Terrible Lizard, by Deborah Cadbury (book review)

I had mentioned that I was reading Terrible Lizard, but hadn't posted much about what I learned or whether it was a good book.

Yes, it is an excellent book. In fact, I would say that if you want to understand where Charlotte Mason and her PNEU cohorts were coming from in their views of the natural world, this is essential reading. It covers the whole digging-up-dinosaurs-in-Britain story from Mary Anning's discoveries around 1810 to the huge shift in thinking fifty years later. It connects geology and anatomy...and, more exactly, geologists and anatomists...with the race to identify, name, and take credit for the new/old creatures. The story starts with a poverty-stricken girl digging up bones, and an aspiring geologist puzzling over a tooth that just had to belong to an herbivore but didn't fit any known category of creature. It peaks with an 1850's dinner party inside a model Iguanodon. It ends with people looking towards the established heads of science, those who had always come up with Biblically-acceptable answers, to respond to Darwin and Huxley...and those same sources of knowledge and faith finally throwing up their hands.

Actually Darwin and Huxley play only a small part in this story--they were the rebels who took over from the previous generation of geologists. Geology was a sort of gentleman's science in the first half of the nineteenth century; if you wanted to be taken seriously, you had to be a member of the Geological Society. The pre-Darwin British geologists were careful to present their findings in a God-inspired, Biblical context; some of them, like William Buckland, held high positions in the Church of England; few of them agreed with "evolution," but they were finding themselves believing less and less in a literal six days of creation, in a worldwide deluge, and in a world that was only a few thousand years old. The stories they read in the rocks and the bones seemed to show without any question that the large creatures must have existed in a time before man--perhaps in a whole other time that God had also created.

And then the evolutionists came along and took even that away.

"When he met Darwin in December 1859, [Richard]Owen praised him for his original ideas on the formation of species. Owen did not accept that Man was a transmuted ape, but in the Origin Darwin had only hinted at Man's relationship with apes. He was eager to build bridges with the famous anatomist, and it is possible that Owen may have imagined that there was some common ground between them: each step in Darwin's evolution could still be planned by God."--Cadbury, page 307

But it didn't work out that way.

"[In 1860, Thomas Huxley] discussed Man's relationship to the apes, highlighting similarities. Owen was furious; had always sought to show that Man was zoologically distinct from the animals. Those seeking to reconcile the findings of science with their belief in the Bible faced a terrible dilemma. How could the 'monkey theory' fit with Creation in Genesis? Owen was the obvious scientific leader who could surely be relied upon to expose the flaws in Darwin's thinking....[but] Owen could no longer shelter behind the ambiguous language he had used for so long....Even though Owen was not a Creationist the sides became polarised, with Darwin and his supporters, 'the Devil's Disciples' Huxley and Hooker, standing in opposition to Owen, who was trying to uphold traditional values....One by one, Owen's cherished notions on the dinosaurs were seen to fall apart."--Cadbury, pages 307-317

There are other fascinating people in this story--Gideon Mantell, the doctor and geologist who puzzled over the herbivore's tooth; Charles Lyell, who had a strong influence in moving scientific beliefs away from having to agree with the Bible; Georges Cuvier. And Mary Anning, who never got enough credit or enough compensation.

But for me the most interesting aspect of the book--aside from the actual dinosaur discoveries--was the clear presentation of how Creationist Christianity was suddenly left in the lurch. I don't have good answers for that even now. I don't know if I could have handled this book twenty years ago, or if I would have wanted to read anything at all where the "good guys" didn't believe that it all happened exactly as the Bible said. Today Christians who don't want to "leave their brains at the door" are being offered Creationist research to consider that was not available then. I'd like to believe all the young-earth-creationist material, because the fact that God made us in his image--really made us--is as central to our beliefs as it was to Buckland and Owen. However, I did not grow up with the idea that men and dinosaurs co-existed, so I have as hard a time trying to fit that all together as they did their piles of bones. I'm trying to keep an open mind on both sides.

Anyway--a very good read, very worthwhile especially for high school students. There are only two places I could see that you might want to have them skip over--an early adventure of Owen's involving body parts, and some other graphic material on page 270.

A Month with Charlotte Mason, #11

"We bashed, and that is the only verb that describes our progress in those early days, through the text-books, got the gist of them by determined attention, and miraculously found ourselves enjoying every minute."--Joyce McGechan in The Parents Review, 1967

You might also say, “You just don’t know my kids.” (Well, you don’t know my kids either. Or maybe you do. In any case, mightn't it be the least "CM-ish" ones who benefit most from a leisurely education that lets them be who they are?) “You’re kidding—Shakespeare?” "All this habit stuff is getting me all mixed up." “This all sounds kind of sweet and idealistic, but this is the 21st century. I think we’d better stick to something safer that we can explain to the in-laws.”

That’s up to you, but I would recommend, before you totally bag the idea of CM, to have a look at "To Prosper in Good Life and Good Literature," an article from the Charlotte Mason periodical The Parents Review, by Joyce McGechan, which appeared in 1967. Joyce McGechan was a parent in Africa (she didn't specify which country) who wrote about her experiences using Charlotte Mason's correspondence school with her children. (The PNEU correspondence school was still operating in the 1960’s). Just to whet your appetite, here’s a bit of what she wrote:

"Although a trained teacher, I knew nothing of Charlotte Mason's methods. I ordered 'Home and School Education' and read it with interest; but I must confess to some scepticism.

"'Children have no natural appetite for twaddle,' she had written in the chapter on Aspects of Intellectual Training.

"'Huh!' thought I. 'Haven't they though?'

"I underlined that sweeping statement; and in my mind I classified it along with a few odd ones I had heard at college'Children are not naughty,' and the rest. Experience had fast taught me that children are downright wicked unless they are kept so busy and interested that they have no time to think up any fresh devilment. I cannot possibly describe my bewildered, fascinated disbelief when the first batch of books arrived. Of them all, 'Plutarch's Lives' hit me hardest. Those long, measured periods in difficult language! Alison, at eleven, would not understand a word! How on earth was Robin going to assimilate 'Mankind in the Making' and 'The Spangled Heavens'? What was Charles going to make of 'Pilgrim's Progress'?”

To find out what Charles did make of it, and the rest of the story, you’ll have to read the rest of the article on the Ambleside Online website. Just be assured that we have all had our own Alisons and Charles (or would that be Charleses)...or, even more to the point, we have felt more like Alison and Charles ourselves while easing into this. Just remember what Lynn said: "ceasing from anxiety and merely utilitarian preoccupations so that one can contemplate higher things, those pursuits without which we cannot be fully human."

(As I typed this high-minded conclusion, Crayons just came in to ask if she could give her Barbies a bath. Is that enough to dispel any illusions? But she did voluntarily start reading Tom Sawyer this week. Things even out.)

The Month with CM will take a break over Sunday and will post again on Monday.

A Month with Charlotte Mason, #10

"It is interesting how disconcerting this idea of leisure is."--Cindy Rollins, "In Which I Implore you to Exert Yourself"

Since we’re talking about a leisurely education, does that mean that there’s anything wrong with work, or that children don’t learn well by being taught to work hard at their lessons, or by thinking through a difficult problem?

No, not at all; actually, diligence is one of the good habits Charlotte Mason valued. But the danger in this is that children, especially girls, may work hard at their studies because they want to please you or even because they know that God wants them to be diligent and get their work done; but they can do all that without finding any excitement and enjoyment in learning for its own sake, just as they can obediently swallow medicine without particularly enjoying it.

Cindy posted awhile ago on Josef Pieper’s book Leisure, the Basis of Culture, and she wondered if there was a distinction between work for work’s sake, and work for wonder’s sake. She said, I think paraphrasing Pieper, that there are things that are meant to be wonderful, as in, full of wonder; there are things that can only be useful by their wonder, that are not meant to be valued mainly for their practical uses. Christians tend to distrust forms of art, including literature, that don’t have a directly practical use, for instance, music that isn’t useful for worship services, or stories without an obvious moral lesson, or art that can’t be either hung in the sanctuary or put on a coffee mug. In a large part of the Christian world, we get a little tense around that disconcerting Mary-wonder idea. It's safer to focus on the Martha-practical.

So it's natural to feel nervous that if you take up a form of homeschooling that doesn’t require an hour of math each day, and doesn’t give you a lot of worksheets to file away in case anybody asks if you really are doing school, and might actually let you get done in enough time that you can all go out and explore outdoors together…something in us might tend to mistrust this, and think that the children must not be doing enough work.

It's natural...but it's not necessarily true.

What's for dinner? Pizza. It's not hard.

Pizza is supposed to be complicated. At least that's what it always seems like to me--because all the best-ever recipes swear that you're going to get something exactly like restaurant pizza, which isn't even really possible unless you've got a mighty hot oven and a pizza stone and all that. Or at least unless you're very ambitious.

But is it okay to just have "pretty good" or "very good" pizza without it having to be international-pizza-competition quality? Sure. You don't have to have a Pampered Anything. You can even have an uneven oven like ours, and store-brand mozzarella cheese, and the simplest possible sauce (thinned-down tomato paste with a sprinkle of dried basil and oregano). And you know what, you can still make pretty good pizza that saves you a phone call and the best part of twenty bucks. (That's what two mediums with delivery go for here.)

This is what we had for dinner:

Two pizzas, made with 2 lbs. of bread-machine pizza dough, the above-mentioned cheese and sauce, a little piece of pepperoni, a bit of deli ham, a few mushrooms, and canned pineapple tidbits. The Squirrelings did most of the putting together. We have no strange magic for the baking--we just put them in at 425 degrees, which is probably hotter than that in the top and at the back of the oven, so I switched them partway through. Bake till somewhat brown on the edges. Let cool a few minutes before slicing.

Soup, made with 4 cups of chicken stock, 2 cups of water, 1/2 cup green lentils simmered in the stock/water, then some cooked rice, leftover chopped potato, and frozen mixed vegetables added and cooked until it was soup. You know it's soup when it stops looking like a potful of water with vegetables and lentils floating in it.

Ponytails' special Pineapple-Juice-Gingerale-Orange drink, made partly with the drained pineapple juice.

Giant chocolate cookies, made from an on-sale chocolate cake mix+egg/oil/water, with a cupful of oatmeal mixed in. (Everybody's seen that recipe, right?) And grapes.

Favourite low-cost/no-cost homeschool stuff

These are some of my current favourites:

1. Paper-plate skip counting wheels. I first saw the idea in the Miquon First Grade Diary when Ponytails was in the first grade...so these paper plates are six or seven years old, but still going strong. Very simple--each number has its own plate, with a series of numerals markered around the rim. The 2 plate goes 2, 4, 6, 8, 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 0. The 3 plate goes 3, 6, 9, 2, 5, 8, 1, 4, 7, 0. (That's the most complicated one.) The 4 plate goes 4, 8, 2, 6, 0, then again. The 5 plate just has 5's and 0's on it. And so on. Do you see how it works? You count around the plate, and each number you say will have the same final digit as the next numeral on the plate.

2. "Topical" Bible sword drills. [2019: link is broken] My kids particularly like the Animals version. (Warning: some of the words don't match up if you use newer Bible translations.)

3. Beaver Ed's card quiz games, sold at Dollarama. We have the Nature and the Dinosaurs games, and think they're as good as the more expensive versions.

4. This study guide to Tom Sawyer. We don't use a lot of literature study guides, but this one has some helpful ideas.

5. Leslie Laurio's updated Ourselves. (The Common Room family also likes this.)

6. Homemade handwriting sheets. I am using our Barchowsky disk, but you can find other sites to make your own. Who needs workbooks?

7. Index cards--good for all kinds of things. Ponytails and Mr. Fixit are using them along with Christian Kids Explore Chemistry, to keep track of all the elements Ponytails has learned. (They also made Atomic Cookies--see a similar photo at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.)

8. Books from the local supermarket's dollar bin--you just never know what's going to show up there. Recently we've found Magic Treehouse notepads, The Courage of Helen Keller, Madeleine L'Engle's The 24 Days Before Christmas, a Mitford book, and several other Scholastic and Troll biographies.

9. The weekly how-to posts at The Common Room.

10. Julie Gilbert's Planned Spontaneity e-book. A different kind of homeschool planner! (The home page is here.)

A Month with Charlotte Mason, #9

In our moral as in our intellectual education, we work too entirely upon narrow utilitarian lines: we want the impulse of profounder conceptions.--Charlotte Mason, preface to Ourselves

Rather than talk about how you do every school subject CM style...because you can get a lot of that information on places like the Ambleside Online FAQ page...I am going to pull some quotes from Home Education, and I’d like you to note the most-repeated words and themes, so that you can see how Charlotte Mason's ideas are really interchangeable from subject to subject. Remember that these are from descriptions of lessons for children under nine (the focus of Home Education), so there isn’t a lot here about Latin or other typical subjects for older ones. School Education (Volume 3) and Philosophy of Education (Volume 6) have more about teaching older students.

“Children’s lessons should provide material for their mental growth, should exercise the several powers of their minds, should furnish them with fruitful ideas, and should afford them knowledge, really valuable for its own sake, accurate, and interesting, of the kind that the child may recall as a man with profit and pleasure.”

From page 221, on learning to read: "He has considerable power to attack new words with familiar combinations; what is more, he has achieved; he has courage to attack all ‘learning,’ and has a sense that delightful results are quite within reach. Moreover, he learns to read in a way that affords him some moral training. There is no stumbling, no hesitation from the first, but bright attention and perfect achievement."

From page 254, on arithmetic: "The chief value of arithmetic, like that of the higher mathematics, lies in the training it affords to the reasoning powers, and in the habits of insight, readiness, accuracy, intellectual truthfulness it engenders. There is no one subject in which good teaching effects more, as there is none in which slovenly teaching has more mischievous results….The child perceives what rules he must apply to get the required information. He is interested; the work goes on briskly: the sum is done in no time, and is probably right, because the attention of the child is concentrated on his work…. Carefully graduated teaching and daily mental effort on the child’s part at this early stage may be the means of developing real mathematical power, and will certainly promote the habits of concentration and effort of mind."

From page 267, a quote from Edward Holden's The Sciences: "....to awaken the imagination; to convey useful knowledge; to open the doors towards wisdom. Its special aim is to stimulate observation and to excite a living and lasting interest in the world that lies about us."

From page 249, on Bible lessons: "But let the imaginations of children be stored with the pictures, their minds nourished upon the words…and they will come to look out upon a wide horizon within which persons and events take shape in their due place and in due proportion."

From page 272, on geography: "The peculiar value of geography lies in its fitness to nourish the mind with ideas, and to furnish the imagination with pictures….[Its educational value] is the developing of power, the furnishing of the mind….the child’s geography lesson should furnish just the sort of information which grown-up people care to possess."

From page 279: [History too] is a subject which should be to the child an inexhaustible storehouse of ideas, should enrich the chambers of his House Beautiful with a thousand tableaux…

A wide horizon, full of persons and events taking shape...to open, to awaken, to furnish, to stimulate, to excite, to exercise...to nourish.

Again I'll post that definition of leisure:

Having the freedom (time, space, opportunity) to discover what makes you fully human.

A Month with Charlotte Mason, #8

Now all that we have said about habits and so on is really important and key to understanding Charlotte Mason, but in all this we’re still missing something basic, and this is one of the most important things to teach: the love of learning. “How much does he care?” Charlotte Mason asked.

Here are some easy ways to kill someone’s love of learning:

1. Never give kids anything more interesting than technical exercises and drills.

2. Don’t let them think their work is really important (John Taylor Gatto)

3. or that whether they do it well really matters.

4. Compare them with each other frequently

5. Make them go over all their mistakes, and confuse them by letting them see wrong sums and spellings as much as the correct ones.

So how do we encourage that love of learning? How do we bring the children into our schola, and make them want to come back for more?

Charlotte Mason said that we want to motivate children to continue learning by allowing them to see the learning landscape or “vista” before them, an opportunity spread out but not discouragingly vast. They need to get the sense that they are getting somewhere, that they are able to solve problems and think through answers, and that they want to know more and do more.

“In other words, he learns as his elders elect to learn for themselves, though they rarely allow the children to tread in paths so pleasant.” Ouch?

Yes! It Matters!

Can Children's Poetry Matter? by J. Patrick Lewis

(Hat tip to Farm School. Check out her list of poetry resources at the end of the post.)

A Month with Charlotte Mason #7: Get a Life

Training your memory is not just a trick for winning baby-shower games, but a habit of mind, taught carefully from a young age. The power of observation is not a unique gift, but a trained power, developed and strengthened with constant use. Along with training in obedience and attention, it makes up a large part of CM’s early-years curriculum. How did Charlotte Mason’s older students get so much done in a school day that ended early and didn’t require homework? They had trained their brains to pay attention the first time, bringing their whole minds to bear on something, visualizing the historical scene or the spelling word, repeating it back, and also retaining it because the next lesson would follow from that one, linking back to the last. The brainwork here was the student’s; he was taught that he could do it, starting small and working up. Charlotte Mason said, “Give an instant’s undivided attention to anything whatsoever, and that thing will be remembered.”

This is what narration is—visualizing, remembering, and telling back either orally or in writing. It is not parroting, or "getting up a lesson" as Laura Ingalls used to do for her mother; it is retelling with understanding. Narration can be written, oral, or done as a combination with a child who is just starting to tell back in writing; and it can be done right after hearing or reading something, or slightly delayed like hearing a story on Friday and then being asked to write a narration on Monday (we have read that this was done in PNEU schools after a Shakespeare reading, later in the 20th century, and we can guess that it was also done that way in earlier years); or it can be done after a bit of time has gone by such as in term exams.

Back to the educational instruments, the three allowable and effective tools for teaching: the last one is the presentation of living ideas. "Give your child a single valuable idea, and you have done more for his education than if you had laid upon his mind the burden of bushels of information." Do I need to say more than that about it? That's all, but that's all.

And if all that habit training and visualizing sound too bewildering and overwhelming when all you’re looking for is what to do for reading and math and how to keep the littler ones out of mischief, Charlotte Mason has some encouragement:

Wise letting alone is the chief thing asked of them…every mother has in Nature an all-sufficient handmaid, who arranges for due work and due rest of mind, muscles, and senses.

These ideas are supposed to free us from some of the anxiety we naturally feel about having all this responsibility for our children’s upbringing and education. You have given them some skills, they have more of their own; let them use them. Parents are not to butt in on play but allow children, as much as possible, to get wet sometimes, dirty, tired, maybe even injured—taking a reasonable risk, but allowing them to grow. The leisurely part of CM is, partly, being able to back off.

“…..A little guiding, a little restraining, much reverent watching, Nature asks of us; but beyond that, it is the wisdom of parents to leave children as much as may be to Nature, and ‘to a higher Power than Nature itself.”

"Nature will look after [a child] and give him promptings of desire to know many things; and somebody must tell as he wants to know; and to do many things, and somebody should be handy just to put him in the way; and to be many things, naughty and good, and somebody should give direction…The busy mother says she has no leisure to be that somebody, and the child will run wild and get into bad habits; but we must not make a fetish of habit; education is a life as well as a discipline."

In other words: CM = Get a Life.

Here is a checklist for leisurely homeschooling—yes, that means You: the philosophy of leisure and the need for an un-anxious, positive atmosphere applies to the teacher too.

If you’re coercing or yelling or threatening, you’re probably doing it wrong.
If you’re spending too much time marking workbooks or cutting things out for the children to paste, you’re doing it wrong.
If you keep switching math curriculums, trying to find the perfect one, you’re probably doing it wrong.
If you’re explaining too much...
If you’re worrying that your kids haven’t mastered sentence diagramming by grade 2...
If you’re pushing your kids to narrate in front of Grandma...
If you never get out of the children’s room at the library...
If you’re worrying too much about this checklist…you’re probably doing it wrong.

In the next post, we'll talk about doing it right.

Review Crew Cruise Question: On Choices, burnout, and violets

This week's question: "Burnout--how do you handle it? Avoid it?" (Click on the ship to see more responses--they will be posted on Tuesday.)

And in the morning it's manna hotcakes.
We snack on manna all day.
And they sure had a winner last night for dinner,
flaming manna soufflé--Keith Green

On the weekend we went out for dinner with Grandpa Squirrel, to a diner-style restaurant we like. The food and the service are good. The wall decor is amusing (lots of diner-era movie pictures).The only problem with this place is its mind-bogglingly long menu. What are you going to have? Fish and chips, pasta, pizza, pasta-plus-pizza, burgers, sandwiches, all-day breakfast? Soup or salad with that? Fries or baked potato? Mama Squirrel went into can't-decide mode, so when The Apprentice asked for a chicken wrap, she just said, "I'll have the same." Fortunately, it turned out to be a good choice. But wrapping your brain around all those choices seems to be a too-common experience in our culture, and it can actually keep you from choosing at all. We have posted about this very thing before.

The Toronto Star posted a review yesterday (by Jennifer Hunter) of a new book by Sheena Iyengar, The Art of Choosing. Iyengar talks about the same issues and describes experiments such as "the jam test"--a grocery store experiment where people overwhelmed by too many flavours turned out to be less likely to buy any of them at all. I've seen the same thing happen at the homeschool conference vendor hall, where the sheer number of books, DVDs, posters and toys makes people either freeze up, or go crazy buying things they don't need. Or the number of people telling you to try this math curriculum, that method, this subject, that program, becomes just another invitation for brain meltdown.

I'm experiencing a slight dose of this myself today, on a gorgeous warm Easter Monday that, besides an attack on Mount Laundry, requires some time spent organizing our spring term. If you can get burned out by boredom (manna waffles) or by overwhelming demands, you can also be attacked with similar symptoms when the choices seem too many. Especially when the weather's nice and the last thing you want to do is go through all those free downloads.

But maybe there's something there I missed...and the DHM is using that Numbers Long Ago book, so maybe I should look at that again...and I just got that 40-page Worksheets Directory, maybe there's something in there we could use. Oh nuts--I'd rather sit on the back deck and finish Terrible Lizard.

Okay...regroup. First of all, our general schedule has been working pretty well. Although I might like a slightly neater weekly table of subjects; and although Charlotte Mason might like it better if Crayons didn't do all her math, spelling and handwriting all in a bunch (or if she didn't do "spelling" at all, but that's another story); I have to admit that if it's working and the work is getting done, we're probably halfway there.

What do I want to see change this term? More outdoor nature; more picture study and music (we've been very lax on that this year), more geography, and more independent literature for Ponytails. More independent Bible reading, since we've finished the year's stories-to-read-together. More Roots and Fruits word roots, since we let that drop in the fall and the Squirrelings keep asking me when we're going to add more prefixes to our lonely little list on the kitchen wall. More habit training, which sounds like rather nasty medicine but which is nonethless beneficial.

Goals: to get Crayons to a particular point in third grade Math Mammoth, and to get Ponytails past decimals and through a bit of algebra. To read Kim and Great Expectations out loud, and more poetry. To get done Easy Grammar Plus through the Verbs chapter. To get done everybody's assigned history for the term. To finish a few other things that we started--no big choices involved there. To keep everything within the idea of leisurely. (You never thought it was so much work to be leisurely?)

Nice things I'd like to fit in:

*A short unit on inventions with Crayons, using some of the chapters from Story of Inventions which is part of her Year 3 work, and since we were asked to try out an inventors game for the Review Crew.
*Marmee Dear's Sugar 'n' Spice Unit Study, just because it looks useful and interesting
*Gardening books
*Spring Nature Study, from Type Lessons for Primary Teachers
*Nature study on the violets that are everywhere on our lawn
*Tables in Word 2003 by Leanne Beitel (how to create tables--very useful)
*Charlotte Mason's Ourselves

Some of those are obviously more important than others--but violets don't last long. We have to keep the priorities straight.

So am I done? Can I go read my book now?

Oh--I still have to get all that stuff in order for tomorrow, don't I? And put the things in the right workboxes. Okay, so I'm not quite there yet...

but I'm not burned out.

Photos: Mr. Fixit

A Month with Charlotte Mason #6

So that left only three valid, allowable educational instruments or tools—the Atmosphere of Environment, the Discipline of Habit, and the Presentation of Living Ideas.” This is sometimes cut down to “Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life.” Let’s go through those.

I’ll touch on environment just briefly to say that Charlotte Mason thought that homes were great places to learn simply because they weren’t too perfect and packaged. Most of you know the Deputy Headmistress at The Common Room. In recent months she and her family have become more and more involved in the lives of two little boys they know, to the point that the boys’ mother has taken the older one out of kindergarten so that the Headmistress can homeschool him when he stays at The Common Room house, which is out in the country with assorted livestock, creeks and woods to explore, and a variety of humans, related and unrelated, coming and going. In the process of all this, the Headmistress exchanged some emails with the kindergarten teacher, who thought that the little boy would really be missing out on something if he didn’t attend school, because the teachers at their school had "high quality literacy training," had “students reading at their perfect instructional level," and even offered "a leveled book room of books that the reading teachers use to match to the specific needs of the students." (Besides worrying about all the usual socialization stuff.) Since then the Headmistress has posted several times about the wide variety of things both boys are doing, too many to mention here, but including the books she reads to them out of the approximately 8,000 they own. Which place sounds like a better environment for learning? What kind of atmosphere do you want your own children to learn in? Can working only at a "perfect instructional level" actually be detrimental?

Second, on habits and discipline: When you think of habits, you might think first of moral things like not being greedy, or manners like saying please, or helpful things like cleaning up your own mess or turning the lights out. But it's not just about getting them to brush their teeth. Those things are all included in habit training, but there are also habits of the mind that are just as important, such as observation and attention. Charlotte Mason said that the formation of habits IS education, and that Education is the formation of habits.

When we teach strong habits of body and mind, we give our children the leisure—the freedom from anxiety—not to have to constantly worry about what to do next, whether they are going to come when they’re called or not, whether they are going to work attentively at their lessons or dawdle or get distracted, whether they are going to tell the truth or not. As adults, we have, we hope, developed stronger wills that enable us to simply tell ourselves to get back to work or do what we don’t want to do; children, according to Charlotte Mason, don’t always have that power, so it is important to begin with the discipline of habits, and work on developing the will gradually. She said, “The habits of the child produce the character of the man.”

If you read Home Education, you’ll find that Charlotte Mason spends a fair amount of time at the beginning talking about keeping children’s brains healthy and growing by giving them lots of fresh air and outdoor time; and her point is that since you’re out there anyway, you have the opportunity to train them in habits of observation of whatever is around them—plants, animals, landscapes, weather, stars, light, shadows, water, dirt, snow, and encouraging them in their abilities to describe, accurately and in detail, whatever they see. (Or whatever they observe, with any or all of their five senses. I still remember Coffeemamma's Schmoo showing the rest of her family that particular maples had their own smell--or was it taste?)

CM is thought of as a books-based, literary curriculum, and that is true; but I think it is just as much a SEEING curriculum, both in what is literally seen and what is visualized when listening to a geography lesson, when studying spelling words, or in picture study, when children look carefully at a painting for several minutes, and then try to describe it in as much detail as they can from memory. She believed that the act of visualizing something was the key to holding it in the long-term memory. You had to create a mental picture of something yourself, but too much given, too many visuals cluttering up the lesson, would actually limit that process, giving your brain less to work on by itself. I think that relates to our phrase “doesn’t leave much to the imagination.” That’s what Charlotte Mason did want to do—leave lots to the imagination.

A Month with Charlotte Mason #5: Only Three Tools

...and studying the subjects we do cover with books, Real Books—with Real Things as well, but largely with Real Books, inspiring real ideas and real questions, modeling real vocabulary, awakening real curiosity, offering real mind-food.

Real Things are important. A Charlotte Mason education can and should have lots of hands-on, feet-on, five-senses activity. It should have maps and globes, dominoes and math beans, coins, CDs, paint boxes, animals, games of tag, costumes and sets, physical exercises, field trips, singing, building, household skills, outdoor play, clay, magnifying glasses, caterpillars, shells, even tea parties.

But the one indispensable factor is books—lots of books, and the right kind of books, a rich, varied, generous serving that makes them want more. And using those books in a way that makes use of all the habits and skills, intelligence and imagination, powers of attention and observation, that are already in our children and that are being built up by the training we have been giving them.

We want whole books, and real books—not cut apart, rewritten, and sugar coated, but with their ideas intact. Even the more difficult books can be a vital part of the children’s education, without our worrying too much about whether they’re totally understood by 21st-century children.

Recently I read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, which is about a wartime book club and how each person in the group formed a relationship with one author or another in his or her own way, just by reading that person’s book, whether it was an ancient Roman or a 19th-century essayist. They were just plain people, some with more education than others, but they heard those voices speaking into their own minds, without anybody else telling them what they should think about the books; and they understood them, argued with them, loved or hated them. The books fed them, in the midst of a literal time of famine.

In the children’s classic Understood Betsy, the main character is surprised, during her first day in a country school, to be not only allowed but expected to read more than a line at a time out loud--just as she is surprised, in another scene, to be invited to drink all the milk she wants. The teacher tests her further by having her read “Barbara Frietchie,” and all the other children stop their work to listen (and are not scolded for listening). That evening as Betsy recounts her day to the supposedly ignorant old “Putney cousins” with whom she has come to stay, they suggest that she read to them from one of the books on their shelf: Scott’s Lady of the Lake. Their mutual enjoyment of “The Stag at Eve” creates the first real bond between Betsy and her new family.

Third--we're still talking about the three questions parents should ask themselves--how should the students learn? Charlotte Mason wrote about her early days of teaching, which she said were often frustrating because each year the children seemed able to do harder sums, and read harder books, but they did not really grow, in the sense of having minds more awake, or in gaining moral power to overcome problems like habitual lying or dawdling at lessons. She wanted to help them more, but wasn’t sure how. Over many years of experience teaching children, and then training teachers herself, several ideas seemed to come together for her.

She knew of many things that certainly might change behaviour, but most of them were not allowable if you started out by viewing each child as a person made in God’s image, who “must not be encroached upon whether by the direct use of fear or love, suggestion or influence, or by undue play upon any one natural desire,” like competition for marks. In other words, fear could certainly affect someone's behaviour; but that wasn't a route she wanted to take. The personal influence of a strong teacher could definitely change someone's behaviour, and probably for the better in some respects; but what would happen when that teacher was gone and the student did not know how to think for himself? None of these options were respectful of a young human being's moral rights. (Hm, so much for accusations of homeschool brainwashing.)

So that left only three valid, allowable instruments or tools that an educator could use to go beyond the "horse in a mill" school routine of endless recitations and sums. Those three were:

"the Atmosphere of Environment,
the Discipline of Habit,
and the Presentation of Living Ideas.”

This is sometimes cut down to “Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life.” I'll go through those in the next post.

A Month With Charlotte Mason will be taking a break for the holidays this weekend.

Life outside of homeschool posts: thinking dinner as you cook

Dewey's Treehouse has always been somewhat eclectic--we go through seasons of posting mostly frugal stuff or food stuff, and other times when we're more about homeschooling or something else. If you're not into reviews or Charlotte Mason, thanks for your patience.

Yesterday we got home from an errand at shortly after four; I had an hour to get dinner on the table and I wasn't sure yet what I was going to do with the pound of ground chicken that I had left thawing in the fridge. I started it browning while I preheated the oven and mixed up a large pan of brownies, since we didn't have even one cookie or anything like that in the house (well, there was some Jell-O in the fridge, that I'd made up from the other package I bought for the disastrous Gummy Worms experiments). I also cut up some sweet potatoes and put them in a casserole, sprinkled them with pepper, drizzled them with olive oil, and added water to the bottom of the pan; they went in with the brownies. (I should have cut them even smaller because they were still a bit hard at the end; I had to finish them quickly in the microwave.)

When the chicken was pretty much cooked, I added part frozen green beans, one chopped-up cauliflower, and this combination of sauce ingredients: 1/4 cup white salad dressing (what we use instead of mayonnaise), 1/2 cup of cottage cheese (because the recipe I was thinking of calls for sour cream or yogurt and I didn't have either), a bit of garlic powder, and a teaspoonful of chicken bouillon powder. I put the sauce stuff on top of the vegetables, and it didn't look like much, but I was figuring there would be some liquid from the chicken and the frozen beans. In the end I did add a bit of milk: not enough to be soupy, just enough to keep it moist. I just let this cook for awhile on the stovetop until the cauliflower was cooked and it smelled done. I also added in the measly bit of cheddar cheese we had in the fridge. (We are not starving, we just need some groceries.)

And I cooked a potful of Basmati rice.

So: Cheesy Chicken Cauliflower Un-Casserole; baked sweet potatoes; rice; brownies; and the remains of the Jell-O. That was dinner, and the Squirrel family approved it.

A Month with Charlotte Mason #4

But if we’re not to undervalue children’s capabilities, not to ignore or abuse their mental as well as their physical needs, not to sidetrack their spiritual lives, not to fall unthinkingly into utilitarianism, what is it that we are to do? Let’s ask the same questions that Charlotte Mason did.

First of all, what is education about? Why must children learn at all?

She says that “our business is, not to teach him all about anything—isn’t that a bit of a stress-reliever?-- but to help him make valid, as many as may be of

'Those first born affinities,
'That fit our new existence to existing things.'” (Wordsworth, "The Prelude")

In other words, a child has the right to learn what it means to be part of the human race, to be living in this world and to be in a relationship with God the Father; and he needs to learn in order to grow.

(Remember the definition of leisure proposed in the second post? Having the freedom (time, space, opportunity) to discover what makes you fully human.)

Second, we ask what the child is to learn.

Charlotte Mason said, “The object of education is to put a child in living touch with as much as may be of the life of Nature and of thought…. a child has natural relations with a vast number of things and thoughts: so we must train him upon physical exercises, nature, handicrafts, science and art, and upon many living books….Add to this one or two keys to self knowledge, and the educated youth goes forth with some idea of self management, with some pursuits, and many vital interests.” That simple, right?

A more detailed curriculum? Miss Mason felt that there were several non-negotiable subjects that all tied in with each other and balanced each other. From her Volume 6, Philosophy of Education:

“But what if in the very nature of things we find a complete curriculum suggested?....A child of man has a natural desire to know the history of his race and of his nation, what men thought in the past and are thinking now; the best thoughts of the best minds taking form as literature, and at its highest as poetry, or poetry rendered….as art….he is a child of God, whose supreme desire and glory it is to know about and to know his almighty Father: as a person of many parts and passions who must know how to use, care for, and discipline himself, body, mind and soul: as a person of many relationships,--to family, city, church, state, neighbouring states, the world at large: as the inhabitant of a world full of beauty and interest, the features of which he must recognize and know how to name, and a world too, and a universe, whose every function of every part is ordered, by laws which he must being to know. It is a wide programme founded on the educational rights of man….Our part it seems to me is to give a child a vital hold upon as many as possible of those wide relationships proper to him.” Those were the things she thought it was most important that every human being should learn—the things that make us fully human.

It may not sound very "leisurely" to tell (or remind) you that Charlotte Mason’s students, by high school, were expected to be on their third or fourth foreign language including Latin, to be taking two or three branches of mathematics and the same in science, to have studied more history and geography than most of us ever learn, and to be able to recast both Bible lessons and current events into lines of verse; not to mention keeping nature notebooks and more. For many of us (and our young people) that may not be realistic, although it’s certainly not impossible; I’ve heard of super-accomplished CM-educated graduates who have covered an amazing amount of material in their high school years, and who may not even realize what an out-of-the-ordinary (yet within reach of others) thing they've done.

But the key to this is not so much copying every branch of everything in the same way that CM did (studying all the same languages just because she did, or ignoring new areas of science), but following her principles, grounding children in the habits of attention and observation from the time they're small (as well as the moral-type and hygiene-type habits), and studying the subjects we do cover with books, Real Books—with Real Things as well, but largely with Real Books, inspiring real ideas and real questions, modeling real vocabulary, awakening real curiosity, offering real mind-food.

More on Why Books in the next post.

A Month With Charlotte Mason #3

In Home Education, she said they needed to begin by asking themselves “Why must the children learn at all? What should they learn? And how should they learn it?” And that after they had considered these questions, they would be in a position to direct their children’s studies…as long as they started in the right place, following a few truths about human beings and natural laws that you can’t disobey without causing damage, and starting and ending with the one who made those laws.

For Charlotte Mason, that was with the idea of God.

Actually she starts more with a lot of talk about oxygen and wool clothes and children not eating fried foods, that gets people very confused, but right at the beginning of Home Education, she says there are just three big thou-shalt-not's for adults raising or teaching children, that come right out of the Gospels and form a code of education. One of the don’ts is not to hinder children in their relationship with God as their heavenly Father. She says we hinder them if we overlook or make light of their natural relationship with Almighty God; if we twist their thoughts about God to suit our own purposes, or even if we overdo certain kinds of religious talk. We are not to do or say anything that will damage the child’s own relationship with God.

The other two big don’ts are not to offend children and not to despise them. To offend them is the sin of commission, meaning both doing harm to them, and allowing them to do wrong. It also means not following what we know about the physical care of children, moral training, intellectual training, or spiritual teaching; mistreating them in ways that cause them to stumble.

Despising children is not doing the good that we should do in loving them or teaching them, because we undervalue their intelligence, their value as persons, their capacity for good, or even their capacity for bad. It means not taking them seriously. “We may not meddle directly with the personality of child or man. We may not work upon his vanity, his fears, his love, his emulation, or any thing that is his by very right, anything that goes to make him a person.” (Charlotte Mason, School Education)

She forgot how afraid she was of Uncle Henry, and poured out to him her discovery. "It's not right or left that matters!" she ended triumphantly; "it's which way you want to go!" Uncle Henry looked at her attentively as she talked, eyeing her sidewise over the top of one spectacle-glass. When she finished -- "Well, now, that's so," he admitted, and returned to his arithmetic.

It was a short remark, shorter than any Elizabeth Ann had ever heard before. Aunt Frances and her teachers always explained matters at length. But it had a weighty, satisfying ring to it. The little girl felt the importance of having her statement recognized. She turned back to her driving.--Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Understood Betsy

What is Mama Squirrel reading?

Still reading: Terrible Lizard, by Deborah Cadbury

"[Buckland's] appetite for information became insatiable: it was as if the layers of rock that enveloped the globe formed the pages of a history of the earth. But if this was so, what would be written on them? And how did all this fit with the extraordinary 'crocodile' found by Mary Anning?"

Just finished: Wondrous Strange,by Lesley Livingston. Not Mama Squirrel's usual kind of book--this was passed on by The Apprentice, something she was given to read for her high school book club. Too gory for anyone below high school, and it won't appeal to anyone who has theological qualms about reading anything about Faery, but: it's well written, often humorous, mostly avoids bad language, and does a wonderful job incorporating original ideas with traditional fairy lore and Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. It reminds me, in places, of The Dark is Rising (which I know some of you do not like, and I can understand that), and the movie Enchanted, and even the part of The Magician's Nephew where Jadis shows up in London and starts ripping things apart (only in this case it's Queen Mabh). There's already a sequel out as well.

Silver is shiny enough

Congratulations, Apprentice.

Why Mama Squirrel isn't cooking tonight

Tonight is the awards night for Skills Canada at our regional level--that is, the two local school boards have a prize-giving ceremony for ALL the categories. The Apprentice has won bronze twice before, and she knows she's going to win at least bronze tonight because there were only three hairstyling competitors from our board at the competition last week. But in spite of that one bobby pin she KNOWS she left sticking out (did you know Squirrels tend to obsess about things? did you? did you?), she's hoping for something shinier this year. Gold medallists in each category go on to the provincial level.

Usually the awards night is close to where we live, and since it's a long sit (like going to a graduation ceremony) and usually very crowded with students, teachers and parents, just Mama Squirrel goes along to cheer on The Apprentice. But this year, because it's been so crowded in the past, it's been moved to a bigger place at the other end of town. And because it starts quite early and it takes awhile to get there, and because there are fast food places right near there, we are going to take all the Squirrels and go out for burgers first.

There are hockey moms. There are music festival moms. I'm a hairstyling mom.

A Month with Charlotte Mason, #2

Post #1 is here.

So let’s go back to the opposite of utilitarian, what we’ve called leisurely. We have the usual definition of leisure as spare time, fun and games, something easy, what you do to relax; there’s Lynn’s definition which included ceasing from anxiety and contemplating higher things; we have the Roman idea of space set aside for thought or conversation; we have Northrop Frye’s idea that irrelevance is not necessarily a bad thing; we have the key phrase “without which we cannot be fully human.”

So if we put them together, we might define leisure in this way:

Having the freedom (time, space, opportunity) to discover what makes you fully human.

But then we also have that very odd connection with our word for school, a place where you’re made to go, listen to what does not interest you, do what you wouldn’t choose to do for as many years as the government says you have to. Why does that just not seem to fit?

And you may wonder what all this has to do with homeschooling. Many of us have kept or taken our children out of school precisely so they wouldn’t forced to be just another brick in the wall. But since utilitarianism is a big part of our culture, and the schools most of us were taught in reflected a utilitarian educational philosophy, it can sneak into our homeschooling. It might show up in worrying too much about provincial/state standards, or basing our criteria for learning on how many booklets children have filled in, or on how well they construct bar graphs and learn their spelling lists. Or we can react to this and go with something that has much less rigidity, a much less parent-directed kind of learning-without-school, where the children are making the decisions about what they will learn and how they will spend their time. John Holt (in Freedom and Beyond) described a cartoon showing a kid in a child-centered school who asks his teacher “Do I have to do whatever I want again today?” But that’s not exactly what Charlotte Mason envisioned either.

In Home Education, she said that parents needed to begin thinking about education by asking themselves “Why must the children learn at all? What should they learn? And how should they learn it?” And that after they had considered these questions, they would be in a position to direct their children’s studies…as long as they started in the right place, following a few truths about human beings and natural laws that you can’t disobey without causing damage, and starting and ending with the One who made those laws.

(Disclaimer here: I have unschooling and "very relaxed homeschooling" friends, and I am not denying that for some people, some of the time, a de-toxing approach works very well. But we're talking here about why CM isn't the same as unschooling.)

Repost from 2008: Kings and heroes, brave, good, and otherwise

I originally posted this in the summer of 2008, when I was planning Crayons' grade 2 year. I thought it was worth going back to along with our Month with Charlotte Mason.

My own second-grade Social Studies, in the experimental '70's, was called Environmental Studies, a word none of us had ever heard and which, I don't think, was ever fully explained. It took us forever to copy that off the blackboard and on to the covers of the new notebooks we were handed. I don't remember a lot about it, either, except for a trip to the sugar bush and some kind of a neighbourhood field trip where we walked around the block and pointed out various kids' apartment buildings. I think the baby chicks we hatched and any other science we did may have been lumped in there as well. For sure, though, it didn't include history.

Can second-graders do more than go to the sugar bush? Would we have "gotten" history in the second grade? No, not in the same way ten-to-twelve-year-olds do, or in the same way teenagers or adults do. Most seven-year-olds don't totally get maps, or dates. They don't get abstract ideas, cause and effect, or political things. But they do like stories, characters, heroes, villains. They do remember what happened and who did what, if not always why. It's the same in geography...I remember The Apprentice's map of the Mississippi, that started somewhere in Alaska. But she had the right idea at least.

So we read the stories of kings and heroes, the brave and good, and the otherwise. Some of the stories may be what Josephine Tey calls Tonypandy; some may be disputed or offer currently unpopular viewpoints. Did King Alfred burn the biscuits?--probably not. Does it matter? Are we teaching untruths or trivialities? Would it make more sense just to wait until they're older and more discriminating?

No, because we are teaching more than facts and dates. We are teaching "norms and nobility," to quote David V. Hicks. "How to live," to quote Charlotte Mason. We are giving them heroes--feet of clay though they may have--to "people" their imaginations. And we are building a foundation for later history teaching--again to quote CM, an understanding that we are not the only people, and our time is not the only time; that people long ago may have known less about technology, may have had attitudes about churches and kings that we don't share, but that they weren't any less intelligent or less human.

Does it matter that we don't start right at the beginning of time, or that some of the history we do is out of sequence? (Bible stories are history too, but we don't confine them to an "ancient history" year! And then there are biographies that come up out of chronological order, and dates connected with artists and writers and the Guinness Book of World Records...) No, not at this age; all "long ago" tends to be a bit hazy anyway when you're still figuring out the difference between a hundred and a thousand; it's after that that children can start making better sense of timelines and other more sequential tools.