this woman’s work

The entry before was named after a song from the musical, The Secret Garden. There are parts of that soundtrack I like quite a bit and other parts that are just damn annoying. There is a gorgeous duet between Mandy Patinkin and Rebecca Luker that sadly cuts short (but the way they harmonize — lovely!) and I think Daisy Eagan is terrific.

(As an aside, if anyone knows of a showtunes mp3 blog, give me a heads up, willl ya? If I had the time, I’d do it myself.)

So I’ve been emailing back and forth with a friend, who is homeschooling for the first time this year, and it’s been an interesting conversation. I like to talk to people about homeschooling because it reminds me of why we’re doing it. And our conversation happens to coincide with the whole getting back to my writing roots thing that I wrote about below.

One of the reasons that I want to homeschool is that there was a lot I wanted to learn when I was little and I didn’t get a chance to. For example, I had no idea that there was any such thing as a sonnet until I was probably a junior in high school. I think that I would have liked to know about poetic form when I was first writing poetry and getting interested in being a better poet, which for me was about in third grade. (I was writing poetry before then but it was in third grade when I can remember feeling very serious about getting it right.)

Instead of learning sonnets, I was stuck learning something else. I don’t know what it was but it wasn’t what I wanted to learn. (Maybe it was that damn multiplication.) And by the time we got to sonnets, I no longer appreciated the value of learning them.

I regret that. I regret not learning about sonnets when I needed and wanted to learn about them. I regret that no one had the time or inclination to be involved enough in my learning to guide me towards something that would have interested me and benefitted what I valued — my writing.

I’m a great believer in letting kids learn by their passions. I basically think that everyone needs to have mastery over the three R’s (and mastery, I think, can mean different things for different people) and then lots of time to explore the things that make their hearts and minds buzz with excitement.

I tell Noah that the fun that he has when he’s busy with an exciting project — a new robot invention, a fort, a Super Peanut comic — is just like the fun I’m having when I’m writing.

“I’m busy with my work,” he tells me, sitting with his robot book across his lap. “I’m making plans.”

In the context of his important play, I try to point out his strengths.

“You have perseverance,” I tell him when he triumphantly shows me a building that was a challenge. “You’re willing to stick with things even when they’re hard.”

I also try to help him understand how to get around his weaknesses.

“You get frustrated when things don’t work the way you envisioned; it’s natural,” I say, my own patience tried by his fury. “Step away, take a breath and come at it from a new angle.”

Within the context of things that he values, Noah is willing to do work that in other contexts would be simply hellish. My hope is that this will teach him that learning itself is fun and that work is rewarding. I think as he gets older he’ll be able to translate this to the broader world.

The example I gave my friend was this: In college, I did simply awful in my required foreign language classes. I flunked Russian and couldn’t get past French 102. (I only passed French 101 because I took three years of it in high school.) I simply didn’t like foreign langauges and as a consequence didn’t do my homework. I mean, I never did my homework. I wasn’t lazy, exactly, I was just not very impressed with the value of learning a foreign language. (And you know what? I don’t regret this because I truly didn’t like it although I do now understand the value in learning one. I’m planning on studying Hebrew with Noah when he starts.) So what I did was change majors. I became a Sociology major in very large part because getting a BS didn’t require a foreign language while getting a BA did. However, I did take Statistics and Geology, both of which didn’t really interest me because while getting a specific degree didn’t matter to me that much, having a degree did.

What I’m saying is that we all have to do things that we don’t really like to do but my feeling is that we don’t need to be trained into doing them anyway. I would say that most children value learning for the sake of learning if it’s presented in a context that makes sense.

So here’s the other thing my friend and I emailed about. I don’t know a boy Noah’s age — give or take a year — who likes handwriting. And as luck would have it, most of them have terrible handwriting so not only do they dislike practicing handwriting but it appears that most of them could sorely use the practice. Now my thinking is that if the vast majority of boys hate it and if the vast majority of boys are lousy at it, then this says something developmentally about boys. Likely most of them are simply not ready to do handwriting.

Noah is one of these boys.

I could make him. I have made him. For a couple of months last year, we did writing every Wednesday. His handwriting didn’t improve but he started to sulk about doing it. I was completely turning him off about handwriting and I was giving him the idea that he was simply not cut out to master this very basic skill. Oops. So I quit making him. And as it turns out, he’s starting to want his handwriting to be legible. He’s frustrated when we can’t read what he writes so he’s been making more of an effort. I’m planning to re-introduce our handwriting curriculum with him (the ever-popular Handwriting Without Tears) to see if this isn’t so excrutiating for him this time around. And if it is? We’ll try again later. Or more likely, it’ll turn out that he is motivated enough to not need a curriculum.

It’s not handwriting that sticks in folks’ craws. The hard part is letting go of the idea that children should do things because, well, because they should. And many people have the same idea that my friend and I were discussing, which is that the very act of doing something horrid — or that seems horrid to the person doing it — is character building. I don’t think so; it certainly never worked for me.

I argue that children — like any of us — need appropriate motivation to tackle yucky stuff. I argue that children mostly have pretty good characters to start and it’s a matter of helping them see that for themselves.

It’s kinda like making kids try new foods: you can tell them they have to take a bite but getting them to eat the whole serving is likely to leave everyone unhappy. Of course there are parents who will serve congealed goulash over and over again in a misguided attempt to break a child’s spirit but who wants to hang with someone like that? To me, it’s the same way with learning. Try it. Try the workshop. Try the book. Try your hand at the new building toy. Try the math problem. Is it working? Why not? Does it need to work? Can we find another way to approach it?

As to sonnets? Will I be teaching Noah about them? Very likely although if he’s not too interested, I won’t fret. See, it’s not what he learns so much — past the three R’s on which all other learning rests — as the love of learning and the belief that he is naturally a wonderful learner.

Anyway. It’s time to go read to Noah so I guess I’ll sign off.

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