Archive for the ‘Brave Writer Philosophy’ Category

Value Your Child’s Voice

Value Your Child's Voice

We talk about writing voice in the writing process quite a bit in Brave Writer. We want the writing your kids do to sound like them—to have their vocabulary, inflection, quirky personality, and sense of humor. We don’t want them to sound like a copy of Aesop or the writer of X, Y, Z curriculum. We don’t want them to produce rote writing where no one can tell who wrote it, so devoid of voice it is.

So we start with freewriting.

But what happens when we give freedom to express and little shows up? What if what we find on the page is lifeless and dull, the utter opposite of what shows up in the bathtub or at an amusement park?

Even worse: what if what shows up really does in fact sound like your child, but it’s lifeless and dull (according to you) and feels like the barest beginnings of original thought?

So let’s back up a step.

“Writing voice” is two words. The real word we want to explore is “voice” all by itself.

Peter Elbow (my writing mentor) describes it this way:

“Most children have real voice but then lose it. It is often just plain loud: like screeching or banging a drum. It can be annoying or wearing for others. ‘Shhh’ is the response we get to the power of real voice.

“But, in addition, much of what we say with real voice is difficult for those around us to deal with: anger, grief, self-pity, even love for the wrong people. When we are hushed up from those expressions, we lose real voice.”

Here’s where we sometimes go wrong as parents. We are busy, our children are young and inexperienced. When they risk saying what they really think in the ways they want to really say what they think, we sometimes move into what I call “civilize the savages” mode. We are more worried about the appearance of what they say than what it is, in fact, they are saying.

If your children develop the habit of shutting down their real ideas, thoughts, preferences, wishes, and dreams around you, they will also turn off “real voice.” Then when you go to writing with them, they will turn to you and expect you to tell them what words ought to fill the page, just like they now wait for you to show them what thoughts are acceptable to say out loud.

Writing is a risk, but so is speaking. We must create space for both the prudent, acceptable, “makes Mama proud” words and the “Oh I hope she doesn’t really feel that way” words. We need to pause and let the rumble of language flow through our kids verbally and they must know that you are interested, receptive, and open-minded enough to hear it (without freaking out) in order for them to find their written voice.

You can start today:

Eye contact and a focused minute of conversation where you really hear what one of your kids is saying is the beginning of fostering an environment where what your child means to say becomes the norm for what is written.

You may have to change your own perceptions of what writing is too. It may be that you use an artificial voice when you write—the one the teacher told you sounded more grown up, or the one that keeps you from being perceived as impolite, or the one you use to project a cheery disposition.

Maybe you don’t even write because the risk feels too great and you avoid it.

Take some time to explore how much space there is in your self, in your children, and in your home to express authentic voice (verbally first, in writing second). See what you can do to expand that space…

Baby steps:

“You look angry—want to tell me about it? Want to yell about it?”

“Your giggly, silliness is cracking me up! I want to be as silly as you!”

“It’s okay to be really sad right now. Tell me about it.”

“I hate that too, sometimes.”

“You are so smart using all those big words!”

“I would love to hear you tell me more about that story! Go for it. I want every tiny detail.” (Instead of insisting on summary)

See what happens… I know for me, I have to put my phone down and walk away from the computer. I also find that it’s easy to tune out my kids when the topic doesn’t interest me or they are struggling to find the words. I have to remind myself to pay attention and to care. You can’t do it every time, but you can do it some of the time, for each child in a rotating way. Be mindful and conscious.

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Revision is Not Editing

Revision is Not Editing

In Brave Writer, we separate the ideas of revision and editing. Revision is “casting new vision” for the original piece of writing. It’s a “re-imagining” of the original content. You have what you want to say, now you are considering all the various ways it can be said.

Your freewrite/draft is the jet stream of thought. It’s all of it rushing out of the writer onto the page willy-nilly.

Revision is not, now, taking that freewrite/draft and fixing commas or identifying run-on sentences. It’s not addressing tone or spelling mistakes. Those practices fall under the category of “copy-editing.”

Revision is that drastic over-haul type work that literally changes the draft sometimes so completely, the original is hardly recognizable in it any more (except maybe some sentences or the germ of the idea). Revision is where you hunker down and look at specific thoughts expressed insufficiently in the draft, and then determine how to expand them, how to enhance them, how to deepen the content or insight or facts-basis.

Revision IS writing.

In fact, most writers would say that revision is the craft, is the heart of being a writer.

What I find in parents (and even in those who claim to be writing instructors) is a tendency to skip this part of the process. They move right to editing and call it revision.

When asked to give revision notes or support, they draw a blank or they praise what’s good or they give general comments like, “Be sure you think about your audience” or “It’s a good idea to make sure your points are in a solid sequence.”

This kind of general feedback isn’t helpful to writers. What helps is to become a child’s creative partner. What you want to do, what you need to learn how to do, is how to create a dynamic partnership of idea generation.

For instance, you might see a flat-footed opening line (note: they are all flat-footed in the first draft – it’s completely rare that the first line stays the same in well revised writing). Your job isn’t to point out that it is flat-footed or could be revised. It isn’t to assign the task of making it better to your child. It’s literally to brainstorm ideas for improvements. Let’s say the child is writing about white water rafting, you might try something like this:

“I wonder how we can make this opening line grab the reader’s attention. Let me think, let me think. What if we start with the experience—Let’s get in the boat. Are you in it? What’s happening now? Close your eyes. What do you see? Blue? What shades?”

You’re jotting things down as they come out of your child’s mouth. Then you say:

“How about the water? I can imagine there’s a spray. Is there? Yes? Where did it hit? What is a water spray like? Does it remind you of anything? Oh good one! The spray of a garden hose when your brother aims it at you. Good one! Yes! Let’s jot that down.”

You’re wool-gathering. You’re collecting

  • images,
  • experiences,
  • thoughts,
  • curiosities,
  • comments,
  • ideas.

You aren’t telling your child what to do. You’re helping your child think freshly about what is already on the page. You are providing the dialog partner the way you would in conversation:

“Then what happened? Oh wait, how did you get there? That must have been amazing! What did your brother say?”

But now, you are focused on writing and you are providing the conversational partnership that your child’s writer needs. You are thinking in writing categories but having discussions about it (natural ones). You aren’t an English teacher. You are an interested friend, partner, ally.

Do you see the difference? Stop the generalizations and get into conversations. Help get those words out.

Then, when you go back to that opening sentence, you have a selection of things to choose from that might grab the reader’s attention. Together, you can find the one and write it in a way that makes magic.

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How Writing Is Like Sewing

Brave Writer How Writing Is Like Sewing

A fundamental confusion exists around how to teach writing. I’ve spent two decades looking for just the right metaphor to explain how a parent facilitates writing growth. Then the other day, on the phone, I stumbled upon a perfect metaphor.

Let’s look at learning to use a sewing machine.

A sewing machine makes it possible to create all kinds of sewing products—anything from hemming a pair of pants, to constructing a quilt, to producing an evening gown. The machine doesn’t do it for you. You have to know how to use the machine, and you have to develop skills: how to sew straight seams or how to drop in a sleeve or how to gather a drape. You need to learn how to create casings, and how to use the zig zag, and what the tension dial does.

When learning the skills needed for sewing, students start with scrap fabric. They don’t pick a dress pattern and then sit down to the machine. Usually they have to learn how to thread the needle and bobbin, they have to sew lots of straight lines and learn how to turn corners and how to backstitch the end of a seam so that it doesn’t unravel.

No one can learn all she needs to know in one sitting or even one year of sewing. There are levels of skill that are gained over time, as comfort with the machinery, and dexterity, and familiarity with the properties of sewing are internalized and mastered.

How Writing is like Sewing

But it is possible at each stage of development to introduce a little project. At first, these might be things like bean bags (squares) or a string dress (no pattern, but the dress uses casings). As the student gets comfortable, making an a-line dress for a doll from a pattern becomes possible and a thrill! Producing a doll quilt is the first step toward making one for a bed.

Eventually, the student of sewing learns tricks to make the process easier and faster. They can size up a pattern to know if it’s too difficult or too easy, and can make changes to make the pattern work.

Sewing is not about the dress patterns or quilts. Sewing is a set of skills that can be applied to patterns.

Let’s drive home the analogy to writing.

Firstly, the original writing process is discovered using scrap language—whatever is in the mind and mouth of the child at the time. The writing is interest-driven and exploratory. The child is gaining facility with the practice of accessing language, ideas, insights, and information from within and getting those words to the page in a variety of ways (all different styles of “language stitching”).

Secondly, the child learns to use the mechanics of writing similar to learning to use the sewing machine. How to thread the bobbin, how much pressure to put on the pedal, how to backstitch, how to zigzag, how to set up the buttonholer—these skills enable sewing. Similarly, the functional skills needed to run the machinery of writing are spelling, grammar, punctuation, handwriting and/or typing. And in Brave Writer, we believe that in the beginning that’s best learned through copywork (someone else’s writing).

Thirdly, students create writing projects which are the dress patterns of writing. Now that older children understand how the machine works and can use it with evolving skill, they can manage the demands of the machine, so it’s time to make a dress or placemat or quilt!

How Writing is like Sewing

In writing, once the student knows how to find language within, knows how to get that language to the page, and how to handwrite, expand, revise, and edit it, he or she is ready to “make something” —to write a report or letter, to write a poem or a dialog, to write a story or ad copy, to write an essay.

The point is—don’t hand your brand-new-to-writing student the equivalent of an evening gown dress pattern and expect it to turn out right on the first try, just because there are “clear instructions.” Writing is a set of skills practiced independently of assignments, leading up to developmentally appropriate writing projects that reinforce and expand evolving skills.

3 components of a complete writing program:

  1. Mastery of the original writing process (Growing Brave Writers)
  2. Rehearsing the mechanics of writing (Quill, Dart, Arrow, Boomerang, Slingshot)
  3. Writing projects to put mechanics and original writing together (Jot it Down, Partnership Writing, Building Confidence, Help for High School, and Online Classes)
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It’s the Writer, Not the Writing

It's the Writer, Not the Writing

It’s tempting to see writing as something a person does, as assignments to complete, as skills to acquire for an academic or career purpose.

It’s tempting to evaluate the writing a person does as though it is a set of math problems—measurable, impersonal, external.

It’s tempting to push for completion, because the assignment or project has a due date or has to be done for the end-of-the-year evaluation.

The paradigm shift is this:

Writing is not like other subjects. Writing is closely related to the self, no matter what the content. Even mothers sending me email get nervous thinking I will read their questions, and wonder what I will make of them, because they are undressing their minds right in front of me. What will I see? How will I react?

How much more kids feel that way?

  • Take the “school definition” out of writing (beware of the ghost of public school past).
  • Focus on the “writer” more than the “writing.”
  • Tears mean the lesson is over for the day.
  • Partial work is valuable.
  • Progress happens through a series of attempts, not through wrestling a single project to the perfected finish.
  • Self-expression is a risk and needs you to treat it gently.
  • Support helps—and help is helpful (not damaging, not cheating, not short-cutting).

Academic formats require as much “soul investment” as fan fiction and diaries. You must be just as gentle and curious with an expository essay as you were with the story about your child’s pet gerbil.

Writers express what lives inside them. Writing is the form it is put in. Expression deserves respectful care. Mechanics deserve minimal care. Expression matters the most. Mechanics are marginally important.

Work on the two components (mechanics and expression) separately and teach your writer to take responsibility for editing mechanics and getting someone to help him or her see what he or she can’t see without a second set of eyes.

That’s it. That’s all the attention mechanics deserve. They do not make or break the essence of the writing. They merely punctuate it, so someone else can approximate the tone and meaning the writer intends.

Brave Writer not brave writing.

Learn More: The Difference Between Brave Writer and Other Programs

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Love who you are

Love who you are

Have you noticed how easy it is to wish away your chief personality features? Do you think to yourself, “I’m the wrong personality for my temperament”? You might wish for a clean, orderly home in your heart, but your personality style is relaxed Bohemian. Or you are the sort who keeps a ship-shape house, but wish you could relax when your kids make big creative messes.

Layered on top of the structured versus unstructured selves we bring to homeschool are our memories of school. We compare what we do at home (even when we don’t want to) to what we experienced as children. We react against it (“I’m not doing that!) or we we suffer because of it (“I’m not teaching my kids anything”).

The temptation to overhaul our essential selves is powerful. Advertising everywhere tells us we are one tweak away from being the fantasy person in our heads. We may be able to resist Botox or Coach purses, but the seductress for home educators is any “method” that results in effortless, joyful learning where parents and kids get along all the time.

We hop from one program to the next like frogs on lily pads forgetting to consider which personality is implementing the philosophy!

Let me let you in on a little secret.

There’s no one personality type that is better for homeschooling than another.

Let me drill down further.

There’s no one personality type that is better for parenting, loving, nurturing than another.

Every type has its marvelous strengths, and (darn it all) each type has its blind spots and liabilities.

What you and I need to do is to become self aware people—able to recognize when our personalities are creating the hum of happiness and productivity, and when they are sapping the energy from the room and causing pain.

It isn’t always better to have a messy or a neat house.

Sometimes waking up to a clear kitchen table, fluffed pillows, books easy to access, and a freshly vacuumed carpet is the most nurturing way to start the day. If, however, the process of getting there ended an art project or removed a Robin Hood fort still lingering in the minds of your kids as they went to bed, the same cleared space in the morning may now feel like robbery:

“Where did you put my art project?”

“Do I really have to get out all the blankets again for my fort?”

The question to ask yourself as you move through the day isn’t “How can I be more relaxed?” or “How can I be more productive?”

You want to ask yourself a single question:

“How can I best serve this moment?”

I remember when I went to graduate school, I had just begun our unschooling experiment. It was a study in contrasts. I was being educated by highly trained academics with lectures, a syllabus, reading schedule, essay assignments, and tests. My kids were free to explore the world without any hindrance.

Or so I thought.

Love who you are

What became apparent to me after a semester surprised me. I loved graduate school. It felt nurturing to have someone care enough to create lessons, to show me what I should read to get a full view of the subject, to dialog with me from a position of investment and knowledge. I liked having a plan and a schedule. I felt relief. I had studied the subject area for five years on my own, and now I felt this surge of strength that came from guidance and support.

Meanwhile, the structures I had used in homeschool were on hold. I wanted my kids to feel free to learn what they wanted, to investigate any topic to their hearts’ content. A couple of them took off! But two floundered. They felt (strangely enough) unloved. They wouldn’t have used that language but in hindsight that’s what it was. They felt connected to me when I took the time to plan their lessons and guide their education. They lost that connection when I gave them “freedom.”

I spent hours on unschooling lists learning how to create the context, how to support an unschooling lifestyle, how to foster and nurture a rich learning environment. I didn’t “abandon” my kids to doing whatever they wanted unsupervised. Nevertheless, two of my children missed planned lessons and a structure for learning. I understood this because I was having a parallel experience in grad school.

What becomes so difficult to tease apart as a home educator is the idealized vision of learning that dances in our heads like sugar plums and the very real home and family we have. Our job isn’t to be more organized or more relaxed, more structured or completely free of structure.

Our job is to serve the moment—to serve the needs of our families from within the framework of our delightful personalities.

We can do that best when we lean into our strengths.

If you’re an orderly person, create happy order. Avoid the temptation to require everyone to be like you. Resist your tendency to nag or to have your feelings hurt when the rest of your gang is unenthusiastic for kitchen duty or keeping tables cleared. Straighten, file, assemble check lists, keep the sink empty, make the beds, plan the day. Enthusiastically offer your talent for creating a clean, peaceful, orderly, neat space to the family as a gift.

If you’re a relaxed, go-with-the-flow mom, stop pummeling your personality. Your home is cozy, it’s alive with activity, and it supports messes without stress. Keep big containers nearby for quick clean-ups, make a loose routine to follow each day (rather than a schedule), allow your kids who need order to create systems to support you and the family. Smile.

Do not worry that you aren’t getting enough done in either system or style. Focus on this moment. What is happening right now? How can I help it become a good moment? Shall I ease up and let the mess grow? Shall I hunker down and clear the space so something new can be born? Are we getting along and growing?

Above all: no system saves you. You will eventually go back to being who you are. Your job is to be the best you, you can be. Be the you that creates love and learning, not the you that worries and frets or ignores and pretends away.

You can even say to your kids in a moment of frazzledness:

“You know me! I need everything cleaned up before I can think straight. Anyone willing to help me so we get the day off to a good start? My brain is about to fall out of my head when I see shoes scattered everywhere. Cookies to the helpers!”

Or

“You know me! I can’t put a week-long system together for the life of me. Let’s make a quick list for today of things we want to study and do, and then put them in an order. Who wants to make the list with me? If today feels good, we can do it again tomorrow. Let’s eat cookies while we discuss.”

See? The goal isn’t to “reform” who you are and how you are. The goal is to be the best of yourself that you can be, acknowledging that within your strengths and weaknesses is a real human being doing the best she can. Your kids want to help you and they want to be themselves too.

They’ll learn to love who they are in direct proportion

to how well you love who you are.

Go forth and love yourself.

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