Archive for the ‘Tidal Homeschooling’ Category
The other day a neighbor asked me if we take a spring break. I laughed and said, “Yes—the whole spring!”
We’ve had such a pleasant time the last couple of months, immersing ourselves in some good books and other forms of study. Now the outdoors is beckoning, and our daily rhythms are shifting. Spring is calling us, urging us out of the house. We are a bunch of Mary Lennoxes, unable to resist the rustlings and chirpings, the spikes of green, the gypsy winds.
I keep finding cups of water on the counter with tiny blossoms floating like fairy lily pads: the first bluets and starry white chickweed flowers. Chickweed, so Jane tells me, is an edible plant and quite tasty. (“Like sugar snap pea pods, Mom.”) She has begged me not to uproot the vast patch of it that has taken over a stretch of our backyard mulch bed, just uphill from the strawberries. Another weed, a purple-flowered plant the children call “cow parsley,” is popping up all over the lawn, much to their delight: they suck the nectar from the itty bitty orchid-like blossoms and proclaim it better than the honeysuckle they’ll seek out later in the summer.
Jane, who had been binging on math during the past three weeks—such a Math-U-See enthusiast is she that she devoured half of her new Pre-Algebra book in a month’s time—seems to have shifted her attentions to botany. I find myself tripping over her tattered copy of All About Weeds everywhere I go, and upstairs, the microscope is much in demand for the viewing of leaf cross sections. An experiment involving scarlet runner beans has become the centerpiece on the kitchen table.
Our oregano and thyme are greening back up, and the foxglove is quite large already. Daffodils are in glorious bloom on the slope at the edge of the yard, but I don’t venture down that hill often; the walk back up wipes me out these days. Such is the ninth month of pregnancy.
A mourning dove is nesting above our front porch light. I can’t imagine how she tolerates the clamor, for this is the season of constant in-and-out. Red Virginia mud is every-where. (Please don’t look at my floors.) A great vat of mud has appeared in the backyard under the white pine, and someone painted the slide. This may account for the recent destruction of several pairs of pants.
My hyacinths bloomed yesterday, beating the forsythia for the first time. The crocuses and windflowers have been flaunting their sky colors for two weeks. It’s just about time to get our peas in the ground—our tradition is to plant them on St. Patrick’s Day.
So yes, we’re on spring break already, and it’ll last until summer.
This post is part of my series on Tidal Homeschooling.
Tags: homeschooling, homeschool, home education, unschooling, unschool, nature, nature study, spring
I found a major flaw in my metaphor.
I’ve been writing about what I call “tidal homeschooling,” the way my children experience an ebb and flow of alternating periods of deliberate study, directed by me, and periods of what is sometimes called “natural” learning but which I more often describe as “accidental” learning—the enormous quantities of facts and ideas children are wont to soak up when given time and freedom in which to do so. I’ve described the periods of structured study as our “high tide” times, when I charter a boat and lead my merry little crew on a fishing expedition in quest of a particular skill or subject, in contrast to our “low tide” times when they wander off, each in her own direction, to explore the shores and tide pools of the world, eager little beachcombers gathering sackfuls of treasure. Because of the high-tide voyages, I cannot accurately call us unschoolers; but because of the frequency and fruitfulness of our low-tide times, which sometimes last for months, I have shied away from various other home-education labels as well, finding more in common with the outlook of the unschoolers than with any other group. Since no label fit, I coined my own term which seems to aptly describe the rhythm and manner of learning that takes place in our family.
But I was mulling over this excellent post at The Common Room (subsequent mulling-over being the usual pleasant result of reading a Common Room post) and it struck me that my metaphor breaks down when I come to the beachcombing part.
“The adults in the child’s life,” writes the Headmistress, referencing Charlotte Mason,
“have the ‘power of appeal and inspiration,’ and the responsibility to act ‘the part of guide, philosopher and friend’ to these young people with wonderful minds but no knowledge to speak of.
“Or… we can just abandon them to their uninformed judgment about what’s important and what isn’t, leave them to their own devices, and allow them to believe that their own judgment about what is and is not important to know is just as well informed and solid an opinion as Mortimer Adler’s, Thomas Jefferson’s, Peter’s, Paul’s, or…. yours. Leaving children to pick up what scraps of knowledge they think to ask about, willy nilly, is not doing them any favors. It isn’t respectful of their situation as newcomers to the world or to the adults they will grow up to be. And if we don’t do our job as the adults in their lives when they are small, the adults they grow up to be will have a malnourished background upon which to build.’ “
For a brief moment, the unschooler in me bristled defensively. Not that I think the Headmistress was denouncing unschooling with this statement—she has made gracious remarks about the philosophy in the comments section here on Bonny Glen and elsewhere. But this statement jumped out at me: “Leaving children to pick up what scraps of knowledge they think to ask about, willy nilly…” Is this, I wondered, exactly the sort of experience I have enthusiastically hailed as our low-tide times? Allowing children the freedom to learn by undirected exploration of the world? To be sure, what I have witnessed and described as the collection of a sackful of treasures is a rich and bountiful harvest of knowledge, not an aimless scrounging after scraps. And yet…is there a willy-nilliness to their education? Am I—are unschoolers—leaving too much up to chance?
Then it occurred to me that I’ve overlooked an aspect of my beachcombing scenario. I’m the one strewing the beach with treasures for the children to discover. You see, this is where the metaphor breaks down. Sometimes, yes, I am simply the person bringing the children to the metaphorical strand and turning them loose to explore. But other times—a lot of the time, when I think about it—I have visited the beach in advance and filled the tide pools with interesting creatures; I have hidden the treasures behind the dunes.
This strewing is something unschooling parents talk a great deal about. It is the same thing Charlotte Mason meant when she said, “Education is a life. That life is sustained on ideas…we must sustain a child’s inner life with ideas as we sustain his body with food,” urging parents and teachers to provide hearty feasts of ‘living’ books and firsthand encounters with the natural world. Of course, Miss Mason recommended regular and orderly mealtimes, while an unschooler would probably say that the human mind thrives best when allowed to graze. But in both cases, we see a committed, thoughtful parent doing the shopping and preparing the food. I am doing just as much preparation (to jump metaphors again) during our low-tide times as I am during high tide. Whether I am piloting the boat on a fishing trip—as I am doing now with our studies of German and Shakespeare—or whether I am hiding bits of sea glass in the sand for a wandering child to discover (or not), my role is indeed that of “guide, philosopher, and friend.”
And so I see that my metaphor needs tweaking. And I continue to chew on these ideas (with apologies to the gentle Headmistress for running off with her post in my mouth), which—like everything connected with Charlotte Mason that I have come across in the past ten years—provide such stimulating nourishment for my own mind.
At any rate, the tidal homeschooling metaphor is not a method; it does not shape what we do. It is useful insofar as it is a way of answering the many variations on the question, “How do you do it?”—which is to say, “What does homeschooling look like in your home?” This is a question homeschoolers are constantly asking one another, and it is a root question in many discussions between homeschoolers and folks whose children go to school. And perhaps a better way of answering it is to apply the Writers’ Rule: Show, don’t tell. I think this is why we love blogs and discussion boards: we crave these peeks into other homes.
One of my favorite “peeks through the window” is Elizabeth Foss’s lovely book, Real Learning: Education in the Heart of the Home. Here we have an entire book full of examples both practical and lyrical to the “How do you do it?” question. The Common Room family lives in another house full of enticing windows. This post at Cottage Blessings is a glimpse into a cottage that is truly a blessed place—so much so that I am daily tempted to pack up my little brood and move right in. (Wouldn’t Alice be surprised!)
Other recent peeks-through-the-window I have enjoyed:
Castle of the Immaculate
Living Without Schooling
Relaxed Homeskool
Mental Multivitamin
Every Waking Hour
Karen Edmisten
Semicolon
And these books:
• Homeschooling With Gentleness
by Suzie Andres
• Homeschooling Our Children, Unschooling Ourselves
by Alison McKee
• A Charlotte Mason Companion
by Karen Andreola—like Real Learning
, this is a book I return to over and over
• The about-to-be-published Catholic Homeschool Companion, edited by Maureen Wittman and Rachel Mackson—a glimpse through many windows!
In my recent post on “tidal homeschooling,” I mentioned Rose’s determination to learn ancient Greek. This has been a driving interest for her for about a year and a half now. (She was seven last August.) Like all good drives, this one has involved frequent rest stops. She sets her own pace, and she’s the one to decide when to get behind the wheel again. As a passenger on this trip, I have to say it has been (and continues to be) a most delightful journey so far.
Her fascination with ancient Greece began with the fabulous Jim Weiss. His story tapes, “Greek Myths” and “She and He: Adventures in Mythology,” have been favorites with all my girls. Rose especially was captivated by the stories of Atalanta, Hercules, and Perseus. Observing her eager interest, I pulled our trusty D’aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths
off the shelves, and Rose read it until it literally fell to pieces in her hands. Like the children in Linnets and Valerians
, her imagination was stirred by the bright islands in the wine-dark sea, the “mountains crowned with ruined palaces, statues and temples and shrines…”
A burning interest in mythology seems quite common among children of Jane’s age; I’ve known many a six- or seven-year-old who couldn’t get enough of these tales of high adventure and meddlesome deities. It is certainly an easy appetite to feed. We scoured the library for picture books; we explored a website chronicling the lives of a fictional Spartan family and their counterparts in Athens. We read long passages from Padraic Colum’s The Odyssey
, and Rose begged several re-readings of selected chapters from Hillyer’s A Child’s History of the World
.
Thus far, the path we traveled was much the same as the one I’d followed with Jane a few years earlier—and, I daresay, quite similar to the roads followed by many a parent of a child this age. Then Rose veered off onto a side route.
“I want to learn ancient Greek,” she announced. “I need you to find me a book. The kind with lots of blanks to write in.”
She meant a workbook. I don’t like workbooks. They make me shudder and look for the exits. Jane has always felt the same way. But for Rose, my orderly, methodical Rose, an empty workbook is a treasure, a blank coin waiting to be engraved. Obligingly, I searched. A few minutes at Anne Zeise’s invaluable website led me to a promising resource: a series called Hey Andrew! Teach Me Some Greek! With Rose panting at my side, I ordered the first level.
As I said, this was well over a year ago. She was very young—is still very young—and I certainly had no plans to commence the study of a classic language—one with a different alphabet, no less—with a six-year-old child. But it’s what Rose wanted. Emphatically, urgently, relentlessly. And that’s what we do. We follow our children’s interests, all of us learning as we go. My job is to outfit her for the journey—or to return to my tidal homeschooling metaphor, to provide the ship for the fishing expedition.
Right now she is about halfway through the second level of the Hey Andrew books. Here’s how she likes it to work. Every day in our home, there is a two-hour period of quiet time. The girls go to separate rooms: Beanie to their bedroom (they all still share a room); Jane to the sewing room; and Rose to my bedroom. I put Wonderboy down for his nap and take a half-hour lunch-and-email break, a welcome hush after our busy mornings. Then I read a story to Beanie, and then I spend 30 to 45 minutes of one-on-one time with first Jane, then Rose. Quite often, Rose chooses to spend her mommy solo time working on her Greek.
What she likes is for me to sit beside her on my bedroom floor, knitting while she does a lesson in the book. Often the entire half hour will pass in silence while she doggedly fills in her beloved blanks. Other times, she’ll lay down her pencil and chatter away to me, or ask me to practice her flash cards with her (flash cards are another thing that make me shudder and fill Rose with delight). She likes me to look over each page as it is finished; she jots little notes at the bottom to record the time and day.
Sometimes she’ll want to do Greek during quiet time every day for a week. Just as often, she wants me to read to her—we’re halfway through Old Yeller right now—while she nibbles a piece of candy. Sometimes she’ll lay aside the Greek books for weeks at a stretch. This is why I call it tidal homeschooling. The tide carries this interest in and out. I’m not imposing these studies upon her; there is no pressure to complete the book in a certain amount of time, or even to complete it at all.
And that’s why I think she remains as interested in the subject as ever. If I were to sit her down and the table every day and say, “Now it’s time for your Greek lesson,” I know without a doubt that sooner or later her eagerness would have given way to reluctance. “Now listen, honey,” I could say. “You wanted to learn this and Mommy is going to help you fulfill that goal.” But what if a child’s goal changes? What if she didn’t have any goal in mind to begin with? I doubt Rose said to herself, at the age of six, “I want to attain proficiency in ancient Greek.” I think she said, “Ooh, this stuff is interesting, I want to know more.”
I know some parents might worry that allowing a child to start a project (or workbook) and cast it aside when interest fades will encourage habits of laziness or irresponsibility. You don’t want to give a kid the idea it’s ok to abandon ship as soon as you find out how much work is required of a sailor, right? But these fears don’t trouble me. I find that there are plenty of other areas of life for the establishment of good habits of discipline and follow-through: household chores, thank-you notes, pet care. I don’t need to harness a child’s interest in ancient Greece to a plow so that she can get practice making nice, neat furrows. My own interests wax and wane; why shouldn’t hers?
And suppose the interest dies a sudden death—then what? What if the Greek workbook gets shoved under my bed and Rose never mentions it again? Well, then that’s what happens. And that’s fine. The tide will bring in something else.
It always, always does.
Click here for the master list of all my tidal homeschooling posts.
Click here for the master list of all my tidal homeschooling posts.
People often ask me what kind of homeschoolers we are: Classical? Charlotte Mason? Eclectic? Delight-Directed? Unschoolers? How, they want to know, does learning happen in our home? Am I in charge, or do I let the kids lead the way? And what about math?
Over the years I have written with enthusiasm about the Charlotte Mason method (which is highly structured) and unschooling (which is not). These educational philosophies seem to have intertwined themselves in my home, so that the what we do—read great books, study nature, dive deeply into history, immerse ourselves in picture study and composer study—is highly influenced by Charlotte’s writings and their modern counterparts; and the how we do it—through strewing and conversation and leisurely, child-led exploration—is influenced by the writings of John Holt
, Sandra Dodd, and other advocates of unschooling. But I couldn’t say we’re “real CMers” because I don’t carry out Miss Mason’s recommendations in anything like the structured manner she prescribed; and I probably do too much behind-the-scenes nudging for us to be considered “real unschoolers.”
The truth is, I couldn’t find any label that completely fit my family, so I made up my own. I call us “Tidal Learners” because the ways in which we approach education here change with the tide. Now, this doesn’t mean that we’re flighty or inconsistent, changing direction haphazardly. We aren’t Fiddler Crab Homeschoolers. What I mean is that there is a rhythm to the way learning happens here; there are upbeats and downbeats; there is an ebb and flow.
We have high tide times when I charter a boat and we set sail with purpose and direction, deliberately casting our net for a particular type of fish. On these excursions I am the captain; I have charted the course. But the children are eager crew members because they know I value their contributions. And also I provide generous rations. No stale or moldy bread on this ship: no dull textbooks, no dry workbooks. My sailors sink their teeth into fresh, hearty bread slathered with rich butter and tart-sweet jam. Well fed and proud of their work, my little crew exhilarates in the voyage. Every journey is an adventure.
And we have low tide times when we amble along the shore, peering into tide pools and digging in the sand, or just relaxing under beach umbrella. The children wander off in directions of their own choosing; they dig and poke and ponder. One of them may crouch over a rock pool and stay there for days, studying, watching. Another will run headlong into the waves, thrilling to the pull on her legs, splashing, leaping, diving under and emerging triumphantly farther out. Or a child might prefer to stay close by my side, drawing stick pictures in the sand or building a castle. All of these things may be happening at once. Sometimes it looks as though nothing is happening: there’s just an array of bodies on beach towels. But oh, the nourishment there is in a time of quiet reflection while the soul soaks up the sunlight!
Our family enjoys both kinds of learning—the heady adventure of the well-planned fishing trip, with a goal and a destination in mind, and the mellower joys of undirected discovery during weeks at the metaphorical beach. Around here, the low tide times happen much more often than the high tide times, and often I find that the children catch more fish, so to speak, when the tide is out. Beachcombing reveals many treasures. But they do enjoy their excursions with Cap’n Mom. I really believe joy is the key, the element we breathe whether the tide is in or out. It’s the wind that propels our ship; it’s the tangy breeze that cools and refreshes us on the beach.
In the coming days I’ll write about how the metaphor plays out in our house on a practical level. “So what do you do all day?” is a question I’m often asked, and since every day is different, it’s easiest to answer that question with snapshots and specifics. Right now, this week, we’re spending our mornings on the boat. We’re studying sign language and German; we’re enjoying a Robert Frost poem every day; we’re reading a book of English history together as well as the oft-mentioned The Penderwicks. Jane spends time on her self-prescribed drawing exercises every day, and my funny Rose continues her dogged pursuit of ancient Greek. (More on that another day). I’ve plotted a rough course that should bring us back into port in early April, when the newest member of our crew will arrive. And then I expect the tide will go out for quite a long time. It’s always a low tide time for us in spring, even when there isn’t a new baby. I’m laying in a good supply of books to read from the shade of my umbrella, but I imagine the children will spend most of their time off exploring the shore.
Read more about Tidal Homeschooling here.
A mourning dove is nesting above our front porch light. I can’t imagine how she tolerates the clamor, for this is the season of constant in-and-out. Red Virginia mud is every-where. (Please don’t look at my floors.) A great vat of mud has appeared in the backyard under the white pine, and someone painted the slide. This may account for the recent destruction of several pairs of pants.