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Ella Frances Lynch thread #2


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Sorry for taking so long to reply, ltlmrs.  I've been trying to observe the school habits of my children who are around that age, but Christmas has made everything a bit haphazard. 

 

My slowest worker (who's also patient and diligent, fortunately) does take about 30 minutes for even a fairly short passage of copywork, but I don't have to be present the whole time for that.

 

In general, though, I think we're interpreting EFL's advice somewhat differently.  I tend to read the descriptions of different types of lessons more as possibilities than as requirements.  For instance, I'd be inclined to study a fable as an occasional change from poetry, not at the same time.   And when she mentions 15 minutes for handwriting, I read that as a reassurance about how long a reluctant child can be required to sit and follow instructions closely, not necessarily as a norm that all school-aged children should do that every day. 

 

There was something I posted a while back, from a 100 year old teachers' journal, that helped me understand the sequence of language arts skills.  Will try to find it.  Up to that point, I wasn't confident about leaving the earlier types of exercises behind when we were moving on to the more advanced ones.   More practically, we can use the children's writing samples (including letter-writing) as a diagnostic for what types of skills they need to work on:  handwriting, spelling, mechanics, description, narrative, etc.  Which is obvious -- so obvious that I keep forgetting it.  ;)

 

We're not strictly using EFL methods, though, since I've slacked off a fair bit with the primary academics  :001_rolleyes:  , and my upper elementary children have each been doing at least one English workbook or textbook a year (with me crossing out any parts that seem unnecessary).   I just realized that my choices for each child have pretty much alternated between books that are more nuts & bolts (such as Seton and CtGE), and ones that are more literature-based (such as the old LLATL or Prose & Poetry).  

 

And when we do the EFL type of literature lessons -- whether it's just for a day, or for several weeks at a stretch -- I just tell them, "that will be your English for today."

 

So I guess I'm not really correlating much at all -- just throwing a bunch of things at them.  One at a time.   :laugh:

 

One last thing that's occurred to me:  the elementary years are just a great big long transitional stage.  It drives me sort of nuts because just when I figure something out, it either changes or becomes irrelevant.  But 7-8 year olds are especially unpredictable.  My 2nd grader just jumped five "grade levels" in reading ability in the last 6 months.   And most of this happened during one of my slack-off periods.  I think the kid got bored, and thus had the motivation to try harder at reading.  Whatever... I'll take it! 

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ltlmrs, if there are specific time-consuming parts of your schedule you're wondering about, please feel free to ask.  Such as the memorization.  I don't remember exactly how you were doing that, but maybe a change of technique or timing could help. 

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Over here, I'm looking for EFL-friendly ideas for keeping notebooks for "appreciation" of art, music, literature, etc.   Not a list of works to study -- just a way of keeping our notes on these subjects in order, and keeping a record of the works we've enjoyed and thought about.  It could be a plan for organizing a handwritten notebook, or some simple reproducible pages to fill in.   (A while back, I tried giving the children some cute reading logs, but most of them haven't been filling the pages in voluntarily, so I've decided that this is going to be more in the realm of "official schoolwork."   So we might as well use 3-ring binders. :001_rolleyes:)

 

If we end up using printed pages, I don't want them to include illustrations, or vague and subjective sections such as "My thoughts about this" or "How this makes me feel."    What I'm hoping for - just off the top of my head - are prompts or headings to encourage the children to record the following:

 

- media perspectives (how have I experienced this work: e.g. have I listened to an audio recording, watched a video of a performance, studied the score, listened to someone play it in person),

- erudition (what I learned about the artist, and people/places/events referred to in the work, including links to science, religion, history, geography)

- language notes (if applicable, e.g. for vocal music; would be pretty much the same as for literature studies)

- artistic techniques & theory (what have I learned about music theory, literary forms and devices, etc)

- reproduction (have I drawn a picture, retold part of the story, memorized some lines, or performed part of the piece myself)

 

I'm not sure if it would make sense to aim for a generic plan that can be used for any of the arts, or specialized ones for different forms. 

 

I hope this makes some sense, and even if it doesn't, that someone is interested in discussing it.   ;)  :D

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I love the outline you just put together. I personally think it's brilliant. I could see it being really useful for a child later too. I like the media, erudition and reproduction parts best for grammar learning and the techniques for older students.

 

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This thread has helped me so much, so I have a burning question to throw out there: how would EFL go about training (?) A two year old, especially training not to scream? I remember in the governess book there was a germ of an idea to pay attention only when there was no screaming. Also, what amount of time and training would she say per day on a toddler? Anyone want to walk me through how they trained a virtuous child from infancy up?!

 

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Anyone want to walk me through how they trained a virtuous child from infancy up?!

Yes, does anyone?   :lol:

 

With my older ones, I was indecisive about discipline, and I'm sure it shows.  I was drawn to both Montessori and "traditional no-nonsense discipline," and it wasn't always easy to figure out how to combine them.   In hindsight, this was mainly because I misunderstood them both.  So I just went back and forth between what I thought they were saying to do.

 

But, to my shame, the child who was a toddler when I discovered EFL is actually my worst behaved.  :leaving:  Some of this is surely due to personality traits, but I was also too free-range at that stage, due to the stress of major life adjustments and the distraction of all the things we have going on here.   I hadn't considered the possibility that older children might be too indulgent toward their younger siblings (to prevent them from screaming...).   

 

My current toddler seems to be headed in a better direction -- though not entirely willingly! -- and I'm more confident about my ability to balance prevention, practice, redirection, and old-style consequences.  But it's obviously too early to say. 

 

So I don't know much about specifics, but it's certainly wise to keep them close to you, and set aside a certain amount of time each day for songs, little chores, and general "practice obeying Mommy." 

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Montessori noticed that small children who are getting upset can very often be distracted & calmed with nature, especially very small objects.  Just turn your own attention to a leaf on a potted plant, a bug, or whatever is handy; observe something fascinating; and make a calm but rapt comment about it.   Wait and see what the child does.  Seems to work quite well!  

 

Now that I think about it, this fits right in with RDI.  It involves joint attention and experience-sharing, and gets the child back on track with the "guided participation relationship" that's based on their trust and the adult's leadership and modeling. 

 

The governess book suggests that children can often be calmed with some sort of washing or grooming -- such as wiping the face gently with a warm washcloth -- which seems to serve a similar purpose. 

 

I've tried to emphasize the "RDI lifestyle" with my youngest, and think it's made a huge difference.  On both sides of the family, we have generations of very verbal and mathematical thinkers, who are strongly inclined to go for what seem like the most efficient method of doing things.  This results in the more or less conscious neglect of the little, repetitive interactions that serve to build social bonds.  Which, as it turns out, are really what this whole life & family thing is all about.   :001_smile:

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  • 3 weeks later...

Starting early is supposed to be best, and her published books and articles are mostly aimed at mothers who are wondering what to do with their little ones.  At the time, though, she did accept older children into her schools, and worked with parents who started homeschooling at different ages.   Those parents would have had the chance to correspond with her directly, and get advice that was tailored to them.   Since we don't have this option, we have to be willing to dig around for the relevant bits, and engage in some trial and error.

 

So it depends on what you're interested in.   In my experience, her books aren't going to provide a straightforward and complete how-to guide if you're starting at those ages.   (I'm not even sure they serve that purpose for the youngest ones, TBH, unless your family lives an unusually old-fashioned lifestyle.)  But it's never too late to start considering and applying her overall ideas about education and family culture.   They've made an immeasurable difference to us.  :001_smile:

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  • 2 weeks later...

Once again, I'm kind of stuck over here.  Looking back, I think I've made good progress in clarifying our goals, helping the children to develop everyday skills, and improving my own attitudes.  But overall, we just barely seem to have it together, even on better days.  We're just getting over a long stretch of illness that's made this very clear.  I'm pretty sure that what's holding us back now is my neglect of two of EFL's standards:  regularity of schedule and "simplicity of surroundings."   I thought these might gradually improve themselves as I sorted out my priorities, but apparently not. 

 

DH seems to interfere the most with our schedule, but I could solve this by taking full responsibility for bedtime (waah), and serving meals at a set time whether he's ready or not.   The clutter is more of a solid problem, literally.  We've been getting rid of things, but evidently not fast enough to make a difference.   Will have to get much more drastic about it. 

 

On the up side, all of this illness and bad weather has given me time to read some more early 20th century housekeeping advice, including two interesting home economics novellas by Kathleen Norris: The Treasure and Uneducating MaryThe Treasure is one of her early works, and is available online.  It centers on a servant who's been professionally trained in housekeeping, in a fictional institute that was evidently based on the Boston school of Ellen Swallow Richards (called "Eliza Slocumb Holley" in the book).   

 

I don't think any of Norris's characters had to homeschool a bunch of children, but at least I don't have to host bridge luncheons or worry about having my hats remade in the current fashion, like her middle-class heroines.  Nor do I have to restore a decrepit 400 acre fruit ranch or wash diapers by hand, like her poor ones.  So my problems begin to seem much more surmountable.  :laugh:

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I've also been thinking -- or trying to think -- about tact.   It certainly isn't one of my strong areas, as is obvious from some of my old posts (sorry, y'all :o), but according to the authors of these vintage books, it's just about the most important skill for the parent, teacher, or homemaker.   Mothers and governesses, in particular, are constantly being advised of the need to "summon up every ounce of tact" to navigate everything from toddler discipline problems, to children's discouragement about schoolwork, to difficulties with other adults.

 

So... whatever happened to tact?  I can't remember seeing it mentioned in advice for today's parents and teachers.  It seems to have disappeared from view along with the older methods.   In fact, it's now so obscure that it seems to only be written about in phenomenological treatises.  :laugh:

 

I haven't read any of that author's books yet (just ordered a cheap copy of one), but from the descriptions, I get the impression that he assumes that parents are naturally tactful in teaching their children.  Sad to say, this doesn't seem to be the case for me, or for quite a few other parents I've met.  It's not exactly that I lack the ability; I can do this surprisingly well, when I remember it.  But it's incredibly draining of "psychic energy," as EFL would say.

 

Maybe this is normal, though?  And we should expect to have to scale back our efforts in other areas, to direct more of our energy into this most important channel? 

 

I feel as if this might be the #1 area in which my education didn't prepare me for my vocation.   And might actually be making this harder.

 

Just the usual round of somewhat burned-out Friday thoughts!  :laugh:  :leaving:

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I've been thinking about what kind of EFL update to offer lately, and a burnt-out Friday one sounds about right. We're still trying to dig out from the chaos of the first trimester - I wasn't quite as physically ill this time around as I have been before, but I did not do so well on the emotional/mental/spiritual front. In retrospect, I probably should have done something about it, although I'm not sure what. Talked to my midwife and/or priest at least, I guess. Oh well.
 
Anyway, suffice it to say, lately I've been doing more thinking about things than doing things. Thinking about where we're at, what is "working" and what areas continue to be a struggle - or outright fail. In some ways, I think I've made a lot of progress in clarifying what we are after in this whole home education endeavor - really, what we are after in our family life altogether. But there are some pretty big pieces that I know are important, essential, but are still basically a black box. 

So lots of ruminating, going back over old territory, trying to figure out what I'm missing/not seeing. I even went back and reread my foundational motherhood text that I first read while expecting my now-eight-year old - (don't laugh) The Continuum Concept.
 
I'm not sure if I can articulate the issue that I'm particularly grappling with and I may delete this, but here's an attempt:
 
I completely agree with what ltlmrs has said about the preeminent importance of character-forming in EFL's understanding. I think what I'm trying to do is square that with what she also says and I have found to be absolutely true in our experience about how children learn. I think when I started this EFL thing, I thought the character-forming was something that required the mother to be very active, very vigilant, very...a bunch of stuff I am not naturally. But despite the fact that I'm not very like those extremely energetic moms with the planners and the habit-training and the washi tape and all that, my kids seem to be thriving intellectually. Maybe not in the most conventional ways, but they are so eager to learn, truly they soak up so much and are pretty observant and make all kinds of connections that surprise me and just constantly demonstrate that they have so much interesting stuff going on in their little heads. And it's so fun!
 
On the other hand, despite me trying so hard to be a more energetic character-trainer, my effects in that area seem to be, if anything, negative. So, I'm just trying to figure this out: how is it that my more laid-back, hands-off attitude to academics seems to be leading to a lot of "self-activity" and even the pursuit of a kind of excellence, but my attempt to really focus my efforts and energy on that "most important business in the world" is ineffective at best, counterproductive at worst?
 
Somewhere EFL compares the mother's job to an orchardist, basically. That we may need to prune here and there from time to time, but we don't cause the tree to grow, nor are we needed to direct its growth. Somehow I (sort of) get this for academic matters - I'm not concerned when it takes the children a long time to learn something or they lose interest for a period in some "important" studies. I'm pretty patient, but also reasonably alert for actual "teachable moments," ready to help when they are ready to be helped. I still over-help sometimes, but I'm getting much better at realizing when I'm pushing a little too quickly and backing off. I'm reasonably good at giving gentle correction when needed. Maybe this is all part of the "tact" you are talking about, ElizaG? In which case, this all should apparently apply equally to matters of character, but I just...can't quite see what that looks like.
 
Another sort of piece to my bewilderment about all this is trying to figure out whether/which part of my difficulties are actual issues of character flaws and which are just that I have a pretty different temperament than many successful and/or self-promoting homeschooling mothers (but I am ltlmrs's twin based on her last post, haha). And how much am I reading some of those models into EFL when she actually, as in that bit ltlmrs pulled out above directed to teachers, allows for considerable variation in the service of specific goals. Or even a third option, which is that we just live in a time that is just much less supportive of what we're trying to do - one thing that rereading Continuum Concept did impress on me is how much more room for error, in a way, there was for mothers in traditional cultures. The responsibilities of child-rearing were actually shared and not everything depended on one poorly-prepared woman. Seems kind of like a smart system, although also the Yequana indians weren't producing a lot of humanist scholars, so there's that. I dunno, maybe I'm just too hard on myself (and by extension, even though I'm not meaning to be, on everyone around me) and need to chill out. Maybe we actually are doing the best we can in the circumstances and when it seems like our efforts are falling short, we need to take that as an opportunity to practice humility and trust in God's goodness.
 
Anyhoo, I also am trying to lever myself out of this funk by reading Kathleen Norris novels, although somehow I picked a couple that deal mostly with divorced women or women wanting divorces, which isn't quite as relevant to my immediate issues as the ones you've been reading, ElizaG.  :laugh:  I've also been reading the first few years of John Holt's Growing without Schooling, which are now available very cheaply on kindle (I did get my new kindle for Christmas), and sometimes it's pretty groovy, but I think he actually shares a lot with EFL in terms of how they both understand children really learn, not to mention their skepticism of public schools (and I wonder if what vintage authors referred to as "tact" is part of what modern folk like Holt mean when they talk about "respecting" children - I don't think they're exactly the same, but there might be something worth looking at there). Anyway, I've been enjoying it. ElizaG, would you share your favorite one or two titles of the vintage mothering/governessing books you've read lately?
 
Well, to try to end with some kind of productive contribution, I did happen to stumble across the answer to the question of how EFL might proceed with Latin: duh, Hiawatha.
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Very sorry to hear about your current situation, ltlmrs.  

 

I appreciate hearing your thoughts about the everyday challenges, especially the lack of opportunity for focused solitary work.   I often think about how to prepare my daughters for this sort of life, but haven't come up with a lot of ideas, beyond encouraging religious vocations (totally serious here; this was a traditional path for more bookish women).  

 

The author of the books on the "phenomenology of pedagogical tact" is Dutch (living in Canada), as it turns out.  He got into writing about education when he realized how deep the differences were between the North American and European approaches.   So maybe Tress can give us some pointers! 

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LostCove, I'll admit to reading some less-relevant Kathleen Norris novels as well.   I even got halfway through The Runaway before realizing that I'd already read it.  Shows how much attention I was paying last time!   

 

Then I came across Corra Harris (1869-1935), a southern novelist.  Making Her His Wife has some solid advice about marriage, though not about motherhood, as the characters don't have any children yet. 

 

And I'm currently enjoying Female Excellence; or, Hints to Daughters, by Esther Copley (1786-1851).  It's aimed at older girls and young women who are still at home, but there's a lot of wisdom in it that's applicable to all ages.  I might buy a hard copy for my daughters' sake.  It would fit very well with that Belgian self-education pamphlet.  

 

I find it interesting, and heartening, that there's so much common ground between women writers who lived many decades and thousands of miles apart, and also between Catholics and Protestants.  

 

It seems to me that what's missing in newer Catholic advice is the sense of patience and endurance in long-term difficult situations (including those of our own making).   When things aren't going well, we're supposed to be able to fix them reasonably quickly, through some combination of prayer and secular expertise.  At least, that's the impression I keep getting, both from books and IRL conversations.   But it often doesn't work that way. 

 

These older books take it for granted that we'll have problems that aren't always readily solved, and might not be solved at all on this earth.  We just have to accept that our vocation often includes doing without the indispensible, and coping with the impossible, as Norris put it. 

 

So, yes, I think you're on the right track.   It seems to me that we're called to make a reasonable effort, and then leave the rest in God's hands.   And "offer it up," hour by hour.   This includes offering up our failures and discouragement, when they happen.  It's not glamorous, but it seems to be the only thing that works. 

 

I think there's also a lot to the idea that we're constrained by the habits of our extended family and society.  This isn't necessarily a good or bad thing; it just is.  But it's another subject that seems taboo in my circles.  We're supposed to talk (and even think?) as if all of our family and household decisions -- not just our initial vocation -- are freely chosen, based on what we've decided is best for our own children.  This is odd, when you think about it, because Catholics often say that individualism is Protestant.   But from reading these books, I get the impression that old-time US Protestants were much more community-minded than present-day US Catholics.  

 

Yesterday, I came across several references to the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, all in different contexts.  His thinking seems to fit with some of this.  But I'm guessing that he'll turn out to be one of those authors whose work requires more than a few minutes here and there.  ;)

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Thank you all for keeping this thread going. I only pop in to the boards sporadically these days and rarely have time to do more than skim threads, but I do always look forward to reading this one. :)

 

ElizaG, you mentioned notebooks - have you come up with anything that is working on that front? I would love to keep more notebooks here too, but mostly we don't really. I did start using a simple comp notebook for all of the dc's language arts needs. So narrations, copy work, spelling, Latin, and whatever else we do is all contained in one book. I tried using a bullet journal type index in the front, but we didn't really keep up with that. It is really nice to not have lots of loose paper everywhere though, and I enjoy looking back at what we've done over the year.

 

Interesting observations about individualism. I'm inclined to agree there. I think it has more to do with the culture rather than Catholic/Protestant at this point, though I would say that Protestant individualism has been a primary force in shaping the current culture.

 

Anyhow, my time is up, hopefully I'll be able to check in again sooner rather than later. :)

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Our notebooks are still sort of random.   Each child has composition books for school subjects, as well as one to use as a scrapbook (which they love). 

 

My older ones take a lot of notes about their hobbies, but left to their own devices, they'd just write them on random scraps of paper.  Child #1 has mostly gone along with my request to use notebooks.  Child #2 has started using the computer for most free-time writing.   Will probably have to have a few lessons in file organization!

 

I often look at vintage used notebooks on eBay (and have even bought a couple).  Most of them are incomplete in some way, and jump around a bit.   Same goes for my own old school notebooks.  I wonder if this is just the reality of how people tend to think and write, when they're not using pre-printed workbooks.   Even with the illustrated poetry binder that EFL describes, IIRC, the child switched rather abruptly from one thing to another.  

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I completely agree with what ltlmrs has said about the preeminent importance of character-forming in EFL's understanding. I think what I'm trying to do is square that with what she also says and I have found to be absolutely true in our experience about how children learn. I think when I started this EFL thing, I thought the character-forming was something that required the mother to be very active, very vigilant, very...a bunch of stuff I am not naturally. But despite the fact that I'm not very like those extremely energetic moms with the planners and the habit-training and the washi tape and all that, my kids seem to be thriving intellectually. Maybe not in the most conventional ways, but they are so eager to learn, truly they soak up so much and are pretty observant and make all kinds of connections that surprise me and just constantly demonstrate that they have so much interesting stuff going on in their little heads. And it's so fun!

 

On the other hand, despite me trying so hard to be a more energetic character-trainer, my effects in that area seem to be, if anything, negative. So, I'm just trying to figure this out: how is it that my more laid-back, hands-off attitude to academics seems to be leading to a lot of "self-activity" and even the pursuit of a kind of excellence, but my attempt to really focus my efforts and energy on that "most important business in the world" is ineffective at best, counterproductive at worst?

 

Somewhere EFL compares the mother's job to an orchardist, basically. That we may need to prune here and there from time to time, but we don't cause the tree to grow, nor are we needed to direct its growth. Somehow I (sort of) get this for academic matters - I'm not concerned when it takes the children a long time to learn something or they lose interest for a period in some "important" studies. I'm pretty patient, but also reasonably alert for actual "teachable moments," ready to help when they are ready to be helped. I still over-help sometimes, but I'm getting much better at realizing when I'm pushing a little too quickly and backing off. I'm reasonably good at giving gentle correction when needed. Maybe this is all part of the "tact" you are talking about, ElizaG? In which case, this all should apparently apply equally to matters of character, but I just...can't quite see what that looks like.

Yes, tact definitely includes knowing when to hold back.  It's basically "how to apply theoretical rules in real-life social situations."    This requires a knowledge of the rules and goals, an understanding of the other person, and at least a small toolkit of methods.   All of this can be done unconsciously, and often is.  Some old-time (mid-19th century) articles say that women and men have very different forms of tact:  the women's is all done by social intuition, and the men's has to be thought through intellectually, as in classical rhetoric.  Hmm. 

 

This is reminding me of Montessori's discovery that untrained country girls were the best at learning her method -- which is hugely based on tact, it seems to me.   Even the better M schools in our area seem to have some horribly tactless teachers, along with the good ones. 

 

As for the general questions of forming character -- I've been thinking about this since you posted it.   We don't do "habit-training" as a specific thing (except a bit for toddlers); TBH, I don't really know what that would look like.  

 

One thing I do know is that it's not picked up entirely by example.  For instance, I grew up in an orderly home, and went to very orderly public schools.   Every day, I was surrounded by order.  This did not make me orderly.  :laugh:  Somehow, in both school and home, there didn't seem to be much of a transition stage between having everything carefully planned and supervised for us, and doing it ourselves.   And it wasn't so much a lack of specific skill training, as a lack of encouragement toward the right overall orientation.  Maybe I was just exceptionally immature and dense (this is probably true), and I also know that by middle school I'd already developed some inner resistance to a system that was overly conventional and spiritually deadening.    It was basically the descendent of Victorian Protestant culture, but with all the joy and peace of Christ stripped out.  

 

So... what to do.  I could try to recreate that orderly environment of my upbringing, and re-infuse it with Christian faith -- taking, say, the governess type books or Susanna Wesley as a model -- but given that this type of system no longer exists in our circles, and I wasn't particularly good at it anyway, IDK If this would be at all helpful.  Maybe its time has come and gone.

 

This is not really helping to answer your questions, I'm sure, but just wanted to update you on the current state of stuck-ness of my thinking.  :laugh:

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I appreciate hearing your thoughts about the everyday challenges, especially the lack of opportunity for focused solitary work.   I often think about how to prepare my daughters for this sort of life, but haven't come up with a lot of ideas, beyond encouraging religious vocations (totally serious here; this was a traditional path for more bookish women). 

 

Yeah, surely I'm not the only one on this thread who occasionally wonders if I'm actually supposed to be in a convent somewhere?  :laugh: I'm finally reading that Vittorino da Feltre book, and this was the path he encouraged for the Gonzaga daughter he educated - dad was against it, but he died before marrying her off, and she and her mother entered religious life.

 

Yes, tact definitely includes knowing when to hold back.  It's basically "how to apply theoretical rules in real-life social situations."    This requires a knowledge of the rules and goals, an understanding of the other person, and at least a small toolkit of methods.   All of this can be done unconsciously, and often is.  Some old-time (mid-19th century) articles say that women and men have very different forms of tact:  the women's is all done by social intuition, and the men's has to be thought through intellectually, as in classical rhetoric.  Hmm. 

 

This is reminding me of Montessori's discovery that untrained country girls were the best at learning her method -- which is hugely based on tact, it seems to me.   Even the better M schools in our area seem to have some horribly tactless teachers, along with the good ones. 

 

As for the general questions of forming character -- I've been thinking about this since you posted it.   We don't do "habit-training" as a specific thing (except a bit for toddlers); TBH, I don't really know what that would look like.  

 

One thing I do know is that it's not picked up entirely by example.  For instance, I grew up in an orderly home, and went to very orderly public schools.   Every day, I was surrounded by order.  This did not make me orderly.  :laugh:  Somehow, in both school and home, there didn't seem to be much of a transition stage between having everything carefully planned and supervised for us, and doing it ourselves.   And it wasn't so much a lack of specific skill training, as a lack of encouragement toward the right overall orientation.  Maybe I was just exceptionally immature and dense (this is probably true), and I also know that by middle school I'd already developed some inner resistance to a system that was overly conventional and spiritually deadening.    It was basically the descendent of Victorian Protestant culture, but with all the joy and peace of Christ stripped out.  

 

So... what to do.  I could try to recreate that orderly environment of my upbringing, and re-infuse it with Christian faith -- taking, say, the governess type books or Susanna Wesley as a model -- but given that this type of system no longer exists in our circles, and I wasn't particularly good at it anyway, IDK If this would be at all helpful.  Maybe its time has come and gone.

 

This is not really helping to answer your questions, I'm sure, but just wanted to update you on the current state of stuck-ness of my thinking.  :laugh:

 

So, I mentioned the tact thing to DH (my exact words were something enlightening like, "So, tact? What is that all about?") and he immediately responded, because he just read a bunch of Pieper and currently categorizes everything by its relation to the cardinal virtues, "Sure, tact. Like prudence plus manners." Oh, sure, honey, now I get it. :laugh: And, coincidentally enough, I read this little bit by John Holt that goes with what you said above:

 

 

When we say someone has good intuition, or has a way with people, or is very tactful, what we are saying is that he has a very good mental model of the way people feel and behave.

 

I think I'm pretty weak on all fronts of this - my mental model, my sense of the rules and goals, and my toolkit of methods. Hmm, that may be a pretty helpful framework for working on this, though.

 

And yeah, I don't really understand what "habit-training" looks like either. I think for mothers who advocate it, what is actually working may be their "social intuition" plus their diligence in pursuing certain behavioral goals for their children? All I know is that whenever I've tried to imitate what they seem to say about their methods (which I've decided probably isn't all that descriptive of everything that is actually going on), I just feel like I'm constantly correcting my children, maybe at first with gentleness and good humor, but quickly declining into irritable nagging and eventually, if I don't just give up, harshness. So, not successful.

 

On the question of what is needed besides a good example, something I've been thinking about lately is which traits and habits of my parents I picked up and which I didn't and what accounts for the difference. Here's a mundane example: I didn't pick up the vast majority of my mom's housekeeping habits - with the exception of menu planning, which I've done faithfully since getting married. Why that? She gave me more explicit instruction in housecleaning, and I can't remember her ever involving me in menu planning or even suggesting it was a useful practice, so why is that the thing that stuck? Or why did I inherit my parents' frugality but not their hospitality?

 

Some of it has got to be a matter of temperament - I'm naturally more inclined to certain habits. But there's a lot of other things going on there. In some areas, there was, as you say, no real period of gradual transfer of responsibility for certain tasks. In other areas, I never really had any scaffolding at all and just kind of sank or swam from the beginning. I'd want to think about this some more, but I also feel like the areas in which my character is somewhat better developed are areas about which my parents did not communicate a lot of anxiety.

 

I'm curious about your musing that maybe "this type of system's" time has come and gone - would you say more about that? I'm not sure if this is relevant to how you are thinking about that, but as I continue to reflect on my struggles with order, I just keep coming back to "simplicity in surroundings," and the question of whether I'm trying to maintain order in unrealistic surroundings just because they are the kind of surroundings I'm accustomed to. Maybe I need to think even more deeply about what I'm trying to order, if that makes sense.

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Oh, two other things I meant to mention.

 

A random note on notebooks: I've started letting my 8yo use my kindle to read Fr. Pavur's Latin ebooks, and he has been making great use of the notes function. DH and I have started reading his notes every few evenings, because they are so lively and hilarious! I wish I could figure out how to translate his enthusiasm into pen-and-paper notebooking, but I think part of that is just that we haven't yet achieved automaticity in penmanship. He does occasionally register his complaint that it's not fair that DH and I get to take notes in our books, but he isn't allowed to write in books, so if I were better about taking my notes in a separate book, he might do more of that also.

 

And, via Growing without Schooling, here's a EFL-ish thing that Anne Sullivan wrote that particularly reminded me of the discussion of observation lessons and sense-training in Educating the Child at Home:

I am beginning to to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built upon the supposition that every child is an idiot who must be taught to think. Whereas, if the child is left to himself, he will think more and better, if less showily. Let him come and go freely, let him touch real things and combine his impressions for himself, instead of sitting indoors at a little round table, while a sweet-voiced teacher suggests that he build a stone wall with his wooden blocks, or make a rainbow out of strips of colored paper, or plant straw trees in bead flower-pots... Such teaching fills the mind with artificial associations that must be got rid of, before the child can develop independent ideas out of actual experiences.

 

 

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ltlmrs, thank you - you really articulated a lot of what I've been groping towards. EFL says somewhere, I will try to find the exact bit later, that you should only ever punish a young child for disobedience, and I really have thought about that a lot and not felt like I understood it but now might finally be getting somewhere.

 

That Trumbull example is so interesting to me, because the thing I always think of when I think about "habit-training" is also about door-shutting. Ages and ages ago, somewhere I read this thing from Charlotte Mason herself about training a child to shut the door when he goes out (although I missed her reference to tact back then, ha). And it just seems...exhausting, especially when you think about how many character traits we're supposed to be helping our children develop and how many children some of us have. And while I can imagine how a very energetic, diligent mother could inculcate all kinds of habitual actions in her children, I could never quite wrap my mind around how those kinds of habits would add up to actual virtues. And the literary examples of mothers I admire don't seem to do that much micro-managing - part of what makes their interventions effective, it seems, is that they are not terribly frequent. And, finally, in what I've read about traditional cultures, this kind of explicit training is just unheard of; children have much more freedom, but also seem to comply with expectations with much less drama.

 

But, I've continued to be bewildered about what else to do, since, as you say, ltlmrs, pretty much all of the child-rearing advice I've read, "traditional" and not, takes as its explicit aim or as the means to the end of "godly character" or whatever, getting the child to perform the actions demanded by the parent. And I can't exactly recreate a traditional culture to raise my family in. So I think I've just kind of assumed that if I were more energetic and diligent and were actually doing this kind of thing, I would be able to see how it all works out. All the very abstract reading I've done about the virtues and the ontological structure of man probably didn't really help. :001_rolleyes:

 

"Outright rebellion against simply accepting reality" - ha, YES. Wow, I've wasted so much time this way.

 

I don't know if I'll really do anything with the Latin Hiawatha besides make it available. It would be fun to read aloud the sections we have memorized in English at some point, but right now we're not getting a lot read aloud because the toddler has decided he is opposed to the whole concept.

 

Ahhh, thanks so much for this conversation, friends. I'm feeling more motivated than I have in months.

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LostCove, I haven't forgotten about this part:

 

So... what to do.  I could try to recreate that orderly environment of my upbringing, and re-infuse it with Christian faith -- taking, say, the governess type books or Susanna Wesley as a model -- but given that this type of system no longer exists in our circles, and I wasn't particularly good at it anyway, IDK If this would be at all helpful.  Maybe its time has come and gone.

 

It's just that the longer I think about it, the less I feel able to clarify it. 

 

For instance, Montessori is orderly, but in a different way.   Not that I'm particularly good at that, either, but I've always been more drawn to it, and I feel as if at least some parts of it might be objectively better than the "managing the children" approach.  

 

While I was considering this, it occurred to me that what I've said above could also be considered in terms of media ecology.  This gets back to some of our very earliest EFL discussions.   How many of the child-rearing norms of the last few centuries have been artifacts of print culture?  

 

Barbara Rogoff's work is very interesting, but it seems that most of the cultures she's looked at are not highly literate.  From a Christian perspective, and also just for practical reasons, I wonder if it might be helpful to look back before the advent of print culture, but not all the way back to primary orality.   This was the time that brought us the New Testament, and classical education. 

 

What does an orderly family life look like in a "manuscript culture?" 

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Oh, and I have it on very good authority -- from the head of a women's religious community -- that "doubting one's vocation" is absolutely Not To Be Done.  I wish there were some way to show you her expression of horror when I raised the subject.   Even if said thoughts don't actually originate with the adversary, indulging in them will certainly lead you in a bad direction.

 

We are just to pray, and plunge ahead, even if (for now, anyway) we feel as if we're making quite a mess of said vocation.   ;)

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It occurred to me that tact is closely linked with imagination.  We observe what's happening (or not happening), try to understand the other person, then imagine a possible next step and outcome.  In recent advice books, the closest equivalents I've found to imagination and tact are "creativity" and "empathy," which are sort of similar, but somehow they seem more idealistic and less do-able. 

 

This also reminds me -- when I was single, I was struck by the way my female acquaintances had two different points of view about men:  "they're like children; you have to manipulate them," vs. "you should never manipulate them; that would be undignified and wrong."   Maybe some of the former group were really as Machiavellian as they came across, and some of the latter group were really as straightforward, but I'm going to guess that in practice, most of them were using tact -- just thinking about it differently from one another (or not thinking about it at all).   Of course, some would call tact a form of manipulation, but then, some would say the same about any concern with manners. 

 

G. Stanley Hall, pioneer American psychologist, believed that girls should be taught with an emphasis on the formation of tact and taste.  This was to be done implicitly, in all school subjects, even the sciences.   This is obviously not a popular view today, and he had many opponents even in the early 20th century, but I think he was correct in recognizing that there was something of great value that was being lost in the modern school system.

 

At the same time, of course, classical education was disappearing rapidly -- and that system served, in part, to develop young men's taste and tact, albeit in a much more formal and standardized way than Hall recommended for girls.  So both genders were losing out.

 

Simultaneous with this, there was the rise of social psychology.  Now we have all sorts of media that are more and more finely-tuned to manipulate people.  In such a world, why would we need parents and educators using their tact to its full extent, anyway?   It would just interfere with the system.  :rolleyes:  

 

On a more practical note, here's something by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (Theory of Teaching, 1841, pp. 67-8) that I found helpful. 

 

     ----------------------

 

Perhaps I should have spoken before of the necessity of children's feeling perfect confidence both in the love and justice of those who are around them; this is the germ of a higher faith, and is absolutely essential to educate them even for this world.

 

Were I to enumerate all which is required in a teacher, I might as well draw a perfect character at once; for teaching engages to all the virtues. But I am too conscious of my own inadequacy, to attempt it. The teacher should be one of those persons in whom the good and true appear agreeable. It is treason against virtue, to be good without being agreeable; that is, to think obedience to principle, in the great affairs of life, an excuse for neglecting the more delicate traits and minor charities; and when the faults of character are deficiencies, and therefore less appreciable, the evil influence on children, who cannot discriminate, is incalculable. A teacher must also possess tact; a quick eye for the right moment to impart knowledge, to praise and to chide. She should have the habit of observing physical circumstances. Physical laws are paramount with children; hunger, thirst, sleep, are on them irresistible claims: it is only when we have more to set against them, that we can ward them off for a time.

 

Not enough regard is paid to the physical peculiarities of children. A state of rapid growth and change must be a state of extreme irritability, and occasional feebleness; and this must never for a moment be disregarded, or the mind and character will suffer.  Nothing contributes more to success with children than a nice perception of their state. Those are happy whom Nature has thus favored; others must seek it by becoming acquainted with mental and physical laws, by disinterestedness, and by endeavoring to enter into the feelings of others. We may imagine how much there is in choosing the right moment, if we observe a person who always chooses the wrong one, and represent to ourselves the influence on the child. The child is eager-to examine certain tools, or to watch a glazier, and the mother calls it away to listen to a story. The child is unwilling to leave the window; she urges it, and perhaps renders it undecided between the two, which is a lasting injury; or she prevents its becoming practically acquainted with what interested it, and allows its curiosity to die away without the natural result of increased knowledge. I believe half the indecision and unreasonableness in the world is caused by such injudicious treatment; and therefore I dread to check or unsettle anything. If the balance in matters of choice and expediency, inclines ever so little one way, I throw my weight into that scale, and bring forward all the arguments on that side. Little children need this confirmation and support. I state both sides fairly at first; but after a decision, I allow no regrets or looking back. They cannot unite all advantages, and they must put those which are unattainable out of their thoughts entirely.

 

A teacher who has this tact, will find many opportunities, even with children two or three years old, to direct the intellectual activity; and I must confine myself to this at present. There is more voluntary and conscious action upon the intellect than upon the feelings. The feelings are only to be kept alive in their first freshness. Perhaps we can never be more loving than children are, though our love may embrace a wider field, or be more concentrated; but we can actually think and know more.

 

-------------------------

 

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From p. 87 of The Advanced Montessori Method:

 

"During the first days when a new school is opened, we may consider a certain initial disorder as characteristic, especially if the teacher is making her first experiment, and consequently is handicapped by her over-sanguine expectations. The immediate response of the child to the material does not take place; the teacher is perhaps discomfited by the fact that the children do not throw themselves, as she had hoped, upon the objects, choosing them according to their individual taste. If, indeed, the pupils are very poor children, this phenomenon does nearly always happen at once; but if they are well-to-do children, already sated by the variety of their possessions, and by the most costly toys, they are very rarely attracted at first by the stimuli presented to them. This naturally leads to disorder when the mistress makes a kind of chain of that 'liberty' she is to respect, and a dogma of the correlation existing between the stimulus and the childish soul. Experienced teachers, on the other hand, understand better that liberty begins when the life that must be developed in the child is initiated, and they possess a tact which greatly facilitates orientation in the initial period."

 

So tact is essential for normalization.  And I've only been sporadically tactful, depending on my energy and concentration.  No wonder my successes in this area have seemed so random.  :o  

 

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In lieu of achieving "simplicity of surroundings" in the entire house, I think I'm going to try making our largest room into a combined Montessori area & older children's study hall, which will be completely off limits to unsupervised children aged < 10 or so.    Everything not directly related to core schoolwork and current content studies will have to find a home in another part of the house, or be given away.

 

This will require moving the toys to a more publicly visible area, but I've been thinking about doing that anyway, because it would be easier to keep an eye on the little ones while I'm working around the house.   And the primary graders really don't need a lot of indoor playtime.   In bad weather, we could still move the tables in the preschool/study room and play active games there.   (Which we can't even do now, in fact, as there's too much toy clutter.)

 

The biggest challenge for me is how to supervise the children when they're outdoors, while still getting something else done.  I've looked at blogs with tips on organization for large families, and many of them seem to solve this by keeping the little ones indoors all day.  :huh:

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More from The Advanced Montessori Method: Spontaneous Activity in Education (p. 96).   LostCove, this relates to a discussion we were having a while back about normalization in older children.  Somehow it went right past me the first time around.

 

--------------

 

I will choose from various individual studies made by two mistresses of a Children’s House at Rome for wellto-do children, those of two children of very different characters. One of these children came to the school too late, when he was too old, and had already developed in another environment. The other is a little creature of the normal age for entrance to the Children’s Houses. The older child (a boy of five) had already been to a Froebelian Kindergarten, where he was considered very troublesome because of his restlessness. “For the first few days he was a torment to us, because he wanted to work, but could not settle to any occupation. He said of everything: ‘ This is a game,’ and ran about the class— room, 'or annoyed his companions. At last he began to take an interest in drawing.†Although normallydrawing comes after the sensory exercises, he'was left at liberty to do what he wished; the teachers rightly thought that it would be useless to insist that the child should apply himself to a different task. Indeed, this child, having passed the age when the primary materials answer to the psychical needs of childhood, was for the first time attracted by an exercise of a higher order, that of drawing. “Whereas at first the child had passed from one occupation to another, and had even taken up the letters of the alphabet, but had never settled to work with any one of the objects, now suddenly discipline was estab— lished. We do not know exactly at what moment the change took place, but discipline was maintained and perfected, and reached a higher level in proportion to the growing interest of the child in every kind of occupation. Interest having been primarily aroused by drawing, the child spontaneously went on to the rods used in the teaching of length, then to placing the plane geometric insets, and so gradually worked through all the earlier sensory stimuli which the teacher had passed over.†Thus we see that the older child chooses the objects in inverse order, proceeding almost methodically from the most'difficult to the elementary.

 

------------------

 

So... do you think this might also apply to EFL's system?  So that the older ones might start with various activities that engage them, and then work their way backwards to neatness, careful observation, memorization, and then (oh, please) good diction and eye contact?

 

Hmm, maybe I am also being normalized, which would explain why I seem to be grasping the "first things" last.   :leaving:

 

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Yeah, I know what you mean about Rogoff - and Jean Liedloff is even more problematic on this front. Right now I'm periodically reading the Cultural Nature of Human Development, and I will say she has an interesting take on what "culture" is and how people actually form and are formed by it and also does a lot of compare and contrast between different kinds of cultures on a continuum from modern hunter-gatherer types to WEIRD societies. None of them would really qualify as a manuscript culture, but there are some interesting variations as relates to literacy and schooling.

 

Did you read In the Vineyard of the Text back when we were talking about Ivan Illich? A professor recommended it to me back in grad school, actually, but I had a baby and dropped out instead of reading it.  :laugh: I think it would have gone way over my head at the time anyway, but I did just order it, with Orality and Literacy finally, too. So we'll see. I went browsing around some of that prof's work this weekend as its (quite) tangentially related to all this, but I did find an interesting argument about commonplace books, which I thought I'd post given our interest in the hows and whys of notebooking:

 

 Commonplacing was the standard reading practice of Renaissance scholars. It involved poring over texts for memorable snippets, which could then be lifted from their argumentative context and made available in notebooks for deployment in future arguments. Commonplaces thus need not be consistent one with another, and any chain of reasoning in which they initially participated rarely survived the commonplacing process. There were limits to this liberty, of course, and English writers tended to call the improper manipulation of commonplaces-improper as judged by the standards of learned conversation-"wresting." But even when properly pursued, commonplace methods tended to be poor tools for systematic criticism. They were good for identifying piecemeal omissions but less good for confronting arguments, which they tended to reduce to fragments. They often gave rise chiefly to new forms of old truths. 

So that in conjunction with the question of oral, manuscript, and print cultures, got me thinking about the differences between things like commonplacing and writing commentaries and taking margin notes in how we interact with texts. Commonplaces go back to ancient times, of course, but the commentary seems like the more typical "notebook" of medieval culture, with commonplace books emerging more in the Renaissance and early modern period as a way of managing information overload. Johns focuses on commonplacing's "inefficacy as a tool for critically examining received views," which...well, maybe, but what really struck me was how a method that involves lifting bits of things from their context for the reader's own purposes doesn't suggest a very receptive relationship between the reader and the text. We've talked about this a bit before - maybe on the Great Books thread? - whether we come to texts to really be formed by them and if, even if we say that's what we we're doing, whether our methods really support that or suggest a more analytical, critical stance.

 

Ok, that's enough on theoretical matters. More later after I help my daughter who just came in with five eggs from the chicken coop in the sleeves of her dress.  :confused1:

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I didn't get very far with In the Vineyard of the Text; it arrived just when I'd started getting burned out on Illich.   I'll have to dig it out. 

 

G. Stanley Hall also makes some interesting points about other cultures, including ancient and medieval Europe, although now I can't remember what they are.  :001_rolleyes:   I've mainly been reading Youth (an abridgement of Adolescence).   He clearly wants to fit everything into his preferred framework of evolution and recapitulation theory, but his observations seem sound, and he seems to have a pretty solid understanding of "pre-WEIRD" Western culture. 

 

There's a lot of complexity to his thinking about men and women.  For instance, while he agreed with the standard traditional belief that adolescent boys should have male teachers, he also suggested that women might be the ones who would take the lead in "de-universitizing" American high schools and colleges, and shaping a new humanistic collegiate curriculum for modern times -- which the men would then take and use as they saw fit.   His reasoning, as I understand it, was more or less as follows:

 

1) women always been the motivating force behind the development of men's secondary sex characteristics,

 

2) they have a special sympathy and understanding for adolescent boys, which is a hold-over from their own adolescent observations;

 

3) since women take more to humanistic studies by nature, they have retained more access to this way of thinking, even in the face of modern schooling -- the implication being that the understanding on the men's side has been more completely wiped out (and keep in mind, this was circa 1905). 

 

Interesting.   It has me feeling a bit better about having to take on so much of the responsibility for my older boys' education.   I had been going on the idea that DH ought to be heavily involved, at least 50/50, in coming up with the vision, and then I could take on the task of carrying it out.   According to the above, though, it might be fine for me to keep making high level curriculum decisions, and have him supervise the day-to-day checklist type stuff as much as he's able to.  Which might possibly even happen.  As opposed to my original idea, which -- I was forced to conclude-- wasn't going to make any sort of timely progress, unless perhaps DH got recruited into some Christian patriarchy group with its own ready-made curriculum plan (please noooooooo  :laugh: ).

 

Youth begins with a section on pre-adolescence that starts at age 8, BTW, so it might be of some immediate interest to those of you who don't yet have great hulking darlings.  :laugh:

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Ordinary Shoes, I'm sorry - that sounds difficult. It wouldn't be that fun, but perhaps more penmanship practice so that your daughter can write faster without sacrificing her standards?

 

I agree with you that thoroughness and attention to detail are good qualities, and at the age your daughter is, I would think they should take precedence over encouraging work that is merely good enough. On the other hand, as someone who persisted in perfectionist tendencies (not in regards to my handwriting, alas!) well into a stage when I need to learn to prudentially accept when good enough was good enough, I do think that is a lesson I would have benefited from some guidance on rather than being left to figure it out myself with a fair amount of unproductive shutting down in the face of deadlines that made it impossible to work to my standards. So perhaps you can see this as an opportunity to help your daughter with that, even if it is coming a little younger than might be preferred.

 

ElizaG, thanks for those great quotes - I shared the one on normalizing the older child with my husband. It matches what a Montessori trainer told me when I asked her about it - just to get the child engaged attentively with something, anything - but it certainly fills in more of what happens next.

 

I try to do a round of decluttering every year either during Advent or Lent, depending on when I'm pregnant/have a newborn, so I'm obsessing about simplicity in surroundings even more than usual right now. I had kind of had the opposite idea to ElizaG of simplifying most of the house (we have a pretty open floorplan) and reserving our one non-bedroom that can be completely closed off for the grown-ups' less-simple stuff. The simplifying, I'm realizing, is probably necessary more for me than the kids. I just really cannot overemphasize how terrible of a stuff-manager I am, and how much energy and concentration that I need to, say, be more tactful, that I spend on stuff instead, whether actually managing it or just being overwhelmed and trying to hide from it. :laugh:

 

On supervising kids outdoors, maybe a good fence? We are fortunate to have lots of space and be very far back from the road with strict, thus-far respected rules about exactly how far down the driveway the children can venture on their own, so we haven't bothered with that so far. We also just treat the outdoors as a less-supervised space with fewer rules, boiling down to don't hurt anyone and don't "borrow" dad's tools from the garage - our yard would definitely not fly in suburbia as a result. :001_smile: I do have a very easy view from the house to the part of the yard where we've strategically located the dirt pile (for serious, you guys, you need a pile of dirt, I cannot tell you how many hours of contented play we have gotten of that) and the swingset (much more expensive and less used than the dirt pile, of course) and set up the sprinkler in the summer. I also leave windows open all around the house so I can hear what's going on even if they slip out of direct view for a little bit or I have to run to another room for something. In my experience, by about age 2, I can trust the littles to stick with the crowd, and the older kids know to keep an eye out for the littles. I'm probably going to need to figure out something new soon, though, because the oldest two are getting old enough that they want to and are capable of venturing out into the far back of the property, where I cannot see from the house and the littles cannot go without an adult. I will send the almost-4yo and the 2yo out by themselves if I'm working right by the back windows, usually this is while I'm still doing lessons with the bigs - they nearly always go straight out to the dirt pile, sit down with a few spoons and hot wheels, and stay there the whole time.

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Ordinary Shoes - This is such a tough one.  One of my children used to have neat-but-slow handwriting -- his cursive was even better than his printing!-- and I finally started hurrying him up around 4th grade, because the work was taking all day.  Now he no longer writes neatly, and has the attitude that he "just can't" write any better.  I showed him some of his old papers, and he was amazed that he'd written them.  

 

With these children, once the workload starts to increase, it seems necessary to explain that we tend to have two kinds of handwriting, "ordinary" and "best," and make sure they have regular practice with both.  We've kept doing formal handwriting practice over the years, but have probably taken too many breaks.  Although I'm just guessing here.  Maybe this child's writing would have slipped even if we'd been more consistent.  But the formal practice is recommended by EFL, and was done in the old-time schools -- even in the higher grades -- which suggests that it does have some effect.

 

 

LostCove, our yard is fenced, but your post made me realize that although it's one of the larger ones in our area, it's very small by rural standards.  I think it's just not big enough for the older ones, so they try to come up with ways to make it more exciting, which usually results in the younger ones getting hurt.  :001_rolleyes:

 

IDK what to do about this.  In EFL's day, the older ones might have been free to leave the property, but it's still not an option here (except short distances for the eldest), and there aren't many places to go anyway.   We saw this coming when we bought the house, but with very young children, and DH not able to commit to much yard work, I thought living farther out would be too isolating and physically difficult.  We talked about possibly moving when they got older (which sounded a lot simpler back then!), but thought there was a chance we'd have found more friends and unstructured activities nearby by now.   As it turns out, there are plenty of specialized classes, and lots of Sayers-ish co-ops and part-time schools, but nothing along the lines of drop-in recreation or "general PE," which is what we really need.   I don't know if this is due to lack of demand, or to the discovery that the Oakland public schools made when they tried EFL's system:  it takes more effort for adults to supervise children at play, than to line them up and teach them structured lessons as a group. 

 

Digressing here, but... this is something I wonder about more and more, now.   After reflecting on older ideas about home education, it seems obvious that many (all?) public school and daycare methods are optimized, not for long-term learning and character development, but for day-to-day management and crowd control.   And on realizing this, we'd naturally be inclined to take them off the table in disgust.  But then I think... how many popular homeschool methods are the same way?   For instance, I've read many blogs on scheduling and organization from mothers whose home is optimized as a learning space, but whose children appear to almost never go outside, or do anything potentially dangerous.  Then there are the numerous plans for academics that are based on a stack of books, all dealt with in a similar way -- whether workbooks, or "living books + a formula."  This is all very tempting, especially as our family gets larger.  And maybe it's not so terrible.  But these approaches seem to me to be much closer to "school at home" than their advocates would like to acknowledge.  

 

Even the large amount of childen's trade fiction and non-fiction that homeschoolers use is, I think, mostly an artifact of modern public school practices.  For one thing, it's what most of us are used to.  Beyond that, would most of these books even have been published, without the demand that comes from graded reading levels, book reports, and research papers?  I don't think so, given the difficulty I've encountered in finding children's books on subjects that don't fit neatly with the current public school curriculum.  Even if they make it to publication, there certainly aren't abundant cheap discards available. 

 

The public schools have the power to create a certain reading culture, and they have done so, with profound effects even on homeschoolers who consider themselves deeply opposed to present-day mass education.

 

Okay, I've psyched myself up to take away more books.  Look out, Landmark.  I'm not going to show you any mercy, just because you have such sturdy bindings and look so "educationally virtuous" when I line you up on the shelves.  :D   

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Hmmm, how to make the yard more exciting for the bigs without being too dangerous for the smalls. I know your oldests are older than mine, so my ideas probably aren't worth much, but I wonder if there are some tools and materials that could be only accessible to the older kids? Our oldest has a whittling knife and will spend a lot of time using it. We have found the biggest issue for him not to be safe use, but absent-mindedness, as he has from time to time left it where a little kid could get a hold of it. We initially got him a fixed-blade whittling knife out of fear of injury while opening and closing the blade, but he got a Swiss Army knife for Christmas and having something that really fits in his pocket has pretty much solved the issue of it getting left around, and so far, he has opened and closed it without incident. 

 

Also slightly more dangerous and thus requiring a bit more supervision/structure, but wood scraps, stumps, hammer and nails? Oh, various lengths and sizes of PVC could be a safer alternative. Or just really big wood blocks - there's a playground near us that has a set that seems to always attract the older siblings, who often organize a big building project while the littles do the manual labor.  :laugh: Or bricks? 

 

All ages get a lot of use out of sidewalk chalk here, and since I never, ever do messy art inside (like, not even markers), everyone gets excited about messy art projects outside. Of course, that requires a bit more set-up than just kicking everyone out the door. 

 

I'd be curious what you come up with since, as I mentioned, I think it's about to get a little harder for us to manage this issue, too.

 

Re: public school methods and the trickle-down effect, that seems totally right to me. Crowd control, and also easily measurable outcomes.

 

I was thinking about something along these lines recently when looking at a particular neoclassical writing curriculum. I flipped through it and thought...oh, we should be doing more (any) writing besides copywork...and look how easy this is to use...and when am I going to have time to read Quintillian and DIY my own progym-based composition program anyway... 

 

But then I looked at the literary models, which were mostly from vintage, "living" books (several of which we do, in fact, own) and kept thinking...hmmm, if I spend my time making the kids do this workbook, what am I not going to have the energy to do? Read Miles Standish with them? Would I actually rather they be studying M.B. Synge instead of Longfellow? And, hey, wait a minute, did Quintillian really have eight year olds doing the progymnasmata anyway? I mean, he wasn't trying to squeeze in a "classical" education while also taking his students through a 21st-century college prep high school curriculum.

 

I think part of the reason why I'm digging the Rogoff right now is that it's a reminder that "observing and pitching in" is a very natural way for children to learn - and one in which the child is doing most of the work (at least as far as the learning goes - there's plenty of other work for the adults to do!). Still not sure what that looks like in a manuscript culture, ha, but at least it keeps me thinking about what specifically I am giving my kids a chance to observe and try their hand at - and when am I maybe relying on some kind of crutch or material to try and get them to do something I don't actually do or even know much about. That may sometimes be necessary and appropriate, but it seems to require a very different kind of system to be effective.

 

Another odd part of this is how, for at least part of the homeschooling world, books written specifically for children seem to have become the key mediating material, not just for academics, which would at least kind of make sense, but for the entire mother-child relationship. When you start to consider the question of why all these books were ever published really, it's just very...interesting.

 

That being said, while I stopped buying Landmarks a while back when we discussed EFL and children's non-fiction books, I haven't been able to bring myself to get rid of the handful we already owned. I even read the Pilgrim one aloud to all the kids over lunch when we started studying Miles Standish, I guess because I was sure we should be doing something more for "context." :001_rolleyes:

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LostCove, I've just started doing a more focused reading of a book that I found a while back:  Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).  The author lived in England (whose countryside, he argues at length, is the world's best place in which to homeschool :laugh: ), but the book was popular in the US as well.  Page 31 describes the hours of happiness that any 10-12 year old boy can spend, with just a couple of simple tools and materials.   I'm going to take this as a sign that you're right.  Though, given that mine still aren't entirely reliable about putting things away, I'm :svengo: at the thought of giving them a gimlet.

 

As for the rest of the book, it's definitely in the "better late than early" camp, perhaps to a greater extreme than the Moores et al.  I think he probably overstates his case in places, and it's a tad Rousseauian for me, but I still like it a great deal.  

 

Oddly enough, I'm finding that books from the 1810s-40s often feel more modern and relatable than ones from the later 19th century.  Maybe it's because there was less artifice?  For instance, page 59 is about tact, and he doesn't assume that we know what it is, or that most of us have it.   Parents evidently found it confusing and difficult back then, as well.  
 

Beside the affection of which we have spoken, and beside the energy of mind which should be its counterpoise, and beside also the natural taste for teaching, there is a tact and address, not easily described, any more than easily acquired, which, in the daily and hourly government of children, and in rendering them happy, avails far more than all other qualities put together ,apart from itself. Mothers or teachers may be seen, in every respect, very poorly endowed with the knowledge or the principles, or with even the moral sentiments proper to the business of education, and yet unrivalled in the art of securing obedience, and of diffusing enjoyment, and of imparting so much knowledge as they profess to communicate.

It is difficult, except by naming its opposites, to fix in words our conception of this desirable tact. We may say, if it be really needful to say so much, that it is not the product of any laboriously obtained knowledge of human nature, or of a scientific acquaintance with its principles. The happy management of human beings is, no doubt, in fact, always in harmony with the laws of the human mind ; but this harmony is intuitively perceived, not learnedly acquired. Many a village dame plies the machinery of human nature well ; but never has a professor of philosophy told those to whom nature has not granted this tact, either how to acquire it, or how to manage without it.

Parents may be found, in the highest degree solicitous for the welfare of their children, and not deficient in general intelligence, who nevertheless are perpetually struggling with domestic embarrassments, and sadly depressed by disappointment in the discharge of their daily duties. In such instances there may be observed, a something too much in the modes of treatment — too much talking and preaching, and a too frequent bringing in of ultimate motives, until the natural sensibility and delicacy of children's minds are, if the phrase may be allowed, worn threadbare ; for all the gloss of the feelings is gone, and the warp and substance are going.

Such parents often, for the sake of making sure doubly sure, lift the arm of authority, when the raising of the finger is more than enough. An indiscreet anticipation of resistance never fails to suggest it. The simple law of the association of ideas is the immediate cause of a vastly larger amount of human actions than what springs from any formal resolution so to act. In all cases, therefore, the probability of compliance is much greater when nothing but compliance is expected, than when a thought of the contrary is, by some inauspicious word, or a mere look of doubt and anxiety, suggested. The great world of moral agency turns glibly upon its pivots, by the momentum of habit and the association of ideas : mischief attends the attempt to urge its onward force, by more motive or reason, in any instance, than is wanted.

If we were to attempt to divine the secret of a prosperous management of children, perhaps it would resolve itself into the simple fact of a quick perception of the train of their ideas, at any moment, and a facility in concurring with the stream of thought, whatever it may be, which, by the slightest guiding word or gesture, can be led into whatever channel may be desired.

The rule of management might then be condensed into the three words— discern, follow, and lead. That is to say, there is first the catching of the clue of thought in a child's mind ; then the going on with the same train a little way ; and, lastly, the giving it a new, though not opposite direction. By the means of a governance of the wandering minds of children in some such method as this, there is hardly any limit to the control which may be exercised over, as well their conduct, as their moral and intellectual habits. The same law of influence holds good even with adults, or at least with all but the most highly cultured and vigorous minds, which renounce this sort of control ; and it is on this principle that the demagogue, or the religious orator, who is gifted with an intuition of human nature, leads and turns the minds of thousands, by the lifting of his finger.

But to return to our proper sphere — we may affirm that the government of minds is the easiest of all exercises, to whoever possesses the secret of influence, and is confident of success ; but the most difficult, and the most vexatious, to those who attempt it on formal principles, such as may be laid down in so many rules fitted to occasions.

 

He goes on to recommend that parents build up the bonds of affection with their children -- and, thus, of influence -- by a sort of "Playful Parenting" approach, which isn't something we'd associate with later Victorian family life.   In fact, Charlotte Mason seemed to discourage the use of this influence altogether. 

 

BTW, two of the author's sisters became poets, and one of them wrote "Twinkle, twinkle, little star."   Their father (another Isaac Taylor) also wrote books about education.  I'll have to look them up.  Maybe the Taylors had the real "poetic knowledge" curriculum?  

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Okay, I found a book that explains some of the shifts I've been seeing in 19th century women's education:  How Young Ladies Became Girls:  The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood by Jane H. Hunter.  I've only been looking at it in Preview mode, but it's been enough to give a general idea. 

 

The chapter on "Work" begins: 

 

"At some point in the nineteenth century, middle- and upper-middle-class daughters of the urban Northeast stopped doing substantial housework." 

 

In the early US, these young women and their mothers generally did their own work, sometimes with temporary "helpers" who were similar in education and status to their employers.  The author seems to present the latter as an example of American egalitarianism, but I wonder if it might be connected with the earlier British system of sending sons and daughters out to service in the households of friends or relatives.  In any case, this was apparently how things were done in the early Northeast until the 1840s, although not without some awkwardness (which I think I can understand, having hired some young women from our social circle as mother's helpers).

 

With industrialization, the largest literate class began moving out of the countryside, and changing their occupation from "farmers of the middling sort" to urban businessmen.  As we've discussed earlier, the factories were also taking over many of the functions of the productive home.    Starting in the 1850s, large-scale Irish immigration created an instant servant class, who were looked down upon and treated as underlings.  This is something I'd never really considered -- the effect of the influx of cheap foreign labor on northern US family culture -- but Hunter makes a case for its being a significant factor.

 

As a result of all this, by the 1870s, daughters' help was usually no longer needed, either in their own home or the neighbors', and "doing one's own work" was associated with a lower social status.  Still, most parents recognized its character-building benefits, and gave their girls make-work tasks such as fancy sewing and token amounts of dusting.   The daughters were well aware that this was gratuitous.  "Especially when girls saw their house work as 'helping mother,' a note of wryness or rebellion crept into otherwise implacable diaries." 

 

This seems to have been a large part of the reason why the early high schools enrolled more girls than boys:  the girls weren't doing anything useful anyway, so they might as well get an education, and perhaps marry up in social class.   Many of these schools were co-ed, and their academic workload had been designed for boys with no domestic responsibilities, so the girls' parents often stopped expecting even token amounts of housework.  "By the end of the century, cultural promoters of domesticity had almost given up on their efforts to reintroduce domestic apprenticeships among an urban elite.  (...) The founding of clubs and the establishment of classes, like the writing of advice manuals themselves, were designed to encourage the practice of dying arts."  

 

This is reminding me of Kathleen Norris yet again.  One of her most memorable short stories, "Rising Water" (1934), is about a family on a California ranch whose nanny sees herself as part of the family, rather than as a servant.  This horrifies the child's mother, who was "born and brought up in New York," in households with "capped and aproned maids."   So it also seems possible that due to patterns of settlement, servant culture never really got established in any but the fanciest neighborhoods of California.  (Which would make sense, since as far as I can tell, neither did culture in general.  :laugh: )

 

In many of Norris's California stories, the closest equivalent to the "capped and aproned maid" is the Chinese houseboy.   And in one of her novels, the heroine, who grew up in a well-off San Francisco family, ends up marrying a ranch hand.  Who turns out to be an aristocrat in disguise... :lol: but the point is, the characters who object to their friendship are clearly depicted as snobs.  So it's sort of a return to 1830s values, at least as they're described in Hunter's book. 

 

This would explain why, when Norris's 1920s-30s town-dwelling women go to live on a ranch, it always feels as if they're going back to pioneer days.  In a sense, they were, and this would have been one of the last ways that American women could experience that way of life.  Interesting.

 

So, looking especially at New England, I think there is a real tradition of literate servantless domesticity for us to connect with, though we have to go back quite a bit farther than I'd expected.  :001_smile:

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Forgot to add links to some interesting early US writings on women's education.   I found out about all of these through another scholarly book, Imagining Rhetoric:  Composing Women of the Early United States by Janet Carey Eldred and Peter Mortensen.

 

The Young Lady's Home by Mrs. Louisa C. Tuthill (1839; this is the 1847 edition)

 

This book contains suggestions for young women in their teens and early twenties, who were home from school, to fill in the gaps in their learning and character development.  As with Isaac Taylor, the author doesn't assume that her readers, or their parents or teachers, are anywhere near perfect, which is a refreshing change from so many later books.  Just as as Taylor's book was available in the US, this one made it into a UK edition (titled Home), so there must have been a fair bit of common ground on this subject. 

 

Ida Norman:  Or, Trials and Their Uses, by Mrs. Lincoln Phelps (1848)

 

This is a fictional work that was originally written to be read aloud in a girls' school.  For me, it started off feeling stilted, but ended up quite compelling.

 

Interestingly, both of the above books contain long descriptions of some especially appealing part of European Catholic culture, which are followed by brief, standard Protestant criticisms of the Catholic faith, as if to "slam the lid on it."  This was right around the same time that French religious communities began opening large numbers of US girls' schools, whose early students were mostly Protestant.   It seems as if there are some connections there that haven't been fully explored.  

 

Going back a few decades earlier, Hannah Webster Foster's The Boarding School (1798) describes a sort of "finishing school" in which the teacher has the girls take turns reading aloud from a good book, while the rest of them do their needlework.  They repeat the process in the afternoon, except that this time, the girls are taking turns reading their own compositions.  Sort of like a "socialized Robinson curriculum."   Well, they could do a lot worse! 

 

That reminds me of a practical request.   I've been trying to make a list of types of old-time handwork that were at least sometimes done while reading silently to oneself, or while listening to someone else read aloud.  Your contributions would be appreciated.  Here's what I've come up with so far:

 

While reading to oneself:  rocking the cradle with one foot; spinning ("with the book taped to the distaff," as Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote of their mother)

 

While listening to a reader:  plain sewing, fancy sewing, knitting, spinning, shelling beans, peeling potatoes; for men, whittling, carving, sewing harness

 

Now, off to do some (hopefully useful) work of my own...

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In the early US, these young women and their mothers generally did their own work, sometimes with temporary "helpers" who were similar in education and status to their employers.  The author seems to present the latter as an example of American egalitarianism, but I wonder if it might be connected with the earlier British system of sending sons and daughters out to service in the households of friends or relatives.  In any case, this was apparently how things were done in the early Northeast until the 1840s, although not without some awkwardness (which I think I can understand, having hired some young women from our social circle as mother's helpers).

 

If I'm remembering the right book (can't find my copy at the moment), I think A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has a good description of this kind of domestic employment of neighbors' daughters in a community in 18th-century Maine. DH has been saying for a while that I need a "mothering intern," but as it is we can hardly find a teenager around here interested in babysitting for a few hours every month or so.  <_<

 

I'm really interested in your observations about how the advice manuals shift over time, because a few weeks ago, it occurred to me that I should go back and look at some of the 19th-century texts (all American) I studied in grad school. Back then, I read them for insights into the development of Victorian ideologies of domesticity, but now I thought, hey, maybe there are some good tips in there! But in fact, overall, the ones I've glanced through thus far are high on sentimentality and low on practical advice.

 

I also pulled an old grad school favorite off the shelf, which I may have mentioned before, Jeanne Boydston's Home and Work. There's nothing about literary culture in there, but there is a lot about how women's work did and did not change from the colonial period through to mid-19th century. One thing that jumped out at me this time was that apparently in the antebellum period mothers' failure to pass on domestic skills to their daughters was a widely discussed issue. Boydston argues that part of the problem was the introduction of a number of new household technologies, particularly the cast-iron stove and the treadle sewing machine, which affected two of a woman's most time-consuming tasks. Women had to learn how to use these technologies from scratch - their mother's experiences or their own from childhood were no help - and plenty of them seemed unconvinced that they were that much of an improvement over the old ways of doing things (so the ambivalence some of us feel about modern labor-saving conveniences is nothing new). The explosion in housekeeping advice manuals was in part a response to this disorienting situation, and of course, runs right along into the home ec movement.

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That reminds me of a practical request.   I've been trying to make a list of types of old-time handwork that were at least sometimes done while reading silently to oneself, or while listening to someone else read aloud.  Your contributions would be appreciated.  Here's what I've come up with so far:

 

While reading to oneself:  rocking the cradle with one foot; spinning ("with the book taped to the distaff," as Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote of their mother)

 

While listening to a reader:  plain sewing, fancy sewing, knitting, spinning, shelling beans, peeling potatoes; for men, whittling, carving, sewing harness

 

Now, off to do some (hopefully useful) work of my own...

 

When my daughter was in middle school, we took turns reading to each other while doing dishes. We should start doing that again...

 

I sometimes listen to audiobooks while doing the dishes. At other times doing dishes is more of a working meditation.

 

Grinding grain is also conducive to reading or being read to. Something else I did when she was younger....ah the memories!

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Thanks for posting those, Ordinary Shoes.

 

I tend to question the first author's assertion (from MacIntyre) that the parish-centered life is a privilege of the leisured class. I'm not sure we have a "leisured class" in our area -- as nearly everyone seems pretty busy -- but church devotions and social gatherings seem to be most heavily attended by lower-income parishioners.

 

If anything, I'm inclined to think that the decline of US parish life went along with the shift in the Catholic population from blue-collar to white-collar. The forms of parish life that developed organically among the former group, such as St. Anthony devotions and spaghetti dinners, weren't necessarily appealing to the latter. There have been attempts to engage educated adults, e.g. by encouraging social and political activism (either liberal or conservative), or by teaching classes about the liturgy or theology (ditto), but these approaches have too many problems to get into here. I'll just point out that they're not family-oriented, in contrast to the more traditional prayer-and-food centered gatherings.

 

This seems to be a core problem. The churches try to engage adults as individuals, without noting that most of these adults come with children. In particular, women tend to be mainstays of parish life, but higher-income women are likely to be part of the culture of intensive parenting, which consumes a lot of time and social energy. I don't think it's realistic to expect them to abandon this -- especially since I don't seem able to abandon it myself! :-D -- but it certainly isn't doing much to help the situation.

 

Maybe we need to establish some new patterns of parish activity that aren't based around the 20th century model of drop-off classes, but also aren't as casual as the "kids running around at the post-novena BBQ" scene. And that appeal to the concerns of today's middle-class parents.

 

I can see it now: the "St. Thomas the Apostle (patron saint of construction workers) Maker Space," with a Sandplay Therapy table on the side. ROFL

 

Hmm... I just found a reference to a 1959 Catholic Digest article, whose author noted that parents gravitated toward parish activities that addressed "children and their problems." He went on to express concern that the church was viewed as a glorified child-care service. Of course, the latter doesn't have to follow from the former, but by the 1950s, the consumer mentality was well established. In the 1920s and 30s, there might still have been a chance for pastors to establish a different set of expectations, centered more on supporting the parents as home educators (as the LDS did, for instance).

 

It looks as if EFL was right on, as usual. It's too bad the NCWC took things in such a different direction.

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I was thinking about the McLuhans' concern that technology is disconnecting our minds from our bodies (aka "angelism" or "discarnate man"). It struck me that the two examples I mentioned semi-jokingly above -- group "maker space," and sand table with small figures -- are somewhat unusual for planned children's activities in that they use the whole body, standing up and moving around, while also challenging the intellect.

 

Sports and dancing use the mind, but not in the same way, especially with younger children who are struggling just to do the basics.

 

This got me taking a closer look at the first decades of the physical education movement, which I'd ignored in favor of the playground movement. It turns out to be more relevant than I expected. The early leaders of PE wrote from a holistic mind-body perspective that had just about vanished by mid-century (though, once again, it's being rediscovered in the context of therapy). They were also deeply interested in the effects of technology on humankind. Here's an interesting article from Gulick, for instance.

 

"Vitality and Modern Life," Physical Education, May 1896

https://books.google.com/books?id=mp1JAAAAYAAJ&pg=RA4-PA21

(continued on p. 33)

 

In contrast to the famous philosophers of academic education, some of whom had sketchy real-life experience, the "philosophers of PE" were very practical men. After Gulick, one of the major figures was Jay Bryan Nash. He ran the parks and recreation department for the city of Oakland, right around the time their school board decided to try EFL's ideas. Nash wrote and edited many textbooks on physical education, and also wrote works of advice and social commentary for a general audience. I can't think of anyone in our time whose career fits that pattern.

 

Online Books page for Nash:

http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=Nash%2C%20Jay%20Bryan%2C%201886-1965

 

"Building Morale" and "Teachable Moments" look helpful so far, and "Spectatoritis" is 85 years old but seems remarkably contemporary (not sure whether to see this as depressing or reassuring...). All are very EFL-ish, I think. I wish someone would reprint them.

 

Anyway, this is all giving me the sense that the connection between thought and action -- especially whole-body action -- is something we really need to work on in our homeschool. Probably even the #1 thing.

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Just noticed that in the preface to one of his later PE textbooks, Nash gives the bulk of the credit for his thinking to Clarke Hetherington, who published little but had a great influence on those working in the field.

 

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015031500203;view=2up;seq=10

 

I'd heard of Hetherington before, because he was in charge of the Oakland Summer Play School, a sort of half-day day camp that started in 1913. The experiment in the public schools took place a year or two later. Each primary class was divided into two groups that took turns between the classroom and the schoolyard. The indoor curriculum focused on the 3R's, and was based on EFL's Schools of Individual Instruction. The outdoor curriculum combined PE, manual work, and "extras," and was based on the Play School. In fact, the whole project seems to have been referred to as the "Play-School Experiment."

 

Interesting stuff! Sad to say, though, I have no idea how to replicate the Play School, or any of the old lovely-sounding day camp environments, in my home. Even though physical education was originally meant to be individualized (another concept that's been lost), IRL the children were always grouped by age, and the leaders didn't allow much free choice due to lack of staffing. They thought they had problems. My lack of staffing is extreme! :-D

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Link dump for those interested in the Oakland experiment.

 

Clark Hetherington's 1913 Report on the Summer Play-School:

https://books.google.com/books?id=q9NRAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA241

 

The public school plan was developed by the Oakland School Women's Club, a group of schoolteachers. Club meeting report, Western Journal of Education, Oct. 1914:

https://books.google.com/books?id=mq0VAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA168#v=onepage&q&f=false

 

Article about the experiment, Journal of Education, August 26, 1915

https://books.google.com/books?id=0CNJAQAAMAAJ&pg=RA1-PA153

 

Henry Stoddard Curtis's 1917 book, "The Play Movement and its Significance," says that this was also tried in Los Angeles and Boston (p. 40 - no details, though)

https://books.google.com/books?id=9Ug6AQAAMAAJ

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Looking at all these names has helped me see some more connections.

 

EFL started her school in Atlantic City in 1907. Around the same time, Frederic Lister Burk was trying a different experiment in individual instruction at the San Francisco State Normal School. Compared to EFL's system, Burk's is closer to present-day norms for both homeschooling and classroom teaching. Students spent most of their time at their desks, working at their own pace in specially written instructional booklets. They also took part in a regular schedule of teacher-guided "Socratic discussions" in the different subject areas. Discussion groups were made up of students who had gone beyond a certain level in the subject in question, so they'd all have the same basic knowledge.

 

This would certainly be convenient for a large family with closely spaced children (it's pretty much equivalent to Seton, CLE or ACE, + group discussions), and pre-EFL, I might not have objected to it. Now, all I can think is: "elevator alert!!!" And it's a sit-down elevator, too. Just as the physical education movement was recognizing the value of standing for oral recitation, the Burk system was doing away with it.

 

After looking into Burk's other writings, I realized that he was one of the three contributors to the series that appeared in the Ladies' Home Journal, criticizing the public schools. EFL's article got more attention (positive and negative), but Burk's proposed solution ended up being more influential. His system inspired the creators of the Winnetka and Dalton plans, and is still mentioned in books on the story of educational technology. And that's clearly what it is: a technology. Like today's electronic versions, the instruction itself is entirely ready-made and standardized. All that's individual about it is the speed at which each child completes the booklets, and the possibility of "testing out of" some of the practice sections.

 

Here's a question, then. We know that technologies don't spring out of nowhere. They're all rationalizations and extensions of some human activity. In many cases, they're also developments of earlier technologies. So where did Burk's system come from? Who, or what, inspired him?

 

It turns out that there was an earlier experiment, done in the 1880s by Preston W. Search in Pueblo, Colorado. From what I've read, he got rid of class recitations in favor of (traditional?) individual ones, and set up a different room for each subject, each having what he called a "studio or workshop" atmosphere. The Pueblo plan is generally held to be the first attempt at "individual instruction" since graded schools became the norm. According to historians, it did influence Burk, and, therefore, all those who followed him -- though this connection often went unacknowledged.

 

Was EFL's (mysterious) approach to teaching older children also influenced, in part, by Search? It seems quite likely to me. His book "An Ideal School" was published just as she was starting her teaching career, and much of his thinking is a close fit with hers.

 

"Individual Teaching: The Pueblo Plan," from Educational Review, 1894: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015014691706;view=2up;seq=168

An Ideal School (1901): https://archive.org/details/anidealschool00seargoog

 

In "Educating the Child at Home," she recommends Edgar Swift's "Mind in the Making" (1908). This book includes a description of the Pueblo plan.

 

https://archive.org/details/mindinmakingast03swifgoog

 

Another popular approach at that time was the Batavia plan, which kept students in age-grade classes, but divided the teacher's time between whole-class teaching and one-on-one coaching. This seems to have had a lasting influence on the public schools, in the sense that it became the teacher's responsibility to spend part of her time helping the weaker children catch up.

 

Letter about the Batavia System, The School Journal (1904): https://books.google.com/books?id=euERAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA679

"The Batavia System of Individual Instruction," by John Kennedy (1914): https://books.google.com/books?id=9TyjAAAAMAAJ

 

Whether or not EFL's school methods were influenced by Search or even Kennedy, I think it's fair to see all three of them as part of the first wave of deliberate attempts at "individual instruction" in a modern school context. These systems (Pueblo 1884, Batavia 1898, EFL 1907) focused on the development of the individual, used standard materials (as far as I can tell), and included old-style face-to-face lessons and recitations.

 

By contrast, the second wave (Burk 1907, Dalton 1919, Winnetka 1919) tended to use special "self-teaching" materials, put a high value on having the children practice adult-style social relationships with one another, and did away with a lot of the traditional teacher-student interaction.

 

Hmm.

 

The more I read about the Pueblo plan, the more it appeals to me. As a homeschooling family, we aren't going to have a dozen rooms with specialist teachers, but I think we could substitute the "teaching the same subject to everyone at the same time" approach that's worked for some families (I wish we had a better name for this! :-) ). It would prevent the chaos of unsupervised children, and also ensure that, academically speaking, nothing and nobody would fall through the cracks. Not my older children, not my younger ones, and not entire subject areas. (Modern language, I'm looking at you... ;-) )

 

I suppose the biggest challenge would be the fact that we'd have a wider range of ages in one room. The older ones need more quiet, and sometimes longer work periods, and the younger ones need play breaks. Each of our "school areas," indoors or out, would have to be small enough for me to really see everyone, but large enough that we wouldn't be breathing down each other's necks. But this is something I have to deal with anyway. :-P

 

 

[ETA: added link & fixed wording]

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G. Stanley Hall was a supporter of the Pueblo plan, and other early efforts at "individual instruction." Here are his comments on a paper read by Kennedy at the 1901 NEA meeting.

 

----

 

PRESIDENT G. STANLEY HALL of Clark University. — This is the most important question that has been discussed at this session, and the most important of the questions now before the educational public. I have recently read the manuscript of a new book by Superintendent Search, of Holyoke, Mass., in which he sets forth his views on individual instruction, with which you are somewhat familiar. Years of experience have seasoned the views of Mr. Search, and his present discussion is not without merit. It is utterly impossible to interest anybody in the feasibility of that scheme who is interested in the mechanics of our school system. Our mechanism is well-nigh perfect, and many give much time to still further perfecting it. We have reached a standpoint in our knowledge of the child where we can say that a change in the mechanics of our schools must be made to suit his needs.

 

The question of individuality is a vastly important thing, and we need to realize more the misfortune of retarding the better half of the child. There is an inspiration in this kind of individual work. And inspiration in teaching, a passion for teaching, is a great thing in the teacher.

 

There is also a financial argument here. A woman guided by her divine instinct is far more effective and worth more money for being so guided. Individual instruction will tend to bring this out in the teacher.

 

All that amounts to anything in my work is not in lecturing, not in class effects, but when I sit down in my study and talk with a single young man, and there move upon him. Tho I may not know of the fruit, it is a blessed privilege to feel that the seed so planted will grow.

 

I wish to express a fundamental conviction. Without losing anything that is good, we are to see a radical transformation in our school work thru more service to the individual child. The lines followed by the party of order are good, but no less glorious is the work of those who are guided by the idea of the importance of the individual. There is one compass that always points toward the pole of human destiny, and that is the developing of the individual child up to its highest maturity. When this new time arrives, we shall have less mechanism, but we shall have more of the thing that inspires the teacher who gets into close contact with the individual child. That is the supreme end to which everything else will be subordinated.

 

https://books.google.com/books?id=E6gpAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA301

 

-----

 

His comment about people being "interested in the mechanics of our school system" reminds me of EFL's claim that her system was rejected because of the textbook racket. It's easy to see that they would prefer Burk's booklet approach.

 

Ironically, Burk was a PhD student of G. Stanley Hall's, so he would have benefited from that one-to-one guidance that Hall described above. How he got to the point of considering it unnecessary, I don't know.

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Hi, all. I fell down a rabbit hole, reading about the history of physical education. :-)

 

As mentioned above, public school PE programs were originally supposed to be tailored to each student. Of course, there were major practical problems, even more so than with individualized academics. (I'm trying to picture a "PE study hall.") They started using group programs as a stop-gap, until someone could figure out a solution. Meanwhile, the college PE major was rapidly becoming a magnet for students who were particularly athletic and -- shall we say -- not into "book learning." Then the 1930s arrived, with their emphasis on the value of group work for its own sake, so the whole question was pretty much set aside.

 

The result is that we have an emphasis on group athlethic classes for the "normal" children, and individualized programs only at the extremes: coaching for the stars, and therapy for those diagnosed with SN. This sort of division would have been anathema to the PE pioneers. They believed that physically normal children were practically non-existent in modern US society, due to the unnatural conditions of school and work life. The job of the PE specialist was to find ways to make up for this.

 

There are also questions about the overall developmental appropriateness of many PE activities. The concerns can be psychological and social -- e.g., as we discussed earlier, evidence suggests that children aren't naturally drawn to team sports until around the cusp of adolescence. They can also be physical, as in this 1920s account of comments by James Naismith.

 

"Basketball Evil" Cited by Inventor of Game

https://books.google.com/books?id=V_ufAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA597

 

I've been thinking along these lines for a while, especially in relation to my eldest DS, who spends most of his focused PE time in activities that emphasize lower body strength and agility. We recently got a Kinect video game system, which uses a camera to detect your position, so that the character on the screen makes pretty much the same movements you're making. (These systems are used by physical therapists, so I figured it might be helpful for my younger child who has a neurological disorder, as well as providing an exercise option for the others when "mommy's tired.") In the first game they tried, a bunch of balls come flying at you, and you try to knock them back by hitting and kicking them. DS did very well at this, but he chose to kick almost 100% of the time. I asked him to try doing a couple of rounds just using his arms, and he didn't do nearly as well.

 

This is all very interesting, to the point that I might consider studying it formally in the long term, but the master's programs in our area are geared to very specific occupations -- PE teachers, OTs, practitioners of proprietary therapies, etc. -- so they're not quite what I'm looking for. I'm most interested in mind-body connections of all kinds, and how to provide individualized support for normal development. For now, I guess I just need to keep reading and (mostly) experimenting on my children.

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Thanks for the interesting update on your trip down the rabbit hole, ElizaG. Reading it, I was thinking about how the first few decades of the twentieth century produced such a lot of interesting commentary on the perils of modern conditions, but at the same time, I wonder what we should learn from their failures to successfully implement their proposed solutions. I think maybe there's something about the scale of everything - EFL's ideas are challenging but workable because they can be implemented right in the family, but once you start to move outside the household, the scale of modern life and corresponding appeal of "efficiency" seems to be a big obstacle (whether in fact or just ideology seems open to debate). Not sure if that makes sense, but don't have the available brain cells to articulate it better at the moment.

 

Lately, all my brain cells have been devoted to consistent implementation, darn it. It's been working, but I totally follow the pattern ltlmrs mentions upthread about periods of ships tightly run followed by just needing to ignore all the things for a while so I can think all the thoughts, so I'm expecting a crash any day now. :001_rolleyes: I keep hoping I will some day hit on a way of combining these two into some kind of sustainable pattern for daily living...maybe when there's no longer a toddler in the house? I dunno, maybe it's not as big a deal as I tend to think it is? If tidal homeschooling can be a thing, can tidal mothering? Well, maybe not, when I put it that way...sigh.

 

Anyhoo, here are some notes from the daily grind of late:

 

The 8yo and I are reading Miles Standish together, but it just wasn't doing it for us, memorization-wise, so I let him pick something out from our Longfellow volume to work on memorizing independently. He picked out "The Skeleton in Armor," of course, works on it himself, and then recites it for me everyday (we've also done some light erudition and copywork from it, but most of those activities are still focused on Miles Standish). I've been way more intentional about working on his posture, enunciation, expression, etc, than I had been. I even pulled out some classic vocal warm-ups from high school drama class, which he has gotten a big kick out of. Raising expectations around that has been a very good thing - and I should mention that DH has been a great helper for this. Every few nights, everyone recites what they've been working on for dad and gets some non-mom feedback.

 

Eldest has also finished all of EFL's arithmetic work! After all kinds of dithering and consulting Hunter, we've started on Ray's Intellectual. My Montessori bead cabinet is going to DH's school, and I ordered an AL abacus to supplement our pebbles black beans. I think we'll use Ray's for the next year or so, and then revisit the question for 5th grade - I suspect at that point we will switch to some modern, written-to-the-student curriculum so that I can really throw my energies into Latin. ltlmrs, if you're around, do you have any thoughts on what to do at that point? ElizaG, I think at one point you said your upper elementary kids were (only?) doing LoF - how has that worked out?

 

I've been working on a Latin plan, and we're going to use GSWL this year and then start LLPSI (Tranquility7 here has some incredibly helpful advice from her experience using it), supplemented with some of Fr. Pavur's stuff, various vintage Latin readers, and Evan der Millner's audio resources. LLPSI seems to work to get a lot of people reading actual Latin, and I think I can pull off teaching with it, so we're just going to try it out and see how it goes. I also just today ordered Reggie Foster's new book - I'm particularly intrigued by his "sheets," collections of Latin texts from many different authors and historical periods. There's a second book in the works that focuses on using Cicero's letters to illustrate the grammatical principles covered in the first book. 

 

(Incidentally, we had dinner with a really wonderful Jesuit earlier this spring, and I asked him about his high school experience in the early 70s. Both Latin and Greek were still in the curriculum at his school - he said it was "marvelous." He told me the authors they read and I wish I had written it down - as I recall, they started with Caesar and went from there, as one did.)

 

The 6yo has started EFL arithmetic and Hiawatha. Separate poems for everyone will probably not work over the long-term, but for now I can manage (although, actually, the 4yo is usually hanging around during her lessons anyway since they are basically inseparable and even the 2yo demands a turn to recite something that sounds like "by da shurz ditchee doomee"). I'm trying to start with better elocution habits with her from the very beginning.

 

I haven't really attempted to implement EFL's reading instruction suggestions - I just DIYed something Montessori-ish and now am having her read me a few pages from the Treadwell readers every day. That's all pretty simple and intuitive for me at this point, so I'm just going to keep going with it for the rest of the kids unless we hit any issues. With the 8yo, after he had been reading fluently for a while, we did a quick run through conventional phonics and syllabification using some of ElizabethB's materials, which I think was fine, but maybe not even necessary for him, since he's a natural speller. So I may or may not do that again with his sister in a year or two - maybe I'll just use parts of the Blue Backed Speller.

 

Some of it is temperament - this child has preferred to be outside since she could open a door and take herself out - but I do think she's also benefited from having more observation lessons (even as lamely done as I have done them) than her older brother has. Just this week, she dissected a magnolia flower and brought it all to me to exclaim over. I got all excited and pulled out HONS (of course, Comstock being from upstate NY, the magnolia isn't in there) and some other reference books - she was interested for a minute and then ran back out to the chickens, but now I know more about the differences between gymnosperms and angiosperms. 

 

I still wonder if we should be doing more formal content subjects, but I can't settle on what exactly I think we should be doing, so we're not yet. I did give the 8yo a comp book dedicated to "research," and he's written a few things in it. We re-arranged where we're keeping our school material and I might put a blank timeline up on the wall for us to start writing on. Maybe.

 

Well, I feel like there was one other thing I was going to mention, but it's time for me to head home and see if DH left me any ice cream. :laugh:

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That sounds wonderful, LostCove! Good for you. :-)

 

It just occurred to me that we now have three who are in the "EFL black hole." This, not *just* flakiness, is probably most of the reason I'm still searching so much.

 

Speaking of which, Superintendent Search might turn out to be almost as big a discovery for our family as EFL. He's certainly vanished almost as completely. After his success in Pueblo, he moved to Los Angeles, and attempted to implement his system there, apparently with disastrous results. IDK if this was due to the scale effects you mentioned, or just that LA is messed up. Maybe some of both. Reminds me of Jamie Oliver's failure to reform their school lunches. :-D

 

His son Frederick became a famous cellist and composer -- one might even say a "prodigy," but one who earned the money for his first cello at age 10, by selling chickens. He ended up living in Carmel, and was the music director at the Del Monte Hotel, where so many of Kathleen Norris's characters met with near-disaster. ;-) Because of this family connection, there's a box of Preston W. Search's papers in -- of all unlikely places -- the music library at UC Berkeley. Maybe I can get a local contact to Search through it for us. (Sorry...)

 

Anyway, I've started reading "An Ideal School," and I do think EFL was influenced by his system. Her description of the math lessons is similar to his, even down to the language (e.g., "suggestions," "a piece of work"). Unlike her, though, he has a lot to say about adolescence. His thinking on that subject is generally in tune with G. Stanley Hall's, without all the over-the-top parts. I'm encouraged by the fact that his son turned out to be both a gifted adolescent and a functional adult.

 

Search refers to his ideal high school as the "gymnasium," not so much for the connection with classical education as for the emphasis on "expenditure of potential energy in kinetic exercises." (I'm envisioning this as including not just PE, but, say, Fr. Donnelly-style oral language work.)

 

"The studies and media of the gymnasium or high school are choices in the sciences, grammar, Latin (and possibly Greek), French, German, literature, history, algebra and geometry, design, creation, play, gymnastics, music, and art. (...)

 

Owing to the excessive growth during this period, the adolescent needs an abundance of wholesome food, omitting confections and pastries, nine hours of sleep with no overindulgence, well-directed occupation, the storage of the mind with good things, plenty of fresh air and exercise, and almost constant companionship."

 

https://archive.org/stream/anidealschoolor01seargoog#page/n10/mode/2up

 

Argh, yes, the confections. :-P Easter candy did a number on all of us, but especially my older ones. Robinson was right about that.

 

This all seems compatible with EFL, and much of it also lines up with Montessori's tentative adolescent plan. The second link below has a chart that compares 0-12 "normalization" with 12-24 "valorization."

 

http://liveandlearnfarm.com/farmschooling-montessori-middle-school-part-1/

http://liveandlearnfarm.com/farmschooling-montessori-middle-school-part-2/

 

The "almost constant companionship" might be the hardest part for homeschoolers, though, especially with current trends. Siblings are sometimes the answer, but not always, especially for the eldest. And adult mentors are hard to find. Recently, I've thought seriously about enrolling a couple of my children in neo-classical co-ops or part-time schools. I might have done it -- despite my academic objections -- if there were a Catholic option that went through high school. But there aren't any around here, which seems to tip the balance for our family.

 

The common thread that stands out to me with Search, Montessori, and EFL, is that the adolescent needs to find his or her own meaningful work. Just like everyone else does, but even more so. And this work is tied to the needs of the family and community, which doesn't have to mean primarily farm work. Even a family farm, in itself, isn't likely to meet all of the adolescent's needs. (The Erdkinder programs have loads of specialized teachers and mentors.)

 

For our circumstances, it would make sense to encourage work that involves technology, or ecology, or helping others in various ways. Or some combination of the above. And we're sort of already leaning this way, though I haven't been viewing it as something central. Which it does seem to be. We just need to find more ways to make connections with other people nearby.

 

Of course, the children can also put real effort into religion and the arts, but those are more "schola" than work. At this age, while they're still figuring out their goals and abilities, they seem to need both.

 

So... I guess I'm getting a bit more of a sense of what we're supposed to be doing. Not a moment too soon. :-P

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Sorry, I forgot to answer your question about Fred.

 

My very math-keen 6th grader has been doing well with it, but we've chosen to alternate between Life of Fred and Art of Problem Solving, i.e.:

 

LoF Pre-A sequence -> AoPS Pre-A -> LoF Beginning Algebra -> now starting AoPS Algebra

 

This is partly for reinforcement, and partly for slowing-down purposes. (Said child might be going to brick & mortar high school, so getting too far ahead would cause problems.)

 

The other child -- who's always been a bit more puzzling, math-wise -- *seemed* to be doing well, but did poorly on a "Let's Go Learn" online test after completing LoF Beginning Algebra. This turned out to be due to a combination of 1) missing a couple of key points in pre-algebra, and 2) not checking work properly, so these gaps weren't noticed and dealt with.

 

Both children seem to have trouble understanding how **AND WHY** to check their work, even after repeated explanations. Dear children, if you don't understand why your answer is wrong and the book's is right, *please figure out why,* re-do the problem from the beginning, and ask for help if needed. Don't just think, "oh, hmm, I got it wrong... :-( ," and copy down the answer from the back!

 

Of course, this is largely my fault for not supervising enough. Some children this age can look like they're able to work independently, but when the parent's back is turned, they forget all the instructions and basically drift into space. :-/ There also seems to be a massive failure of common sense, at times. **THE POINT OF ALL THIS IS TO LEARN HOW TO DO THE PROBLEMS, NOT JUST TO HAVE THE RIGHT ANSWERS WRITTEN DOWN!!!** Ahem.

 

From what I read on the boards, this is all fairly normal." I wonder, though. Maybe our younger children will do better. I hope so!

 

Anyway, I didn't want to just re-do Fred (in case the narrative style was contributing to spaciness...), and this child isn't keen on AoPS, so I decided to try the Math Rescue DVD course from Systematic Mathematics. It's meant as a remedial course for older teens and adults, to fill in any gaps and build a very solid foundation for algebra, but I thought it might suit our purposes. One thing that didn't occur to me was that, while video-based instruction might be better for the child's understanding, it makes it very hard for the parent to keep track of the child's progress. So now I have even less of an idea what's going on. :-P OTOH, child likes it, and has asked to use the same series for algebra, so I guess we'll give it a try. It's not a very popular program, but seems to get excellent results, from what I've read over the years.

 

Unfortunately, right after I bought the materials, Systematic Mathematics closed their online shop. It's not clear if they'll re-open in the future, but for now, their courses aren't available for purchase.

 

My next two are going to use the complete Fred elementary series as a supplement, starting around age 8-10. I'm going to use this as an opportunity to teach study skills, so that they're working independently by the time we get to Goldfish or so. We'll see how it goes.

 

I've thought many times that it would be more efficient just to have them all use Saxon. But then they wouldn't have so many opportunities to mess everything up, LOL.

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ElizaG, thanks for the info about Fred and what y'all have being doing, math-wise, also for the recap of Search and reflections on adolescence - some of this reminds me of things DH related from a book about the founder of Deerfield he read a few years ago. Maybe we'll have to consider boarding school as a solution for the "constant companionship" problem.   :laugh:

 

I remembered the other thing I was going to mention, but now already have a pretty rambling update on, which was grammar. So, after spending some time a while back experimenting with combining some of EFL's suggestions with using Montessori grammar symbols to code our poem, I stopped because I thought that it was just too difficult and confusing, trying to use literary examples with often quite complex poetic syntax to illustrate and learn basic parts of speech. Surely it made more sense to start with the simplest of sentences that isolated each new part of speech until it was understood. I had decided to drop grammar for the rest of the term and then pick a simple program to use to get us through enough grammar basics to start Latin next year. 

 

But now I'm rethinking again, because of the coincidence of two things. Ossa Latinintatis Sola came in the mail on Monday, and, whoa, is it interesting. I haven't yet come across anything that spells out a method of teaching grammar with examples from real literature the way this does. I'm just scraping the surface of the book itself so far, but here's a pretty interesting exchange between one of Foster's students and successor at the Vatican and a classics professor who has a new book out on ancient methods of teaching Latin to Greek speakers that gives a feel for some of the key aspects of Foster's methods and how they fit in with the history of Latin-learning (although it would be nice if the folks in this conversation had at least acknowledged that there is, um, a continuing pedagogical tradition after the classical period).

 

So, I had various things from the introduction to the Ossa kicking around in my brain, including this passage -

Therefore, the objective of these pages is to get people into immediate contact with and understanding, love, and use of the entire Latin language in all its literary types and periods of time and authors. Personal practice has been that, by eliminating terminology and all kinds of preambles to the language and literature, people can have access immediately to real solid, natural Latin, which they can then imitate and use and find in these infinite authors and works of Latin in the world. 

 

So the emphasis will be on what things mean, not on what they are called; on how the language functions, not on some sort of artificial rules it allegedly follows. Concentration will be directed to the immediate practice of Latin and the natural learning of it by means of a self-teaching approach which maintains contact with real solid Latin that has existed in this world for all this time. 

 

- when we came across this line in Miles Standish - "Merrily sang the birds, and the tender voices of women/Consecrated with hymns the common cares of the household" - and the 8yo said, "This makes no sense." So we talked about the vocabulary, and he still didn't get it, and it dawned on me - he doesn't understand what function each of these words are playing in this sentence - we need to examine the grammar! I did not do a great job of talking through it (and I already see that I should have used the first half of the first line as an introductory example because it is so much simpler), I think partly because I was too focused on the terminology rather than really talking about the function of the words (Foster actually doesn't use the common terminology in discussing grammar - he talks about the function "by-with-from-in" rather than the ablative, for example), but it did suddenly click with me how this could work.

 

So before I had been teaching definitions and then trying to apply those to our poem indiscriminately. The result was that when the poetic syntax was simple, DS could do it, when it wasn't, he usually couldn't. What if instead, I taught grammar as we needed it to actually understand what we were reading.

 

Of course, when you're studying a foreign language, that is needed basically from the beginning for the most basic parts of speech. But with the vernacular, you really don't need explicit grammar instruction to understand a lot of what you read or have read aloud to you. And when you do start to find that looking at the grammar can be an aid to understanding, maybe you don't actually always need to start with things broken down very incrementally, but can start with a longer, more complex and thus more confusing sentence. In addition to keeping front and center the way that grammar can actually be a tool to convey and receive meaning, not a system to apply (art vs. science), this approach has the advantage of keeping the student in touch with the real language as used in history to communicate real things, as Foster says about Latin, instead of a contrived and grammatically simplified language. 

 

This approach would seem to require something different from the teacher and student, though. Generally speaking, from what I've seen, in the definitions-first way, the teacher explicitly teaches the definitions of the basic parts of a sentence, say, probably with a few simple sentences to illustrate, and then the student is expected to analyze sentences in a series of exercises of gradually increasing complexity over perhaps a very long period of time. So in going through these two lines of Longfellow, I found myself trying to lead my 8yo to identify the subject, verb, and object (which he has had some explicit instruction in) with a series of questions, but it was just too much for him at this point - this is what we had tried and quit in the fall. And it makes sense - if he could do it himself, he wouldn't really need to look at the grammar to understand the sentence in the first place, right? To put it in Montessori language, he's still in the first period. So, instead, I need to explain the grammar myself - emphasizing function, not just classification - and the work of the student would have to be something else - maybe the chreiai type exercises discussed in article above, Kilgallon-style sentence composing, or maybe just copywork/dictation. 

 

I don't think this is actually all that different from how we've discussed some of this in the past, by the way, but it's just been the next step for me, not an natural teacher, in the iterative process of figuring out how to actually DO this integrated language study thing, pulling back together the bits and pieces that can still be found here and there, so I share in case it helps anyone else.

Edited by LostCove
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Thanks for explaining your thought processes, LostCove.

 

Have we talked much about Fr. Stephenson's Latin books? They're from the 1930s, and seem to be his attempt to set down an example of the traditional pedagogy in textbook form, much as Fr. Donnelly did for English and rhetoric.

 

There are two books: a grammar (including background information and advice on conversational Latin), and an anthology of Latin literature. The excerpts are fairly short, and are taken from a wide range of sources - classical authors to 20th century papal encyclicals. They're sorted by pedagogical order, not chronologically. Each page of the anthology is divided into four parts:

 

1) the original selection;

2) the same selection, with minor changes to make it conform to the author's standards for "correct Latin style" (which he acknowledges is arbitrary);

3) the English translation;

4) notes, including new vocabulary and points of grammar, keyed to the relevant section of the grammar book.

 

In theory, these materials could be used by an absolute beginner, through self-study (though of course you wouldn't get the conversational aspect). I suppose that's the only way we're going to use them, unless we find an adventurous Latin tutor. None of the ones I've spoken to so far are comfortable venturing beyond standard current textbooks.

 

Meanwhile, my eldest has been using both Artes Latinae and Oerberg, and is pretty happy with this, but definitely prefers LL over AL. I've been checking what limited written work there is, but do have a bit of a creeping fear that we'll end up in a similar situation to Algebra. Worst case scenario, I guess we could just start over with Henle in 9th, and would still be "caught up" with the people who've been following MP or MODG recommendations for years. (Just typing that makes my head hurt.)

 

Eldest child is much more keen on learning Greek than Latin anyway, and finished the Hupogrammon independently a while back. #2 is doing the book a bit more slowly, with my help, though of course it's new to me too. That should be finished in a few weeks, and then the three of us are going to start doing Greek together. I have no idea when, though. One of the children has energy all the time, but the other is slow to get going in the morning, and I'm wiped out in the evening. (Did I mention we're expecting another little one? I couldn't let you and ltlmrs have all the fun, LOL. ;-) )

 

#2 hasn't even started formal Latin yet; we really should get going on that as well. I've started to feel as if Greek actually needs more of my personal attention, though. There are plenty of online classes and local tutors for Latin, and it's part of the high school programs we're looking at for some of the children. The way they're teaching it isn't ideal, obviously, but at least they'd get more of a foundation than I did. If they chose, they could supplement it with Fr. Pavur's books, colloquia, Latin camps, etc. With Greek, though, unless they learn it at home, they're unlikely to get the foundation at all. (Kolbe doesn't even *offer* Greek in high school! Head is hurting again.)

 

Between the lack of outside support, and the ongoing SN and habit remediation issues with my older ones, I'm forced to apply Hunter's concept of triage, even if it's at a higher level than usual.

 

Anyway, I'd be happy to share more from Fr. Stephenson's books, if you're interested. I'd also be happy to share copies of the actual books (which are public domain), if I can get around to it. "Working with scanned images" is going to be lesson #1 in our adolescent Montessori curriculum. :-)

Edited by ElizaG
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