Herbartianism Made Fun and Easy: Eye of the beholder

Did you ever have an illustration for something just handed to you, so obvious that you didn't even have to think about it?

(one of the few videos I could find about The Dress that didn't include profanity)

"Perception of reality is not the same thing as reality." (SciShow, The Science of That Dress)

Chapter Nine of Herbartian Psychology, "Graphic Hypotheses," begins with something that was first mentioned in Chapter Three:

"It is true that in Reid's comfortable dogmatism we are assured that we perceive the outer world exactly as it is, and therefore we all perceive it alike. But Locke admits that the outer world may be modified in certain aspects,--colour, smell, sound, taste,--but in other more fundamental respects remain unchanged. According to this view, man is the measure of colours, smells, sounds and tastes..."

In other words, the size and shape of something may be fairly fixed and common to almost everyone; but on the other aspects, you're on your own. Referring back to his perception games in Chapter Six, Adams says, "Even a simple straight line may mean something slightly different to each new observer, and the greater the number of lines in a drawing, the greater the range within which its interpretation by different observers may vary." However, "when two persons are talking about the drawing that lies before them, there is at least something to go upon, there is a sort of least common denominator of thought, to which all the ideas of each party must be reduced before agreement can be expected." "The fact is that while our mental impressions of a given object are continually changing, they always correspond with each other, and to the given reality."

So there's room for personal interpretation, but there's also the possibility that someone doesn't understand, doesn't have the right information, is just inaccurate. Not everything is relative. The Dress may be seen as white and gold or as blue and black, but nobody has suggested that it's pink and purple, or that it's actually a ski jacket or a pair of boots.

What does this have to do with Herbartianism and education?

First and most practically, teachers can use graphic narrations to evaluate how well students understand something. Hence the value of Charlotte Mason science notebooks. Adams gives the example of student teachers reading Robinson Crusoe, who were asked to make drawings of Crusoe's tent based on the information given in the chapter. The story said that the roof was covered "with flags and large leaves of trees, like a thatch." Apparently some of them took "flags" to mean the Union Jack, and that's what they drew. They weren't stupid, just lacking information.

Second, Adams discusses the non-value of bad or misleading diagrams. If a diagram or an illustration is "an integral part of the idea it illustrates," then it can be worthwhile; otherwise, we might want to reconsider using it.  "Milton has been often praised for his reticence in not fully describing Satan. Can we say as much for the illustrators of The Pilgrim's Progress?" "There are certain things that are better left undrawn."

Third, we are given the detailed description of a "Map Robinson Crusoe's Island" contest.The Boy's Own Paper advertised the contest and offered a prize, and Adams says that over a hundred and fifty maps were submitted. The contest contained a couple of possible snags, although those weren't mentioned in the rules. The biggest one is, obviously, that not everything is given in the story, and some things must just be imagined; but the text also contains a few contradictions and impossibilities regarding the geography of the island, so even a careful mapmaker would have to deal with those. You can read more of the details in Herbartian Psychology at the archive.org site, but for now, the educational question becomes the double difficulty "of communicating an idea from one mind to another....The idea must be dissolved, as it were, in words, and then again crystallized out in the new mind....The concrete of one mind must be reduced to its abstract terms, and then rebuilt into the concrete of the new mind." It's like what happens when you beam somebody up on Star Trek.

And obviously, there's a risk of something misfiring. Words are tricky things. As was said in the last chapter, we have to make sure we're using the "same system" as the person we're talking to; a newer way to phrase it would be "on the same page." But we also have to recognize that our minds are all unique; we're not clones, and we don't see things exactly the same way. Our "apperception masses" are all different; to every lesson or situation, teachers and students all bring who they are, what they know, and their own ways of seeing. White or gold, or blue and black.

As a postscript: If the mind is a spider web, Adams says, a teacher may be seen as "a benevolent spider...whose business is not to make plain the already geometrically clear lines of the web, but to see that guiding apperception masses are so arranged that they shall lead ultimately to the centre, by the way, however crooked it may seem, that is best for each seeker." (I'm not sure whether these seekers are supposed to be younger spiders, or what.)

But oh dear, I don't like to be seen as a benevolent spider, do you? I certainly don't feel qualified to decide which way to the centre is "best for each seeker."

Robinson Crusoe making pottery, by Crayons

Created in Paint by Crayons

A Month with Charlotte Mason, #12

The last part of Home Education is about the role that our wills and our reason should have, and how we teach that to our children; but I think it’s more practical at this point to ask a fourth question on education: What should we use? Or to put it another way, "what shall we then buy?"

There was an idea going around awhile back that it didn’t matter at all what you used, that any curriculum could be used in a CM style, and so you had people trying to use basal readers for narration, and so on, usually with a lot of frustration. It was like serving popsicles with forks and knives and calling it dinner--it just didn't work. There is a lot of flexibility in Charlotte Mason, and there is no one perfect, comprehensive booklist (or schedule) that is going to be suitable for every family in every circumstance; but it is important to choose quality books and other resources that will meet the objectives of a leisurely education. Just as it matters what children eat, it does matter what mind food we provide, what books we read, what music we play, what kinds of craft materials we choose. So how do you know what to use?

This is where the booklists from Ambleside Online and other CM websites (like Simply Charlotte Mason, Mater Amabilis and so on) can be very useful. You don't have to start right from scratch; you can look at what other CM homeschoolers recommend, see which classics are still being used, and get a sense of what newer materials seem to fit. Even then you need to be discerning, but when the same material comes up repeatedly, that’s probably a good sign that it’s worth checking out.

Let’s start with the very obvious, what not to use. We can rule out a large portion of most public school teacher catalogues, including "Guided Reading Beach Balls." "Great Graph Art Around the Year." "Picture Sorting for Phonemic Awareness." And "40 Wonderful Blend and Digraph Poems." We don't want study guides that are just long lists of questions to answer and definitions to copy. And unit studies loaded with fill-in-the-blank reproducibles, colouring pages, and word searches. Actually a lot of commercial unit studies can be crossed out, unless they’re limited, say, to correlating history and literature, and maybe tied to appropriate music or art of the particular era. Charlotte Mason used that tying-together approach in her teaching, but she didn’t think of that as unit studies, more just a correlation of things that naturally went together. It was when teachers started trying to get too clever and drag in all the subject areas that she had a problem, especially when the topic chosen was something insubstantial like apples; or even a better topic like Robinson Crusoe, that would just make the kids hate the book by the time you’d done Robinson Crusoe math, Robinson Crusoe songs, Robinson Crusoe copywork, Robinson Crusoe geography, Robinson Crusoe recipes and so on.

It’s kind of like when my mom first got a wok back in the ‘80’s and enthusiastically started stir-frying things. First she made stir-fried chicken and that was fine, then she made stir-fried beef and that was good too, but by the time she got to stir-fried hot dogs, we had had just about enough stir-fried anything for a long time. Easy to overdo.

More do's and don't tomorrow.

The planning process

Melissa Wiley at the Bonny Glen (actually this is on her other blog), and others (linked from Melissa's post), have been posting in answer to some non-homeschoolers' questions about why we’d want to homeschool, or how we have the nerve to do this without courses in pedagogy etc., etc.

An analogy I used last year was that of a professional chef vs. cooking for your own family. I made supper tonight (in the middle of a heat wave) and we ate it (in the middle of a thunderstorm). Aside from the freaky weather, how did I know how to do that? How did I manage to get it all on the table, in the right amount, at the right time? We had chicken breasts baked in canned pasta sauce (in the toaster oven), whole wheat fusilli, spaghetti squash (cooked on top of the stove), raw broccoli and carrots (cut up yesterday), and a frozen ricotta dessert topped with leftover canned pineapple. And it wasn't a complicated meal to make; it was just experience, knowing how much chicken to thaw, how to thicken the sauce at the end, remembering that we had leftover veggies, figuring that the pineapple would go nicely on top of the dessert. At home, you learn to cook (see #s 18 and 19 there) based on experience, reading, watching, asking other people how they do things. Family meals aren't like restaurant cooking, and they're not meant to be (unless you're Anne Tyler). Homeschooling compares better to home cooking than it does to the surgery-on-the-kitchen-table analogy. If the math lesson doesn’t connect, you can try it another way tomorrow, or wait awhile and then try it again. Surgeons don’t have that option; homeschoolers do.

But back to the pedagogy, qualifications question that keeps coming up: somebody out there has an idea that I (or any homeschool parent) must have a little schoolroom in my house with a blackboard and a pointer, or at least a kitchen table with chains to keep the students there; plus a piece of paper from the government that says I took a course in how to teach and what to teach; and that if I don't, then I don't know what I'm doing and shouldn't be teaching.

So this post is meant to show anybody who's interested how the process of planning a school year works, after ten years at this. These are some of my real-life thoughts and experiences as I plan for Ponytails' grade 4.

1. Mathematics: I order Making Math Meaningful Level 4, since we'll be done Miquon Math and I need to find something that has a good dose of word problems in it--something Ponytails is still weak on. When I get the books, I realize there’s some repetition of what she's already done, so I figure we can complete it in 3 days a week next year, and that leaves 2 days for activities in geometry, and other topics that MMM doesn't cover. How did I get the general idea of grade 4 math topics? I compared a couple of scope and sequences and made a list of goals for next year. I checked those that aren't included in our main book against a list of good library math books (not textbooks--there are a lot of other books on the 500's shelf) and a couple of our other resources like Family Math--for instance, I want to work on using a calculator, and Family Math includes several calculator games.

2. Language arts: again, I have a list of typical grade 4 skills, which I’ve gone over with Ponytails in mind, eliminating what she already knows and adding in a couple of other things I would like her to work on. I have two main goals for the year—-increased independent reading skills (especially in non-fiction) and improved ability in writing—-not her ability to express herself so much (see Theseus here) as her level of comfort with written work—-mechanics, handwriting, spelling, all the boring but important stuff. Also she'll be working on skills in finding things out—-choosing resources (a dictionary? A thesaurus?) and using them.

And how will we be working towards those goals? By checking off pages in a language textbook? Am I ordering a creative writing program, a speller, and basal readers? No, we've never done things that way. At our house it's more like this:

Reading skills: This will be the year I ask her to read more school books on her own—-not setting her adrift, but giving her 15 minutes to read a section and then following up. We will start with short sections and see if she can work up to reading a whole chapter and then telling back what she's read. It means working on habits like attentiveness, not getting distracted. (Do we need readers with chapter-end questions? No, we have books, magazines, newspapers, emails...)
Writing: again, beginning short written narrations—-or writing some and then dictating the rest. Knowing Ponytails, she will probably initiate some of her own writing projects as well.

Mechanics: we will use copywork and dictation, from books across the curriculum, as a place to work on mechanics and very basic grammar (just parts of speech, not diagramming); on noticing story details and picking out homonyms; on experimenting with synonyms or changing tense. Will I have all those lessons prepared ahead of time? No, it’s not practical. If something needs extra work, we spend extra time on it. It’s a waste of time for me to write out 36 weeks of language lessons for Ponytails, just like I don’t buy her new shoes until she needs them. (We do have a couple of yard-sale grammar workbooks to fall back on too.)

Handwriting: besides copywork, we will use Ruth Beechick’s 3-week cursive improvement course (from You CAN Teach Your Child Successfully Grades 4 to 8). (That's less involved than it sounds; it just means having her write sentences and then looking at specific things that need improvement.)

Spelling: I don’t know yet how much extra time Ponytails will need on this next year, so we'll just keep working on it along with her other language activities.

3. Latin (the thinking continues here): I look at the Latin program a friend loaned us, and decide this is not the year to be adding another language. We’ll include some Latin roots when we talk about prefixes and suffixes.

4. Nature studies: I look at the fat handbook we’ve had forever but hardly use,and realize we can use it next year for some book lessons about ladybugs, spiders, ants, worms, and other wiggly crawly things we have close at hand. I was going to add to our collection of magnifiers and bug-lookers anyway, and this will give us some things to examine and maybe draw.

5. Music: At a rummage sale, I find a book & record set of Leonard Bernstein’s 1960’s young peoples’ concerts. There’s a whole kid-size music appreciation course in there, and I know our library has some of the videos too. At our support group's annual conference I buy 2 new Music Maker packs for our lap harp, including a basic music theory pack.

6. I list books we own and can use for history, Bible, science, poetry and more. I write down a couple of others to ask for on a swap board or to look for at the library. Something with legs crawls out of Five Little Peppers, so I toss the book in case the little thing is thinking about multiplying (it was an old tattered copy anyway) and make a note to replace it (the book, not the bug). (No, I do not want to do nature study on a silverfish.) I plan to use one book of Greek myths, but then pick up something I like even better at a library sale and cross out the first one. I decide to order an audio book of Robinson Crusoe, because it's probably the hardest book we’ll be doing this year. An online friend has written her own geography e-text, so I decide to use that for both of our elementary-aged students. I also plan for each of them to make a scrapbook about Canada.

Interlude: I re-read some of my favourite Charlotte Mason chapters and Parents' Review articles and underline key points about why we do what we do. Call it inspiration.

7. I write down the plans in a binder, print out ideas for memory work, favourite songs, and a few other Internet printouts. I divide them up into terms, then roughly by weeks. I collect the books, find CDs, save cardboard and pop bottles for science experiments. We’re ready to begin again.

And did you remember the point of all this? Does this sound like homeschoolers are competent to make curriculum choices, to find resources, to teach lessons, to modify and supplement when needed, to set goals and evaluate progress?

I hope so.