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Email: Pokemon

Friday, November 2nd, 2007

So I’ve got a slew of email reacting to the One Thing series - everything from young kids to high schoolers. Because we’ve focused so much on high school (and will continue to next week), let’s take a break and look at a question from a mom with a 9 year old boy.

Julie,

After bouncing around doing different things for my two children, while homeschooling for 5 years now, I am falling in to a more relaxed homeschooling pattern.

I am very much into the idea of “one thing.” But, finding one thing that my 9 year old son and I can both focus on seems to be impossible! I want to study things alongside him and enjoy what he enjoys. In addition, he is not interested in my interests.

Today I am going to a wildlife refuge to hear a talk about bats. He wants nothing to do with it. He wants to stay at home and study the evolutions of Pokemon. Blech! That is his only love right now. How can I make that “one thing?”

First of all, I am wondering how to incorporate HIS “one thing” with learning. I have been desperately trying to figure out how I can make Pokemon educational. Knowing the evolutions (what they turn into after each stage of life), or knowing how to spell them has stumped me as to how he can use this later in life. He is past learning to count so we can’t use that as an excuse. In addition, there are not hundreds of sources to study to learn about it. Wouldn’t it be easier if he studied something like, Albert Einstein or Rachel Carson? Or the trees or the weather? Or Shakespeare or even Scrabble to learn spelling?

Does it even matter if his “one thing” is related future uses in life? I am just worried that this phase ultimately will be a waste of time and further his educational career.

Thanks,
Casey Lee
Bravewriter Mom

Hi Casey.

I’m so glad you asked this specific question as my son went through a Pokemon phase. Then his interests graduated to Yugi-oh cards and I came along for the ride. You ask some good questions. Let’s take them one at a time.

What if your son isn’t interested in what you’re interested in? I mentioned in another blog entry (Undefining Unschooling) that moms need to pursue what interests them regardless of whether or not their kids are interested in those same subjects. You can learn anything that is interesting to you, right in front of your kids, for its own sake (not because you hope your kids will want to learn it). At the same time, being the more mature of the pair, it is up to you to discover what it is that is interesting about your child’s interests. If you show genuine curiosity about the areas of interest your children have, you will gain several benefits right away:

  1. Your child will like you. We love people who like what we love, who show interest in our interests, who admire our expertises.
  2. Your child will trust you. He’ll believe you when you say, “I think you might enjoy X.” Why? Because he’ll know that you know what kinds of things he likes and that you support who he is (you’re not trying to draw him away from what he loves to do because you disapprove of it). He will be more likely to assume that you’ve got his best interests in mind if you find the interests he already has valuable.
  3. You will discover the value of any interest because through patient engagement, you’ll see the subject/area of interest up close and can discover the aspects of it that are intrinsically educational and valuable.

How are Pokemon cards educational? The danger here is trying to see value in the content of Pokemon rather than the process of playing with these cards. Content shifts, varies, has value or doesn’t depending on context. For instance, a mother may consider playing a musical instrument more valuable long term than playing cards with Japanese cartoons on them. Music is universally approved by mothers. But the content of playing is only valuable if the child likes the flute or piano and goes on to continue to play it for pleasure for the rest of his or her life. I played both flute and piano and never play either any more. Was it a waste of my time? What value did it have, if content is the measure? The content is no longer relevant to me. I don’t enjoy playing either instrument and haven’t in twenty years.

And yet I don’t regret having played when I did. I enjoyed it then. And I learned valuable skills: daily practice to improve, reading music, playing with a group, performing for an audience, appreciation of various musical styles, learning how to write music, and even the discovery that I don’t really want to be a musician.

The point is this. You may or may not enjoy Pokemon as a subject, as a content area. What you can do, however, is note it for its educational value apart from the pictures on the cards. Here are some learning processes that your son is internalizing without any special work from you that are extraordinary and useful to him for the rest of his life:

  • Sorting and classifying: He is naturally putting cards into groups based on particular features related to each of the characters and their powers.
  • Ranking: He is determining the hierarchy within the cards themselves, evaluating one power against another and which is more valuable when playing these cards against each other.
  • Strategy: He creates a deck that he believes is stacked in such a way as to beat his opponent. (If he doesn’t have an opponent yet, you get to be that person!)
  • Writing: Some kids (both of my boys who played these types of games) write lists constantly. And they were more than happy to do copywork when they were able to make lists based on card games.
  • Teaching: Since you don’t know anything about Pokemon, your child is in the perfect position to be put in the driver’s seat. That means he teaches you how to play, how to create your deck, he explains why some powers are more valuable than others, what happens when you play one card instead of another etc. It will be a challenge to him (and to you). You’ll feel bored, frustrated, wishing you were done, wondering why this matters (all the feelings he might have when you are trying to interest him in something you care about). This is your chance to learn how to learn in spite of yourself, it’s your chance to validate his expertise and to help him learn how to express in language what it is that he knows.
  • Calculating: All these card games relate to math (not just counting). Calculating damage when playing one card against another, understanding the ratio of cards with certain powers to other cards in the same deck (there are rules about how to stack a deck and they have to be observed), and so on. All of these skills are the same ones taught with tedious categories and examples in math text books (sorting, ranking, calculating, strategizing).
  • Saturated Interest: We can never really know how a deep interest relates to other subjects until we deepen the interest and watch it naturally interconnect to other parts of our world. Two of my boys have been avid card gamers. The oldest (Noah) is now deeply involved in Role Playing Games which have provided him with extensive understanding of the history of philosophy, for instance. Liam’s love of Yugi-Oh cards has given him transfer skills to bird watching and ornithological study (sorting, attention to detailed differences between birds, classification and so on).
  • Friends: A lot of times, the areas of interest we care most about lead us to people who are similar to us. Even if the interest doesn’t last longterm, the friendships founded during that season continue because the area of interest led us to people more like ourselves.
  • Entertainment: Don’t forget that having fun is perfectly fine when learning! :)

The point is: every subject is rich with learning opportunity if the student becomes deeply interested and has time to develop that interest. At the point of deepest interest, the student relies on the tools of learning to become expert in the subject area. These tools are what are critical to his future (not content as much).

Will it be a waste of time if he doesn’t use it in the future? I have a theory that nothing we truly care about is ever wasted. The mistake is assuming we will make use of things we hated doing based on the theory that we would need that material later.

For instance, I grew up truly resenting math. I felt like a failure in that subject, never did discover how to grasp it in a way that served me or helped me with life and was told repeatedly by my dad (bless his heart, he didn’t know better) that mathematical aptitude was the only measure of true intelligence. Despite earning a 3.85 in high school, going to UCLA for college and repeated success in writing, I felt less smart than my peers because of my dislike for math.

To this day, I don’t use math. I resist counting, I skip numbers when I read them in articles, and I get all shaky and teary when I go to any financial meeting with my accountant.

Fortunately for me, I did devote myself to writing and acting (and singing and dressing up and playing Barbies and making my toy animals talk to each other) from an early age and developed proficiencies that continue to reap dividends in my life every day.

So bottom line: Pokemon turns his crank. Get on the adventure with him. Discover together what uses it may have in his life. You can help him create a deck, ask him questions, draw his favorite characters together, jot down details he doesn’t want to forget, write up a list of instructions for you so you can play with him, watch the TV show and learn who the characters are, and more. I just looked up Pokemon on Wikipedia and discovered all the tournaments and opportunities for competition associated with Pokemon!

Let me know how it turns out. (Remember: he’s only 9. This interest will pass and will lead to others. Enjoy it while it lasts.)

Posted in Email, General, One Thing | 4 Comments »

One Thinging High School: Principles 1-3

Wednesday, October 24th, 2007

Last week I shared about our two oldest kids and their very different approaches to their teen years. Today, let’s talk philosophy. Let’s extract a few principles. We’ll look at these principles in sets of three until I’ve exhausted what I hoped to share. So without further ado, here are the first three principles.

1. Teens need adventure.
The family home is often too confining for teenagers. Their primary need between 13 and 17 is to get out into the big world right outside their door. The truth is, they have far more energy than their parents, boundless curiosity for things we take for granted (having already experienced them), and an insatiable need to relate to peers (in order to figure stuff out, like, what it takes to be a good friend, how to manage gossip, what’s cool and what’s not, what it means to manage myself, where to find good music, and who in the world out there is like me and can join me in my interests?).

They also want to do big things, like throwing pots, designing logos, writing articles that get published, mixing chemicals, traveling to a foreign country, flipping burgers at McDonald’s, backpacking in the mountains, driving a car, and so on. To accommodate this need for adventure, teens deserve to go places where they connect to their peers and other adults away from the supervising eyes of their parents.It doesn’t matter if they get a job, do an internship, go to school part time, take a college class, join an acting company, participate in a sports team or band, work out at a rock climbing gym, or volunteer at a local hospital. They need time away that stimulates them.

2. Teens aren’t lazy, they’re bored.
Laziness is usually a disguise for disinterest. When your child spends hours typing lyrics into his facebook but won’t do copywork from a classic novel, laziness is not the issue. Content is. Another example. To beat multiple levels in Sims or Halo 3 or Warcraft requires hours of sustained repetitive tasks that are tedious and mostly unrewarding at the lower levels. Somehow teens are willing to plug in all that time dragging and clicking a mouse or controller in order to get to a level that they consider more prestigious and rewarding, yet they grumble about the boring 15 math problems. Why is that? Because the teen does find that the stimulation of these games outweighs the tedium. Not so with the math homework he’s done in the same style notebook for six years.

Subjects that are especially dry and repetitive benefit the most from tutorials, classes (both in person or online), small learning groups, co-operatives and passionate competent adults. Farm out the subjects that fail to inspire your teens so that those topics have a fair chance for success. If it’s impossible to find meaning and/or passion in a required subject, make it as painless as possible - don’t double it up with other tedious subjects, don’t require A’s or perfect work, don’t do the advanced version of the subject, or conversely, do it over the summer by itself so it doesn’t ruin the school year.

3. Teens have interests that interest them.
I remember when I worried that Noah was not doing “anything” I could count for his college transcript. A friend asked me, “Well, does he have cool interests?” That was an odd answer to my worry. I responded, “Well, yeah. He studies Klingon, is teaching himself electric guitar, plays Role Playing Games, and acts in plays… but how is that helpful?” I found out.

I’m still discovering how these interests have sustained him. He made friends through acting and RPGs, he discovered linguistics (now his major) through Klingon, he still plays music for pleasure and he has an extensive CD collection. :) Yesterday on the phone as we talked about college, his chief frustration with his schedule is that he wants more time to read books and study music apart from his class schedule. He said, “I have really strong interests and I miss having more time to put into them.” Well yeah. That’s what happens when you grow up. It is harder now.

And I was suddenly glad that he took time in his teens to develop those interests while he still could. He’ll never get those years back. Isn’t it worth it to let teens do the stuff they love while food and beds are still provided to them for free? Don’t you wish you had had more time to do the stuff you wanted to do? (And don’t forget how many hours you spent on the phone or walking through the mall or sitting by the pool with friends. Today they call it facebook, texting and AIM. It’s how teens learn the art of relationships, a critical high school course of study that homeschooling kids need as much as any of their peers.)

These first three principles focus on seeing the world through a teenager’s eyes. Their perspective matters. Boredom isn’t something to scorn. Laziness isn’t typical of teens (they need lots of sleep, and sometimes they look exhausted), but the truth is, they are gung-ho when they’re interested. I rarely see a lazy teen on the ski slopes, in a water park, at a concert, or playing online games. Teens in most of my classes exert huge amounts of effort to write well, to turn things in on time, to execute their work with care. The ones who don’t aren’t lazy. They aren’t interested. There’s a difference. Make more space for passionate engagement and reduce the tedium of tasks that tire.

As you look at your teens, the one thing you can do right away is identify which of these principles you can act on. Don’t feel you must do them all at once. Just start “one thing” at a time.

Posted in General, Homeschool Advice, One Thing, Tips for Teen Writers | 4 Comments »

One Thinging High School: Johannah

Wednesday, October 17th, 2007

So we wandered down Noah’s labyrinthine path to college. Let’s take a short cut to Johannah’s.

Her journey answers the following question: How do you do “one thing” at a time when you have to fulfill college entrance requirements? Or as my daughter so aptly put it in 10th grade:

I don’t get the saying that you should live as though you only have a week to live. That’s a stupid idea. We are required to live as though we’ll be alive next week, next year, in four years, in twenty years. What teenager can say, “I will live like I only have a week to live so I’m not going to spend it doing Algebra 2…”? But then, oops: “Uh-oh. I’m still alive and I need to put Algebra 2 on my transcript except, well, I went skateboarding instead.”

Johannah was bugged that she wanted to do all those little things that make life interesting but felt the press of requirements crowding out that spontaneous desire to make origami cranes for three weeks straight.

So let’s back up a bit and look at how Johannah tackled her future one thing at a time.

In eighth grade, I designed a schedule for Johannah to follow that would train her to work through a course of study with assignments and due dates. She had co-op classes (including biology, logic, theater and literature discussion), my writing courses, history and math. I felt really good about the carefully laid out plans, the weekly assignment sheet, the check list, the way each item neatly fit our targets for high school prep (when things would “really” count).

One morning, about six weeks into our carefully crafted plan, Johannah picked up her stack of books, moved to the living room sofa and declared, “I hate my life.” That comment, so utterly uncharacteristic of my daughter, stopped me in my tracks. What could she mean?

Over a cup of tea, I found out. She loved us, of course, but she knew all about us - what we ate for lunch every day, how we brushed our teeth, which TV shows we couldn’t miss. She knew how Liam and Caitrin bickered and made up. She knew how I’d present a lesson and what I would expect and what I wouldn’t. Childhood had been a Disneyland ride, but that ride was over. The little car had come to a full stop and she wanted me to release the metal bar clamped over her body so she could exit like the other travelers and head out to a new ride somewhere else in the park.

I got it. I saw the four walls of our house through her eyes: limits, boundaries, familiarity that no longer comforted, tedium. That wasn’t how the four walls appeared to me! I saw them as canvases for paint, as the boundaries that kept my kids protected, as the warm backdrops to teatimes and snuggled up read alouds. For Johannah, they were barriers to seeing the big wide world right outside the door.

That conversation led us to consider part time enrollment in the local high school for her. While that decision for Noah had proved to be completely incompatible with who he was, it seemed that Johannah could imagine nothing more wonderful than the inexhaustible opportunities to people watch. So we made a promise: get through 8th at home and come 9th grade, she could go to school a couple of hours a day. We modified her 8th grade program (she found some of my terrific ideas tedious - imagine that!). But what made the difference in her attitude was knowing a day would come when she’d get out of the house a couple of hours a day.

9th grade included to two school classes: Honor’s English and French 1. At home, we turned a corner. I had the following conversation with Johannah:

I want you to have a great four years and your dad and I will do everything you need us to do to make that happen. We’ll coach you in writing, Dad will help you with literature, we’ll provide you a math tutor, we’ll pay for extracurricular activities, I’ll create a transcript for college, we’ll invite your friends to our house.

What we won’t do is nag you, coerce you, tell you what to do and when to do it. If college is your aim, we’re happy to collaborate to make it a reality, but we won’t harass you into fulfilling requirements. That will be your job - finding out what they are (with our help) and then following through.

This strategy was perfect for Johannah. I stopped following up on her school work or even assigning it. She would come to me for advice about how to organize her time, what classes to take and would ask for help in fulfilling those objectives.

One Thing Lessons
Because Johannah was college bound, we did want to ensure that she fulfilled the requirements for her transcript. However, because we are a family much more interested in learning that checking boxes, we tailored her education to fit her personality and learning style.

For instance, math. Algebra had stumped Johannah in 8th grade. We waited. She didn’t start algebra until the spring of her 9th grade year. Then she did math year round with a tutor through algebra 2. We found out that Johannah was good at math when taught by someone other than me. We discovered that with a tutor, she could skip a week when she had too many other requirements, when the plays were in full swing. She could cover a chapter in more depth when it was challenging or she could move ahead quickly when she understood the ideas. Because math had not been her favorite subject nor her strong suit, using a tutor meant that math became manageable with the rest of her life. She did math one unit at a time, fitting it to her life (not the other way around).

She studied Latin one year starting in the summer (with a tutor) to see if she’d like it. By starting in the summer without any other subjects, she could give it the attention it needed and a fair chance of success.

She participated in a Shakespeare company that included summer camps and year round acting training. This program also included textual analysis which provided her with her best vocabulary development of all the things she did during high school. As a result, we didn’t do a formal lit program her sophomore or junior years of high school.

She continued French, took chemistry (hardest class of the four years), and electives like AP psychology, sociology, human sexuality, acting, economics, and government at school spread out over four years. Chemistry was a bear. I wanted her to quit about six times. Jon had a different point of view. He felt that rather than think about learning chemistry as the objective, Johannah could use that class to learn how to pass a class when it was hard and not interesting. So he helped her think of test-taking strategies, she used the teacher’s tutorial times to help her learn the material (every week), she did all extra credit and I sat with her going over the chapters she read each night during the first quarter to be sure she was understanding what she was reading. We adjusted our other expectations to make extra space for chemistry that year.

It worked. Johannah not only passed chemistry, but she learned how to learn in a traditional setting even when it didn’t suit her temperament or interests. Because she was not carrying a full load (at school or at home), she could give that extra time to this challenging class without hating her life.

Johannah was heavily involved in extra-curricular activities: color guard, plays, psychology club, Darfur Awareness Week planning committee. I often wonder how she could have done all she did with a full load of traditional schooling.

What about history? Interestingly, Johannah doesn’t enjoy the study of history. Which stumped me. It was my major; I was a Sonlight mom. So we put it off.

Because we had done ancient history in 8th grade (and in some depth), I didn’t worry about it early on. But by senior year, she did need to have studied US History for admissions to the colleges she chose. So we did a crash course. I taught her every night for six weeks using the SAT 2 prep book. Then she took the test and got a better than passing score. I happily checked that box at the end of it. It struck me that she may not have had the level of depth in history that some people consider necessary. However, even with a major in history, I noticed that I have not retained all the details of history over the course of my adulthood. It’s been a process of layering. I grasp it better and better as I age. She will too since learning is not limited to the years under 22.

What we discovered with Johannah is that we could organize her learning into blocks. Rather than having to take seven courses every day over four years covering all of the subjects, we figured out how to manage the stressful courses one at a time, how to stagger the expectations so that she could learn the subjects that challenged her most with the greatest support that she needed, all while meeting her social needs through school.

So Johannah took math with a tutor during summers and during the years she didn’t take chemistry. The year she took chemistry, she wasn’t writing papers for an English class. When she wanted to try Latin, she did it with a tutor in the summer to get started to see if she’d like it. In her sophomore year, when she discovered that the Honor’s English class in school felt like a dud (she couldn’t bear students hating on Shakespeare), she dropped the class. She and her dad set up a lit discussion group in our home with four of her best guy friends. They met every other week, reading a great book and discussing it together over the year. No writing, as a matter of fact. Does this approach to learning remind you of anything? College! That’s how it’s done. You take a few classes at a time, intensively.

She built her tolerance for school classes going two hours a day in 9th grade, then three in 10th, then four and four in 11th and 12th. She never did go full time so that she could still pursue her own interests outside of school (which included a daily date with Oprah and a nap :)). Interestingly, Johannah earned a 5 on her AP pysch test and had her highest GPA during the last semester of her senior year. She made a great comment:

I never got senioritis. I wanted to do all my homework right up to the end and did it. I still liked my classes. I wanted A’s. I guess I never burned out on school. It still interested me. I wanted to learn the content and I liked being there. I didn’t understand why other kids were so glad to be done. Then I realized I hadn’t been “doing school” the way they’d been doing it for 12 years.

We’ll look at what I make of all this in tomorrow’s blog.

Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, General, One Thing, Tips for Teen Writers | 5 Comments »

One Thinging High School: Noah

Sunday, October 14th, 2007

I have so much to share about high school that I thought I’d take it a child at a time first. I have two who have “finished” (a relative term as you will see) high school and they couldn’t have tackled it more differently. The principle of “one thing” in the teen years is expressed in the following idea: Momentum is gained when a child is allowed to build on his or her interests and skills one thing at a time. It doesn’t mean that multiple things aren’t going on at once. It means that the center of life (the things that animate and motivate your teens) will get a lion’s share of attention… one at a time. It means that some things (some subjects, requirements etc.) will not be addressed with the same level of commitment as others. This will look different for each child, by the way, just to make it more complicated.

Without further ado, let’s look at Noah, my now 20 year old son who lives in an apartment and goes to University of Cincinnati.

Full disclosure: Jon and I are hopelessly committed to college education. We think it’s the elixir of life. I wander through university quads with my palms up expecting “collegiate smarts” to rain from the skies and bless me, Ultima. So while we always prided ourselves on letting our kids be who they were, are and would be, rock star or plumber, the one silent coercive expectation in our home is that kids go to college. Period. Just like some parents expect their kids to take over the family business, go into the ministry or join the military…. Only see, we didn’t know we were like that. I mean, we thought we were being normal and friendly-like. We never saw that our passionate cheering for UCLA football and slobbering gushes over university professors invisibly cajoled our kids, telling them, “We like people who go to college more than people who don’t…”

Translation: The not-so-hidden-from-our-kids agenda (though well-concealed from ourselves) meant that my educational decisions were directed by the inward push to see our kids get to college. And I would still say that is a reasonable approach to high school education assuming you have kids who show academic aptitude and an interest in traditional modes of education. Assuming… which is just what we did.

Train on wrong track: So while the ideals were noble (college for all our beloveds, and even paid for by us!), the reality that we faced as our oldest made his way through high school and college prep revealed just how stubborn our hidden agenda really was! Noah has never been one to follow the straightest path to our expectations for him (probably because he has enough internal spirit to have his own ideas of how to spend his life). So freshman year of high school looked like a check list of courses that would sweeten his high school transcript not the portrait of a highly creative, curious linguist in the budding. Resistance to school work? Understatement. The high volume tug of war had begun between my anxiety over his future and Noah’s commitment to his valuable present. By midway through sophomore year, Noah pulled the plug. He told us he couldn’t do it any more.

Rerouting the train: Noah knew that he didn’t like traditional education (evidenced by the fact that he wrote poems during his math tests at the local high school where he was enrolled part-time) nor did he feel motivated by the dire predictions that without college, he’d have no future. Instead, he poured himself into the study of Klingon, he read widely, he learned some computer code, taught himself guitar, played the piano, acted in a Shakespeare company, worked for a pizza place and then Barnes and Noble, watched movies, played RPG’s and skipped: chemistry, US history, English in its traditional structure, a second year of foreign language and math beyond Algebra 2. He also hung out with friends and slept a lot. By what should have been his senior year, he stopped anything resembling traditional education.

Getting on board with who he was: It took me three full years to adjust to this new reality: Noah was not college bound, not worried about it, not interested in a graduation or homeschool diploma or party to celebrate the end of homeschool. What interested him? Living one day at a time, one interest at a time. I had to let go (so hard for me to do!) and trust that if college were in his future, he’d discover that without my constant prodding and pushing. I also had to accept (and still do) that college may not be for him. Once Jon and I got past our need to direct him, we enjoyed him! We found his interests truly stimulating. He knew more than we did about grammatical structures, the IPA, Shakespeare and math (he developed an interest in math as a language) than we ever would.

The surprise! At 18 Noah decided to move out to live with friends. We were thrilled for him to feel ready to take on paying rent and living on his own. Then as an after thought about a month later, he said, “If I’m going to live down the street from college, maybe I should go.” Come again? It did not seem possible to me that he would be able to meet the admissions requirements for college. But what do I know? We put together his transcript which included a list of linguistics books he’d read as well as all that stuff he did on his own. UC not only took him, but they waived the courses he didn’t take saying that his linguistics profile combined with what he did study was enough. (He did have one college level Greek class on his transcript, something he took “for fun” during his year off.) And I had been worried…

Today: College is a challenge to Noah. He loves it (just like we hoped he would). But the structure is not conducive to his learning style. He’s not a natural academic. He’s a natural learner. I don’t know if he’ll finish. It no longer matters. What is more important now is to stay tuned into him as he figures out what makes him tick one thing at a time. Backing off in high school made it possible for him to reconsider college because by the time he went, he had not burned out in high school. Additionally, he sought help at the learning center and is able to take advantage of accommodations designed for him (he discovered that he has some auditory processing issues).

I share this story in part to set up conclusions I will post after I share my daughter’s on Wednesday. So stay tuned if this feels like you are still trying to figure out where I’m going. I also have observations to make based on working with hundreds of teens over the last eight years through Brave Writer.

Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, General, Homeschool Advice, One Thing, Tips for Teen Writers | 8 Comments »

“One Thing” High School Style Part One
(or what happened to Cozy Learning?)

Monday, October 1st, 2007

Lots of moms are very comfortable with what I might call “cozy” learning during the early years. “Cozy learning” is that unhurried longer look at a topic of interest using our natural appetites to guide us in our study. So, for instance, if bird calls entice, a cozy learner packs an apple and a bottle of water in a backpack, loads the stroller and sling into the car and ties the shoe laces of her other three under-ten year old kids as they head out to the hills to hike. She hands out the free field guides she got from National Geographic when she renewed her subscription. When the four-year-old exclaims, “Mom, look! That’s an American Crow!” pointing simultaneously to the photo in the book, the happy homeschooling mother contentedly reflects on the day as a success. Learning happened.

Cozy learning, then, is that wonderful intersection of real studies combined with natural lifestyle (yummy snacks, walks, long looks, snuggling under blankets, fires blazing, soft music, enjoyment of art - both admiring masterpieces and finger painting-cheerful enthusiasm when learning the structure of the ear canal or the shape of a teepee or how to skip count 7s).

By junior high, the coziness starts to disappear. It happens slowly. This odd notion called, “Now it really counts” moves in and takes the cozy learner hostage. With the gun of college prep requirements aimed at the homeschooling parent’s transcript generator cautiously saved on the hard disk, panic and doubt ensue.

Sure she knows a Picasso from a Monet, but will that really help her get into college?

He’ll read any novel I hand him, but I can’t get him to take interest in current events. Doesn’t he need to care about his world and understand how to interpret the events of today to make it as an adult?

And math. Oh. My. Toothbrush! What will I do? My kids stopped loving it and I stopped knowing how to teach it and don’t they need at least three good years of it to get to college?

I’ve barely scratched the surface of the concerns. Writing, history, economics and believe it or not, some moms even stress over PE and Health. They look at the college admissions list, remember their own high school days and immediately lose all the love of learning they’ve cultivated for the last eight years. Enter Madam Textbook and Master Year-Long Program.

I totally get it. I yielded to the pressure like any good mom. When my oldest two were in 8th and 10th grade, I got “serious” and planned a program that would have them studying like good students for several hours a day, writing narrations, reading meaty books, preparing oral and written reports, all while being tutored in math, of course. Within eight weeks, my daughter (the 8th grader) told me she hated her life. My 10th grader looked at me one day and said, “If this is what college will be like, I don’t want to go.”

Good thing my hearing is fine. My nerves, however, were not and I did what I do when my plans fail. I freaked out. You see, the one thing I’m not good at - looking at a miserable child and doing nothing. We started over. I went back to what I really believed about education. Deep down I knew that what you hated to do did not educate you. It harmed you and your relationship to that subject (and the person requiring it). I also knew that any subject could be engaging if the learner bought in (believed he or she needed to learn it) and the delivery was compelling.

So I rethunk a lot of things at that point. My “rethunkings” will be posted in installment two: How I turned four years of fulltime “college prep requirements” into four years of doing one thing at a time.

Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, General, Homeschool Advice, One Thing | 5 Comments »

The “One Thing” Drum Beat

Thursday, September 27th, 2007

For two years, my kids got stuck in Ancient Greece. Try as I might to drag them into Rome, they dug in their heels and kept reading myths. We read them in every version we could find them. Correction. My kids read them. I read the first myth book aloud to them and then they took off finding alternate versions of the stories.

They not only read myths, they wrote them. They drew the gods and goddesses. They discovered myths from other cultures and compared them to the Ancient Greeks. They found references to gods and mythology in Shakespeare. They were overjoyed when they realized that painters love Greek mythology and became expert in identifying the stories in paintings and sculptures when we went to the art museum.

In short, they saturated themselves in mythology. I fretted a bit at the time. Shouldn’t we be reading Plato? Wouldn’t it be better for them to understand the role of the city-state and democracy as conceived by the Greeks? What about moving ahead to Egypt and Rome and into the Middle Ages? They wouldn’t budge.

I gave in. (I’m like that.) So over the course of two years, mythology dominated our homeschool experience. We certainly continued to do the things we usually did (math, language arts, reading aloud, poetry tea times, trips to museums, parks and the zoo, science-y projects, co-op). We watched the history channel occasionally. But for the most part, if you ask our older kids about those years, they will tell you: we studied mythology.

One day, they were done. We moved onto Ancient Egypt, Rome finally fell and we trundled into the dark ages. A highlight of that period: listening to Seamus Heaney recite “Beowulf.” A deeply satisfying period.
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Sometimes when we look at our homeschools, we want to be able to check off the chronological list of historical moments. We imagine that if we read the historical fiction, tie it to a timeline and discuss the major events in history, our children will be educated. We move them along, making sure we “cover” the whole Middle Ages in one year, or whatever. Yet education has to do with investment and retention, the ability to generate meaning from what is being studied. Many kids can’t make heads nor tails of time. Last week feels like a month ago. Christmas is ten years away. But history is all about time and imagination, the ability to put yourself in someone else’s place and know it as it was. If we move too quickly through history, we risk information overload and a deliberate disconnect from the material in favor of “getting through it.”

We have a running joke in our family. I majored in history, but Jon recalls historical dates and events better than I do. I can tell you a lot about trends, the philosophical conditions of each period of history, how people lived and what they wanted or knew. He can tell you what year the government was overthrown in Guatemala. (And a lot more than that too.)

Even as a history major, though, knowing the facts of history has not been key to my success as a student, as an adult, as an educated person. What’s been useful to me is knowing how to learn, how to analyze, what to do with the information once I have it, how to make connections. By allowing my kids to wallow in mythology for two years, they discovered a way into history that helped them imagine other times and places, that prepared them for other literature and religions from historical periods of the past. It created an anchor point from which to examine other cultures.

In applying the “one thing” theory to other aspects of homeschool, pay attention to what “hooks the jaw.” If one of your kids becomes utterly fascinated with weapons, use that fascination as the access point to look at history. I remember when Noah spent six months watching World War 2 movies with his dad. He also drew tanks and guns into a sketch book. We read some historical fiction from that time period as well.

“One thing” implies trusting that the immersion in one topic that really interests will lead to all the learning necessary. There’s that spill over of developed vocabulary (genocide, Aryans, socialism), calculations about numbers of people (Holocaust, Normandy) or years (when the war started for whom and when it ended) and months (military campaigns) or distances (how far is it to fly from Japan to Pearl Harbor and on how much gas?), geography (which countries existed where and when and for how long), alliances, philosophy, and economics….

Knowing how these fit together in one period is enough for a long time. It provides the right frame of reference for future historical studies. When absorbed, the next war or period examined will automatically be internally compared to this first one. Momentum is gained when you yield to interest. Real learning takes place and created connections point to the next phase of study.

We’ll look at high school Monday, and how the “one thing” principle applies if you’re worried about covering those pesky college entrance requirements.

Posted in General, Homeschool Advice, One Thing | 8 Comments »

Registration for One Thing now open

Wednesday, September 5th, 2007

Registration for the first in our “One Thing” series is now open. To read more about the four week intensive workshop related to copywork and dictation, click here.

Posted in BW products, General, One Thing | No Comments »

Introducing: One Thing!

Monday, September 3rd, 2007

Brave Writer presents: The “One Thing” Series

It’s easy to get overwhelmed with all the good homeschooling advice available today. Homeschool can quickly become a slog through “wonderful ideas” rather than the inspired, natural rhythm and routine that fosters a love of learning and healthy educational growth in your kids. Good ideas abound, but they are only as “good” as they are satisfying to parent and child in the application of them to our lives.

To help overwhelmed mothers, I’ve often suggested that they focus on “one thing” at a time. Pick a practice or event or strategy that is appealing, that you believe in, that you hope to bring into your family life and focus on it. Plan for it (learn what it is and how it’s done), prepare for it (get the right materials, set aside the right amount of time, talk enthusiastically about it with your kids), execute it (with the phone turned off, with your full attention in the moment, not rushing ahead to what you’ll do when this event is over), give it all the time it needs (until interest flags). Then clean up and before doing something else the next day, reminisce about the event/project/activity. Then try it again, in a few days or a week later. Once you have begun to see a routine practice develop into an effortless part of your life (or at least, not painful or agitating), it’s time to add something new again.

One thing.

You can develop a pleasing homechool routine “one thing” at a time.

True to our philosophy, we’ve decided to offer a series of short, one-month classes that feature “one thing” at a time.

The Brave Writer Lifestyle includes experiences like art appreciation, nature walks, freewriting, dictation and copywork, poetry enjoyment and writing, revision of one writing project per month, grammar study through games and interaction with real literature. Rather than sending you off to invent how to do these all on your own, the Brave Writer team is heading up short, intensive workshops to help you develop the skills and creative applications for each of these ideas, one thing at a time.

One Thing: Copywork and Dictation
Our first one-month session starts October 8 and features an in-depth treatment of copywork and dictation. Rita Cevasco, Brave Writer instructor and professional speech pathologist, will teach this month-long workshop. Families with children who struggle with language processing disorders are especially encouraged to sign up as Rita’s expertise makes her an invaluable resource for the mom wanting to help her language impaired student.

However, these kids are not the only ones who will benefit from Rita’s instruction. This course is designed to show any family how to maximize the values of copywork and dictation in ways you haven’t thought of before. If you’re new to copywork and dictation or you want someone to hold your hand in showing you how to take advantage of great literature to teach language arts naturally, this is the perfect setting for you.

For families committed to copywork and dictation as the primary tools of language arts (grammar, spelling, punctuation, literary elements, and handwriting), this four-week course will take you a good distance in establishing copywork and dictation as regular practices in your homeschool (and will help you past the anxiety that drives you keep those workbooks stashed in a closet as a back-up plan).

Included in the course: One issue of the Arrow and one issue of the Boomerang (you will decide which level to use for each child during class; both will be provided).

Tuition is: $99.00 (per family)

The tuition is per family as you will be doing the work with your children at home and therefore can apply anything you learn to any number of kids. In other words, we’re offering you a real deal in terms of tuition!

Registration opens Wednesday. I’ll post a link here and on the home page of the website. Hope you’ll join us!

If you have any questions, please post them here in the comments, or email me.

Posted in BW products, Brave Writer Philosophy, General, One Thing | 1 Comment »

One More Thing about One Thing

Monday, July 31st, 2006

Ha! I’ve used this title before. It popped up as I typed it.

A recurring question about the “one-thing” principle is how to fit everything in if we start moving that slowly in homeschool. In other words, if I take time for tea and poetry and it uses up most of my Tuesday, and then if I focus on copywork the next day and make that a joy and a success on Wednesday, and then Thursday, we read four chapters of the novel we are now savoring, and finally on Friday, we have a rousing good time doing a Friday Freewrite where we prepare to write, write and then share the writing with each other… when will we ever get back to math or science or history?

Just as you’ve taken the time to really savor those literary experiences, you will want to do the same with math, science or history. There will possibly be that time when you put your BW practices on the back burner for a day as you focus on math (for a morning! not just for two pages). You might find that your BW practices bleed over into other subjects.

For instance, what if you decided to really prepare for a morning of math. You look ahead to the concepts and find games that reinforce the concept. You might find a library book that shows how the concept works. You might mosey over to the website Living Math which gives you practical ways to make math relevant.

Then the morning comes and you have a math tea party. Perhaps while you play the game, do the math page, read the living math book, you drink tea and eat some brownies. Maybe you divide the brownies up into 1/16ths and talk about how you did that.

The point is that as you give yourself to one experience fully, you will discover how the way you prepared, the way you executed, the methods you used for enhancing the experience actually transfer to any of your educational objectives. Additionally, you will learn more in these highly focused moments because your full attention will be directed into that activity (rather than divided).

You might make copywork about a math principle, you might have your kids narrate about history, you might suggest they write about a science experiment, your children might read poems about the natural world, they might drink tea and light candles to play Sudoku!

You might find that the “one-on-one time” reminder in the Brave Writer Lifestyle means that you spend one-on-one time with the child who needs to learn his multiplication tables. Perhaps you throw a baseball back and forth with just that child to practice them. Or perhaps one-on-one time can be used to read one book with one child.

Take these principles and use them to augment all of your aims for homeschool. Stop doing what makes you and your children miserable. If they are unhappy, rethink the subject/assignment/goal and find a way to change it. Ask these questions:

Would he be more able to handwrite if I did it with him?

Would tasty snacks during math help?

Would she be more alert if we read the science book outside?

Would it help if I rubbed his shoulders first?

Is there a game online that demonstrates this principle?

Do any of my friends understand X better than I do? How do they teach it?

Has anyone written a quality book about this subject (novel or compelling non-fiction)? Can we start there instead of the dry workbook?

Take it “one thing” at a time and slowly modify what you do with your children to create momentum that leads to joy and immersion in the topic/practice. Enter into it yourself.

P.S. I will write a bit about how to handle babies and toddlers who want to destroy tea times, projects and all read louds next week. :)

Posted in General, One Thing | No Comments »

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