One morning, Monet, the middle child of our five children, came down to the computer room where I was observing the very beginning stages of a monarch butterfly emerging from her chrysalis. I knew that she would be breaking forth at any moment, because all of her monarch colors were very visible through the casing, and it was the time of the day when monarchs typically emerge. We'd been raising butterflies through the summer, after a fellow homeschooling mom had given us a bouquet of milkweed hosting a half-dozen tiny caterpillars. Though we'd watched the other stages of metamorphosis, the growing caterpillar, the shedding of their caterpillar skins, and the change into a chrysalis, he'd not yet seen the amazing moment when the transformation comes to completion. In the kitchen, a list of the day's goals were sitting on the table--chores, lessons, piano practice, etc. Even though I was standing there watching a miracle about to take place, my mind was on that list of goals. I knew that if we got distracted for too long, the day would run away with us. "Come on, Monet," I said, "let's start our day." He protested, of course, but it wasn't a disrespectful thing. He just really wanted to make sure he didn't miss that moment. "We'll keep checking," I assured him. "We'll only be in the next room." He hesitated, but followed me into the kitchen.Earlier this week, when a homeschool mother asked me if I would share at Saturday morning's homeschool mothers' luncheon, I was both pleased and surprised; pleased because I'm an attention hog--I love to talk. Surprised because I wasn't really sure what I had to share that would be of interest. The attention-hog me won out, and I told her "yes." Then I did what I normally do under these circumstances--panic. How could I bring all of my thoughts of fifteen years of homeschooling, into focus, and keep it under fifteen minutes? "Talk about your specialty areas, your special interests," she said. Huh. What are my special interests, I wondered. I mean, philosophically speaking, our educational style is all over the map. Homeschooling in the Thicket Dweller household is quite eclectic and, if nothing else, very interesting. At any given time, you might find us looking for formaldehyde to preserve the eyeball of a cat that had been run over by a car, or smearing shaving cream all over the kitchen table to beat the boredom of practicing our letter formations on paper, or recording old time radio drama satires, complete with Rich Chocolatey Ovaltine Bar commercials and blooper reels.
We have a lot of fun with our learning. But I'm never really sure, when someone, say the cashier at Wal*Mart who wonders why my kids aren't in school, asks me to define what we do. We aren't school-at-homers. We tried that for a while, and there wasn't a day when one of us didn't end up crying. We aren't classical homeschoolers, strictly speaking, because, while we read a lot of classical literature and focus on a many aspects of classical education, like art and music and some Well-Trained Mind philosophies, we have many modern interests, like juggling and unicycling and blogging. We aren't unschoolers, because that connotates a completely child-led, structure-free lifestyle, and my kids would be quick to tell you that that's not us. I don't relinquish complete control very easily.
So, while we gleen from many different educational styles, we don't strictly follow any of them. I guess I'm a homelearner of all trades, a master of none. If truly pressed to define our educational style, I would have to categorize us as interest-led learners.
"What does *that* mean," the cashier at Wal*Mart might ask while I lift a bag of potatoes onto the conveyor belt. Well, if she had some time, I'd tell her. Because, if you remember what I said before, I like to talk. I guess talking would be my specialty area.
I'd say, "Well, it's like this. Interest-led learning can be broken down into three sub-categories. We can allow interest, we can express interest, and we can encourage interest." At that point, the cashier would probably hand me my receipt, throw my bag of potatoes into the cart, and send me on my way, but since I have you here, a captive audience, I'll expound.
Allowing interest. I would say that's my biggest priority. To me, allowing interest is God's gift to educating parents. Having five children, ranging in age from three to almost sixteen, it would be difficult to choose one learning style, one out-of-the-box curriculum, and use it successfully with everyone. For me, it's important to be flexible, to appeal to their interest areas for clues on how they learn. Out of my school-age children, I have one child who is a voracious reader, one who is very artistic, one who loves animals, and one who...well...he's easily distracted, a bit strong-willed, and likes to be the center of attention. In other words, he's an awful lot like me. But I think he's the child who taught me the most about the importance of flexibility in our learning environment.
One day about six months ago, I got a call from a homeschooling friend. She was exasperated with her thirteen-year-old daughter. "I can't get her to do anything! She won't write her book reports, she won't do her math, and it's driving me wild! All she talks about is learning how to play guitar. I told her today that I've had enough. No way. I won't stand for it! If she can't handle doing her regular lessons, then she can just forget about ever getting a guitar."
So I told her about my proverbs 22:6 story.
For years, Houdin balked at the idea of learning to read. Reading was something his *sister* did, not him. His sister, who had taken to reading like a homeschooler takes to curriculum fairs, learned to read with very little help by age three. She was reading Pride and Prejudice by age eight. She was off the charts in her language arts assessments by age ten. Houdin, however, showed no interest in reading. As a matter of fact, by the time he was six and still wasn't reading, I went into so much of a panic that I enrolled him in a local private Christian school. By the end of the year, my wallet was quite a bit lighter and he had developed a deep appreciation for recess, but the boy still didn't know how to read. It was about then that I got a hold of Raymond and Dorothy Moore's books and found a bit of comfort, that it was better for a child to be late in reading than too early. Mortimer J. Adler says something very similar, that it will do more damage to force a child to read before he's ready than it would do for them to read after they're ready. So I decided to just stop pushing it.
Proverbs 22:6 says to train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not turn from it. One day, I happened to be reading this verse in my Amplified Bible, and I was encouraged to read this:
Train up a child in the way he should go [and in keeping with his individual gift or bent], and when he is old he will not depart from it.
In keeping with his individual gift or bent. That's one of the beautiful things about homeschooling. We can do this--we can make accomodations for kids who are night owls, or kids who communicate better by speaking than by writing, or kids who think they hate to read.
One of my favorite authors on education, Charlotte Mason, says, "The parent who sees his way to educate his child will make use of every circumstance of the child's life almost without intention on his own part...Does the child eat or drink, does he come, or go, or play--all the time, he is being educated, though he is as little aware of it as he is of the act of breathing."
This quote reminds me of a story that John Holt, the father of unschooling, told about walking across a courtyard on his way to work one day, how he envisioned a seminar where everyone talked about breathing. "How are you breathing today?" One would ask. "Oh, not like Joe Smith...doesn't he breath beautifully?" And so on. If we were to witness this type of convention, we'd wonder if the attendants were sick, or had been sick. Why so much talk and worry about something healthy people do naturally? The same might be said, Holt concludes, about how much we worry about learning. Given room, we all have interests. We all have things that motivate us to learn. Aristotle said that the pleasure arising from thinking and learning will make us think and learn all the more.
So I thought about my son's individual bents and gifts, wondered what would motivate him to think and learn all the more. What does he like? Well, he likes magic, I thought, sleight of hand. Illusion. It's an interest he picked up from his great-grandfather, a master magician who has never failed to wow us with his tricks. I took Houdin to a magic shop and let him choose a few things with the promise of more the next week if he did his chores and cared for these gifts. This, not reading, was clearly his talent. But the beauty was that, in order to learn to do these tricks well, he needed to read the instructions. Bam. The inspiration was there. The motivation was there. And as if by some intervention of the Lord, the next time we went, the shop owner, who had taken a liking to Houdin, suggested...GASP!...some BOOKS for him to read! "Do you know anything about Houdini?" He asked. "A little," Houdin answered. "Do you like to read?" the shop owner asked. "Not really," Houdin answered. "How old are you...about twelve?" Houdin nodded. "When I was twelve, I hated to read, too. And then I got interested in magic. I read about Houdini, and then I started reading books like this one..." he handed Houdin a huge book filled with instructions for different magic tricks. "Can we get it?" Houdin asked me. We took the book home, he got some books on Houdini from the library, and by the end of the week, he was reading every night. When the student is ready, the master appears. Now, Houdin takes his magic tricks to businesses to entertain patrons, uses them as ice-breakers, and presents them at nursing homes. And, he still reads every night.
So, after I told my friend this little story, I suggested that she use the guitar as a motivator, not as a punishment. "Have her research guitars. Tell her to take notes and present them to you. Encourage her to save her own money for lessons. You have a gift here, the gift of motivation that comes with her desire to play guitar. It's the best tool you have." I added, too, the benefit of a lifelong love of music, how it will always be a means of meditation and worship, how it will increase her logical thinking.
Last week, the young girl played her guitar for me. She plays beautifully. she has started a teen worship team at her church. And her mother no longer has problems with getting her to do her lessons--she sees the value in research and written communication. Abbe Ernest Dimnet said that children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves. I find that by giving my children a little room, a little benign neglect, they educate themselves quite well.
Of course, there are things that we, as mothers, want our children to learn even if they can't be easily motivated by their gifts to learn them. That's where encouraging interest comes in. Listening to her play a new piece on the piano, asking to hear the new story she's written, showing a guest his latest drawing, and, one of my favorite ways of encouraging interest,"strewing." Strewing is a term I picked up from unschooler Sandra Dodd. Strewing, defined, is leaving materials of interest around for my children to discover. This follows the same course of logic as keeping healthy foods in the pantry. Charlotte Mason, in her book Home Education, says, "The more the child shapes his own course, the less do the parents find to do, beyond feeding him with food convenient, whether love or thought or bodily meat and drink. The parents' chief care is that that which they supply shall be wholesome and nourishing, whether in the way of...books, lessons, playmates, bread and milk, or mother's love." Strewing could be as simple as leaving an interesting book beside the toilet, as effortless as playing Edvard Grieg pieces during meal preparation times, or as pre-planned as taking the whole family to a contra-dance. Sometimes these things meet with a bit of resistence, but with some polite discourse, the child usually trusts that I, the mother, know what I'm talking about, that I've rarely steered them wrong, and they comply. I once heard John Tesh say that it takes introducing a food up to fifteen times before a child will like it, so sometimes, I have to keep trying. The important things stick. The superfluous ones slip away.
And, while encouraging interest, I incorporate those modifications I talked about earlier. For a child who thinks he hates to write, I started a mother/son journal, a place where we communicate with each other in writing on a regular basis. Interest encouraged. For a child who thinks he hates math, we get into discussions about pi at midnight, the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle, by measuring every circle in the house to see if the theory holds true. Interest encouraged. For the daughter who doesn't like to keep records of her lessons or do narrations about the books she's read, we created a blog where she can record her educational progress. Interest encouraged. In these ways, we learn, not just during traditional school hours, and not just during the traditional school year, but all the time. Taking every opportunity to learn. Learning like breathing. We breath everywhere. Last week, while on a date to Coccia House in Wooster, my son Monet and I had a conversation about continents. "Are they, like, cities?" He asked. "No," I answered, "let me explain." And right then, that italian restaurant became the world. Each room became a continent. Each table became a country. He caught on. Each plate became a state or province, my pasta, a tangled mass of cities, towns and villages. "I like my teacher," he said. "Because, in a way, I am my teacher."
And while they do teach themselves, I also feel that there are things that I must teach them, things that resist being learned by allowing interest and encouraging interest. These things can almost always be learned by my expressing interest, by my taking the time to learn and become entranced. Frank Clark said, "Every adult needs a child to teach. It's the way adults learn!" And I believe it's the way children learn, too. A well-publicized study by Harvard University in 1997 found that both literacy and school success could be linked to--guess what?--pleasant dinner table conversation about current events. We know that we influence our children with out interests. Charlotte Mason wrote "The child who sees his mother with reverent touch lift an early snowdrop to her lips learns a higher lesson than the print books can teach" and "If [children] see that the things which interest them are indifferent or disgusting to you, their pleasure in them vanishes." Learning together, showing a never-ending interest in learning, is one way that I have seen inspires my children to love learning.
That's how we got interested in the monarch butterflies. After my friend brought us our first batch of caterpillars, I just fell whole-hog in love with them! I couldn't get enough, checked out every book in the library, made a monarch butterfly habitat and a caterpillar feeding jar, and the kids and I went out in search of fresh milkweed when the caterpillars had eaten through their supply. Monarchs monopolated our lives. But they also taught me another valuable lesson in flexibility.
That morning, Monet and I left the monarch chrysalis and went into the kitchen to begin our day. Not two minutes after we'd walked out of the computer room, I peeked in to check on the monarc. There, dangling from the chrysalis, was a perfectly-formed butterfly, spreading her wings. "WE MISSED IT!" I yelled. Monet came rushing into the room, wide-eyed, yet disappointed. "I told you to wait, Mom!"
He was right. I can't remember specifically what drew us away, what we were doing that was so important, but I do remember that we missed an opportunity to witness a miracle. I don't want to make that mistake again. So I try to be open to learning opportunites, to make accomodations, to allow interest, to encourage interest, and to express interest, and in this way, I believe I can witness miracles rather than busy myself with things that I'll probably not remember in years to come.
I want to leave you with one quote by author Borg Hendrickson, words that have encouraged me to trust myself to develop my own educational philosophies:
"The homeschool parent listens to her inner voice, the voice she recognizes as the world's most natural and suitable teacher for her children. She listens to her own convictions, to her life-earned wisdom, to her love for her children, to her hopes for them and she then knows how and to what purposes she wants her children educated. she then knows her educational philosophies and aims. She also knows that nothing else will do."
