Archive for the ‘Tips for Teen Writers’ Category

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Why talking is so important to writing

Tuesday, May 6th, 2008

We want words, lots of them, churned out on reassuring sheets of lined paper, with curlicue cursive ‘r’s and proper punctuation reflecting both the demands of syntax and emotion. When the words fail, we resort to coercive tactics or the gentle reassurances that words are inside and they can be coaxed out.

What sometimes gets missed in this process is the power of talking. Speaking leads to writing more than any other skill. Getting words formed in the head and then out through the mouth leads to better writing. It doesn’t even matter if they are organized or concise or logical. What matters is the process of dredging them up, giving them room to develop in the mind and then speaking them through the lips by way of the tongue.

Writers make as many words available to themselves as possible. They do this by reading and speaking, speaking and reading… and then writing. There’s a powerful imitation process that gets worked out through talking too. Writers are likely to test new words in conversation before making them a part of their writing vocabularies.

I’m reminded of Jon (my husband) when he’s learning a new language. He has this endearing habit of adopting a new word and using it before he actually knows what it means. He tosses it out in conversation with a native to see the effect it has. He plays with it, attaches it to other words and behaviors. For instance, when we were in Italy three summers ago, he overheard an Italian man say to a woman “Ciao bella.” He could tell from the delivery it had something to do with a greeting or a good-bye but wasn’t entirely sure if it was formal, informal, or even strictly personal and intimate. Yet undeterred, at the next opportunity, he paid for his cappucino and then winked at the middle-aged barista and declared, “Ciao Bella!” She burst out laughing, patted his arm several times and erupted into more italian.

Caitrin, picking up on this habit, will often mimic actors and their lines, testing them in conversation for effect. Jacob will ask us if he’s using a word properly when he encounters a new one.

But even these strategies are only part of growing as a writer. Being able to speak with, to talk to an adult in a supportive, nurturing space increases competence in articulation, in putting words together that will lead to effective writing later. To support that process, think of these principles when you talk with your kids.

  • Find time to give eye-contact and focused attention. Kids talk better and more if the audience is actually interested. You can give the best level of interest by hearing a story or talking with your child without distractions (not cooking dinner, not cleaning, not shopping). Driving seems to be okay, though, and often leads to some of the best conversations.
  • Involve yourself in the interests of your child. Let your child teach you how to play a game on the Wii, or learn how to shoot baskets, or draw together while your child talks to you about art. Find a way for you to be in the role of “learner” and let your child sort through the vocabulary and sequence of events or practices to help you learn it.
  • Talk about language. When you watch a Shakespeare movie or read a novel or notice a clever billboard, take time to discuss the words themselves, the effects they create, the nuances they reveal. Make words cough up their secret and share these with your kids. Even ask them to see what is funny or clever or insightful about the wording of whatever source.
  • Discuss important things. Trust your kids to tackle big topics with you (according to their ages). Draw them into discussions about ideas like justice, compassion, racism, poverty, space, nature, human and animal rights, education, going green, neighborliness, death, birth, materialism, power, war, punishments and crime, and so on.
  • Don’t shush your kids. It’s easy to want to turn them off when they get rolling on another narration of level 4 of Smash Mouth Brothers. I understand. Still, you need to make space for the repetitions, for the meandering so that they can sort it out. If the words stay in their heads, they don’t grow as writers as easily.

So get talking! Snacks help unleash words, too, if you have children who are more reticent to share. :)

Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, General, Tips for Teen Writers, Young Writers | 4 Comments »

Email round-up: Praise and Research Papers

Wednesday, April 16th, 2008

Praise for Brave Writer

Julie-
First, my children and I just finished the Kidswrite Basic class with Jean Hall… Thank you so much for making these classes available. My children didn’t turn out marvelously witty or poignant works, but they did write something and without too much complaining and they learned that they CAN write. And that is with suffering from the flu for most of the class. I no longer fear teaching them writing… I just have to figure out what kind of assignments to give them.

Second, I’ve always thought canned writing programs were fluff and the assignments were drivel…but it wasn’t until I found your website and read The Writer’s Jungle that I realized others felt the same way. Most of the other homeschool moms I’ve talked with have looked at me as if I’d lost my mind but I know what works for my family. Since I discovered your website last summer, we have incorporated into our school routine Teatime Tuesdays (my 4-year old’s MOST favorite part of the week), Friday Freewrites, and this May we are taking your One Thing Workshop: Shakespeare… We (well, I) can’t wait. Thank you so much for inspiring me to make the most of the time I have with my children, learn to love writing, and only focus on one thing at a time!

Laura

Answer:

Thanks Laura for sharing with us. I’m so glad you have begun this journey one thing at a time.

–Julie

Question about research papers:

Hi Julie,

I really value & trust your opinion & wonder if you have a chance to answer a quick question for me. At what age would you recommend having a child do a research paper? My son will be 12 next school year. We do a copywork/dictation passage each week (courtesy of you next year) & also a creative writing assignment each week. At what age should I begin thinking about research papers?

Kim in Venice, FL

Answer:

Hi Kim.

I have lots of thoughts about research papers. First of all, it’s not possible for a 12-year-old to actually write one. He may be able to write a long report (which is usually what is meant by the term “research paper” when you read about them at the junior high level). A long report means that your child will study a subject using multiple sources and will then compile and paraphrase the information into his own words. He’ll organize the material by sub-head (subject heading). At the end, he’ll include some type of bibliography that itemizes his sources.

Just to be clear. That kind of writing is not a research paper. A research paper takes a specific point of view about a topic (a thesis-based paper) that is controversial (or at minimum, that provokes a counter-argument). These papers engage the academic community. What that means is that the papers are analyzing the academic work done by experts in the field. Students (particularly those who are in high school or who are college undergraduates) attempt to synthesize and analyze those arguments by taking a risky position, paraphrasing and understanding the arguments made by the experts, and then bringing something of their own insight and perspective to bear on those arguments (either agreeing or disagreeing or nuancing the positions). They use multiple sources (usually the rule of thumb is that you will have consulted the equivalent of one source per page based on the total length of the paper – so 15 sources for a 15 page paper).

For a 12-year-old, writing a long-ish report is fine. But don’t call it a research paper. I have a chapter in The Writer’s Jungle called “The Dreaded Elementary School Report” that gives blow-by-blow steps of how to put one together that doesn’t drain the soul-life from your child. Most reports are tediously long, encourage flat-footed writing and kill anything resembling peaceful writing relations between parent and child (or teacher). The main benefit of the “long-ish” report is that your child learns how to use the library’s computer catalog system, sorts information into categories and learns how to make a little bibliography at the end. All of these can be achieved without writing a report, but if you are set on writing one, then exploit the experience for these aims rather than thinking about it in terms of “quality writing instruction.” Make sure that you keep the writing portion of the process to a minimum.

For the record, two of my five kids have written elementary school reports. Our ratio of how we organized our time: many months of reading and research and about a week of writing. :) None so far has written a research paper before college. Jon and I have worked with our high schoolers (three of them) on crafting solid, 4-6 page essays. They are all very good at these now. When the older two went off to college and had to write longer papers (what would technically be called a research or term paper), they were both able to do it! They just expanded the essay format, lengthened the depth of their analysis for each of their points and voila! Research papers.

So I think the “research paper” as an academic goal before college is overblown. What we really want isn’t the ability to string together enough words for 15 pages. We want to cultivate rhetorical thinking and the skills of analysis in writing. We want to expose our kids to multiple points of view about a topic and teach them how to critically think about those viewpoints and how to offer their own. Most junior high kids aren’t mentally mature enough to do that kind of thinking yet. But in high school, kids are. Tackle that skill then and research papers will take care of themselves in college.

Julie

Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, Email, General, Tips for Teen Writers | 1 Comment »

They never change. Ever.

Thursday, April 10th, 2008

When Noah was not yet two, I found him hanging by one hand from the outside railing of a two story stairwell over a concrete patio below. He had swung his way to the top with casual ease, while I, like a game hunter, slowly, carefully, inched toward him from our upstairs apartment, until thwack, my hands clapped onto his shirt collar and my super-maternal strength hauled his dangling body to the safe side of the rails.

I’ve found Noah in trees; on top of brick walls; on the roof; outside the window of his bedroom, three stories up; two streets over; in the middle of the street; in a neighbor’s apartment; on top of a cliff (while my back was turned) and down in a ditch. To stop his risky inquisitiveness, I had to haul my usually pregnant, bulging body at lightening speed without pee dripping down my legs to get below, beyond, next to or on top of Noah before he broke bones, was kidnapped or cracked open his skull.

When I was pregnant with Johannah and Noah had just turned two, I lived in missionary housing. We all shared a quad with play equipment and spent every morning and afternoon with other families gossiping and supervising children. Our favorite topic: the poor parenting techniques of the mothers not currently present.

Being endowed with a brain at birth, it didn’t take me long to figure out what happened when I wasn’t there. I asked my friend Kris: “So it occurred to me that if I have opinions about everyone else’s right to spank or not, their scheduled breast feedings and swings, versus slings and the perennial baby-on-the-boob tactic of my preference, there must be a few opinions about how I’m wrecking my child forever. Would you mind telling me what it is I need to do to be a better mother?”

Kris, being classy, offered to think and pray about it for 24 hours. When we reconvened, she shared the following idea with me: “Julie,” she said, “I’ve noticed that your body is Noah’s boundary. You run in every direction to stop him from doing what he shouldn’t do. Look at you! You’ve lost weight, you’re sick. He needs to learn to respect your words. And he needs to learn that now.”

clunk

The words dropped into place and I felt so thankful for that guidance. Her vision launched me on a path to create a relationship with Noah dependent on words, not my physical acts of obstruction.

So the next time I said, “Stop!” (meaning: get down, don’t go there, turn back or What the Hell Do You think You’re Doing?), I made sure that I followed it up with some kind of discipline. We started with the venerable Time Out. I told Noah he had to stay in the bathroom until I told him he could come back to the family. As I walked through the door to leave him alone with the toilet, he followed me. I repeated: “No, you have to stay here, until I say you can come out. Understand?” He understood. I walked out. He followed me.

Hmmm. If I sit on him in the bathroom, or if I hold the door shut, isn’t that using my body to get him to do what I say? Yet he isn’t doing what I say. What if I give in and follow the “spank on command” strategies I oppose? But then isn’t that yet another way my body is stopping him and not my words? So I kept talking and Noah kept walking. I talked louder and he just walked faster. There was absolutely no way I could make Noah stay in the bathroom with words.

In fact, the more I tried to make my words stick, the less effective I felt. Worse, we went from the interdependence of my body being Noah’s non-judgmental boundary to Noah’s increased shame as I piled words on top of him (hurtful, resentful, nagging, cajoling, guilt-laden words).

For the next fifteen years, Jon and I used every word in the book to influence Noah’s decisions about his life: his friends, his music, what he read, where he went, his education, how he drives, his values and any other life area we could nag into matching our vision of what it ought to look like.

We’ve had many great conversations. We’ve also had many shameful ones when our words fell flat or scorched his tender heart— the end result: despair, hurt, painful memories; words that required apologies, even years later.

And for all that: what hasn’t changed? Noah. He’s not guided by our words. We can take away a car, we can limit the funds we give him, we can choose not to co-sign apartments (if we want to), but our words don’t stop him. Instead, now we ask ourselves: “What do we need to do to feel right about our relationship with Noah?” We don’t ask ourselves, “What should we tell Noah to do so he’ll make good decisions?” (Though inevitably, as a stupid moth to a bright flame, we often still blunder forward with our Valuable Opinions until we remember again.)

Noah is guided by an inner impulse that we can limit only as far as we have physical control, just as it’s always been. As Jon used to say: “Age and Maturity will be Noah’s best friends.” Noah, from the time he was born, has had an incalculable confidence in his ability to manage his life. Lucky for us, he grew up so he finally can!

It struck me the other day as I thought back to Kris’ well-intended advice. She was right about one thing – I was running myself ragged setting the boundaries with my body, my whole self thrown extravagantly into the abyss that is “limiting Noah.” But in the end, it’s the only thing that ever worked without causing emotional damage. It turns out, this is just who he is and has always been. I have a hunch, it’s who he’ll continue to be as well. And on this side of it, I’m in awe of who Noah is and the sheer genius of his brave embrace of life.

Posted in Family Notes, General, Tips for Teen Writers | 3 Comments »

How the six principles apply: Writing and teens

Friday, November 9th, 2007

I’ve elucidated some of the ideas that have been meaningful and useful to me in raising teens and working with them over the years. What I wanted to do now is to move into how these ideas connect to writing (and by extrapolation, perhaps, other subjects you are teaching).

I’ve suggested that teens need adventure, they aren’t lazy, but bored, they have interests that interest them, and that teens deserve a social life and live in a wired world.

These principles have to do with honoring your teens’ evolving sense of personhood. As we know from all the Brave Writer writing advice given over the years, the place we start in writing is with the writer, not with writing forms or skills. We begin by recognizing that the writer is someone whose mind is already brimming with experiences, ideas, thoughts, hopes, information, insight and humor that deserve to be recorded and shared with others. We yield to the process of nurturing writers, not requiring writing. We look for ways to validate that emerging writer’s voice. We celebrate successes, we minimize errors fully confident that over time, fluency will come through repeated excursions into written language, just like we saw spoken errors as passing phases on the journey toward fluency in speaking English.

With our teens, then, writing at this stage of development ought to be (if at all possible) the flowering of greater and greater self-awareness and ease in the act of writing. In other words, just like your 10-13 year old never thinks about speaking (does so easily, in his or her own voice, speaking what’s on his or her mind freely), so your high school writer ought to be more and more able to use written language to communicate ideas, thoughts, arguments and insights. Fluency (ease) comes earlier than competence (effective argument or communication), just like in speaking. Kids can talk easily even if they can’t yet enter a debate or give a speech or teach a class.

Teens need adventure, they need not to be bored, they need stimulation in areas that interest them. Use these principles to your advantage in writing. It’s easier to write an argumentative essay about animal rights when your teen volunteers at the local zoo or vet, than it is to write about the death penalty, a topic he’s never studied. Literary analysis goes better when the teen writes about an author that she loves. If Jane Austen is her favorite, why write about Hemingway? The same skills can be learned using the material she knows best.

Remember the value of direct experience in adding depth and insight to writing. Trips to foreign countries, service to others, working in a political campaign, a part-time job, serving on the library literature board for teens, varsity sports, musical performance… these experiences contribute to your teens’ growing expertise and competence level. Allow these to show themselves in their writing.

Likewise, don’t forget the value of peer relationships and technology in nurturing your writers. Writing and literature discussion groups create natural spaces for sharing writing. Classes (whether in person or over the Internet) offer opportunities to mix with peers as well as to compete with them while working on writing. Writing also benefits from teenagers’ hunger to master technology: skillful use of search engines, reading other writing online, facility with Word and PowerPoint, online courses and so on.

What it all boils down to really is this: see the world through your teens’ eyes. Don’t forget what it was like to be a teen. While they may do “dumb” things occasionally due to the underdeveloped frontal lobe, they also benefit immensely from deep engagement and investment into ideas, people and experiences that cause them to make connections between their world and the larger world around them. Writing is one tool that serves to integrate those disparate bits of information into a more thoughtful whole. When your teens take what they know (or think they know) and put it onto paper, they are required to slow down, examine their ideas and submit them for examination to others who can guide them in the process. Teens who feel the support and enthusiasm of their parents during this odyssey are the lucky ones.

Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, General, One Thing, Tips for Teen Writers | 2 Comments »

One Thinging High School: Principles 4-5

Monday, November 5th, 2007

We looked at the first three principles for keeping your sanity while raising your teens. Let’s add to the list.

4. Teens deserve a social life.
A few weeks ago at our homeschool co-op, I stood in front of the white board with a green marker in hand. I asked my 9th and 10th graders to throw out terms often associated with homeschool. Our goal was to compile a list of cliches or stereotypes to then rebut in writing. These kids were passionate in expressing the commonly used terms that were intended to malign them. Almost as one voice, the words they see associated with homeschool were ‘nerd,’ ‘social misfit’ and ‘backward.’ I asked them if these were words they used to describe themselves or if these were terms applied to them by others that they rejected. That’s when class opinion split. Half felt that these terms were unfairly applied to homeschoolers. They explained that after all, homeschoolers have friends, they have activities that bring them together with their peers. But the other half of the class argued that in fact, they sometimes did feel like social outcasts. They considered the world they lived in smaller, less populated, less engaged in common teen activities.

In my experiences of working with teens (and having some of my own), it’s clear that by 14, most of them crave peer relationships. Homeschooling protects young kids from negative peer influences in some cases (though I have to admit that my oldest son was bullied in our neighborhood from age 6-10 because he was homeschooled, because he was different than his peers… a very painful experience for all of us). High school is often seen as a scary place where bad things can happen to our kids (some adults know this from personal experience).

Yet it’s during the high school years that our teens first flex their maturity wing span. These test flights include hanging out with peers, spending what looks like tons of wasted time gossiping, flirting, checking out each other’s facebooks, texting three different friends all at once over dinner, sending photos to each other… Today’s teens live in a networked world the likes of which we parents have never seen. They are enrolled in a sophisticated socialization program that requires a level of expertise and etiquette that can only be learned by jumping in.

One way to look at the growing need for peer relationships (and providing space for these to occur) is that in encountering other viewpoints, personalities and life experiences, your kids develop their ability to value and evaluate their own previous experiences. Sometimes the sense of lethargy or negativity aimed at you or the structure of your family is simply the absence of contrast. Kids who have been in the homeschooling world for their entire lives find it harder to individuate since their world has been controlled by home and parents with much more attentiveness than those in school. By giving your teens the chance to broaden their experiences through outside relationships (whether those come through parttime school, working at Starbucks, volunteering in a vet’s office, dancing in a studio, acting in a theater troupe, playing on a competitive sports team, hanging out at the local gaming store), you encourage them to discover differences between what they’ve had at home and what they find elsewhere.

You also help them discover how to manage themselves in their relationships. These friendships give them the chance to test their values, to imagine the world through someone else’s life experience, to figure out how to balance responsibility against the temptation to spend all free time hanging out at the mall. College is one huge dose of unsupervised, peer-drenched experiences. To put a tightly supervised homeschooler into that environment without previous experiences is like asking your teen to go to college without enough math or writing… and perhaps worse.

So make time for your teen to broaden his or her world so that while they still have you around, they can sort through the complexities of emerging into young adulthood and the wider world.

5. Teens live in a wired world.
Len Sweet wrote in one of his books that today’s teens and young adults are the “natives” and we (their parents) are the immigrants in this technological world they inhabit. The kids speak the language fluently, naturally, without an accent while we parents sound like we just got off the boat. It’s a mistake to imagine that because we can get through our days with small doses of technology that our kids should do likewise. Similarly, limiting access to the Internet or computer to protect teens from seeing things they shouldn’t doesn’t wind up achieving the effect of protection. Instead, these teens end up behind the curve in terms of learning this complex, vital language that is driving the world they will enter.

I’ve had a couple of local students who have grown up without the Internet. One of them was a senior in high school last year. I use the Internet all the time to send vital course information, to receive drafts of papers, to send grades and so on. This student could not receive any of that information. When I asked her mother why they didn’t have the Internet, she told me it was because her husband had a pornography problem. The irony here is that while the home had no Internet, the husband’s work place did. So as a result, he had Internet access all day away from the home, while the family at home all day had none.

I explained to the mother that she was severely handicapping her college-bound daughter. Today’s colleges and universities use the Internet and computer programs to conduct everything related to enrollment, tuition, grades, housing and class work. Students today are expected to know how to create PowerPoints for their oral reports complete with accompanying music, they participate on discussion forums to discuss material in class, they often turn in papers via email, they work in small online groups for group projects using the project managing software offered by the school, and of course they use the Internet for research for writing projects and e-reserves. In short, everything college kids do is tied to the Internet.

Additionally, the Internet provides a way for kids to stay in touch when they leave home. Those special homeschooling friends will be a source of real strength when your kids move away to a world of all new people. Keeping up with friends through facebook, for instance, helps your kids maintain the relationships that were anchors to them. I recommend getting your own facebook account to be able to stay in touch with those young adults and teens. There’s a lot to be said for that tool in the parent-child relationship too.

Today’s entry is really summed up in one word: risk. It feels risky to put our teens out there into that world where bad things can happen. We have worked so hard to make home a safe, nurturing, healthy environment. Additionally, the world of technology feels like a leap into the unknown for some families. One of the best things you can do to lower your anxiety (if you have it) is to ask your teens to teach you about that world. Find out what they need to thrive (cell phone? digital camera? facebook account?). Provide them, and learn from your teens how to use them and what they do. As they get involved with new friends outside the network you’ve cultivated, learn those new names. Have the kids over, if your kids will let you.

All of these new connecting points create more opportunities to talk about the things that matter to you, too.

Consider “friendships” and “technology” as two of the vital courses of study your kids need to make it in the adult world. Don’t see time spent in these areas as wasted, but as critical to healthy growth and maturation. Teens are amazing. I’m in awe of how much they can juggle successfully.

Posted in General, Homeschool Advice, One Thing, Tips for Teen Writers | 5 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 »

Freshening the homeschool plan

Thursday, August 16th, 2007

This post is for the veteran – the homeschooler who can teach a child to read while stir frying dinner, who has more books in her bookcases than she could ever use, the mom who multi-tasks (violin lesson for one child, reading with another while waiting, picking up yet another child from soccer practice on the way home).

This post is also for the mother who is tired. Cracking open a new set of math books isn’t as exciting as it once was. Her hope that this year “will be different” for at least one of her children has dimmed. She starts to wonder if she’s got the energy to keep planning creative projects for the younger ones when high school kids are demanding intensive attention.

The long haul is a long haul. Make no mistake. Home education starts off as an exciting adventure for everyone, especially the mother. A plan and purpose to child rearing combined with the thrill of quality books and a deepening interest in history and science creates a momentum in the home that few outside the homeschooling movement really grasp. That momentum sustains many families for years, often right through junior high for the oldest child.

Usually, though, about year 8, 9 or 10, the primary homeschooling parent (usually the mom) feels the effects of being solely responsible for the education of her children. There are complaints from the peanut gallery (aka, your kids) about certain subjects and habits, there are the inevitable failures of products that were supposed to transform your child’s abilities in a specific subject area, there is the repeat duty of teaching children to read, over and over and over again (depending on how sizable your brood is).

How do you inject life back into the predictable routine so that all of you can re-up your enthusiasm and commitment to home education? Here are a few ideas to get you started.

  1. Do what you love to do, every week. That sounds obvious, but usually the first thing to go in a family’s togetherness program is a mother’s passions. If you love knitting, keep knitting and take some classes to keep it going. If you suddenly find that learning is your favorite thing ever, find an online school or a university or a community program where you can study a specific topic or area of interest. Do one thing every week that expands who you are and what you think about. You’ll be surprised that there is a trickle-over into your home that comes from being a student yourself in another context.
  2. Join a homeschool co-op, a cottage school, hire a tutor or use part time enrollment options. You can’t do it all yourself forever and your kids don’t want you to. Find other adults who are passionate about the subjects you either don’t know well enough or don’t want to teach. Kids enjoy getting out of the house and hearing feedback from other adults. You’ll like the break.
  3. Get out of the house and into nature every week. When our kids were little (with strollers and backpacks and diaper bags and juice cups), we tended to get out of the house often (sanity required it). But somehow, once our kids are old enough to carry their own stuff, we forget to leave. We stay home except for outings to the supermarket or piano teacher. Get back to your weekly outings. Walk in the fresh air, visit a museum, hike, bike ride, play miniature golf or go bowling.
  4. Do some of your schooling at Barnes and Noble or Starbucks. Seriously. Take the Friday freewrite to the mall or the local coffee house. Finish your math for the week at the library or at a park. Do you see a pattern here? Get out of the house more, not just for music or dance lessons and errands.
  5. Pick one project that requires preparation and committed execution to complete. Remember the medieval feasts of your kids’ youth? The building of teepees in the backyard? As our kids get older, we stop doing things like that because we think book work is so important. And it is. But let’s not forget the benefits of being at home. Do extraordinary memorable stuff too. Join Project Feederwatch and count birds every week. Follow through on those kitchen style science experiments. Learn how to compost. Quilt blankets for leukemia patients. Take a vintage dance class every week and prepare for the ball at the end of the year. Train to run in a 10K with your teens.
  6. Consult your kids. Ask them what would make them happy this year. What new thing would they like to try, learn, discover, execute? If a 15 year old asks for piano lessons, it’s not too late. If your teen wants to learn to fly a plane, guess what? It’s possible. What about planning some overnights away from home? A backpacking trip, a weekend in a major city, a flight to visit out-of-state grandparents. Remember, your teens are as happy as they are busy. Social life, adventures and a feeling of independence give them the greatest sense of well-being. And if your teen is happy, you’ll be much happier too.

If you’ve got more ideas about how to help the veteran homeschooler keep her energy and enthusiasm, post them in the comments below.

Posted in General, Homeschool Advice, Tips for Teen Writers | 18 Comments »

From the trenches

Tuesday, May 15th, 2007

I hope you all had wonderful Mother’s Days. That date always sneaks up on me and I never quite expect it to be wonderful and for some reason, it just usually is. In addition to Mother’s Day, I went into deep recovery mode. As many of you know, I spent the last four years in grad school, taking it one class at a time (usually) with summers off (except one). As I tallied up how much writing I’ve done for grad school in those four years, it turns out I’ve written 600 pages of double spaced academic writing. 600 pages (I was kind of surprised the number was so round, actually).

I got to thinking about all that writing and what I learned from it (beyond the obvious content analysis that the writing was meant to generate). I want to share a little of that here.

  • Weekly essays are too frequent.
    Several of my professors liked assigning weekly writing topics. They would give us something to read and then ask for 2-4 pages of writing to a prompt related to the reading. Usually we were narrating the content and then bringing a bit of personal insight or an interrogative point of view to the topic. I found that in classes where I had to generate original writing about brand new material without the benefit of a lecture first every week, I did not learn as much as I did when I was given time to read, think, listen, discuss and then write about that topic. I often felt I was prematurely offering my thoughts before they had had time to grow inside of me.

    The plus side to weekly writing is that you get over the intimidation factor pretty quickly. I did get into a groove and could produce weekly essays without much angst.

  • Academic writing benefits from mingling personal experience with scholarly analysis.
    I usually found a point of contact between myself and the material whenever I could. My professors not only valued this, but several of them specifically asked for it from us as students. My final MA thesis has six pages at the start that trace my journey theologically which leads to the thesis and why I chose to write the paper. These introductory remarks were requested by my advisor. I want to point this out because there is still a feeling among so many homeschooling moms that academic writing is meant to be objective and impersonal. Certainly the analysis must have the air of scholarship and considered opinion, but situating the argument contextually and relating it to personal experiences is valid and in some cases, encouraged in the humanities, in particular.
  • Introductions need to include a “word map” of where the paper will go.
    When I teach the essay, I tell my students that they need to include both a thesis and a sentence or two (at least) that suggest the direction of the paper (what points they will cover in the essay). I can’t emphasize this point enough. Scholarship depends on clarity of organization more than any other element. The reader must know where he or she is being taken and how he or she will get there.
  • There’s a difference between textual analysis and the use of secondary sources in analytical writing.
    Usually academic writing in the humanities (philosophy, literature, theology, history, sociology, theater arts, political science) means analyzing primary sources (reading original documents and doing textual analysis) and then cross-checking that analysis against secondary sources (scholarship that offers insight into the primary source). Using tools designed for textual analysis and examining arguments of secondary sources helps you create your unique take on the topic. It’s strange, but given how many of us went through college and spent hours writing papers, I’m surprised that I have never read in the homeschooling market a book or tool that breaks this all down and helps kids understand what they are doing when they write a paper. For the June and July issues of the Slingshot, I’ll be writing tools to help you determine source credibility, how to do textual analysis (primary source work) and how to use secondary source material. In the fall, I hope to offer an essay class that works with primary and secondary sources to give your kids a feel for how it’s done.

I have many other insights to offer and will do that over the next few weeks. In the meantime, feel free to ask questions in the comments section. I can’t wait to expand what we offer through Brave Writer. It’s been such a wonderful experience being a student and I think my experiences can translate to real benefit to all of you, particularly those worried about how to prepare your teens for college writing.

Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, General, Studying Lit, Tips for Teen Writers | 4 Comments »

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