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The art of narration in learning

The Art of Narration in Learning

My aunt and uncle live in Italy. She’s American; he’s Italian. They have two kids. Their daughter took her exams to complete junior high in June. My aunt sent me the following email that described what exams for that age group look like:

Lara [my cousin] spent between 2 and 4 hours each day for 4 straight days on her essay tests (not multiple choice) in Italian (Composition), English, French and Math (no essay there, obviously!). That was last week. This afternoon she had her orals in Italian (Literature), History, Geography, Art History, Science, Technical Studies, English, French, Music and Physical Education. (No, I’m not kidding around, they actually had to prepare a several-page report on a sport! She chose figure skating.)

She was in the room (with all the teachers for the above subjects and the Exam Committee Officer, who is a teacher from another school, to prevent partiality) for about 30 minutes, but the first 5 were spent discussing the results of the written tests. In addition to separate presentations on specific topics for Art History, P.E., French and English (she brought pictures of our trip to California last year and talked about most of you guys [the relatives]!), she had to prepare one of the topics covered during the last school year from a multi-disciplinary perspective.

She chose the Cold War and its consequences, and trekked through History (dates, people, policies, causes, effects), Geography (characteristics of the Western and Eastern blocks), Literature (passages dealing with the Cold War, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima and the Viet Nam War) and Science (the atomic bomb and nuclear energy in general) during her presentation. She wasn’t allowed to read any of this. She could look at an outline, but the content all had to be from memory.

I read this litany of objectives and exams, and headed straight for the bottle of Nyquil (drug of choice when I want to knock myself out and sleep through the pain). Argh! The Cold War?! The freaking Cold War in Italian? Okay, I was a bit loopy from the meds, but it sounds harder to do in Italian… doesn’t it?

I clicked out of that screen, mopped the sweat off my forehead, hyperventilated, and then, in a frenzy of irrationality, yanked children off computers, away from TVs and magazines. I hustled my English-speaking chicks to the kitchen table and downloaded as much Cold War info as I could remember directly into their spongy brains, quizzing them every seven seconds to be sure they were retaining my pearls of educational lecture.

We got through it… that momentary panic, the fear of orange-jumpsuits and police locking me up for scholastic neglect. Once I’d ignored the email for about three months, made a cup of tea and spent more than a panicky fifteen minutes castigating myself in my imagination, I did happen to notice some commonalities between our homeschool and Lara’s more organized, traditional school.

In fact we may be achieving similar results and you may too, without having an exam period. And it may be that our kids are not necessarily versed in the Cold War (though mine are now, thankyouverymuch), but they may be able to give this kind of integration to any number of other interests and studies.

Notice, for instance, how important the art of narration is to the Italian system of evaluation. The examiners are looking for the ability to do the following:

  • to orally retell what the student has learned, as well as to write it. Both of these are forms of narration.
  • to form connections between subject areas. Lara (my niece) had to be able to relate the history of the Cold War to geography, science, technology, and literature.
  • to prepare a field of study. Rather than the examiners creating a test that the student must study for blindly (hoping to guess what material is of most interest to the examiner), the student was expected to use materials read and studied during the year to prepare a narrative that wove together what she had learned. Certainly the examiners may have asked questions that would reveal ignorance, but because the exam was oral, she would have a chance to fill in incomplete detail, to add support to a weak assertion, to follow a trail of questions determined by the examiner in dialog (rather than having to guess it).

Whose style of education does this remind you of? (Now that you can breathe again.)

Charlotte Mason, of course! (She’s the British educator who placed great emphasis on the art of narration through oral and written exams.) Charlotte says that narration ought to be a pleasure to the child and that exams ought to be a chance to reveal what the student knows rather than to expose what a child has not yet mastered.

How can we apply this idea of narrating and mastery to the way our kids learn? In the Brave Writer Lifestyle, we take each area of interest and explore it as far as a child’s interest and enthusiasm carry us. As we do, we provide opportunities to talk and write about those interests (using freewriting, conversations, even presentations if appropriate) to give language to those interests and fields of study.

Narration lets us know that the child is learning, that he or she has taken in information and can now make connections. Some children thrive on conversation while others gear up for a more formal examination. We’ve done both. One year, for fun, I used a tape recorder and in December, right before Christmas, I prepared some open-ended exam questions in four areas: literature, history, math and poetry. The kids got to sit alone with me and tell me in their own words as much as they could about the things we’d studied together while I recorded their answers. To a child, they loved this. It was very gratifying to me at the time as well to listen to them formulate answers, to put things together in a narrative whole. I was repeatedly surprised at which aspects of the topic they retained and how those fit with their overall schema of life.

We’ve also used freewriting as a kind of narration exam. After studying a period of history or a novel, I’ll suggest freewriting all that can be remembered (perhaps with a question to help focus the writing) about that historical period or book. Sometimes that little bit of closure gives both mom and child a lift!

The Homeschool Alliance

Image of girl by EdenPictures (cc flipped, cropped, text added)

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Checking Boxes

This past week, I received several emails from moms who want to be more relaxed in their approach to home education but who feel like “type A” mommas. They like to make to do lists, and to check off activities, to know they’ve accomplished stuff. How do they make life more relaxed without feeling out of control, unable to set a goal and see it fulfilled?

It’s true that some curricula lends itself to check boxes. You can say “read pages 100-152 by Friday” with a little box next to it and you’ll know that it was finished when the child marks it with an ‘X’.

So can a more structured personality run a more relaxed homeschool? Yes! We just need to update the content of those little check lists. What if you made a ‘to do’ list that looked more like this?

___ I made each of my kids laugh today.

___ I found a way to get one of my kids to say “That was so much fun!”

___ We read aloud and I heard the words I read, and noticed one great simile and one great word pair.

___ We followed one rabbit trail today (someone brought up a subject that made me stop what I was doing to go do a google search, to look for a movie or book on the topic, to talk about it and follow it up with a plan of some kind).

___ We used one freewrite prompt.

___ I hugged each of my kids.

___ I listened to one child tell me a long story about something important to him.

___ I learned how to do something today that one of my kids taught me.

___ I read a blog or book or magazine about relaxed schooling.

___ I didn’t do one thing that I hate to do.

___ I didn’t make my kids do _________ today.

___ I did one thing that made me supremely happy today.

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Get that Education You Really Want

Mom is learning too

The whole family is learning all the time.

Navajo rugs littered my kitchen table right before naptime. Three little faces smiled up at me with smears of glue on their chins and clippings of construction paper stuck to their t-shirts. We were KONOS homeschoolers and that month, we were firmly ensconced in the Indians unit (Native Americans, really, but I think we weren’t using that nomenclature consistently yet). I had boundless energy for homeschooling in the days when my children were small (6, 4 and toddler). I had hand-drawn a big map of North America that I hung smack in the middle of the living room wall. The map showed color-coded hunting regions for each major Indian tribe or nation. Yeah, I know. Haven’t done it since.

Reality: The kids looked at that map every morning and yet, I guarantee none of them remembers today the names of the tribes, the regions where they hunted, the little paper rugs we made or the original habitats we created in shoe boxes. But I do. I loved all that stuff.

One day at naptime, we read about the Battle of Little Bighorn and the courageous acts of Sitting Bull. My toddler had long since collapsed on my breast. I thrust the nearest scrap of paper (ever ready and willing on my living room floor) into the book to hold my place and cautiously carried the big lug into his bedroom. I hurried the more reluctant 4 and 6 year olds to their beds, flipping on the cassette player with Disney tunes to keep them quiet.

Then, as a woman possessed, I raced back to the couch where three pacifiers and six Legos “greeted” my eager body. Once I’d cleared the couch of debris, I popped the book back open, laid my head against a pillow… and read for an hour. I had to know what happened at that battle. I had to know what Custer’s Last Stand meant and why the Sioux Indians were outraged against our military.

I suddenly realized how hungry for information I had been.

Mind food. It was as if all those years of pregnancy, nursing and baby care came screeching to a halt for an hour and my now subdued, hormonal brain roared back to life. I read with a vengeance.

I finished the chapter before anyone woke up, deeply satisfied.

That’s when I saw the truth:

I wanted to be home educated. I wanted to know things. I reflected with a bit of horror, honestly, that even with a degree in history from UCLA, there were still all kinds of histories I had not studied, had not retained, had not cared about then… but I cared about them now.

Get the Education You Really Want

I loved learning!

I asked myself:

Who is interested in this material? Who wants to learn it?

I did. I wanted to learn about everything!

Then I wondered to myself:

Do the kids need to learn it just because I think it’s interesting, because a curriculum says so, because they should learn it?

A trickier answer followed and it took years to flesh itself out.

Kids love to learn. They’re open to all kinds of information, projects, events, books, movies, experiences. But they aren’t adults. Their ability to assimilate and use the information we give them is not comparable to ours. They live in what I call “first exposure” stage (where they hear about things for the first time, where they lay groundwork for second and third exposures), while we parents live at the other end of the continuum – the synthesis stage where we make extensive connections and fill in gaps almost effortlessly.

Exposure is great (needed, valuable, important). It’s not the same as mastery. In fact, unwanted exposure, first exposure mishandled can have an undermining effect, deterring a child from wanting to take a second look later when more mature.

So I faced a dilemma early in my homeschooling career. What is the purpose of homeschooling our kids?

  • Is it to satisfy my renewed enthusiasm for learning things I haven’t learned well?
  • Is it a chance to give my kids what I didn’t get assuming that I could have “gotten it” if I had been home educated?
  • Is it about “covering” some set of criteria by the time they’re 18, as though if they haven’t gotten to it by then, they’ll never get it?
  • Or is their education about them as they are now, their needs, their abilities, their first exposures?

If you have that hunger to know, feed it. Live it in front of your children.
Let them see how it’s done.

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Over time, I saw that my desire to homeschool could not be a substitute for my personal hunger to flesh out my education. The education of my children had to be about them – their readiness, interest, capacity to retain, their hunger to know. But if in that process I discovered what I’d like to learn, if the homeschool catalogs advertised fabulous books and aspects of history, art and science I had somehow missed as a child, I could fill in my own gaps without making my children learn them just so that I could learn them now.

I also saw that just because I deemed something valuable to know didn’t mean it was valuable to know as a child. All learning and exposures didn’t have to happen by age 18, as I was proving in my own adulthood.

It was at that point that we went from school-at-home where mom was the curriculum director, educator, and principal (and the kids were the students) to home education (mom and kids both on a learning journey – sometimes shared, sometimes parallel, sometimes kids teach and mom learns, sometimes mom teaches and kids learn). The curriculum is as diverse and varied as the world around us.

If you have that hunger to know, feed it. Live it in front of your children. Take time for it. Read books, study, use the middle of the day to watch that PBS special on art history or to go to a bird watching training. Let your children see how it’s done. Being an engaged learner for your own sake is the most important lesson your kids can learn from you… that learning is a lifetime habit and source of joy, and that it’s important enough to demand your time and energy. They’ll be fine, sitting on the floor playing with Legos while you get a full drink of French Impressionist painters. Promise.

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Before joy, comes the pain

Patty walked toward me with tears leaking out from under her glasses. First day back at co-op—100 families gathered to share the load of homeschool education. I teach writing. Patty teaches nature journaling.

She grabbed my shoulder and wiped her cheek. For fifteen minutes, she described a change of heart and home education that took place over the summer.

“I bought your book last year and read five chapters of it. But then I put it away. I didn’t know why, but I just couldn’t read any more of it at the time. This past summer, I made a decision to not put it off. I took that big notebook with me on our family vacation to read the whole thing beginning to end, realizing I’d spent all that money on it and I knew the content was good.”

As she read, a painful memory bobbed up from inside.

College,

English literature class,

a calloused professor who shamed her for “bad writing,”

who stomped on her spirit.

A self-protecting decision: I can’t write.

The pain stayed buried but resurfaced in an unconscious way as she home educated her kids. To protect them from the humiliation of criticism, she didn’t teach writing. Patty skipped the subject, and moved into the land of Maternal Home Educator Guilt. Native tongue: self-criticism.

Reading The Writer’s Jungle awoke that memory, that pain. As she revisited the feelings in my presence, more tears. She shared that in The Writer’s Jungle, she saw more than writing advice, but a way to be with her children that created an atmosphere of respect, admiration and support. She realized that what hurt in college was not that her writing was poor, but that her professor had wounded her in the process.

So as she began this first week of homeschooling, she vowed to change how she taught. She would teach writing with a different spirit. She shared that when they began dictation, one of her kids groaned. She switched things up and shouted, “I don’t care what you write. Write, ‘Happy Birthday!’ Write, ‘I want to eat a turkey sandwich for lunch!'” Suddenly the kids were laughing and writing and contributing their own sentences. Dictation became a game of figuring out funny things to write rather than a burden of work they didn’t care about.

Then Patty joined her kids outside on the porch for a little freewriting. They all wrote together and Patty discovered that she loved to write! She found out that a little friendliness, some humor, a change of scene all make writing easier. Too bad her professor didn’t know that. I wonder how many others believe they dislike writing because of his unkindness.

It amazed me in listening to Patty how powerful pain is in our lives. We bury it, hide it, ignore it, drink it away or drown it in reality TV. But if it lurks inside, it will find a way out. My husband likes to say, “You can’t cheat the dark gods.”

As you read The Writer’s Jungle, as you click through pages of this blog or peruse the website, be conscious of your own writing memories and how those may control your conception of writing in your home. If pain stands in the way of joyful teaching, allow it to come up. Recognize it for what it is: a memory that you have the power to transform today with your children. Then, brush off your knees and do it differently for your kids. There’s nothing like treating your children with gentleness to heal your own scars.

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How one mom did it…

Summer Year-Round in Your Homeschool

A friend of mine recently shared on an online forum about the transforming process she’d been through. I loved how she expressed herself, so I thought I’d start this week sharing her story with you. She gave me permission to post her experiences here.

For context, I had had a conversation with this friend two summers ago. She had been struggling with a reluctant learner and wanted to change her structured homeschool to one that was more relaxed. I told her that one way to change how you see homeschooling is to pay attention to how you live with your children during summer. Summertime is usually less scheduled, you feel freer to play with your kids, to follow their interests and take your time over things like cookies and lemonade. Imagine living that way all the time and think about how that outlook might change how you live the rest of the year.

It’s in that vein that my friend begins her story.

I had just finished a difficult and dissatisfying school year with my oldest son and took a much-needed break (choosing to rest instead of researching and planning all summer like I normally do). We had so much fun together that summer – we baked cookies, played games, read books, ate popsicles, painted, built Legos and Magnetix, went to the park, swam – time off from planning gave me so much freedom to really be with my children.

I’d had thoughts of more relaxed methods of schooling over the years and had even made some progress, but that summer allowed me to see how much learning was in everyday life (really was everyday life), how much my kids learned through their own pursuits (or through a little bit of “strewing”*) and begin to trust, listen to and act on what I knew and believed about learning deep inside. It was about this time, as I was contemplating how to change our school experience to match the summer, when Julie made her comment about summer being a guideline for the rest of the year.

It helped me see that the attitude of freedom and ease was the key and from that point on I began to re-evaluate everything (sujbects, curriculum, plans, schedules etc.) through that thought.

I spent the rest of the summer doing a lot of reading on unschooling, relaxed schooling, Montessori, Charlotte Mason etc. I looked at all the neat books and materials I’d bought over the years and never used. I thought of my kids’ interests and strengths. I reviewed our state’s homeschool requirements. I subscribed to some yahoo groups (livingmath.net was a great help – another recommendation from Julie). I read unschooling and relaxed schooling blogs.

I let all that stew and eventually a plan began to form. With our state’s requirements, I didn’t feel I could totally let go and pursue unschooling so my goal became to get the “basics” in but make sure it was through a “relaxed” method. For us (for oldest ds – 4th grade) that meant:

  • giving up on Spelling
  • switching to a grammar program that could be done quickly (Daily Grams and Easy Grammar)
  • doing more reading for Math and do away with as much repetition as possible in Abeka lessons (and do Math with him whenever possible)
  • have “free reading” and allow my son to choose the books to read
  • let my son choose what he wanted to study for Science
  • let my son listen to Story of the World CDs (instead of me reading it to him) and let him choose what he wanted to pursue (if anything) beyond that
  • made freewriting (with Julie’s Brave Writer prompts) our only creative writing
  • watched more TV shows (educational) and videos
  • watched lots of Wildcam Africa of Pete’s Pond
  • made Friday a “basics” free day and a day to pursue interests and/or art/music
  • got a membership to the Science and History museum and went often
  • made lots of trips to the library

I also gave my son the freedom to do what was scheduled in any order at any time (during the day). The only thing we kept from the year before was “assigned reading” time (ds reads for a set period of time each day) and Bible reading – both of which ds loved and there were no struggles over.

Overall, we had a great year. Attitudes changed and we began to learn together, mostly through everyday life. We remained relaxed and flexible all year – changing, tweaking, even giving up on the schedule and plans as needed. My son’s math scores on his year-end test jumped 4-5 grade levels – that score let me know that we’d made progress on his fear, “block” and hatred of math. The year wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t struggle-free but looking back, I think the most important thing was that we made progress – both in moving towards relaxed methods but more importantly, relationally.

My son was doing almost all his schedule independently (I’d made it that way too because of tension when we’d worked together before on the basics) but through his reactions when I worked with my middle son, I sensed my oldest craved the time together. I offered to work with him when he asked and he began to take me up on it. He told me he missed being read to – I made read-aloud time a priority instead of something I tried to get to. Some of the old struggles were still there but I tried different responses and over time, as he saw a new “me” and that I didn’t hold things so tightly, he began to relax too.

I think changing towards a relaxed approach and realizing learning takes place all the time (and not always in “schoolish” ways or subjects) really helped with getting past a check-list mentality. It takes time and trying different things to get there. I made some mistakes my oldest son’s schooling over the years (some out of ignorance, others out of stubbornness) and I think I had to earn his trust.

He had to get to a point where he could trust that what I put in front of him was relevant and catered to his interests and/or learning style. Plus I communicated to him that I was willing to be open and venture out and do things differently but that I’d appreciate some help from him during the process (attitude and initiative), especially with the “basics” I felt we had to get to. There isn’t much “just get through it” attitude left because there’s at least some element of each thing he does that he likes and enjoys.

I made some more changes for this year and so far things are going really well. It seems we’ve really hit a groove in some areas while others I know we’re still on the journey. I’m gaining confidence in our methods and love that our “schooling” (don’t even think of it that way much anymore) is getting closer and in some areas, totally in sync with my beliefs about learning.

Imagine if you lived and educated all year the way you do in summer.

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Isn’t that terrific? I will post about my journey later this week, but thought it might be more encouraging to hear how another Brave Mom is making the journey to a freer, more satisfying home life with her kids, right now. I’d also like to thank her publicly for sharing about her life with all of the Brave Writer readers.

*strewing: unschooling term that suggests that moms leave cool stuff to explore, read, discover in the paths of their children to stimulate interests.

The Homeschool Alliance

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