The Right Questions

From Robert Hutchins, The Ways (and Whys) of Reading:

"Deluged as we are with a welter of printed words, we tend to devaluate all writing, to look at every book on the shelf as the counterpart of every other, and to weigh volumes instead of words."

and a bit on the questions to ask of a reading:

"The art of reading a book or piece of writing consists in asking the right questions in the right order. They are as follows:

1. What is this piece of writing about? What is its leading theme or main point? What is it trying to say?
2. How does it say what it is trying to say? How does the writer get his central point across? How does he tell his story or argue for his conlcusion to produce the effect in us that he is aiming at?
3. Is it true -- factually or poetically -- in whole or part? HAs he won our assent or sympathy? And if not, what reasons do we have for disagreeing with or rejecting his view of things?
4. What of it? What meaning does it have for us in the shape of opinions or attitudes that we are led to form for ourselves as the result of reading this piece?

Now, I typed these out because I thought they were good questions. These are the sort of questions that a serious reader goes into a work trying to find answers to. It is helpful for me to keep them in mind as I prepare for teaching my 5th 12 year old next year.

HOWEVER -- and I am not sure how to say this, so it will be interesting to see how it turns out on the screen ;-) -- judging purely by myself, since I don't have access to anyone else's head -- they are not the kind of questions that you fire at the author. You don't go into the book demanding answers; rather, you put yourself into a receptive though not credulous mode; you listen and attend. Hutchins talks about the respect owed to an author, elsewhere. Nor are they the sort of questions you scribble answers to, quickly and simply, on a worksheet. If you do it that way, if you are like me, you will get the feeling of bored horror I get when I look at many literature study guides. Or worse, you may think you understand the book, but that would be like giving a personality questionnaire to a visitor to your house and imagining that now you know everything about him.

They are good questions to keep in mind, but they are not as good to bring to the forefront, like a scripted dialogue rather than a real conversation.

Talking to myself here, and there's a bigger application than just literary analysis. I have been thinking recently about how much "philosophy begins in wonder" as Socrates said. My daughter commented recently how much she dislikes having answers given to her before she has formulated the questions (just to make the context clear, we were talking about Plato's Republic which we are reading together, and how Socrates often seems to raise issues that he doesn't really settle). David Hicks said that much the same thing is the problem with modern teaching methods, often... the answers are given before the questions are asked -- a multitude of answers. I feel like last homeschool year, though it went pretty well in many respects, was a little bit too much about giving the answers before the questions were really thought through. Anyway, I thought I would write that out to remind myself!

Changing the Pace

Hey! I found Robert Schwickerath's book Jesuit Education: Its History and Principles....over at the Google Book Search page. It is a big download -- 12 MG (LOL -- just saw this typo -- you can tell I have a kid with medical needs around here, of course I meant MB)-- but looks interesting. The article I linked to earlier is a chapter excerpt from the book.

But what I was going to do was put an old article about lectio cursiva and stataria on here -- I wrote it in 2003 under the title Changing the Pace and it was in reference to following Kolbe Academy's syllabus, just so you know. But I guess it could apply to any of those times when a homeschool needs to change its flow a bit. That often seems to be in January.

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You know how it talks in Implementing Ignatian Education in the Home about lectio cursiva and lectio stataria? Basically, the idea is that some things in a given subject can be covered relatively quickly, while other things can be chosen to go into in more depth. The variety between a broad overview and an in-depth focus helps train the students to see both the "big picture" and to concentrate on the details.

A lot of the curriculum chosen by Kolbe seems to go this way naturally – e.g. Saxon, Voyages in English, Faith and Life, and Sadlier's Composition, to name a few, have"spiral" approaches where similar ground is covered every year but with a different focus or depth depending on maturity level and so on.

However, it is possible to use this concept as a tool for variety in the homeschool. You can still cover all the required material-- either by doing extra in one subject while doing less in another, or by using the course syllabus as an outline of what to cover, but covering it using a different book or resource. You can also add short courses of things that are not covered in the Kolbe syllabus, like Art and Music.

Some examples, since I see this is not very clear:

1. Focusing on history, doing a lot of memory work and reading historical fiction, with timeline and notebook projects, while temporarily doing less of the exercises in the science text. Or sometimes, for science, we focus temporarily on all the experiments or field work that we DIDN'T do the rest of the year -- you know, the experiments that Kolbe schedules for the fifth day of the week. Contrarily, in spring we sometimes focus more on science with a lot of out-doors "nature study" while just reading through the history text.
2. My oldest spent a term on a research paper composition course. During this time he did less work in grammar and none in vocabulary except a SAT practice course.
3. My first grader is presently moving up a notch in reading skills, going from painful decoding to primer-level fluency. So we are having a language arts intensive right now, where he has several short lessons in reading per day and correspondingly less work in the other subjects.
4. My middle two are above-average spellers, so we usually don't follow a spelling curriculum. But one year we made a Writing Road to Reading type spelling notebook, which was also practice in handwriting for my then 6th grader. Also, sometimes I have had them do their phonics or English lessons orally (especially when they were younger) to free up time to focus on something else, or to advance faster through the book if the lessons were easy and more or less review.

That kind of thing can easily be done without getting very far from the syllabus. The little variety or change of pace seems to help me and the kids. I guess I could also relate this to the Ignatian recommendation that the teachers always be ready to flex the material and tailor it to the class and also approach it from a fresh perspective each year so that teaching doesn't become stale and mechanical.

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Lectio -- Extensive and Intensive, Cursiva and Stataria

The following are quotes from Francis Crotty's book called Implementation of Ignatian Education in the Home. Bear with me because this is groundwork for talking about lectio cursiva and lectio stataria. Funny, when I go Googling, the only things that come up with regard to those terms are my own posts and a few texts written in German or Latin ;-). So here are the quotes and then I've tried to paraphrase them in my own words since I know it's really difficult to read quotes taken from context:




Selective Emphasis

In respect to the treatment of subjects in the curriculum, home teachers must avoid attempting to cover wide areas of subject-matter with equal emphasis on all of its phrases. They must rather select salient aspects for intensive treatment and cover subsidiary phases in summary form. For example, general courses in history and literature are of little or no educational value unless they are conducted on this basis of selective emphasis... p 24

The short version -- it's effective to combine in-depth treatment of a topic with a survey-level approach. This is particularly true in courses like history and literature, because you want both an awareness of the "big picture" AND a method of delving more deeply into particular aspects of the whole. A century book or timeline is a nice way to do this with history and for literature, a cluster of books on a topic can be a good way to go.

Lectio Cursiva and Lectio Stataria:

Depending upon the stage of the lesson, the teacher may develop a few aspects of the lesson thoroughly (lectio stataria) or go into many aspects by way of introduction to a new subject of preparation for a review or wide and rapid teaching of subject matter (lectio cursiva).

My short version -- decide what is best in a particular lesson -- either a "big picture" survey or approach, or a more in-depth treatment. What you decide on may depend on many factors -- I decide based on what we have available, what I know about the subject personally, whether the little ones are cranky that day, or based upon whether one of the other assignments for that day is cursory or in-depth (I like to balance those things so the kids are using different parts of their intellectual equipment for different lessons -- as Charlotte Mason says, variety in lessons during a day).

More on Intensive and Extensive Treatment of Subjects

In view of the pedagogical problem created by the immense growth of knowledge, there is needed a principle of selectivity of subjects, of limitation of subject-matter, and a technique for both intensive and extensive treatment of this subject matter....

The principle of the limitation of subject-matter is based on the formational function of education....

..The principle of intensive-extensive treatment of subject matter rests on the fact that merely extensive treatment would lead to superficiality and too restricted treatment would prevent a sufficiently broad view and result in lack of student interest and stimulation. Hence, there must be both intensive and extensive treatment of subject-matter: intensive within the home-class, to fulfill the formative function, and extensive, in required and independent reading, apart from home-class, for the adequate knowledge appreciation, eg of literary works and their historical setting.

This part explains the disadvantage of too shallow or too in-depth an approach and suggests that "teacher-time" ought to be spent conveying a method -- analytical or synthetic. Analysis is breaking things down into parts -- categorizing or parsing or translating. Synthesis is putting things together -- discussions or compositions or narrations. Reading aloud is definitely a premium use of teacher time since there are few ways to better set an example for comprehension, enjoyment and even elocution than by reading with a child, and if you can cuddle up on a couch together while reading that is even better, truly an almost- perfect "whole" way to educate.

Education is meant to be formative -- that is, teaching habits and methods and an attitude that will last throughout life. When in doubt, that is the aspect to consider first, so it doesn't usually work to push through the checklist at all costs to the point of tears and bitterness (this is my paraphrase of what he is saying).


Types of the Whole

A practical solution for the teacher (who is short of time) ...is to combine the intensive and extensive system in teaching the matter for the first time. Some parts of the subject, some periods of history, some scientific principles, warrant careful and detailed explanation and study, while other phases can be summarized, or typical segments can be treated thoroughly and shown to be representative of the whole.

Personally, what I do is try to glance ahead at my children's reading to see what areas I would like to consolidate in their minds and which are less key. A more relaxed way to do this is to "discover" together and go on rabbit trails based on interest or availability of resources. To be honest, this is my default mode of operation and it does work but ideally, the Ignatian method calls for a bit of preparation ahead of time.

Now to leave the Ignatian Education and move onto the one other place I found the terms "lectio cursiva et stataria" mentioned in a book written in English online. Here is a bit from a book called "Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic" and this is the relevant section:

The third rule under this head is "Accommodate the intensity of the reading to the importance of the work. Some books therefore are only to be dipped into; others are to be run over rapidly; and others are to be studied long and sedulously." All books are not to be read with the same attention; and accordingly, an ancient distinction was taken of reading into lectio cursiva and lectio stataria. The former of these we have adopted into English, cursory reading being a familiar and correct translation of lectio cursiva. But lectio stataria cannot be so well rendered by the expression of stationary reading. "Read not," says Bacon in his Fiftieth Essay, "to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. Some books also may be read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others; but that would be only in the less important arguments, and the meaner sort of books, else distilled books are like common distilled waters, flashy things. " (The whole quote from Bacon is here) ...

You will notice that when this Hamilton is discussing "reading" it looks like he is talking about the kind of reading a person does when he is already educated. But in Ignatian education, the way I understand it, a large part of the coursework was based on "readings", so the terms "cursiva" and "stataria" in that context referred to how the material was studied and taught. (of course, the goal for the teaching was that the student would eventually be able to carry this out on his own). Basically the class would go through a book and study specific sections in great detail, while reading larger sections at home in their own time and then reviewing/discussing their independent reading in class. They also memorized sections of the works they were studying, and wrote themes -- compositions -- based on them. There is a lot more detail about the process in this excellent article by Robert Schwickerath called The Method of Teaching in Practice. I think I have mentioned it before but it really is a great resource.

Oh, and that reminds me that I finally found the CS Lewis quote I've been looking for for the longest time -- here it is, since it seems to relate a bit to the quote above:

“An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only. There is hope for a man who has never read Malory or Boswell or Tristaram Shandy or Shakespeare’s Sonnets: But what can you do with a man who says he ‘has read’ them, meaning he has read them once, and thinks that this settles the matter? … We do not enjoy a story fully at first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties. Till then, it is like wasting great wine on a ravenous natural thirst which merely wants cold wetness."

But I'd better stop now, I see. For one thing, Paddy wants me to read to him... again! More on this lectio subject another time.