Archive for the ‘Brave Writer Philosophy’ Category

Essay-writing, not Lecture-giving

Today’s writing tip:

As I comment on essay topics in the Brave Writer Classroom, I’m struck by context. It’s easy to get sidetracked into “advice-giving” rather than “essay-writing.” There’s a difference between explaining why you, the reader, should exercise, versus explaining the role of exercise in improved health. Many of our kids are used to lectures, sermons, and mini-lessons designed to urge them to be better people. They internalize this voice and then they mimic it in their essays. But that kind of writing is *not* appropriate for essay writing. Essays are the dispassionate explication of information and how various strands of detail correlate to prove a thesis—a risky proposition, an assertion.

If your student writes about what the reader should do, or directs any comments at the second person, “you,” know that that student has shifted from essay writing to sermon giving. Even without the “you,” if implicit in the writing is a list of “smart practices” or “good ideas,” know that your student is not writing an essay.

We had a question on Facebook:

Any specific tips for redirecting them to essay writing?

My answer:

Yes. Ask them to change the voice of the essay: Move from “you” to third person. Focus on content, not on practice. For instance, in the example of exercise:

Don’t write—

People should work out three to five times per week to get their hearts to beat faster. You won’t be as vulnerable to heart disease if you do cardiovascular exercise on a regular basis.

Write—

Regular cardiovascular exercise has been shown to prevent heart disease. People who work out three to five times per week reduce their chances of heart disease by X%.

See the difference in tone? Feel it? That’s what you’re going for.

Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, General, Help for High School, Tips for Teen Writers | 7 Comments »

Email: What to do with a struggling daughter

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I get lots of questions about kids with learning disabilities and language processing disorders. While it’s important to get the right help for those neurological issues, you can do a lot to change the mood around learning by creating an entirely different context for education. In some cases, you’ll discover that what you thought was a learning disability was actually resistance to tedious, poorly executed lessons. You are key to creating a brand new, sparkling environment for learning. My answer to Lisa follows her note to me.
 
 

Hi Julie,

I came across your site through a home school message board. My daughter is in 7th grade and is new to homeschooling as of last month. She has some pretty significant learning issues with dyslexia and she literally can barely write a sentence. But… she has a very high IQ and is very creative and can learn very quickly when she wants to. On top of the learning issues she has a severe mood disorder and EXTREME anxiety. She is an absolute perfectionist with herself and this is one of her biggest obstacles. She absolutely hates reading and also refuses to use audio books. She was in private school K-4 and did ok. She transferred to a remedial school for 5th & 6th grade and this year we tried to go back to a small private school that offered support for learning issues. She had so much anxiety and went into a deep depression. As a result I decided to pull her out and try homeschooling. So… having said all this, I am struggling to find curriculum that she will enjoy and comply with. I had her journaling and doing some free style type writing but she is so hard on herself.

She cannot spell and gets so frustrated with herself. No level of support or love can help her get over this perfectionism in herself and it’s very crippling. I have spent a lot of time on your website and it looks really neat. The Arrow program looks good even though my daughter is a 7th grader since her reading level is low. I am just not sure if this program will work for her but I am very encouraged. Do you have any good results with kids with learning/mood disorders? I love the idea of the online class for the accountability but she would probably have a nervous breakdown worrying about the instructor and how “bad” she writes. Any advice you could offer would be appreciated. Thanks so much!!

Sincerely,
Lisa

Hi Lisa.

Your daughter needs some deschooling. No “school” for a little while. Give her trips to art museums, do craft projects, take up baking and sewing, sign her up for Taekwondo where she can learn to be tough and defend herself and show strength. (These are suggestions, obviously, not prescriptions.) The point, though, is that she is damaged from all the pressure of school. 7th grade is still young. Celebrate the joy of learning together. Watch “Downton Abbey” (the PBS show) and learn about war, and costumes of that era, and have tea, and discuss hierarchy and classes, and then watch everything Maggie Smith is in, and then discuss acting, and then try memorizing a speech together from a movie and acting it out.

Get OUT of the school mindset. Get into the learning one.

One of the best things I ever did with my kids was to learn about art history in front of them. I got books from the library, watched the “Sister Wendy’s Story of Painting” videos (dark ages!) with my kids in the room. I dragged them with me to the art museum. I brought my own pencils and sketch book to draw what I saw and take notes. These kids became so interested in art, they’ve continued to love art museums and know famous painters and trivia about their lives.

The point is this: you have a bright, creative, energetic daughter who is damaged from school. Writing, as important as it is, must be moved away from school and back into a natural part of life. That comes from not requiring it and living it in front of her. But if she has nothing new to think about or consider, she will have nothing to write about.

Her perfectionism is her defense against judgment and failure. She’s trying really hard not to fail. So take away the “failure” by eliminating the need to perform… for a good long while.

Try poetry teatimes (these are low stress, HIGH results experiences). Go to a Shakespeare play; knit; read Harry Potter aloud; get out in nature and record the temperatures, the trees, the birds; visit the zoo; see movies in the middle of the day.

YOU read newspapers and non-fiction books about history and then talk freely about what you’re learning in her presence (not as a lecture, but in that “I was really struck by…” kind of way). Let her hear you learn. Take up some new pursuit yourself and see how you learn!

Write a Christmas letter together. Let her take the photos and lay it out and contribute her ideas. You write it. Mail it together. Have her address the envelopes (if she will). Let her type. Let her use spellcheck on the computer.

See?

The Arrow is great, but it can feel like school to a girl like yours. So get it for you so you understand how to talk about literature naturally with her (let it teach you). Don’t force ANYTHING on her. You might even listen to a book on CD over lunches that YOU want to hear and if she listens, great. If not, that’s okay too. Get into learning and you’ll discover how to help her too.

Lastly, a cafe au lait at Barnes and Noble is a great way to shift gears. Take her OUT of the house, and share that things are changing at home, that her input matters, and that you want her to feel happy and successful and will take your cues from her… then invite her to tell you what she would LOVE to do all day long and then go DO IT!

Hope that helps!

Julie

Posted in Brave Writer Lifestyle, Brave Writer Philosophy, Email, Learning Disabilities, Poetry, Poetry Teatime, Unschooling | 1 Comment »

The Value of Follow Through

The value of follow through

I just re-read the title of this blog entry and thought: Ugh. Soft consonant sounds, nothing to crunch or bite. Just the slippery shimmer of a “v” followed by sounds you swallow and forget.

It’s almost as if the words “follow through” defy the very idea they suggest. Follow through needs to get my attention a little more firmly if I’m going to tear myself away from the riveting newsfeed of Facebook and the incessant whining of my dog to be let out the back door.

Even in the days of caveschooling, before the Internet and cell phones, we found ways to avoid actually doing the task of educating our young. The telephone, recently freed from the wall, could wreck an entire morning as we padded around the living room pretending to supervise Explode the Code pages while nestling the receiver between an ear and a shoulder bone.

Sometimes sleep, sometimes a mountain of laundry, sometimes the news, sometimes the radio, sometimes the sheer inertia of not knowing which book to start with, stopped us cold and we let days go by without any meaningful progress in any subject, or household task… pretending to unschool, as a way to salve our consciences and heal our sense of failure.

Doctors’ appointments, piano lessons, grocery shopping, field trips, the bank, the post office, and the library all conspired to crowd out learning, that thing we told the state and our family that we’d happily do 40 hours a week or so.

Imagine how much worse it got when everyone on the planet bought a personal computer and logged onto the Internet. Now the distractions were real in the sense that we were answering real letters (called email), we were updating message boards (called “researching homeschool”), we were reading blogs (called “gathering information and ideas to use with my kids”).

After a hard night with a bed wetter and nursing baby, easing into the day with that zombie-like stare at the monitor screen is soothing. You don’t have to turn your gaze to the dishes in the sink from last night. For a few moments, words, ideas, and images cheer you up or keep you from engaging the here and now.

The rub is—you never quite get to your best intentions for homeschool. And that drives you back to more distracting, to ease your guilt… and to add to your pile of “this would be great to do with the kids” that never gets done.

Follow Through

When I was a kid, my parents enrolled me in endless tennis clinics. Yes, I grew up as a rich kid outside of Malibu. I didn’t particularly like tennis or clinics, for that matter! What I remember with excruciating detail is being told how to “follow through”—for my weak forehand, my two-handed backhand, and my powerless serve.

Tossing the racket in the direction of the ball was not enough. Making contact with the ball, though laudable (and startling!) for me, was still not enough. No, apparently to get the maximum impact and speed on the ball, you had to keep your arm moving even after the ball was already on its way back over the net.

It’s the strangest experiment in physics that the continued motion (the ball’s awareness that your impact on it is still accelerating as you hit it) sends the ball farther and more accurately than if you stop, right as you make contact.

Homeschool is so similar, it’s scary! Okay, not scary, really, but it is similar. It’s not enough to toss a couple of workbooks onto a table, while you juggle a baby on the hip and chat with Liz, who lives two blocks over. That’s barely making contact with the ball.

It’s not enough to spend 3 hours reading about homeschooling and only 1 hour doing it.

Follow through in homeschooling—that long drag of the arm across the body after hitting the ball—starts like this:

  • You prepare,
  • you expend the energy to do the project,
  • read the book,
  • recite the facts,
  • figure out the assignment,
  • study the image,
  • observe the experiment,

and then, THEN, you  follow through—

  • you discuss whatever it is you just did,
  • you display the results,
  • you share what you learned as a family with someone else or each other,
  • you find a field trip that matches the subject,
  • you use what you learned in a real life context.

In other words, you take the learning further!

It’s not enough to barely get cereal bowls off the table to make room for the math book. It’s not enough to know where to find the math book (though it’s a start!). Follow through for math means engaging the material enough to know it happened today, to know that kids in MY family deepened their connection to math, with my presence fully a part of the experience.

We would never enter a tennis clinic with a cell phone, our iPad, and a Kindle handy. We wouldn’t try to hit tennis balls while still in a bathrobe. We wouldn’t practice our strokes on a driveway cluttered with bikes and basketballs. And we certainly wouldn’t leave the court before the clinic ended to get our teeth cleaned for an hour, and then come back to the clinic and assume we’d have the same level of engagement and stamina for finishing.

The most important part of homeschooling IS your presence:
strong, engaged, undistracted,
and able to integrate what happened this morning
into the rest of life.

Give learning your best. Devote, focus, stay home, schedule doctor appointments after school. Don’t assume that you have hours to use any old way. Devote some hours (hours you pick, hours you plan) to being with your kids without distraction come hell or high tennis net! See how that goes. See if you feel a little happier about your life.

Follow through. The ball goes farther, and is more likely to land where you want it to.

The Homeschool Alliance

Top image by Ft. Meade (cc cropped)

Posted in Brave Writer Lifestyle, Brave Writer Philosophy, Homeschool Advice | 14 Comments »

Know Your Kids as They Are

Know your kids as they are

I read a plea from a desperate mother of a nine-year-old girl who hates school. The mother felt helpless, hurt, and angry. She appealed to her email loop for support and advice. The first email reply went through the “nurturing model”—

  • rock her in a rocking chair,
  • don’t worry about school,
  • she’s young still,
  • enjoy precious moments,
  • help her to feel comfortable and happy in your home with less school pressure

…etc.

The very next reply was a 180 degree turn. This mother offered a list of quotes out of a popular child rearing book. The first one said roughly, “Don’t make rules you won’t enforce.” And of course, if you make a rule, require obedience. Suggestions of penalties followed:

  • time outs,
  • wooden spoon spankings,
  • withdrawal of TV or computer privileges.

These two positions were so opposite to one another, I found myself laughing out loud. What kind of parents are we? It seems to me that the real issues are often missed in these discussions. We parents are so quick to evaluate the behavior of our kids and then to look to each other for “tricks” or “tips” on how to “deal with them.” The desperate mother is asking the wrong questions to the wrong people.

The Inner Lives of Our Children

The inner lives of our children ought to be the object of our quest. When they throw routine tantrums and say outrageous hurtful things, why aren’t we asking where that’s coming from? So often we just want to squelch the behavior—extinguish it like a sputtering candle.

Can we know our kids from the inside out? Will they talk to us? Some kids have no trouble telling us their needs or hardships. Others are completely tongue-tied—stuck perhaps in the non-verbal mode of relating to themselves—aware of problems and feelings but unable to articulate them or to even identify them.

Instead of rules enforcement versus nurturing to the point of “catering to,” how about investigation and support/compassion? How about encouragement and understanding? Are we willing to know our kids as they actually are rather than to simply apply labels for behavior, or symbols for their season of life, or rules for their “own good”? What if we become fascinated by the complexity of our kids, rather than worried about it?

Sweet Noah

I remember when Noah (my oldest) was 10-years-old and he struggled with writing. His attitude showed that he was demoralized (even after “all I’ve done for him” to make it easier). My ego got flustered and irritated.

He was violating my system.

He was invalidating my work.

But my spirit knew differently. I suddenly saw that Noah must have had real reasons that made sense to him about why writing was continuing to feel hard… It was a moment. I flipped my point of view away from wondering where I went wrong or why he couldn’t validate my efforts, to what was going on inside of him. So I asked him with gentleness and true interest:

“Noah, what’s wrong? What is bothering you?”

Do you know that for the first time, tears of shame and earnest self-displeasure surfaced? He felt badly that he couldn’t please me by “getting it” more quickly. This reminded me of feelings I had as a girl when my father tried to help me with math homework and I just “didn’t get it.” My dad got so frustrated with me, thinking he’d been clear (I’m sure he was!). But I felt desperate inside. I couldn’t validate him. I could only fail in his presence and make him miserable. What an awful feeling—to know your parent is trying to help and you can’t translate that help into success! The only way forward is to shut down, if there is no entry point for discussion or honest communication of scary internal feelings. I feared I wasn’t smart. I didn’t want my dad to know that about me. So I clammed up.

Noah’s weren’t tears of frustration or anger or anxiety about writing specifically. I could tell. He said to me,

“You’re a writer. You and Dad talk about it all the time. You teach it. No matter how much you tell me that you aren’t worried about how well I write, I still know that you’d be happier if I wrote well. And I want to do it but know I can’t.”

More tears.

Wow. So honest. So risky!

The only respectful reply at that point was silence. I saw. I didn’t have an explanation, or more information to throw at him, or even good ideas, or defenses for how wrong his perceptions were. I saw. And in seeing, I knew that all I really had to offer was compassionate support. A hug. A kind, understanding smile of sympathy.

So I told Noah that I loved him, appreciated his openness in risking those words out loud, and I offered to do whatever it took to support him in finding his own way out of those oppressive feelings. It was a moment.

My real job at home

I suddenly realized that my true job as a mother was to care more than anyone else about the interior lives of my kids. I wanted to be there to watch, encourage, and do what it took to support them in triumphing over the hurdles they faced. Noah gave me a gift. He articulated his feelings in a way that I could understand them. Lucky me! Here was an instance where Noah’s self-awareness and verbal capacity helped him—and even realizing that—that he could find his words when he felt safe and cared for—helped me know he’d write well one day.

Not all of our kids can express themselves as easily in words. We want to remember to listen beneath the words, or to help find the words for our other kids when they get that stuck. Or at minimum, we can offer a comforting response like,

“It must be so frustrating to not be able to express what’s bothering you right now.”

Noah and I talked for 45 minutes the next day about his writing project on roller coasters that he’d begun, and the change was dramatic. He felt freer to ask for help, to try my ideas, and he knew I was relaxed and happy with him. We did the work together, and I watched him go to the computer to write with relief and success. I was humbled by that. It struck me that he found a way to relieve the pressure of those “illegal” feelings, and then with my kindness and companionship, writing followed.

That may not be the exact sequence in your family. However:

  • relief
  • light
  • hope
  • intimacy
  • optimism

…may follow.

Those are good too.

Partnership Writing

Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, Family Notes, Homeschool Advice, Young Writers | 7 Comments »

10 Tips for the “Lazy” Writer

10 Tips for "Lazy" Writer

There are tips, practices, tools, and helps that make writing easier. Don’t believe for a minute that your kids are lazy!

Ten ways to encourage writing today:

  1. Put out gel pens and black paper
  2. Instant Message or text with your child
  3. Light candles and listen to music while writing
  4. Write a sentence on a white board that is provocative yet unfinished, like: “If I could do whatever I wanted today, I would….”
  5. Write together (at the table, everyone at the same time)
  6. Write at the mall, jotting down fashion observations
  7. Give a shoulder massage before writing
  8. Comment on 3 status updates on social media
  9. Rewrite the ending to a favorite movie or book (make it melodramatic, sad, angry, happy, or include aliens!)
  10. Write on a clipboard, under a table, lying on a trampoline, up in a tree, with sidewalk chalk on the driveway

Writing is about freedom to express without the pressure that comes from straight jacket formats. Formats are only helpful once kids feel FREE to write.

Let me say it again: You can’t produce good writing that fits a format until you’ve spent hundreds of hours writing without caring one whit about format. Once you feel as easy writing as you do talking, formats are a snap of the fingers to teach and follow.

So play with words today.

Growing Brave Writers

Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, Writing about Writing, Writing Exercises | 1 Comment »