Our Next Poem, Perhaps?

I just read through some wonderful material on teaching poetry sent to me by Strider, a kind and knowledgeable woman at the WTM boards. In one of the documents she recommends "acting out" a poem--just for the sheer enjoyment of it.

Since my son seems to want to act out his poem recitation, I thought perhaps this one, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, might give him scope for his acting abilities:

The Splendor Falls
from The Princess


The splendor falls on castle walls
And snowy summits old in story:
The long light shakes across the lakes
And the wild cataract leaps in glory.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes dying, dying, dying.
O hark, O hear! how thin and clear,
And thinner, clearer, farther going!
O sweet and far from cliff and scar
The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!
Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying,
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes dying, dying, dying.
O love they die in yon rich sky,
They faint on hill or field, or river:
Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
And grow forever and forever.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.

We've been talking about sound waves as we study the ear....

(Oh, I am an idiot. I copied and pasted this poem straight from Ambelside On-line--and the title is as you see it above. I have been reading this and trying to figure out how the "splendour" (or beauty of the Princess) relates to the bugle call. Poetry is often opaque to me, so I wasn't too worried about it. But then, I went to close the A-O page and the next poem on the list is "Tears, Idle Tears from The Princess " set out exactly the same way. Silly me, "The Princess" must either be a book or a much, much longer poem. Ok, got it now. It's a longer poem. I'm glad. I wasn't exactly sure how the bugle's blowing and the splendour falling (really falling) from the Princess fit together. Whew.)

Weekly Report. Week #9

The Highlight: The kids recited "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" by Robert Frost for their Grandmother and Aunt today. My daughter did it prettily, my son did a more animated version with little actions throughout. My mother thought my son's recital "wonderful" which was too bad, really. I suppose he's making it "fun" but he does that just a bit too much. I'd been coaching him to "let the feel of the poem come through your voice." Oh well. I wonder if I can get hold of that CBC episode in Anne of Green Gables where Anne recites her poem? Then they could see how an "expressive" reading hits all the right notes (and none of the wrong ones).

The Low Point: We covered Clovis in SoTW this week--and Cartier in Canadian history. Both of them being Frenchmen confused the poor dears. "What did Clovis do?"

He discovered Canada!

No, no, that was Cartier.

And today, after covering Clovis and Cartier, we read about Sir Humphrey Gilbert and his ill-fated voyage to Newfoundland. After listening to my daughter and me hash out her narration, my son actually wrote: "Sir Humphrey Gilbert was sent by the King of France to claim Newfoundland for France."

Sigh.

I was cheered up though when, after remembering that, oh yeah, it was the Queen of England, he said, "but her name can't be Elizabeth. That's the name of the Queen now." I happily explained how Kings and Queens used the same name over and over. "There were eight Henry's in England and fourteen Louis's of France!" Eyebrows went up, I tell ya.

Good news: my daughter is loving math again. She's in that section in 2A where multiplication is introduced. She whizzed through the week's work and actually whined, "There's no more to do." I'm going to have to look into supplemental stuff for her to flesh it out.

Bad news: my son announced today that he "hates Latin."

That wasn't the whole week, of course, but you really don't want to read about every little detail, do you?

Math and Your Brain

I found this article from the New Yorker courtesy of M-MV.
Thanks!

And if evolution has equipped us with one way of representing number, embodied in the primitive number sense, culture furnishes two more: numerals and number words. These three modes of thinking about number, Dehaene believes, correspond to distinct areas of the brain. The number sense is lodged in the parietal lobe, the part of the brain that relates to space and location; numerals are dealt with by the visual areas; and number words are processed by the language areas.

Nowhere in all this elaborate brain circuitry, alas, is there the equivalent of the chip found in a five-dollar calculator. This deficiency can make learning that terrible quartet—“Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision,” as Lewis Carroll burlesqued them—a chore. It’s not so bad at first. Our number sense endows us with a crude feel for addition, so that, even before schooling, children can find simple recipes for adding numbers. If asked to compute 2 + 4, for example, a child might start with the first number and then count upward by the second number: “two, three is one, four is two, five is three, six is four, six.” But multiplication is another matter. It is an “unnatural practice,” Dehaene is fond of saying, and the reason is that our brains are wired the wrong way. Neither intuition nor counting is of much use, and multiplication facts must be stored in the brain verbally, as strings of words. The list of arithmetical facts to be memorized may be short, but it is fiendishly tricky: the same numbers occur over and over, in different orders, with partial overlaps and irrelevant rhymes. (Bilinguals, it has been found, revert to the language they used in school when doing multiplication.) The human memory, unlike that of a computer, has evolved to be associative, which makes it ill-suited to arithmetic, where bits of knowledge must be kept from interfering with one another: if you’re trying to retrieve the result of multiplying 7 X 6, the reflex activation of 7 + 6 and 7 X 5 can be disastrous. So multiplication is a double terror: not only is it remote from our intuitive sense of number; it has to be internalized in a form that clashes with the evolved organization of our memory. The result is that when adults multiply single-digit numbers they make mistakes ten to fifteen per cent of the time. For the hardest problems, like 7 X 8, the error rate can exceed twenty-five per cent.

Now I understand why giving my son copywork for his mutiplication tables works to help retain his "math facts." Knowing 3x7 is a linguistic skill more than a numerical skill.

And, for the record: Evolution is a theory, not a fact. Adaptation is a fact, not a theory.

Levinson Leaves Me Dubious.

After reading Schaeffer Macaulay, I was wholly prepared to love this book, too. Instead, I find every skeptical antennae I have on ALERT.

I'm sure it's not the first time someone has had this reaction. Since I have not read all of Miss Mason's works, I can't tell, in all honesty, whether my reaction is to Miss Mason or her representative. So, if I say Levinson when I should say Mason or vice versa, please grant me the indulgence given to a beginning student.

My first thought is: it can't be as simple as just doing narrations. You cannot provide an education merely by asking children to repeat back to you, whether verbally or in writing, what they have heard or read for themselves. Narrations, rather, are a place to start.

They are an excellent means for organizing and retaining the story and information of what one has been exposed to. And it isn't quite the be all and end all. There's the Book of Centuries, for example, which is a tool used by the child to make connections between events and happenings in history. In Nature study, it's mentioned so casually by Levinson it's easy to miss: but one is to label the drawings one makes. One should know the difference between a sepal and a petal. (Perhaps one should, I don't!) If narrations were the be all and end all, a child would never compare and contrast two presentations of the same idea, at least not in so far as I understand narration (and perhaps I don't understand it!).

Secondly, how does a Charlotte Mason education escape being merely the cultivation and expression of taste? Think about it. The books shall be "good ones." No twaddle. The art shall be "The Masters." Ditto music. Taste can certainly be trained. It's a class notion, though, as well as an educational one. If you act like you are well educated, look like you are well educated and sound like you are well educated--then who's to say you are not? And who defines "well-educated?"

In times in which Miss Mason lived, it was most definitely the upper class--those who attended Oxford or Cambridge. I have the impression (but an impression only) that the subjects which were studied in the private schools of England at the turn of the century represented high standards and had the potential to furnish the mind with a good education. Most likely, the public schools of the day for the common folk were very poor. But the way Levinson portrays Charlotte Mason, it seems to me that one could only achieve the appearence of the accomplishments of the higher education and not, truly, its reality. But, of course, I'm can't be sure of that. (And whether the education of the upper class achieved its aims is a question too.)

Thirdly and lastly, these reflections were caused by thinking mostly about the way Miss Mason recommended teaching a second language. Of course, you have an expert (an actual speaker of the language) come and speak to them. Of course, you "focus more on the grammer of latin" than you would the other languages....
This is where the whole thing breaks down for me. If an expert in French (or German or Latin) is allowed, then why not an expert in Biology, in Math, in Literature?

Learning grammar and spelling of one's own language in the tortorous way Miss Mason advises, frankly, just doesn't appeal. Nor do I honestly think it would work, unless the child is a natural speller to begin with. Covering the concepts in a textbook or program of some kind first and then reenforcing it in one's readings and writing seems a much more sensible approach.

There are two things, though, I think Miss Mason was spot on about. 1) The food for the mind is ideas. As platonic a notion as this is, it is nonetheless correct.
2) A child, a household, must always have the examples of the best presented. This is just a practical manifestation of Paul's exhoration in Philippians 4:8-9.

All that said, I am quite interested in what Miss Mason has to say about habit and training the will. Someone said to me once that although Miss Mason's method of educating was questionable, she was absolutely correct about children. Levinson gives a great guide to Miss Mason's writings on the subject.

My opinions, by the way, are always open to revision and reflection and perhaps I ought not to be quite so hasty to express them! Your thoughts?

Writers, Take Note!

I am a Canadian.

I learned nothing about Canadian History in school. It may have been taught and I was alseep, all I know is that I didn't become fascinated with Canadian History until I wrestled with the inanity of the decisions of Judicial Committee of the Privy Council back in Journalism school. (Never mind. It would take far too long to explain).

In any event, I want my children to know their history. What I have been able to discover is utterly fascinating. I haven't made it to Confederation, yet, mind you. I may change my mind when I get there.

Today, someone asked on a message board: Could we help her pull together some literature and geography for her to teach her kids about Canada?

I went digging around in my files (really, I think my on-line name ought to be "web-scavenger") and I found a document I'd saved from someone's web-site ages ago called "Read Your Way Through Canadian History."

"Bonanza!" you might say.

Well, not quite.

I started looking through the list to find the books: first my local library, then Amazon, then Google Books. I was just trying to find descriptions of them. I took one tiny section of the list: Early Explorers. Of the 23 books cited, my library has 6 of them. This is instructive as my library doesn't seem to carry oop (out of print) books. And indeed, a random search of the remaining books seems to be that they are indeed oop.

But my library does have lots of books on John Cabot, Hudson, Cartier, Champlain, and Radisson. But they are, for the most part, factual books. They tell you when each of them explored, how many voyages each took, they show maps and who went with them, who backed them, what they found, blah, blah, blah. But, they are not adventure stories. Why not? Why make history boring, dry and factual when it was full of danger and fear and courage and excitement?

So, authors, take note. Canadians need stories. Our kids need the stories of their past. Maps and facts are fine but after the feel of the sea breeze in your hair, after the relief of sighting land after many months of dry biscuit and stale water, after the wonder of looking at so many trees, after the wonder of exchanging all your buttons for luxurious furs, after the feel of boarding a canoe and shooting the rapids.

Is it any wonder Canadians don't know their history?

Ask and Ye shall Receive...

I have come across a plan for Read-Alouds. Yeah, yeah, I know, I probably seem really uptight to those of you who can wing your way through life with spontaneity and grace. Me, I just fall flat on my face without a plan, a guide, something to hold my hand.

I have found Tanglewood Tales. I'm not sure who is in charge over there, but they have some absolutely wonderful ideas--and tonight I'm interested in the Read-Alouds.

Firstly, the books are divided up into categories. (I love categories. I remember being so impressed when Wise wrote that she required her children to take out at least one book from a broad range of categories each time the visited the library, and I've wanted to do that, but I can't remember what they were!) Anyway, these are Tanglewood's:

Group A- Poetry
Group B- Fairy Tales
Group C- Animals etc.
Group D- Tall Tales
Group E- Regular Fiction
Group F- Science Fiction
Group G- Mysteries
(Group H- Historical Fiction- included in historical studies rather than literature)
(Group I- Biography- included in historical studies rather than literature)

Secondly, these are even linked--to lists! (I am excited. OK, maybe it's the sugar rush from my Eccles Cake. (What's an Eccles Cake? Don't interrupt.) No, truly, I'm a nut for lists, too.)

And this is THE PLAN:

Group A- Poetry: Study the works of (2) authors, have (1) anthology on hand.
Group B- Fairy Tales: Read approximately (1) fairy tale each week.
Groups C-G: Read at least one book from each of these groups

Strive for a minimum of one book for every month. This works out to be nine books each school year.

So, one from each category C-G is five. Add four more and boom dada boom, the planning is done!

No, (and I'm hanging me head in shame), I did NOT read to the kids after their baths tonight. It was a bit chaotic and the kids started playing a Professor Noggins game with each other. (What's Professor Noggins? Sssh. Don't interrupt.) Me? I was reading A Philosophy of Education. On-line. Ouch. It was not fun sitting here at the desk doing that.

So, what shall the books actually be?
I don't know yet.
I'll let you know tomorrow.

A Charlotte Mason Education

Something in my heart longs for this.


I finished reading Susan Scaeffer MacCaulay's book For the Children's Sake today. I deeply appreciated her message: do what you can.

She writes,

"[Can you give] your home so much vitality, [and] life through your creative effort that it becomes the 'center of gravity' in a child's life?"

I don't know if I can: but what is homeschooling about, at its heart, if it isn't to make the home the child's "centre of gravity?"

Along with improving my children's academic opportunities, what I want, what I have always wanted, is to make our home and our beliefs the place from which the children go out to live their lives in this big, bad, mean ol' world.

Miss Mason's philosophy of education, as MacCaulay reports it, was based upon her view of children as persons and an understanding of education as an instrument of 1) the atmosphere of the environment, 2) the discipline of habit and 3) the presentation of living ideas. These are taken from the 5th principle found here. These concepts are far richer than these mere words can possibly indicate.

Briefly (and inadequately) the child learns from the atmosphere around him or her. Is it harsh? Is it welcoming? Is there someone available to listen to the child? I was so convicted several times of my own failings here, that I cried as I read through this part. In many ways, I am so stressed by our curriculum and the need to get through everything that I am providing a very poor environment, indeed.

Schaeffer MacCaulay also had wonderful things to say on behalf of Miss Mason about habit--mainly, that, if I read through my red-rimmed eyes properly, "habit" is Miss Mason's way of talking about training the will. I need to reflect on this a whole lot more before I know what to think of it.

As for education being a life, that seems to me to be self-evident. The result of this maxim, however, is that all books should be living books; books written by people who inject their very spirit and enthusiasm and love for their subject into their works. There is obviously more to this concept, reams and reams have been written about "Living Books" vs. "twaddle" but I'm not going there at the moment.

Rather, I want to explore Schaeffer-MacCaulay's caveat: do what you can.

What can I do?

The first thing that leaps to mind, is, no, not going outside, but turning off the T.V during the week. I should clarify--we don't have T.V. per se, we have a TV screen which plays DVD's and videos (and the latter can't be rewound without great frustration). Still, the kids, especially my son, watch too much. My husband doesn't quite understand my hatred of it. He agrees that it should be on "less in the summer." For a few evenings now, I've had the impulse to go in and turn it off and just read to them from The Railway Children. I am very frustrated by our little time we have for reading aloud. So, why haven't I done it?

The usual excuses, I'm tired, I don't want to fight with them, I need a break. After supper and before bed is the only time I have in my day which I can fully claim for myself. I can read, plan, hang out here on the computer. (I should do dishes, laundry and cleaning but you can see how an introvert may be relunctant to scarifice down-time?)

It has a lot to do with the disfunctionality of bed-time around here (One must sit with each child until they fall asleep. My boy doesn't sleep until mid-night and the girl isn't far behind). But perhaps, just perhaps, I can take a half hour after bath-time and read to them. Perhaps. I could certainly try that tonight.

As for other aspects of a CM education, I really need to think it over. I'm a Big Picture sort of gal. I have to understand it and think about it before I implement the practices which facilitate it. But I want to leave you with one more excerpt from Miss Mason which grabbed me by the throat. It may just be school at our house. And what a waste if it is. What a pervesion of my goals! The quote is long. I apologise.

I had at the time just begun to teach, and was young and enthusiastic in my work. It was to my mind a great thing to be a teacher; it was impossible but that the teacher should leave his stamp on the children. His own was the fault if anything went wrong, if any child did badly in school or out of it. There was no degree of responsibility to which youthful ardour was not equal. But, all this zeal notwithstanding, the disappointing thing was, that nothing extraordinary happened. The children were good on the whole, because they were the children of parents who had themselves been brought up with some care; but it was plain that they behaved very much as ''twas their nature to.' The faults they had, they kept; the virtues they had were exercised just as fitfully as before. The good, meek little girl still told fibs. The bright, generous child was incurably idle. In lessons it was the same thing; the dawdling child went on dawdling, the dull child became no brighter. It was very disappointing. The children, no doubt, 'got on'––a little; but each one of them had the makings in her of a noble character, of a fine mind, and where was the lever to lift each of these little worlds? Such a lever there must be. This horse-in-a-mill round of geography and French, history and sums, was no more than playing at education; for who remembers the scraps of knowledge he laboured over as a child?

From Home Education, pp. 98-100 (my italics).

Weekly Report #3

Last week, I decided to switch us from a five day Monday to Friday schedule to a four day, Tuesday to Saturday schedule.

But wait, the more mathematical among you may cry: that's still five days! Well, yeah, but it's really 41/2. The idea is to get all we can done from Tuesday to Friday and do whatever is "left" on Saturday. Why? The Dad has Sunday and Monday off and I was tired of not being able to do anything with him as a family on those Mondays he actually decided not to work over-time and stay home with us. As well, it's a terrific incentive for the kids. "You better come and get this done or we'll have lots of work to do on Saturday" was the cry this week.

But, as the poet Burns has said, "Oft plans gang awry" and indeed they already have. My fault. I just plumb forgot we hadn't done some stuff and so didn't plan on doing it today. And the neighbourhood kids cam over and another friend my daughter hasn't seen in weeks....and so after only an hour of instruction this morning they're outside playing. Charlotte Mason would be proud.

I had thought we'd done well this week, too--until I started making up next week's schedule.

We were supposed to finish Lively Latin Lesson 2 this week--nope.

I was supposed to finish Lesson 4 in Canadian History. Um. gulp, nope. We did start it this morning, however!

Math for the Boy is still stalled on Long Division. Actually, I'm don't really care we're behind schedule because of this. It just needs to be done, that's all.

We did finish all the topics in our Science chapter this week: I took about 10-15 minutes 4x this week (including this morning) to work on each of the five senses. The "ear" diagram I made was too complicated, though, so we didn't finish that. And although my daughter told me she "loved" the experiments we did--none of them worked. Not one got across the point it was supposed to! For example, this morning, the experiment for "touch" was to 1) rub one finger between the thumb and index finger of the other hand. Then, (2) one was to place a pencil or pen underneath the rubbed finger and do it again. You were supposed to "think" the underside of your finger was numb. It didn't quite work. But as I tried to explain how (your brain is missing the signals, but YOU know what you're doing so it "doesn't work.") my son asked something like, "My brain is sending me messages, but...where do the messages go? I am not my brain...how do I think?" or some such thing.

Ooooh, was this philosopher Momma proud. "Well, son," I began, "that's a question that's been asked down through the Ages. Some people have called it mind, and..." Just as I was about to launch into Descartes and the whole pilot in the machine idea, my eight year old daughter interrupted me and said, "Mom, please, let's get on with it." Well, I couldn't blame her, she had a playdate arranged to begin when "school was done."

The biggest outstanding things are all my son's subjects. Chiefly his writing, (editing and re-write), Bible Study and Grammar.

The grind feels absolutely relentless. (And it's only the end of week 8!)