For example, you might assign him to write everything this week in the style of a newspaper reporter, if you had studied reporting in composition. Next week they might be Encyclopedia articles, or as though he were one of the participants describing the event to his grandchild. For composition he might take a passage (even one of his own narrations) and re-write it into a different style. When he learns essay format you would show him how to take three selections from the reading passage as examples to answer the question, instead of telling you everything he knows about the topic. He is learning discernment, choosing what is needed.

Some of this is quite similar to what the ancients called copia: learning written verbal fluency and range through practice.

Good Reading

The 4th Charlotte Mason Carnival is up.

I like this post on How to Use the Handbook of Nature Study. Very practical and helpful.

And a post on learning through exploring and forming relationships at Dewey's Treehouse.

Blogging Lapses, and Lions and Reading Levels

I haven't written much on this blog for a long time, as you probably have noticed if you happen to visit here.

Part of it is that there are so many positively great blogs out there. Too many to read them all. There's not really a necessity for one more. Every time I load up the blank typing screen, that's what I start thinking, and it freezes up my writing.

Of course, there's another way to think about it. A blog is like a personal journal or book or essay depository accessible to others. The number of blogs out there doesn't matter so much, in that perspective.

That's how I've been trying to think of it recently. I would really like to start writing here again.

By the way......

It occurred to me just now that my last post with the readability test might look like bragging. And ever since then I've been squirming, wondering whether to delete it altogether. But really, it is not. It's not bragging, and I will prove it. I thought it was amusing that Love2Learn Mom's daughter's blog scored at a higher level than hers, and then when my daughter and I came through with the same disparity, I thought it was even more amusing for the same reason.

But now look at this blog, The Window in the Garden Wall, which is daily quotes from CS Lewis's writing. When I put that link into the readability test, it came up as Elementary level. You see, while there's a place for Genius blogs like my daughter's (BWG) that doesn't mean that "Elementariness" isn't a definite virtue, either.

Flannery O'Connor's blog If Flannery HAd a BLog also has an elementary readability level. Lewis and O'Connor are two of the best modern stylists I can think of.

The daily GK Chesterton blog has a high school reading level. Chesterton's style is unique and can hardly be categorized, but is marvelously vivid and effective.

This blog, John Henry Newman, which is about Newman, with plenty of quotes from his work, gets a college/postgraduate readability. I thought it might. Newman is a first rate stylist, too, but much more in the Ciceronian than the plain style.

And so on.

By the way, if you go to the CS Lewis blog I linked to above, you will find on the sidebar what Aidan describes as "A Lion Toilet!!" (imagine a tone of delight).

I think that's the right note upon which to end this post. Aidan always has the best turn of phrase. If he wrote a blog, I cannot even propose what level of readability he would land at.

I think it's the poems and the GKC quotes

Like Love2Learn MOm, I checked my blog for readability:



then checked my 12th grade daughter's:



HT: The Bookworm

Self-Portrait of Aidan
















Aidan's portrait of his little brother Paddy.