The Ghost of Ophelia

This turned into a long, complicated rambling post.  It started as a fitness post but migrated into self-concept and then into wider society issues.   Don't you hate that!   Then it got endlessly long, which is even more irritating.  And I could never quite pull it together into a unified whole, which is representative of life, but often rather unsatisfying in a casual read.

Luckily, it's a weekend in June, and you have your summer beach novels ready, so you can just skim through this quickly for the story parts or the review parts if you are interested in the topic and then move on to the next thing in your reader.    

I am reading a book I've heard of often, Reviving Ophelia:   Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls.   I found it at a thrift store and couldn't resist.   I don't have an adolescent daughter anymore, and since she was homeschooled she missed almost all of the Lord of the Flies experiences recounted in the book, but it was interesting reading anyway.    The book is named after Ophelia, Hamlet's tragic betrothed, who becomes representative of the way that adolescent girls are pushed and pulled into compliance in often contradictory and anti-personalistic ways, leading to their psychic destruction.    The reviving part speaks to how we as parents and people of good will in general can keep this from happening.  

This is somewhat of a feminist message, yes, and there was a layer of Friedan and Beauvoir in the book that I did not entirely agree with, but the book as a whole turned out to fit into the pro-family, anti-toxic-peer-culture genre like Hold On To Your Kids,  and A Tribe Apart (which I talked about on my old blog).  So it was very interesting from that perspective.    The author, Mary Pipher, who came from a sheltered and loving home herself, firmly sets herself apart from Freud and others who see families as a seedbed of dysfunction and pathology.

And she sounds like an excellent counselor.  She tells many stories of her own life and the girls who come into her practice, and that was fascinating, if sometimes depressing in the case of the girls she worked with.  I'm going to go back through the book and pick out some of the methods she used to relate to and help the difficult, troubled girls who she saw in her practice.  They seemed like the sorts of things that could potentially be helpful in getting kids to engage in taking constructive responsibility for their own lives.  This is something that doesn't come naturally to me as a parent so I can use the tips. 

One factoid that stuck in my mind:

Miss America's have become taller and thinner over the years. In 1951, Miss Sweden was 5 feet 7 inches tall and weighed 151 pounds. In 1983, Miss Sweden was 5 feet 9 inches tall and weighed 109 pounds.

If these statistics are accurate, then the original Miss Sweden (who was the first Miss Sweden, and went on to became Miss World, the "prettiest girl in the word")  had a BMI of 23.6.   Still well within the healthy BMI ranges of 18.5 to 24.9, but towards the higher end.

As for the 1983 Miss Sweden?  Her BMI would be 16.1 according to the statistics given.  This is statistically well underweight.    She should be at least 125 pounds to reach the lower end of the healthy range.

There's actually a chart of the physical statistics of the Miss Americas.     The contrasts aren't as extreme as the difference between the 50's and 80's Miss Swedens.  There were some tall slender Miss Americas way back in the 40's (though tall and slender then meant 5' 10" and 135 pounds, which is still healthy range) and there was a 5'11" Miss America who weighed in at 145 just 13 years ago, as well as a petite 5'3" Miss America in recent years.   Still, it looks as though the trend has indeed been towards taller and slenderer.

The point in the book is that women measure themselves against an impossible physical standard.... emaciated models and actresses whose presentation is expertly tailored by masters of illusion.  Of course we all come up short.   What I did in junior high, since I didn't watch movies or TV or read star magazines,was to take the best physical feature of every other girls I saw and make an ideal composite in my mind, against which I compared myself.     So you don't really need the media to make yourself into a miserable young teenager, but no doubt the media confirms the tendency and makes the unrealistic seem realistic.  

Early adolescence is the stage when most girls get their fixed impression of their physical appearance.   I don't know if it's so much true of homeschooled girls --- I would have to ask my daughter.  But if you were tall  or developed early physically, or developed later than other girls, or had problems with your skin, or had some other physical attribute which set you apart from others, you may still, as a perfectly acceptable adult woman, carry around that sense of yourself like a phantom extension.     My guess  is that this is particularly the case of anorexics, who look in the mirror and see a fat person looking back at them, even if that fat person actually has a BMI of about 14.    Anorexics take the "thin" message and push it to the extreme.    It becomes self-perpetuating as the body responds to the starvation and changes.   Perceptions become even more distorted as the body fails to be controlled completely by the mind.  There is a dual destructive feedback which takes on a life of its own. 

In Sean's Algebra II book there is a formula they teach for statistics where you take the mean and subtract it from each data and then square it, and add them all together and divide.   OK, if you take that analogy for what it's worth, I think adolescents  do something like this, but not accurately, when they compare themselves on their absolute worst day with a composite of all the best in everybody else and then square the result of the comparison.   Distortion results but it's not recognized as distortion, because it's hard to have perspective when you don't have any yet.  The intellectual qualities and experience needed for true prudence are in the future.  So in junior highs all the differences are squared, just when physical, emotional and mental changes are greatest and everyone is most conscious of the differences of those around them, for better or for worse..

Mary Pipher thinks that these years are pivotal in the lives of American teens, especially girls.   We don't just carry a phantom physical body into adulthood, but a phantom self who is the composite of adolescent social experiences.  Since the majority of American children go to school, the majority go through the most volatile stage of their life surrounded by others going through the same things, basically away from adult intervention for most hours of the day, and in a wider cultural wasteland that sends damaging messages about ideal identity.   This is conventional wisdom nowadays, but partly because of her book, I think. which was one of the first to point it out in such resonant terms to the public.

She repeats several times that the experience of adolescents today is categorically different than that of teens in the past.  Because of the media culture, kids are exposed to, and inflict on their peers, a kind of violent sexual and verbal and physical harassment which most of us adults were not exposed to.  Pipher remarks that she could not use her own autobiographical stories much to relate to her patients, because they were from such a different world.  Parents today, she says, are in the same situation.   They realize that their kids live in a very different culture than even the one of the 70's.   This puts them in a helpless or defensive stance which diminishes their authority and further dilutes the influence they have on their growing children. 

Can homeschooling protect a girl from this situation?  Well, I don't think homeschooling can or should circumvent the developmental stage itself.    There is new ability to evaluate self and others and bring together an adult identity that is characteristic of these years and always has been. .   An adolescent always has had the imperative of developing a concept of herself and how she relates to the society she lives in.  Most  cultures have coming of age rites at this age, or at least acknowledge a transition by apprenticing, or marriage, or by some other social sign that acknowledges the adolescent as in some way a new person in his own right.

Our culture doesn't give clear transitional markers, or so some have said, so the kids have to design their own transition, and though it is often clumsily done,, like a tiger tripping over its paws, it is an inescapable part of personal development.   However, junior high is an explosive form of the transition rite; as if it had been designed expressly to test our kids in every way possible, with challenges that don't confront most adults unless they are inadvertently recreating the drama of that time in their lives.     Those young tigers are put in the equivalent of a confined cage, with no real responsibilities beyond the academics they tend to despise, and they try out their claws in an environment where everything is magnified.  

 Mary Pipher points out the way a confident, competent 11 year old girl, full of interests and enthusiasm, can become a peer-oriented, angry, risky-behaving teenager in just a few short seasons.  A girl raised to think independently and outside the status quo becomes boy-crazy and utterly compliant to her peers.  The girl has designed her own rite of passage, or her peers have designed a gauntlet for her to run through to prove herself, and she is radically shaken and battered and comes out with scars.    Pipher's perspective is somewhat different than mine;  she is dealing with the situation as it exists, seeing the girls who come in to her for help and trying to help them cope with the world they have to live in.   

Seeing it somewhat from outside, I think the heat is raised higher than many children can or should bear.   I don't know if tthere is one single solution.   Homeschooling brings some challenges of its own, of course..  And certainly homeschooled kids have to deal with that tug of their peer group in one way or another.   But the evidence shows that at least some homeschooled adolescent girls keep their 6th grade enthusiasm and competence into their teen years and beyond.   They have a different experience of adolescence than their schooled peers.

Unlike some feminists, Mary Pipher does strongly support families.   She thinks that most families, even less than perfect ones, are devoted to their daughters reaching their potential and are committed to love and respect for their daughter as an individual, whereas most of the time, the peer group and the institutional school and the media influence are more interested in conformity and judging by appearances.  Though Pipher does discuss misogynist dads, bitter divorces, abuse and neglect, she tends to think that families are a stabilizing force, but that girls are often swept away by the adolescent vortex and become distant from their families, and hostile, just at the time when their influence is most important.   Teachers aren't seen as much of a factor.  Some children are "saved" by a committed teacher, who takes an extra interest in them, but this is getting harder and harder as teachers have their own families, more paperwork to do and standards to meet, and personal involvement is so often perceived as risky in today's litigious, suspicious environment.  

In a strange way, adolescent girls sometimes don't WANT to be reminded that they are persons.  Fitting into the peer group requires that they be interchangeable, objectified, not unique beings with a past and visible origins.   This goes back to the media ideal of a female, which is often (Pipher thinks) conceived as passive, compliant, beautiful and giving, not a unique individual.   Consequently, a teenage girl is sometimes bitterly ashamed of her parents for the very reason that they are a reminder of her particular self, which she wants to keep hidden.   I can actually remember this.  I needed my parents, they were a stabilizing force, yet I was sometimes quite humiliated by their very familiarity and stability.

(I think this is somewhat a normal developmental stage in Western culture, too, given all the stories about girls who are princesses in disguise.  But it becomes a rawer issue when it's channeled through peer culture rather than through traditional stories, understanding and sympathy from a grandma or aunt, and meaningful work to do)

In the school setting, athletics and music and performance and academic-related clubs can help a girl maintain a unique and positive  identity in the face of crushing pressure to conform.   Outside the school, involvement in community activities and volunteer work can help.  So the extracurricular activities cooperate with family goals in keeping the individuality and stability of the adolescent girl.  Academics themselves don't work quite so positively because they are thought of negatively by the peer group.   Pipher thinks that girls' intelligence in particular can be a drawback in the social setting.   Many girls intentionally let their grades drop in order to seem more acceptable to their friends and particularly to boys. 

My strategy in the junior high and high school years was to keep my nose in a book and socially distance myself so I wouldn't have to be in the middle of things I was too emotionally young to deal with.   It didn't entirely work as I went through a rough time in my later years and I was certainly often lonely and alienated   I wasn't really a joiner and I wasn't inclined towards team sports like soccer and basketball, which were the only exracurricular activities offered in my high school.    I did join Youth for Christ and was involved in the church youth group but these were equivocal experiences.   They probably did help me stay afloat but this was during the 70's when most Christian youth organizations were doing some existential floundering of their own. 

 So it was challenging for me to find a niche identity that worked within the walls of the high school campus.  In the last couple of years I developed an eating disorder and some symptoms of chronic depression.   As the social scene got more painful, I cast myself as the "shadow student" who interacts with others as little as possible.    My reality was off-campus, and I was just marking time, trying to slip through as unobtrusively as possible.    Pipher points out that this withdrawalworks to some extent; it protects the child from pain and from getting in over her head into scrapes that a young person shouldn't have to handle.   It served that purpose for me.  But on the other hand, this strategy doesn't give the child a chance to practice communicative skills that will be valuable in adult life.  It forms coping habits which aren't necessarily very helpful  past immediate psychic survival.   Since school takes up so many hours of the day, and parents are often busy, the child can spend days basically not speaking to anyone beyond a few words.   I was fortunate that my parents remained a wholesome presence in my life, even if I sometimes resented that.  But it wasn't until I graduated and got into the "real world" (if only of a Christian young adult group and then college) that I got a chance to relate freely to my peers and others outside of my family.    

As a homeschooler, my daughter kept her interests and confidence through her teen years.   Homeschooling served for her somewhat as books and selective mutism served for me, providing insulation between her and the unleashed peer world.   But it was a healthier buffer, more like the athletics or extraocuuricular interests ones, because it allowed her to develop her persona rather than simply cope.   She participated in various activities, watched her peers with interest.   I think was probably aware of the tug of the pressure to conform but it was at a lower level of intensity, since she had lots of things going on outside the peer world.   So I think she went through the same developmental process but in a different way.     Unlike the "shadow student" who withdraws from the school scene within its walls, she was able to find ways to communicate with a range of people and develop a range of social skills. 

Again, I think some kids are able to find this insulation zone within the school building.  My daughter never went to school and she is very glad she didn't, but perhaps if she had she would have been all right.    Her younger brother attended our local high school  for 2 1/2 years.   Because he was primarily interested in football and other sports, and was willing to  follow the rules and succeed in his classes, this customized his experience within those walls.   He got the personal influence of adults (the coaches and other teachers involved in athletics) and he made friends through athletics who were generally motivated and relatively healthy. 

Like I did, and his father too during his high school years, knowing that the drama and idiosyncrasy of the "cool" world was too complex and potentially dangerous for our skill set, he simply kept himself away from all the things that struck him as too devouring of emotional energy.  He got a reputation for being cleancut and because of his athletic ability and hard work, he was accepted for what he was.   He made a lot of casual friends and some closer one who were his daily support system, and didn't bother to go to the school dances, so his experience did not seem that different from that of his dad growing up in the 70's (though the music is a little edgier and the kids swear more than they used to back then, I think). 

I think that the perception of having a choice might help somewhat.  My son knew that school was only one option.   We didn't put him in school, and when he wanted to leave and independent study, we were happy about it.    Perhaps some other kids, perhaps particularly girls, would have trouble "choosing" to opt out because they would feel the compulsion to keep trying to fit in.   They would perceive homeschooling or changing schools as a defeat and an admission of incompetence.

But from what I've seen, the homeschooling and charter schooling option has provided a vent on the perssure cooker situation of the school setting.    It's probably a very workable option for the kind of kids who are non-conformist, creative and idealistic, and possibly physically different in some way.  These are the kids who probably don't want to join the volleyball team or the float-making committee, who dislike the emotional enmeshment of the high school but in some ways are basically already young adults.   They are the kind of young person that Grace Llewellyn talks about in Real Lives.   Though they are strong determined kids who will probably survive their high school years, it seems pointless to force them to waste their time and possibly develop a slightly warped phantom image of themselves when they are basically ready to start apprenticing in real life.

So to get back to the book -- one practical strategy Mary Pipher often used with the damaged girls she saw in her practice was to ask them to write down three things a day they did that they were proud of.  This is simple, and I'm sure she had to build some kind of relationship with them before they would be that honest with her (I remember very carefully concealing anything I cared about from anyone who seemed to be in a position of authority), but if it was done it became a way for the girls to understand themselves better and I suppose, start constructing a self-perception more based on their own actions and feelings and perceptions than on those reflected back to them from their peers.  I think this might be a good type of topic to discuss with my boys when I sit down with them to talk about their goals and interests.  Since when I ask them outright they usually just say "I don't know!" and I realize I probably would have said exactly the same if my parents asked me a similar question!

Now I will glide offstage, in the noble tradition of literary phantoms!   My boys are outside and want me to see what they are doing out there -- the weather looks bleak but I guess they sense spring is here in spite of appearances!

Reading Literature through Themes

I like this concept of using literature to treat Big Questions.    The topics mentioned are 1. Individual and Society 2. Facing Adversity 3. In Search of Identity 4.  Truth and Justice.   They each come with a set of questions.   Presumably you read the books and this gives you grounds for thinking and talking about these questions through a literary perspective.  They seem perhaps subjectively focused, except the last one, but they also seem like good starting points for talking about things that are important to the high school age group as they grow into adulthood and have to figure out how to live good lives.

In many ways literature is a precursor for philosophy, and so approaching it from that perspective seems developmentally much more appropriate than the dry and somewhat out-dated analytic method too often brought down from post-graduate lit in diluted form to the middle and high school.

Plutarch says

Wherefore those that would give their minds to philosophical studies are not obliged to avoid poetry altogether, but rather to prepare themselves for philosophy by poems, accustoming themselves to search for and embrace that which may profit in that which pleaseth them, and rejecting and discarding that wherein they find nothing of this nature. For this discrimination is the first step to learning.

But of the specific literature suggestions of the public charter school mentioned, some are simply bemusing when we are talking about 15 year olds.   It seems to presume that they already have enough maturity and experience to deal with material that is meant to shock adults into thought and understanding.   Teens are certainly capable of dealing with ambiguity, but they are also easily pulled into vivid subjectivity, and their thought processes can be co-opted by the subjective intensity of a book.  For example, if you read 1984, I think the take-away for a typical teen would be the impression that individuals can't stand up to a total society, and that really, they don't deserve to because they can't even live coherent lives.   Whereas Animal Farm, though the message is similarly disheartening, the fable format allows more of a detached and thoughtful consideration of the modern totalitarian society.... important for a teenager, but important not to be disproportionately swayed by what you might call the "accidents" of the literary effect.

Too many of the books on that list seem to be disproportionate in that sense, when you are speaking of a relatively immature readership.     Though the more modern and controversial2 books on the list relate to modern dilemmas, the child does not have the historical or literary perspective to grapple with them as literature, which increases the likelihood that he will comprehend them in a distorted way.

Flannery O'Connor writes:

I would to put forward the proposition, repugnant to most English teachers, that fiction, if it is going to be taught in the high schools, should be taught as a subject and as a subject with a history. The total effect of a novel depends not only on its innate impact, but upon the experience, literary and otherwise, with which it is approached. No child needs to be assigned Hersey or Steinbeck until he is familiar with a certain amount of the best work of Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, the early James and Crane, and he does not need to be assigned these until he has been introduced to some of the better English novelists of the 18th and 19th centuries.
The fact that these works do not present him with the realities of his own time is all to the good. He is surrounded by the realities of his own time and he has no perspective whatever from which to view them.

I have Mortimer Adler's book Six Great Ideas (haven't read it yet) and I know that he discusses 102 Great Ideas that come up again and again through literature (literature being broadly defined as all the Great Books, including the non-fictional ones).   


I suppose a Great Idea approach to literature has a possibility of becoming too simplistic "How does this book portray Justice?"  but at the same time it does seem to deal with what you are left with after you read a book -- how it embodies certain concepts of the big ideas.

Love is the Basis of Education

From Cooperate with Nature by Dr Herbert Ratner.

Parents are primary teachers. The profound formative influence of the first six years of life is universally recognized. During these preschool years the primary teaching function of the family is not the elevating of the I.Q. but the nurturing of emotional maturity. Its work is to temper emotions, to order the emotions to proper ends, and to lay the foundation for cultivating the cardinal virtues. ....

Because love holds together the delicate membranes of human society and is the basis of our relationship with God, the chief need of the child is to experience love leading to a healthy self-love and to be able to love others as he has learned to love himself. Since love is taught essentially through a one-to-one relationship, nature sees to it that the vast majority of babies come one at a time, so that each child has his or her private tutor of love.

Kierkegaard said: "the trouble with life is that we understand it backwards but have to live it forwards." Our goal should be to educate the young so that they understand life as they live it forward and thereby help them make prudential judgments

From the introduction to the article at EWTN:

Dr. Ratner, recently departed, had one great message for his large circle of friends and clients: learn from nature. One of his pithy observations is that good doctors do not over-prescribe medical interventions, preferring to allow nature to do its work well: "There is a world of difference between a good doctor and a bad doctor but very little difference between a good doctor and no doctor at all"

Study Habits

Hey, the way we're doing things this year isn't so far off the track, according to this article on study skills quoted at bearing blog.

This post will skew the average post length way downward so I won't feel so embarrassed about writing a long post after I said I was going to try to stay short.  But then, I did say I expected it would be a process.

The 4rs -- Writing continued

I mentioned how I realized that my children had naturally been following a very natural "analysis and imitation" program without me really being aware of it.   This was such a relief for me to discover.   I had seen that my older children had become good writers without very much help from me.   But since I didn't really know HOW, I never felt comfortable because I had no way of knowing what had worked.

When I say "analysis" I am not talking about young children formally dissecting works of literature.  Maybe it would be better to say "comprehension" or "participation" -- or perhaps mimesis?   When a child's psychological "cup" is brimming he naturally tends to express it according to the models he is growing up with.  So when a child reads a very good book and puts his imagination and heart into the reading, it tends to come out in some way.  For example, I can usually tell when Paddy has been reading our Paddington Bear treasury because he comes up to me wearing a hat and tips it, and he pays more attention to his manners!  Clare and Brendan would almost live in story worlds, taking on an almost permanent identity of Merry and Pippin, or Tony and Tia, or whoever struck their fictional fancy. 

So it's not surprising that my children would grow up writing stories.   And as I said, narrative is the core of almost all written expression.   Take a look at any blog, or magazine article, or even a presidential address.  

This gives me a way to approach writing this year with Kieron.   The cool thing is that writing is also a natural way of becoming a better reader.   The two processes are linked. I will give more details in future.     Right now I just wanted to think on the screen about why my children generally tended to resist non-fiction writing until high school years when they naturally started developing this ability.   I think it's probably because they didn't read much non-narrative writing until then, and what they did read, they didn't "participate" in enough to imitate it.    Most of what they enjoyed was narrative, whether fiction or non-fiction.   And young children don't make a sharp distinction between fictional and non-fictional narrative.  My 7 year old puts Gilgamesh and the Assyrian army in his games as readily as he puts in Marvel superheroes.  It's all material for the imagination. 

I've noticed again and again the interlude between first exposure and actual assimilation and use.   In fact, if I could go back and do mothering all over again, this is the one thing I'd like to take with me!  A child hears us speaking for 2-3 whole years before he first starts speaking himself, and then it's another 1-3 years before real fluency in expression.    He hears and comprehends me reading to him for, say, 2-3 years before he starts stumblingly decoding the written word himself, and there's another 6 months to 4 years before real literacy.   Then once a child is reading well, it's usually another 2-4 years before he is comfortable writing.   And so on -- it applies almost across the board, like where you have to expose a child about 15 times to a strange new food before he is willing to accept it into his body.   And it takes about 3-5 years before the manners of the household are fully imprinted onto the child's manners... before he fully knows how to behave at Mass, at table, in regard to his siblings.   And so on. 

This principle, which I really wish I could apply retroactively, seems very powerful -- but what it means here is that in junior high or high school is usually where students start seriously reading essays and other non-narrative forms of literature.  For example, I started having my oldest read CS Lewis and other similar things when he was in about 7th grade.   And then, right on schedule, 2-4 years later he started being able to write good non-narrative prose.   My daughter followed a different route when she started reading non-narrative on subjects of interest, but similarly she started spontaneously writing for newsletters, blogs and the Barrowdowns site a couple of years later.

How very interesting!  That seems to be an argument for having kids start reading a variety of literary forms EVEN if they don't entirely comprehend what they read.  The content is not the only thing of importance here -- it's the exposure, if my thinking is correct.   It's reading (and if possible, hearing and memorizing) the form done well.   The corollary seems to be that you shouldn't give the children too much dumbed-down, simplistic prose to read (such as is found in textbooks for kids) because then that's the non-narrative "style" that the kids will tend to develop (and the same goes for twaddly, badly written fiction as far as developing a narrative style).

I can't seem to find the exact article, but Ed Vavra's KISS grammar site had a fascinating anecdotal study of how freshmen's writing had been influenced by syntactically over-simplified content-oriented textbooks.  This is the reverse truth of the truth that when children assimilate complex syntax they are actually refining their mental powers.    From Mary Daly:

clarity of thought is essential to maintaining Catholic Christian civilization. Clarity of thought depends on being able to keep track of the way that words are related in complex sentences

You can see all around us, and this doesn't just apply to Catholics, the problems that come up when ordinary people can't think past basic subject/verb/object constructions.  And unfortunately, this is often all we are exposed to nowadays. 

Nothing really new has been said in this post -- nothing that Charlotte Mason, the Jesuit educators, Andrew Pudewa and Andrew Kern haven't already said better -- but it's still sort of a breakthrough for me because now I understand better what we did right and it will help me to be more intentional when I'm figuring out how to do things for Kieron's (and Paddy's) high school.  It even gives me some insight into how to approach Aidan's education.

This will be my last looong post for a while!   School is about to start, for one thing.   And also, long posts are hard to read.  It will be fun to try to keep it short for a little while.  I think it will help me with simplicity.  I'm not promising to be 100 percent perfect right away!

The 4rs -- Writing

Over here I once shared how my family approaches writing.   In thinking through it this summer, I realized that our writing program, though informal and unsystematic, was never as chaotic and incidental as it sometimes seemed at the time.   Basically, my reading children naturally started seeing themselves as writers because that was who they were hanging around in their reading.   I don't think I fully understood the importance of this.   My children were reading the writing of great authors, and they were seeing me write and read, too.   Most of them started writing stories as soon as they could write.    The later children wrote stories even BEFORE they could write -- I have stories that Aidan and Paddy dictated to me, and stories that Sean and Kieron dictated to Clare before they could even read.

Last year, my 8th grader Kieron was signed up with California's Virtual Academy which uses the K12 curriculum.   They had quite a nice language arts course that included four "strands":  grammar, vocabulary, composition and literary analysis.    The composition course covered the typical 8th grade standards (which in turn prepare for high school level standards) of:  autobiography, description, persuasive, character analysis, research, persuasion/argument and perhaps a couple more I can't think of right now.

The first one he was assigned was a personal narrative, where he had to write about some experience in his past.  This looked dull both to him and to me.  This was where I suddenly remembered something that had worked for me in junior high -- the idea of taking an experience from my past and fictionalizing it.  I suggested this to him; he loved the idea and wrote a very good story (based on an experience visiting our dark spidery basement with a friend...).

Over the course of the year we did all his composition assignments this way.  Instead of the stupid persuasive/argument assignment where you have to argue whether students should have curfews or not, he wrote about a debate in his fictional world and how it was resolved.   This way we could stick to the rubrics of the assignment (presenting both sides, coming to a reasoned conclusions, etc) without having to write about something that bored both of us.

He was inspired and actually enjoyed being challenged to focus on one aspect of his fiction rather than just writing free-flow.    And his writing improved both mechanically and in style over the course of the year.   I realized that this was not too dissimilar to the way I personally had learned to write and it was also the way Liam had approached high school composition.   He followed the progym but used his own fictional world as the basis for the assignments.   He even wrote some of the assignments in Latin : ).   He still wrote some conventional high school papers but the fictional approach let him tone up his writing and experiment with effects in an enjoyable way.

Over this summer I was rereading Robert Schwickerath's Jesuit Education and  realized that what we were doing wasn't entirely dissimilar from the Jesuit method of developing the writing and speaking voice.   In the Jesuit schools, the students carefully studied the writing of excellent stylists (usually rhetoric, but sometimes poetry as well) and then imitated them.   If you take a look here, here, and here you can see some examples of how students were taught.  They converted prose to poetry, and vice versa. 

The idea of analyzing and imitating excellent writing isn't foreign to anyone who uses a literature-based curriculum.   The epiphany was in realizing that OF COURSE, my children tended to imitate what they had read, and that narrative is the most natural literary form for younger children.   Even at the older ages, as the progym sequence makes clear, it's a central part of effective discourse.  This wasn't something to be hurried through or passed over as just "what children do naturally".  It's actually something to build on.

Summer Inspiration

Sarah posted Angie's Principles of Happy Moms who Home Educate and then followed it up with Truth about Mom , then Erin followed up with Truth about Mum and Planning : ).   Very good reading especially as I sit around trying to figure out how to have a good homeschool year next year -- I have trouble coming up with my own "truths about Mum" but I could relate to a lot of what Sarah and Erin said. 

My friend Chari and I are writing a talk about how we homeschooled our high schoolers (gosh, look at that cool alliteration; I almost feel like writing the rest of this in Old English metre; almost).   I don't know how the talk will go -- please pray for me since it's my first public talk -- but I've already been blessed by just getting an opportunity to look back at where we've come from.

I was going to write more but there is so much going on around me at the moment that I can't think ;-).   But those links are inspiring if you're in the planning/refreshing your vision stage like I am right now!

Today's Bread, Not Tomorrow's

You probably thought I was going to write a food post.... but no, this is about educational stuff.   I've been thinking about philosophy -- and trying to envision next school year....

I am a regular reader of Quiddity, the CIRCE Institute's blog, and I think their definition of classical education is the best I've come across since it sums up the essentials as I understand them:

Christian Classical education is
the cultivation of wisdom and virtue
by nourishing the soul on truth, goodness, and beauty,
so that in Christ the student is better able to know, glorify, and enjoy God.

While I accept this definition, my puzzle has always been HOW? How do you cultivate wisdom and virtue? How do you nourish the soul on truth, goodness, and beauty? How do you raise a child to know, glorify and enjoy God?

Having some chancy success in raising children with at least decent characters and at least adequate intellectual equipment doesn't really help solve my puzzle. After all, I didn't do it. It wasn't me, and I KNOW that, and so do all of you who have raised children to adulthood and learned something along the way. We are all like Socrates: our wisdom is knowing that we are not wise. Our virtue is in knowing that we are not virtuous. So I can't point to what helped. And perhaps that IS the point, but I would really like something more to go on than that.

But when I was thinking that, I couldn't help thinking that it really, really is the point. It's up to God. It's easy enough to SAY that, but really acting that way -- skirting between the Scylla of over-activity and the Charybdis of lethargy -- is the task of a lifetime. It's up to God. Any virtue or wisdom that happened in our family came from Him. Very simple, but not easy. I want security, after all; which in this context is another way of saying that I want to be independent of the need to ask every day for what I need. 

I've also been thinking about something I read recently about the Lord's Prayer. Jesus tells us to pray "give us this day our daily bread." Louis Marie de Montfort explains it this way:

Our Lord taught us to ask God for everything that we need whether in the spiritual or temporal order. By asking for our daily bread we humbly admit our own poverty and insufficiency and pay tribute to our God, knowing that all temporal good come from His Divine Providence.
When we say BREAD we ask for that which is just necessary to live; and of course, this does not include luxuries.
We ask for this bread today THIS DAY which means that we are concerned only for the present, leaving the morrow in the hands of Providence.
And when we ask for our DAILY BREAD we recognize that we need God's help every day and that we are entirely dependent upon Him and for His help and protection.

If I can carry the theme over to the educational realm, this would imply that I should not be questing after some perfect system -- a perpetual-motion educational machine that would make it unnecessary for me to depend, to trust, to be careful and simple. The Israelites would probably have liked to store manna for tomorrow, but God would not let them. That was because he didn't want a safe, comfortable people but a people who could look beyond physical security to much, much better things.

Similarly, I think that when CIRCE talks about cultivating wisdom and virtue, about nourishing the soul on goodness, truth and beauty -- well, first look at the verbs. Cultivating is a gardening term and nourishing is a food-related term. They are both very down-to-earth -- gardening and eating are two of the most down-to-earth things you can do.... rather literally, in fact.  

But the objects of the phrases refer to immaterial things. Immaterial does NOT mean airy or insubstantial. Immaterial means things that are more necessary and more eternal -- things that remain when everything else is gone. When your food is gone, the nourishing effect remains. When your garden is cultivated, from small brown wizened seeds comes branches, flowers, fruit. Similarly, wisdom and virtue, beauty, truth and goodness are IN things but transcend them --- they are still there when the things themselves are gone.

When Jesus told us to ask for our daily bread, as it's been understood by the Church, He was talking about our physical needs but He spoke beyond that as well.    First of all, He was teaching us the habit of asking, of looking beyond our own gathering and preparing efforts to where the harvest comes from.   Second, when one talks about daily bread one isn't just talking about preventing starvation, though preservation of life is crucial, of course, but of growing, thriving, being strengthened.   Once again, it's what remains when the physical food is gone out of our system.  It is incorporated, literally, into us. 

If I am understanding it right, education is meant to do the same thing to our mind, heart and spirit -- not just keep them from starvation, but to provide what they need to expand and be strengthened.   It is incorporated, though the word doesn't seem quite right in the noncorporal context! 

I think of St Paul in his epistle to the Philippians:

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable--if anything is excellent or praiseworthy--think about such things.

This, of course, suggests a model for education. It's not a recipe per se -- put in one tale of the virtues, 2 character lessons, 1 music study, stir and bake -- it is "cultivation" and "nourishment" -- growing what is good, carefully weeding out what is not so good. It's ongoing and radical, literally, "from the root".

So anyway, thinking this through seems to sort of answer my question, though it still "feels" like not enough security. I think that anything that depends on radical trust, hope and commitment is difficult for me because these are things you do and cross off the list but things you reconvert to moment by moment.   My tendency towards acedia wants to have the thing done once and for all so I can stop striving.  But at least knowing where my challenge is helps me to know better how to deal with it!

tangles and solving them

When I was little I used to watch with fascination as my grandpa patiently worked away at a string that had gotten tangled. He loved to do things like this -- he was deft and patient, almost contemplative as he worked away at a seemingly hopeless tangle of string. Eventually the string would fall loose in his hands and he would show me proudly the freed length of yarn or rope or whatever. He influenced me enough so that even as a child, impatient and not too skilled as I was, I would spend time trying to undo some tangle or put into order some mess in emulation of him, and for the delight of seeing the final resolution -- the tangle freed, the drawer neatly categorized .

Even bigger than that was the respect implied for the thing itself, the almost humble attentiveness involved in solving something step by step that to initial appearances was unresolvable. To me as a child, it seemed to exemplify a kind of faith, hope and love.



I was just thinking about that this morning. My natural turn of mind is to reach for the higher ground when I'm thinking about doing something. So maybe, when I'm contemplating teaching math, I will try to research pretty much everything ever written about math and come up with some Higher Principles that will direct everything. This is all very well. The problems are these:

1. I spend so much time thinking that I never get around to actually doing it, or else I do 5 times the thinking that I do the actual working.
2. The thinking doesn't do what I hope it will do indirectly. It doesn't generally inspire me to act. In fact, if anything, it makes me more hesitant to act because I might get it wrong.

In the first case, I think it's helpful to remember my grandfather's approach with the tangles. Sure, maybe he'd look over the knot briefly before he started, but for the most part he was solving the knot as he worked. He would just start somewhere, anywhere. Because it was all one piece of string he knew that eventually his fingers would find the ends and then it was just a matter of work and patience and time.

So say, for teaching math -- if I sit down with a child and try to teach him math, I may not choose the perfect start, but if I am wrong, the feedback the situation gives me will help me to find the "end of the string" so to speak and I'll slowly work my way towards untangling.

Yes, I realize a child is not a passive thing like a string. But I'm not talking about the child as learner here so much as the general situation -- here's a child -- here's the math -- what do I do now? In a way, my grandfather would let the string show him how it should go, and that's sort of what teaching is like in some ways. Also, he would work patiently -- he never jerked or yanked, because that just tightened up the knot, and sometimes would run the risk of breaking the string altogether.

Simpler with the house, perhaps, because the house isn't a free agent, though sometimes it does seem to push back at me. But starting SOMEWHERE is helpful. I may have a general plan or goal in my mind, and it may be very helpful to have some principles for prioritizing, but at some point I need to just start and let the house itself show me how to proceed. And patience is important there, too -- a kind of willingness to deal with an ongoing situation and not expect rigidly perfect, lasting results. After all, strings tend to tangle up almost as soon as you let them go, and you often end up untangling them more than than once.

I also think of Aidan's therapy. I think one reason I'm not always very good about following up at home what the therapists have worked on in a session is that it subliminally frustrates me to see a generalized difficulty approached piecemeal. "Oh, there's a problem -- let's see how to tackle it." I need to remember though, that a child's body and spirit are a mystery -- the therapists are dealing with mystery, just as teachers are. They are respectful in trying to find the loose end and unravel things from there, rather than imagining they can just look at the tangle and do some sort of therapeutical hocus pocus. Since the string is all one, they figure that if they start somewhere, it will lead somewhere, and then they can go from there to somewhere else. Anything that helps will help the whole tangle. It's much more of an art than a science in that sense.

In that way, there is no "wrong" start, so long as you start. And there's a kind of faith and hope and charity in starting, even not knowing for sure where it's going to go.

History of Latin -- Links

Interesting article about Latin through the centuries.

In sum, we can see from this progress of Latin that trendiness, traditional purism and technology are all, in their different ways, capable of killing a language.

Ultimately, the many threads in the 2,500-year history of a dominant language beggar summary, but I have distinguished three themes that can stand as lessons for modern linguists. Firstly, discrimina: language survival depends on community coherence. Secondly, vicissitudines: translation and contact can be enriching for a language. And thirdly, strages: trendiness, traditional purism and technology can kill even the most deep-seated of linguistic traditions.

I found the site because of this Simplicissimus Latin course based on the Mass. I'm trying to figure out if I could use it as a supplement to my highschooler's Latin course next year.

I have a book around the house called The Classical Tradition by Gilbert Highet that goes into a lot of detail about what our Western culture owes to the Greeks and Romans. I skimmed through it last summer but am looking forward to reading it again this summer.

God and Causes

God delights to work through secondary causes

Putting God in the gaps unexplained by science has always been a mistake, because science eventually fills those gaps with material explanations. An enlightened Catholic view of science must be anchored in the proposition that God delights to work through secondary causes. God concedes an enormous degree of causality to his creation, and we ought to be in awe as science explains more and more of it. At the same time, we ought to remind those who will listen to us that the universe will never finally explain itself.

and the importance of those secondary causes

Paradoxically, by not being present at all (in nature), God becomes present all the way through, the way Shakespeare is present in his plays. But the entrance of God into the mutable and changeable world is always revelation. It is a peeling back of the very “narrative” of nature.

In that light, is using God to fill the gaps (in the natural sciences) a mistake in the way it's a mistake to use historical knowledge of the author to "explain" (usually fancifully) parts of the author's work? I always thought it seemed to underestimate God -- as if He wasn't capable of "writing" the book of Nature seamlessly (my main problem with Intelligent Design as it's often taught, at least).

To use God as a filler for present lack of natural knowledge is an error of method, in that sense, and it also gets things exactly backwards by subordinating the higher sciences to the lower ones. As CS Lewis said, "he's not a TAME lion." He can do things the way He wants, he's not bound by nature, and He certainly doesn't have to bear the burden for our intellectual limitations, like Atlas carrying the sky.

At the same time, to think that a book can be thought of as not only internally consistent, but somehow the sum total of everything, seems unnecessarily naive, as if we could take Hamlet and use it to disprove the necessity for the existence of Shakespeare, or say that somehow Shakespeare is completely comprehended within the pages of Hamlet. In that case, it's trying to get the lower sciences to comprehend the higher ones, which also gets things exactly backwards.

My husband is a computer game designer. When he makes a game he does his best to make it seamless, with nothing of him peering through. When the programmer peers through, it is usually through a flaw in the game play or in the technology.

Yet, a perfect game will be infused with the mind of its maker. You can tell something about the author of the game just by the game itself -- its elegance, its power, its effectivity. The stamp is very personal... but NOT because of gaps. People reading the source code of a perfect game designer might well have gaps in their understanding, but that only indirectly reveals the presence of a master craftsman. The master craftsman, I would think, would not leave gaps, holes in the workings of the thing which can't be explained by the thing itself. Those types of holes are called imperfections, faults.

One more quote, from the article I linked to earlier called In the Beginning.

Although Thomas (Aquinas) believed the universe had a temporal beginning, he advised against using scientific arguments to prove such a beginning. He always warned against using bad arguments in defence of beliefs.

A quote from Augustine:

"It not infrequently happens that something about the earth, about the sky, about other elements of this world, about the motion and rotation or even the magnitude and distances of the stars, about definite eclipses of the sun and moon, about the passage of years and seasons, about the nature of animals, of fruits, of stones, and of other such things, may be known with the greatest certainty by reasoning or by experience, even by one who is not a Christian.

It is too disgraceful and ruinous, though, and greatly to be avoided, that he [the non-Christian] should hear a Christian speaking so idiotically on these matters, and as if in accord with Christian writings, that he might say that he could scarcely keep from laughing when he saw how totally in error they are. In view of this and in keeping it in mind constantly while dealing with the book of Genesis, I have, insofar as I was able, explained in detail and set forth for consideration the meanings of obscure passages, taking care not to affirm rashly some one meaning to the prejudice of another and perhaps better explanation."

It goes two ways, though -- if believers shouldn't make laughable points in connection with science, neither should non-believers do it. When non-believers use natural science to disprove the existence God they show an almost shocking metaphysical naivety, almost what you would call parochialism.

Thinking about Memory

Well, Philebus says that the good for all animate beings consists in enjoyment, pleasure, delight, and whatever can be classed as consonant therewith: whereas our contention is that the good is not that, but that thought, intelligence, memory, and all things akin to these, right opinion and true reasoning, prove better and more valuable than pleasure for all such beings as can participate in them; . . . and that nothing in the world is more profitable than so to participate.

I've been thinking about "memory" and its role in education as I work on my highschooler's lesson plans for next year. This year, the assignments he hated most were the ones where he had to think or imagine in the service of the work that was done. I know that most 13 year old boys hate making their brains work in the service of their studies. But is there some validity to his particular form of loathing? He liked the memory work, the multiple choice or comprehension quizzes, and he liked writing stories. He was OK about conversations with me -- discussions of the study questions related to his studies. I think he would think that Bloom did middle school students a disservice with his Taxonomy. From casting back to my own younger days or even to this morning, I have some sympathy. Most "schooly" exercises feel a bit too much like being in the power of Procrustes. They try to draw out something one is not conscious of actually having -- in fact, something that one strongly feels one does not have.

On the other hand, memorizing just takes work.

And writing, though difficult, is genuinely a human enterprise. I'm starting to think that IEW is correct to focus on style rather than projects like making newspapers of a given historical time, etc. Maybe newspaper projects and the like were originally meant to be fun, relevant and practical, but in effect, they don't really form the young human being. Style, the way it was traditionally taught, is based on imitation, which comes easier to young people than trying to create something out of scratch. It's like following a recipe.

The best occasion to create something out of scratch is when you WANT to. I let Kieron write fictional versions of some of the assignments he gets from his charter school. This is because this is how I learned to write and love writing, and this is how my older children learned to write effectively, too. Writing fiction can teach you pretty much all you need to know about style, structure and coherence. And unlike newspaper projects, it is something that comes naturally to almost all readers of literature.

Back to memory -- what I really wanted to say was that I was pondering memory in terms of Beauty, Truth and Goodness -- or, to say it in a somewhat similar way, in terms of art/senses, knowledge and morality. Or as St Augustine says it here -- there is a triad of goals that apply to what is said by the eloquent, and perhaps there is a similar triad when we are talking about what is stored in the memory.

“It has been said by a man of eloquence, and quite rightly, that the eloquent should speak in such a way as to instruct, delight, and move their listeners.” St Augustine

Beauty

One kind of memory is that based on observation of art or nature, or the hearing of beautiful words or music (I'm leaving aside the other senses right now because they are less intellectual and less intrinsically connected to the substance of the remembered thing, though smell is very evocative to memory).

Charlotte Mason used to have her students take a mental picture of a landscape and said that a few of these were a wonderful solace and refuge for the memory. Many of her other exercises to do with nature were directed towards attentive observation and remembering. Same with the visual arts, and with music.

Memorizing beautiful words, similarly, focuses the memory on beauty and power and wisdom of expression.

Truth

Another kind of memory is oriented towards "knowledge". Nowadays we think of memorizing facts but traditionally, mere contingent facts were considered less important than humanistic knowledge -- knowledge to do with the art of reasoning, of expression, of the "sciences" of math and philosophy and theology. But sure, there are some "mere facts" that are valuable to know as hinges for further knowledge. ED Hirsch talks a lot about that in his works on Cultural Literacy and I find that some "fact knowledge", especially if it is "humane" (associated with things of interest to humans, like literature and nature), leads to sympathy and further interest and involvement with those things, and indeed deeper comprehension.

Another way to put the different between higher and lower knowledge is that higher knowledge is necessarily true.... true by nature of how things are. There's a continuum that goes all the way down to more trivial truth -- one wouldn't see a valid reason to know what time one's distant acquaintance goes to bed at night. It makes sense to focus on the kind of knowledge that will be important no matter what, though most people also have a collection of knowledge that happens to be interesting to them for their own reasons, and this has humane value IMO (Aidan knows different models of cars and my very brilliant father used to memorize baseball statistics as a young boy).

Goodness

The final kind of memory seems to me to be somewhat similar to what Charlotte Mason calls "training in habits". Maybe you could call it a kind of "muscle memory". It might even involve athletic or other physical training like dancing or riding or playing a musical instrument. But it would also include all the things one does without effort of decision. It might even reach to higher habits of morality -- like finding peaceful solutions to conflicts, or honesty, or sincerity of expression.

Of course these areas overlap. For example, reading stories of virtue and heroism can inspire one to behave more nobly. A beautiful landscape can actually have a similar effect. The astronaut James Irwin gave a talk at my church saying that he converted to Christianity when he looked back at the radiant sphere of our Earth from the moon.

I was thinking that it's not important to thoroughly comprehend beautiful things one stores in the memory -- in fact, it's probably not possible to really "comprehend" beauty as if you were bigger than it is. Beauty requires approach not incorporation. As Dorothy Sayers says, children can fall in love with the rolling syllables of a wonderful poem without understanding its content. Aidan has memorized all the prayers of the Rosary in Latin without an effort just by hearing them.

It seems more important, to me, to have some understanding before one memorizes "knowledge". Perhaps I'm wrong, but Richard Feynman talks about "Fragile Knowledge" and I think he means memory without understanding. For one thing, it doesn't tend to get retrieved appropriately -- I would imagine it gets stocked in a different part of the brain or in a different way in the brain, a narrow verbal one rather than a contextual one. With things like math and natural science and even linguistic vocabulary and syntax it seems important to have a broad base of exposure upon which to build the memorization.

As for mere habits, physical and moral and hygienic, etc, many can be taught by sheer repetition, but perhaps they aren't carried through life as well if they are just isolated physical reflexes rather than purposeful or intentional actions. Understanding and appreciation can enliven the practice of physical habits -- Sean does well at football not just because of training but because he loves the game and studies it.

I guess there's another category of "secondary memory" -- things like phone numbers, remembering appointments and birthdates and places you've been, values of coins, how to write checks -- things that aren't directly concerned with beauty, truth or goodness, though they aren't opposed to them either. These seem to partake of charity in a way in that these little things are usually connected with our duties or our affections. I remember my family's birthdays because I love them, and I remember how to do the laundry, drive a car, etc, because these things are concerned with the type of responsibilities I have. I'll have to think a bit more about that category. It's not "liberal" memory like the other things are -- it's useful memory, even what they called "servile" memory, but it's still something you can't get by without. So it doesn't concern "education" per se but it has a part to play in life.

I've noticed that a lot of schooly strategies fall into this category -- they aren't directly concerned with improving the mind or intellectual or moral habits, but are incidental. My son who goes to public high school had to learn to follow some rather arbitrary rules that applied only to one particular classroom or year. Having a plurality of these can make it difficult for a student to distinguish between what's truly a formative intellectual habit and what's simply an arbitrary convention. ... just like very complex public regulations make it difficult to practice true morality because they induce a kind of cynicism and disrespect for law in the ordinary citizen.

Catholic Series on Philosophy (for high schools and colleges)

You can click on the picture to follow through to Google Books.

I liked this as a depiction of a subtle difference between the worldview of the "good magician" and the "bad magician". (I'm sorry if the idea of "good magic" seems offensive -- I'm thinking Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and other stories where magic is portrayed-- see here for a good discussion from a Catholic perspective). This is from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

"Well, Dumbledore," said Karkaroff, displaying his yellowing teeth to their fullest extent, "we are all protective of our private domains, are we not? Do we not jealously guard the halls of learning that have been entrusted to us? Are we not right to be proud that we alone know our school's secrets, and right to protect them?"

"Oh, I would never dream of assuming I know all Hogwarts' secrets, Igor," said Dumbledore amicably. "Only this morning, for instance, I took a wrong turning on the way to the bathroom and found myself in a beautifully proportioned room I have never seen before, containing a really rather magnificent collection of chamber pots. When I went back to investigate more closely, I discovered that the room had vanished. But I must keep an eye out for it. Possibly it is only accessible at five-thirty in the morning. Or it may only appear at the quarter moon -- or when the seeker has an exceptionally full bladder."

To get away from the magic metaphor, try thinking science, which is actually a good parallel, since most technology is just precisely as "magical" to most of us as magic is in the old fairy tales, though perhaps more ordinary. We can use it, but we are just as likely to be used by it, and rarely do we thoroughly understand the technology we are using. In a certain sense it is "magical" to us.

There are two kinds of scientists, the kind that think of science as somehow their property, to guard and take pride in, and the kind that for all their special knowledge still recognize mystery and the quirkiness of reality and their own comparative bemusement in the face of it.

Slow Reading Redux

Very interesting article on Slow Reading.

“The problem is you are thinking that to begin slow reading means to pick up a text and read it in a certain way, different from how you have been reading before, but that’s not the way it works. Slow reading doesn’t start with reading. When slow reading begins, you are already reading. You have been reading for a long time. Slow reading starts, not with reading but with slowing.

But even that is not quite right. It would be more accurate to say that slow reading starts with stopping, with turning around. In our reading habits we are like drivers who have been speeding down the highway, intent on reaching our destination, when we begin to notice that things along the side of the road don’t look quite the way we expected. At some point we begin to think that we might have misinterpreted a road sign that we passed a few kilometers back, and then suddenly the thought strikes us that we have been driving rapidly in the wrong direction! Now, as you turn your car around and start driving back to take another look at that sign, now you may find yourself in the slow reading frame of mind.”

If one could begin slow reading the first lesson would be: Just be present to the words on the page. Allow the words to simply BE there, and take note of the fact that they ARE there – BEFORE YOU DECIDE WHAT THEY MEAN.

While I'm reflecting on the New Year I wanted to mention that I've actually been doing something like this for a couple of months at least. As you know, my oldest son graduated from Thomas Aquinas College last spring, and my daughter is currently a freshman there.

Ever since I first found out about classical education I have been trying to some extent to give my kids the education I didn't have, and educate myself a bit into the bargain. It's a slow process, and recently, in conversations with my college kids, I've realized that a lot of time what is handicapping my thought process is simply a lack of the fundamentals -- ie the traditional arts or tools.

When I realized this, I thought that I have a perfect opportunity right now. I don't have babies or toddlers anymore. My daughter's a freshman at TAC. Right now, I have a bit of extra time on my hands. Why not start reading through the Thomas Aquinas curriculum?

I'm not doing it quite the way they do it, because obviously my circumstances are different. Right now I'm reading:

• Aristotle's Categories
• Augustine's On Christian Doctrine
• The Vulgate (though I have a hard time making my brain focus on the Latin and often end up just reading in English).
  

I'm also trying to go through one devotional work at a time. Right now I'm re-reading St Francis de Sales' "Introduction to the Devout Life."

I'm reading these slowly, a bit at a time.

Of course, I have other books that I read at normal speed. But I'm trying to improve my study habits by reading these ones a bit at a time and writing notes. What helps me is making a private blog for each one. It's like an electronic notebook for each different book. It's so much easier for me to write and re-read my notes when it's all on a typed page rather than in my messy handwriting.

Thought I'd share!

Quiet but Not Still

It's so funny how you can tell a newly literate person -- by the silence. Paddy's been reading for a couple of years now, but he's just made a jump in fluency.... or integrated maturity level, perhaps. As a consequence there are new stretches in the day when I don't hear his high little voices playing pretend games or talking to his siblings or to me. When I go and look for him I see some variation of the pictures below.

Even when he's quiet, though, he's never quite still. These were taken during a five-minute period (sorry they are so blurry -- I thought the natural light would be enough, but it wasn't) . And this level of activity during concentration is very typical of my brand new 7 year old. I wonder how things would go for him at school?

More on Classical Education

When I was writing this post on Truth and Tradition it would have been useful to have read this post at A Healer's Geste. There are links there to a whole series of posts on classical education.

"Alice in Wonderland" math

Winston Churchill sounds like such a Visual-Spatial learner to me, which may explain why he was always bottom of the school during his Harrow years, had to take English three times because he wasn't thought smart enough to advance to the Classics, and had to take his exit exams three times before he passed. His liking for grammar defined by colored underlining, his battle formations of toy soldiers (he apparently had a collection of more than 1500) and his way of thinking about math all seem to show this tendency. Even his sense of humor and his ability to see the big picture seem to me to be visual spatial traits.

In regard to Mathematics he writes:

Of course what I call Mathematics is only what the Civil Service Commissioners expected you to know to pass a very rudimentary examination. I suppose that to those who enjoy this peculiar gift, Senior Wranglers and the like, the waters in which I swam must seem only a duck-puddle compared to the Atlantic Ocean. Nevertheless, when I plunged in, I was soon out of my depth. When I look back upon those care-laden months, their prominent features rise from the abyss of memory. Of course I had progressed far beyond Vulgar Fractions and the Decimal System. We were arrived in an 'Alice-in-Wonderland' world, at the portals of which stood 'A Quadratic Equation.' This with a strange grimace pointed the way to the Theory of Indices, which again handed on the intruder to the full rigours of the Binomial Theorem. Further dim chambers lighted by sullen, sulphurous fires were reputed to contain a dragon called the 'Differential Calculus.' But this monster was beyond the bounds appointed by the Civil Service Commissioners who regulated this stage of Pilgrim's heavy journey. We turned aside, not indeed to the uplands of the Delectable Mountains, but into a strange corridor of things like anagrams and acrostics called Sines, Cosines and Tangents. Apparently they were very important, especially when multiplied by each other, or by themselves! They had also this merit—you could learn many of their evolutions off by heart. There was a question in my third and last Examination about these Cosines and Tangents in a highly square-rooted condition which must have been decisive upon the whole of my after life. It was a problem. But luckily I had seen its ugly face only a few days before and recognised it at first sight.

I have never met any of these creatures since. With my third and successful examination they passed away like the phantasmagoria of a fevered dream. I am assured that they are most helpful in engineering, astronomy and things like that. It is very important to build bridges and canals and to comprehend all the stresses and potentialities of matter, to say nothing of counting all the stars and even universes and measuring how far off they are, and foretelling eclipses, the arrival of comets and such like. I am very glad there are quite a number of people born with a gift and a liking for all of this; like great chess-players who play sixteen games at once blindfold and die quite soon of epilepsy. Serve them right! I hope the Mathematicians, however, are well rewarded. I promise never to blackleg their profession nor take the bread out of their mouths.

I had a feeling once about Mathematics, that I saw it all—Depth beyond depth was revealed to me—the Byss and the Abyss. I saw, as one might see the transit of Venus—or even the Lord Mayor's Show, a quantity passing through infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus. I saw exactly how it happened and why the tergiversation was inevitable: and how the one step involved all the others. It was like politics. But it was after dinner and I let it go!

It's interesting to me that Richard Feynman, not too different from Churchill in his irreverence and his dislike for abstraction, became a theoretical physicist while Churchill became a politician. But here, maybe family influence plays a big part. Feynman's father used to talk to him about the natural sciences, while Churchill's father was a notable political leader.

Mere Literacy

Richard Mitchell is an old favorite of mine -- I read Graves of Academe almost 20 years ago now. I just read his Less Than Words Can Say. You can find it as open-source over here.

His basic theme is that bad syntax is no accident. Basically, horrifying grammar and style derives from two sources:

• Inadvertence (that is, the person writes badly because he doesn't know any better)
  
• Intentional obscurity (the person's writing perfectly reflects his intention and state of mind)
  

And it matters. It matters if the general population can't tell bad writing from good, or write well instead of badly. In this way he shares Hirsch's view, though Hirsch focuses on the role of knowledge in literacy, and Mitchell focuses on the logic in literacy. But both of them see it as a matter of civic importance that as many people as possible get an education that will prepare them to think and communicate as well as possible.

From Chapter Three:

If we want to pursue extended logical thought, thought that can discover relationships and consequences and devise its own alternatives, we need a discipline imposed from outside of the mind itself. Writing is that discipline. It seems drastic, but we have to suspect that coherent, continuous thought is impossible for those who cannot construct coherent, continuous prose.

"Writing," Bacon said, "Maketh the exact man," as we all know, but we ordinarily stop thinking about that too soon. The "exact" part is only half of what writing makes; the other half is the "man." Writing does indeed make us exact because it leaves a trail of thought that we can retrace and so discover where we have been stupid. At the same time, though, it makes us "men," grown-ups who can choose what toys we want to play with and who can outwit the random suggestions of environment. In his writing, then, we can judge of at least two things in a man--his ability to think and his intention to do so, his maturity. An education that does not teach clear, coherent writing cannot provide our world with thoughtful adults; it gives us instead, at the best, clever children of all ages....


The logic of writing is simply logic; it is not some system of arbitrary conventions interesting only to those who write a lot. All logical thought goes on in the form of statements and statements about statements. We can make those statements only in language, even if that language be a different symbol system like mathematics. If we cannot make those statements and statements about statements logically, clearly, and coherently, then we cannot think and make knowledge. People who cannot put strings of sentences together in good order cannot think. An educational system that does not teach the technology of writing is preventing thought.

It also matters if people are able to use their language to make things harder to understand rather than easier. See also Orwell's Politics and the English Language, where he writes:

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.

and also:

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one's elbow.

Hands-On Teaching

We were doing this demonstration for Paddy's science -- which was on the reason for the seasons.

The demonstration called for an orange with a pencil through it for the axis, and a floor lamp, but I didn't have an orange, so I grabbed a kiwi and a wooden skewer.

Me: Here, Paddy, I want to show you something.
Two pairs of startled eyes look at me and there's a moment of silence.
Kieron: Mom, you impaled that kiwi! Why?
Me: I'm trying to show Paddy something for science.
Kieron: What did the poor kiwi do wrong?
Paddy (doubtfully): What IS that?
Me: This is NOT an impaled kiwi....this is the earth and this is its axis..... well.... anyway, what do you think I'm doing to this kettle corn?
Kieron: Poor kiwi! It's bleeding....
Paddy: Poor kiwi!
Kevin, coming downstairs: What's Mom doing to that fruit?
Paddy: K12 told her to do it. It was supposed to be an orange.
Kevin: K12 told mom to torture fruit?

Sigh.... so the seasons demonstration bore a different kind of fruit than planned (pardon the pun). I never really did get the idea of the tilted axis across to Paddy.

This is where I think Hirsch has a point (ha ha, I can't get away from these word plays) about the limitations of project-based learning. Asimov says that scientists construct models of real things, but SIMPLIFIED and abstracted, so real-world difficulties don't get in the way before their time. A kiwi apparently doesn't stand in for the earth and a skewer for the axis, in the mind of a 6 year old. Or a 13 year old. Or a 48 year old, either. They are quite different realities.

Here's a lesson plan which links to a video showing the earth's orbit. Here's a list of links about seasons. More links here. And we have this book Sunshine Makes the Seasons. So I'm sure we'll get to some understanding in due season. ;-).