A Brave Writer's Life in Brief

The Brave Writer motto used to have nothing to do with writing, except everything to do with it:

“Joy is the best teacher.”

I still believe that.

Trust it. This one you can take to the bank. When your doubts flare and you wonder if you are “serious” enough or “organized” enough or “doing” enough, pause. Scan your environment. Where is joy happening? What’s causing joy? Chase it! Go after that. See what happens.

Who’s laughing? Has it been a while since you heard laughter? Who’s engaged and deeply involved?

Example: When Liam was small, his passions combined were Legos and Pokemon/Yugi-oh card games. He created his own world of Lego men who held supernatural comic book powers. I got into his world with him. He couldn’t read yet, but I could jot down the names of these Lego men. I could record their powers in a list on a sheet of paper on a clipboard. He could carry that around for a month sharing it with everyone. And he did.

We played those card games (mind-numbing for me; sheer delight for him!) for over a year! Who knows how much this early interest in card-playing helped him read? I just know it did.

An interest in the discovery of gold led my family to a whole new way to homeschool I call “party-school” where we created a full scale Gold Rush party with other homeschool family-friends.

Reading entire series back-to-back, over-and-over; knitting; coloring pages; sewing; Legos; forts made from sheets; fingerpainting; a treehouse-ish structure in the backyard that was built from scrap wood and nails and an abundance of hammers; learning to draw (all together, on the deck, in the sunshine); baking, baking, baking; poetry reading; walks with the dog and strollers and baby backpacks—on the beach, in the woods, up the street of condos; picnics because we could; reading too many chapters because we had to know what happened next and so, skipping math; Googling and googling and googling to find out more, to confirm a hunch, to invalidate an incorrect statement; online video games; the whole LOTR trilogy on DVD for the nth time (extended edition); making candles; dying cloth like they did in colonial times…

See?

Sure a workbook here and there might reassure you that you are being responsible to “educate.” Ask yourself. What do YOU remember from your education? Content can be delivered in many packages. Risk something—find a package that is big and life-encompassing whenever you can.

You are at home. Let joy lead the way. When you see the spark, chase it! Sprint, leap, grab hold, and ski to the learning.

Will you always successfully shake a jar with heavy cream and a marble in it and get butter and see smiles at the end? Not necessarily! Some of the initial passion to “try” an idea will be muted by hard work or a bad fit or a simple debacle of failure. That’s okay! That’s true of workbooks too, by the way. But at least the attempt is in the right trajectory.

Wash your hands of the flawed attempt and move on. Laugh about it later.

Let joy be your guide. Leave guilt in the basement. Flick the “ghost of public school past” off your shoulder.

Let joy be your teacher and your children’s teacher. Joy does it best. She’s so freaking adorable, who can resist her when under her spell?

Exactly.

That.

Image by CJ Sugg (cc cropped)

The key to depth learning is intensity. We hear about passion, immersion, delight-directed learning, deep-dives, talent, intelligences, curiosity, and other language around self-education that all attempt to create an image of focused attention and sustained interest in any number of subject and skill areas.

While each of these terms and phrases has a place in the self-education conversation, the key factor that creates the retention of what is studied or explored is intensity. The most talented, sharpest mathematics-whiz kid will not go beyond what is easily attained through natural aptitude without it! A physically gifted athlete cannot progress to the first string or select teams without it.

Intensity creates clarity of focus, the drive to work hard and struggle through the challenging parts, and serves to magnify the importance of the material or skills so that the child is motivated to master them. Intensity in learning is what is missing in most traditional school settings. Kids are introduced to subject matter in the least catalyzing ways, and then are asked to master it without any “hook” – no intrinsic reason, no obvious benefit to them. They learn to passively work on homework or take notes for the sake of passing tests, rather than the deep dive into the material because it compels them to know!

Intensity in learning, then, is the “compelled to know” ingredient to an education. When I was in high school, I became obsessed with theater (all sides – acting, stage managing, lights, set design, PR, directing). By the time I was a senior in high school, all of my classes were in the theater and I used time outside of class to read plays, to diagram the sets, and to set the blocking as a kind of enjoyable exercise for my own self-instruction.

You know intensity when you meet it. These kids are driven to know and to create time to find out. Sometimes we demean the chosen passions (video gaming, shooting free throws, studying fashion and make up). Still, you can tell what your child cares about by the level of intensity that shows up with it.

Sometimes intensity looks like a child walking through the house with a full length original novella and red pen in hand, editing it at all hours of the day.

Sometimes intensity looks like a boy cradling his lacrosse stick in the car, at the store, sleeping with it by his bed.

Sometimes intensity is marathon DVD viewing of the same LOTR trilogy over and over again, while reading the books and visiting fan sites online.

There’s a persistence and an insistence in intensity. The child keeps at it without being nagged. The child cares about it without being convinced. The child acquires the vocabulary of that world, without workbooks or lectures.

Intensity in children is not always attractive, however. It can look like throwing stuff, and shouting at the computer screen. It sometimes manifests as taking a swing at a sister or crumpling up the paper so carefully written and stuffing it in the waste basket.

Angry comments come from intense children:

“I hate it. You can’t like it. It’s ugly.”

“I’ll never be good at ___________.”

“Leave me alone. I’m trying to figure it out!”

“I don’t need your help. Quit telling me how to do it.”

“This book is stupid!”

“I was just getting to the good part. I can’t stop now!”

“I’m not tired (hungry, dirty, angry). I have to finish.”

Euphoric comments come from intense children:

“I’m the best speller in the world!”

“I figured it out WITHOUT your help!”

“I’m going to read every JRR Tolkien book in order and learn elvish.”

Make you feel stupid comments come from intense children:

“You’re wrong!”

“Actually, that’s not true. The truth is…..”

“You don’t know anything. (Expert person) says _________.”

Intensity shows engagement, even if the expression of intensity from an immature person comes across harshly or brashly. Being cocky is the privilege of expertise and while adults learn how to be cocky without offending everyone in the room (at least, some of them do), your kids may not yet have been “socialized” to discover that they need to reign in their “lording it over others” disposition.

The only thing you need to do around intensity is to admire it. It’s intrinsic to the person. You can’t “drum it up.” Disposition is not what I’m talking about. You don’t have to be loud or bug-eyed to be intense about an interest. Rather, intensity is measured through the raw commitment of your child to that one particular area that lasts longer than a moment in time.

When you see it, please support it. Intensity around a video game could well lead to intensity in other areas. I watched one of my kids spend an enormous amount of time on an Elijah Woods fan site that led her to discover the wide range of lives other girls her age led. She is now a social worker. Another child loved the Internet so much that when he discovered Google could be rendered in other languages, he switched his Google page to Klingon and that led to a fascination with linguistics (which he studied for two years in college!).

I read a book about a homeschooled child who became a conductor of a symphony. His passion in life began not musically, but with blocks. He became obsessed with building them, arranging them, moving them into new configurations. When he finally studied piano, this deeply held passion for arranging parts led to his fascination with conducting music. Who could have known that blocks would lead to music in that way?

You can’t know how the intensity in your child will morph into a long term interest that has value that you understand and appreciate. All you can do is admire it! Enjoy it. See if you can look behind the intensity that worries you to a possible benefit.

My online gaming son has become quite the chess player. Funny how we all admire his endless fascination with mastering opening moves and watching international contests for chess, but are put off by his endless love of specific online video games. Strange, isn’t it? We approve one intensity and the other we want to call an “addiction.” I’ve had to learn what those games mean to him and am trusting that they will lead to the next thing—that next intensity.

It would be fun to hear all the ways your kids show you their intensities. Please share what fascinations are showing up in your household. Also, of course, feel free to post questions. One of the challenges of raising an intense child is what to do when that child becomes belligerent or excessively arrogant.

Here’s to intensity!

Cross-posted on facebook.

Image © Dmitry Naumov | Dreamstime.com

Harry Potter slime party image by woodleywonderworks (slime recipe)

If you can’t detect a pulse in your homeschool, it’s time to get your heart pumping again. There’s no shame in finding yourself exhausted or bored. These are ordinary experiences in any long-term activity. The idea isn’t to make yourself feel better by pretending, or to explain away the lost enthusiasm, or to judge yourself for the natural result of hard work and commitment. We get nowhere when we heap blame and shame on ourselves.

I’ve urged parents to consider the idea that their investment in home education ought to exceed their children’s output. When I did so, I did not have in mind that the parent would necessarily sit side-by-side with a 16 year old pointing to the next Algebra 2 problem on the page to ensure that it gets done (though truth be told, I did do that for one of my kids because he needed it at the time). Still, that is not the vision I had in mind.

The concept to consider is this one:

Your homeschool depends on what you, the parent, brings to it.

Let’s take a look at what you can bring that will create/foster learning. Then let’s take a look at what you can do for yourself to prevent exasperation, fatigue, and disillusionment with the whole project (we’ll cover the second one in an additional post.)

To foster an environment for learning means that you, yourself, have a sense of what generates learning to begin with! Textbooks don’t do it. Workbooks don’t do it. Heck, even some teachers and tutors and classes don’t do it. Learning is not imposed from external sources, though external sources can facilitate learning.

Learning is an internal experience that comes from connecting to the ideas presented and making them your own. The concepts, practices, ideas, systems, facts, and stories are taken in through any number of means (lectures, DVDs, workbooks, classes, YouTube videos, conversations, cartoons, the Kahn Academy, reading, your local public school, self-teaching through following the rabbit trail of your own interest, a library, the Internet, hearing about the topic from your best friend, trying it yourself, practice, using whatever it is in ‘real’ life…). You get the idea.

Learning is what happens to human beings who are engaged with life. Intentional learning (where you set out to master X set of concepts or books or musical pieces or dance steps…) happens when a learner takes responsibility to follow through on a course of study using any one of those means suggested above. Sometimes intentional learning is supported by accountability structures (weekly piano lesson, tests, narrations, due dates and deadlines, competitions, attempts to be published, co-op classes, a promise to mom, rehearsals, performances, traditional school). Sometimes intentional learning is not structured or monitored and it happens at the pace and enthusiasm level of the learner.

The key to a happy homeschool is the experience of satisfying progress in learning. Kids and parents need to know that together they are in a context of stimulating discovery, that satisfies the child’s need for two things:

1) challenge to grow, and

2) comfort at having mastered or achieved.

Parents often measure learning by challenge (how much effort the attempt to learn requires) and see mastery as an “end point” to be acknowledged, but then to move on to the next challenge.

We all like to be challenged to grow (that’s what drives us forward in life). But an equally important part of growth is enjoying the fruits of having learned—it is the act of using what has been gained that solidifies “the thing” as a person’s own possession. It feels incredible to use skills that are mastered before moving onto the next challenge. Too often in homeschool we forget to revel in “having learned.” We forget to indulge the desire to do what feels easy and natural, for a good bit, before hurrying off to “long division” or the next unfamiliar historical period, or from an easy musical piece to Beethoven, or from readers to chapter books.

Image by ShardayyyMaybe your child just wants to write limerick after limerick after limerick once he’s got the pattern down. There’s nothing wrong with that! No need to hurry him into the villanelle or sonnet to prove he’s “still learning.”

Just because your child is over the hump with manuscript writing doesn’t mean she needs to immediately plunge into cursive. Enjoy manuscript. Get tools that enhance the experience (different styles of manuscript, make place cards, decorate photo pages with captions). Really enjoy the skillful use of manuscript without any demand to “grow again.”

If your homeschool feels strained, it could be that too much emphasis is being put on “next, next, next” and you haven’t sufficiently enjoyed “having achieved.” One way to regain the pleasure of home education is to spend a week (a month!) simply recounting and using the skills mastered. What would happen, for instance, if after mastering the multiplication tables, you found dozens of ways to use them?

You, the parent, could find games online, you could set up a scavenger hunt where the clues are revealed after answering a multiplication fact, your children could create times table pages that are decorated and laminated, you could go through your house looking for all the games that can be played using multiplication and then stack them up and play them!

For a week long period, each time you and the kids find a use for multiplication, toss nickels, dimes, and quarters into a jar, and at the end, you could sort them and then multiply the number of coins by the coinage value to see how much money you collected.

The possibilities are endless, but they need to be created by you. This is what I mean by your investment. This is how you partner with your kids.

Your kids won’t think of ways to reinforce their learning on their own (necessarily—though sometimes they do and we might be the ones to shut them down saying, “We already did that. It’s time to do x, y, and z”). Heck, you may find it rough to think of creative ideas on your own. That’s why we have each other and the oh-so-awesome Internets (ha!) to aid us! We want to get beyond the endless drive, push, press, complete, move on, try harder moments of learning and learn to also revel in the joy of having learned!

If you just completed reading aloud the entire Harry Potter series, why wouldn’t you now dedicate the next weeks to watching all the films? Why wouldn’t you host a Harry Potter party with games, and trivia quizzes, and cookies that look like each of the characters?

“Having learned” is under-appreciated in homeschooling, yet it is one of the ways that you sustain the momentum and joy of the experience!

Making the subject area your own possession is another way of saying what Charlotte Mason says:

“We, believing that the normal child has powers of mind which fit him to deal with all knowledge proper to him, give him a full and generous curriculum, taking care only that all knowledge offered to him is vital, that is, that facts are not presented without their informing ideas. Out of this conception comes our principle that:––

“Education is the Science of Relations’; that is, a child has natural relations with a vast number of things and thoughts: so we train him upon physical exercises, nature lore, handicrafts, science and art, and upon many living books, for we know that our business is not to teach him all about anything, but to help him to make valid as many as may be of––

“Those first-born affinities; That fit our new existence to existing things.”

So revel! Enjoy! Validate “having learned.” It’s your right as a homeschooling family.