Reading Slowly

It seems counter-intuitive to stop a book or a lesson while the child is still enjoying it, but there are reasons.  Here's one, gleaned from a story by Ina Hervey:

“The hour devoted to this exercise flew by so rapidly, that the children could scarcely realize that it was time to go home, and coaxed to stay longer ; but their teacher was too wise to exhaust their enthusiasm by granting their request. Even their recess was partially occupied by lively discussions on the relative beauty of their discoveries.”

We don’t want to ‘exhaust their enthusiasm.’  We want them coming again to the next lesson with their appetites and interest still seasoned by the sauce of curiosity.  Don’t glut their appetite for learning more.

It's hard to put a book down when a student is  loving it. It's hard for most of us, as parents, to even begin to think of that as a  sensible procedure.  But it really, really does make a difference when children have time  to reflect on small portions of what they have read in their schoolbooks.

In fact, I  would go so far as to say that they get even MORE out of it when they  _are_ loving the book and have to put it aside. They are so eager  to know what comes next that they can't _help_ but think about that  story all day and night until they get to read more. They are  wondering, wondering "what happens next?" What if... will this  happen, or will that? They are reviewing events in their minds up  to the point where you left off and trying all sorts of ways to  think about the story to figure out what happens next and why, and  wherefore, and what the possibilities are.  They will think of things they would have overlooked in reading  through it too quickly.

Even if they are giving great narrations,  there is more to the process we want to see than just retelling the story. It's also  important for learning that the children are sometimes reliving the  story, making sense of cause and effect, pondering the ramifications  of this or that event, thinking about what sort of people the  different characters are- and they really do this in greater depth  when they are enjoying the story and have to close the book.

That space between when you forced them to put the book down and when they are at last allowed to pick it up again- that space is an important space where deeper learning is taking place.

IN my own life I learned the benefits of this slower, more measured reading in a rather silly  way. I am a book glutton. I swallow books whole. Before I met CM  it was my policy not to pick up a book I couldn't finish in a single  sitting. I read fast,  neglect my house while I read,  and stay up too late reading, so this means I could read a book of  up to four hundred pages in an evening- but I couldn't do more than  that.

Another vice of mine is mysteries. I love mysteries, and I always  read them cover to cover. After reading Charlotte Mason I began  working on myself and  my bad habits (I have a long way to go) and I  learned to put a book down before I was finished.

I was amazed to discover that when I did this with mysteries, when I  came back to the book, I was figuring out 'who done it' with far  more regularity than when I read the book cover to cover. Without  even consciously thinking about it, I had given my brain the time it  needed to process what I had read, absorb details I overlooked, and reach accurate conclusions.

This is what we want for our children, and that is why (eventually) I did not let  mine read ahead in their schoolbooks- I did let them read pretty much  as much as they wanted and as fast as they wanted in other books, and  they had access to thousands of titles to choose from- but they really were not supposed to read ahead in their schoolbooks.  I discovered, once I implemented it, that this works, and it works really well.

I didn't begin this way.   Before we fully implemented Charlotte Mason principles, if I was reading a schoolbook to the children and it was time to stop, and they begged for more, I would keep reading. It was fine by me if we ripped through an entire book in a day instead of spreading it out over a few weeks.

Before I actually tried this, stopping while a child was still interested was anathema to me – I thought it a terrible, ridiculous thing to do, and it went against all my assumptions.

But like so many of Miss Mason’s ideas, when I actually tried putting it into practice, the results made me a believer. In fact, I even got extra ‘narrations’ as my children would come up to me sometimes during lunch or while we were at the park and suddenly say, “I just can’t believe that he’s dead!” and I, startled, would say, “who?” and then they proceed to tell me their concerns about where some story is going and what is going to happen and their indignation at the behaviour of some character.

They soaked in details while they were away from the book- they marinated their brains in the whys, hows, and what happens next.  One of them would come up to me for several days between readings to tell me, "Mama I've been thinking about why the King did what he did, and what's going to happen next, and I think... " and she would share some remarkable reasoning, pulling together tiny details to draw conclusions, often correctly, and always with more insight than she'd had when I let her gallop through her books. 

You’ve heard of the slow food movement, right? (Right?) Lindsay Waters wants to start another new movement of her own, a slow reading movement. Of course, Charlotte Mason got there earlier, and Charlotte herself was only explaining ground that had been covered by philosophers before her. She didn't just make it up brand new.   If you've read and enjoyed Charlotte Mason's writings, you will find much that strikes a resonant chord in the article linked above.

Here are a few excerpts from Mr. Waters’ essay, published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, where he laments the trend toward valuing speed over careful, thoughtful reading: 

The Monty Python crew made fun of this imperative in its “All-England Summarize Proust Competition” for the best synopsis of Proust’s seven-volume Remembrance of Things Past in 15 seconds. The fun poked at attempts to speed-read the classics was as painful as Chaplin’s effort to survive industrialization. And it’s no joke: Imagine radiologists forced to read 13 mammograms per hour, without interrupting their reading to speak to the women whose scans they are analyzing. I know of at least one such case.

He says that what is done in the preschools and grade schools today will affect grad programs years from now (which should be obvious, but the obvious often isn’t). This has already happened in large degree, as we increasingly see college programs today dumbed down again to accommodate the products of the current high school programs, where reading and thinking is hardly valued at all. Much of this is, says Waters, “due to the willful embrace of methods for teaching reading that are inimical to reading in depth.”

It’s no wonder so many of us who are all grown up now and ought to know better are so quick to dismiss complex, rich, and meaty classics as ‘too hard:’

What happens when we have children speed up learning to read, skipping phonics and diagramming sentences? I believe it’s hard to read Milton if you have not learned to take pleasure in baroque sentence structures.

The problem with reading too quickly, says Waters, is that

“Unless one can digest the letters on the page fast enough, one cannot comprehend what one is reading. But once one learns how to read, there is a speed beyond which one stops reading in a truly effective way. I am convinced that most speed-reading is impaired reading, just like the sort you do when you have a fever or are tired or engaged in other tasks at the same time you are supposed to be reading. Unless you are very smart, speed-reading forces you to ignore all but one dimension of a literary work, the simplest information. What we lose is the enjoyment that made people turn to literature in the first place.”

But of course, what most of us want from reading is the single dimension, the simplest information- what happened, and who was involved. We read to find out ‘how it ends’ and we don’t much care how it happened along the way. We skip descriptive passages and quickly dash through or over any philosophizing.

When finding out ahead of time ‘how it ends’ spoils the book for you, then that’s a big clue that you would benefit from broadening your expectations from reading. We give lip service to the theory that learning is a life long process that doesn’t end when schooling ends, and indeed, we do continue to read (most of us, I assume). Unfortunately, we read more, but not deeper, not harder. Whatever our reading level was when we left school, that will be the same level most of us are reading at when we die. And when we largely stay at the same reading level for the rest of our lives as the one reached at 18, just how seriously do we believe that learning is a live long process? It doesn’t occur to us that we have an obligation to ourselves, our own minds, our children, and even our Creator, to continue to grow, and that a stagnant reading level (whatever it was, it doesn’t matter- stagnation is bad) is a sign that we haven’t attempted to continue to develop intellectually.

Behind the fads of the last 20 years, the shift in methods of teaching reading — at all levels — has rejected paying attention to everything literary in a piece of writing, from phonics to poetics, from sentence structures to all larger formal structures.

Charlotte Mason recommended slow reading over a period of time. She also recommended returning to the classics and rereading them:

Novels are our lesson books only so far as we give thoughtful, considerate reading to such novels as are also literature. The young person who reads three books a week from Mudie’s, or elsewhere, is not likely to find in any of them ‘example of life and instruction in manners.’ These things arrive to us after many readings of a book that is worth while; and the absurdity of saying, ‘I have read’ Jane Austen or the Waverley novels should be realised. We do not say ‘I have read’ Shakespeare, or even Browning or Tennyson; but to ‘have read’ any of the great novels is also a mark of ignorance.

Charlotte Mason’s Formation of Character, Vol 5 of her 6 volume series, pg 374. She read Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen over and over throughout her lifetime. This surprises a lot of people who understand that she recommended a single reading- and she did- for school purposes. She wanted students to develop their attention and focus so that they didn’t get lazy with reading their school books- so that they read carefully the first time, instead of speedily breezing through, sure that they could review whatever they missed.  So it isn't an either/or issue with Charlotte Mason's approach.  Slower readings for schoolbooks read the first time can be followed by faster, repeat reading.  

I am a bit saddened when I see parents pushing back on the slow reading, because I have learned how valuable it is.  As Lindsay Waters says:

…slowing down can produce a deeply profound quiet that can overwhelm your soul, and in that quiet you can lose yourself in thought for an immeasurable moment of time.

The issue is more than just savoring literary experience. I am suggesting that there is more than meets the eye in reading, literally. If we attend to the time of reading, we might notice that our relationship to a literary work changes over time. One consequence is that we begin to be charitable to “bad” readers, whether they are our students, our acquaintances, or our former selves. Most important, though, we learn to drop the idea that we can neatly distinguish good from bad reading because we realize that, at some time in the past, we were not up to reading a particular work. Or perhaps we see that while we missed a great deal, we did respond strongly to parts of the work. It begins to make sense, then, to track our career with a certain work, in order to open it up as literature.

 It's not just for the children.  This year, why not try to read something just a little harder than you’ve allowed yourself to read beofre? Take your time. Read slowly, carefully, and steadily. If the books you read are no harder or more complicated than when you are 18 (unless you are 18), then it’s about time.

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$5.00- Education for All, vol 2- the Imagination (and more) issue!- transcript of the imagination talk from the AO Camp meeting, with additional material I had to cut to save time.  
   
 $5.00- Education for All, a new CM journal,   Feed Your Mind!  This issue contains several articles on handicrafts, outdoor play, nature study and science. See sidebar for purchasing options if you are in the Philippines.


 $3.00 Five Little Peppers and How They Grew Copywork (grades 2/3, carefully selected with an eye toward finely crafted sentences, lovely bits of writing pleasant to picture in the mind's eye, and practice in copying some of the mechanics of grammar and punctuation typically covered in these years.

  $3.00 Aesop's Fables Copywork for Year One!  Carefully selected with an eye toward well written sentences, memorable scenes, and some practice copying sentences that model the basics of capitalization and punctuation.   Suitable for use with children who have already mastered the strokes and letters for basic penmanship.

Picture Study!  Miguel Cabrera's beautiful, diverse families, painted in 18th century Mexico this package includes 9 downloadable prints along with directions for picture study and background information on the artist and his work. $5.00


Common Kitchen:  What's for lunch?  Isn't that a common problem in homeschooling families?  What to fix, what is quick, what is frugal, what is nourishing?  How can I accomplish all those things at once?  We homeschooled 7 children, and I was a homeschooling mom for 29 years on a single income.  I collected these recipes and snack ideas from all over the world.  These are real foods I used to feed my family, my godsons, and sometimes my grandkids.  Includes some cooking tips and suggestions for sides, and for a variety of substitutions.  I think every family will find something they can use here. $5.00

Charlotte Mason is a Liberal Arts Education

You either already know, or you have heard, that a Charlotte Mason education includes the idea that education is the science of relations. You may have heard about affinities.  But what does this mean, practically speaking?  Here are some thoughts taken from a Parents' Review article;

Goal: to give ideas and experiences in as many branches of our relationships as possible. (relationships with the natural world, the technological world, relationships with the story of mankind past and future, and the chief relationship, that with the creator).

This type education is not taught by making it as your goal to teach them 'all about' a country in their geography lessons, for example. Rather, when we study geography, to spark such interest in and curiosity about the places in our reading that they will want to discover more on their own, and they'll look into books of travel, and make plans one day to travel to the place itself, to view its panoramas or take their share in its future destinies.

How?

• "First.--Proceed from what is known to what is unknown, in other words touch upon old associations with former lessons or experiences before plunging into something fresh.
• Secondly.--Give simple ideas before complex.
• Thirdly.--Work from the concrete to the abstract, or don't fly before you can walk.
• Fourthly.--Illustrations are the hooks which fasten ideas to the mind.
• Fifthly.--Reproduction is the only proof of retention, therefore narration or recapitulation must form a part of the each lesson.
• Sixthly.--An idea is valuable in proportion as it enlarges the mental vision, forms the ground-work of a valuable habit, and is simple, clear, definite and suitable to the degree of experience in the pupil.

One other condition will affect our choice of ideas; they must be "interesting" in their nature or in their method of presentation.

This doctrine of interest explains why we should omit dry areas of foreign countries, strings of parliamentary enactments; what is interesting to us and therefore to the children, is the nature of the scenery of a country or the spirit of a bygone age."

"No lesson is valuable which does not promote self-activity by making the child think, exercising its powers of narration or reproduction, or laying the ground-work for some future mental habit, making the idea given a well-spring of activity."

Lap-books, scripted activity books assigned by the teacher, unit studies where the teacher makes the connection and gives the children activities to do- these are not 'self-activities' unless the child seeks them out and plans them himself.

"No, it is the child who has to become accustomed to an idea, or led to discover a fact with as little of the teacher as a middleman, and as much "direct trading" as possible.

Therefore we teachers often have to pass a self-denying ordinance, and instead of showing off to our children how much we know, we take our children to the fountain-heads of knowledge and stand by in "masterly inactivity" which they drink."

Which subjects are chosen, and why:

Bible- for ethics and a closer relationship with their Creator.
"We do not, even for tiny children, advocate "Bible stories," but actual passages from the sacred text, for the wonderful grand old English in which it is written has been more than one great writer's school of language, and will, with necessary explanations, be far more impressive and likely to carry the contained idea, than the paraphrase of some well-meaning but common-place teacher."
(note: there were at least two other more contemporary translations than the KJV available in Miss Mason's time and there were multiple Bible story books available).

     Secular History: to give them heroic ideas, hearts full of brotherly love, patriotism, and the desire to do and be for the good of others!

That the past shall for them be peopled with noble examples, dear friends, and awful warnings--not for nothing did "Boney" take the place of "bogey" in the nursery when Napoleon was devouring the world.

We want the children to learn their history lessons, not "William the Conqueror, 1066," but God's dealings with humanity, the sequence of cause and effect; we want to train their moral judgment, that they may put the motive before the deed, nor dub all men with neat little labels of good or bad.

How: Life stories of the great; readings from original and contemporary or standard and classical sources; select from the best authorities such passages as will most vividly leave with the children the spirit and ideas of the time, not teach naked facts from a miserable text-book.

Century charts- the children fill the small square allowed for each year with little pictures, drawn by themselves, of the events which have struck them most, anecdotes, pictures, connection with places familiar to them, reference to events in their own experience illustrating the same forces at work.

Literature: The dividing line between history and literature is almost imperceptible.
If the child learns his history at first hand from the writings of the times, whether they be the Saxon Chronicles or _With Kitchener to Khartoum_, the phraseology will help him as a model on which to form his own, as well as a key to the spirit of bygone ages.

In studying the masterpieces of literature we do not learn about them in text-books (though we must concede a point by using the invaluable little Stopford Brooke to show us in what constellations the bright peculiar stars shine), but we introduce the children to the first sonnet, or to Malory's _King Arthur_, or Tennyson's _Idylls_.

We choose the children's books, not on the score of "prettiness," but on account of the score of their true literary flavour; _Robinson Crusoe_ and _Don Quixote_ are quite as much literature as Macaulay's _Essays_ or Gibbon's _Decline and Fall_.

We therefore choose sundry really valuable books, which are to be read to or by the children every term, not leaving their literary taste to be formed by the first story-book which catches their fancy.

As we study the history of many nations and of many times, the Hebrew race, the Ancients--Greek and Roman, and the modern peoples of Europe, so we must also study their literature; older pupils will work at the "classics," works crowned by the French Acadamy, the masterpieces of Goethe, etc., in the language in which they were written, while for younger pupils there is the wonderful classical library now published by which we can enjoy Plato, Virgil, Petrach or Racine in our mother-tongue.

Learning to read- Our method for that "battle"--learning to read--is, teach by the eye as well as the ear.

Choose words which convey an interesting idea to the child and he will as readily learn to recognize robin-redbreast, as one-syllable words like "cat."

Then if he knows the sounds, not the names of his letters, he can build up Bobbin, Dobbin, or any number of words from those already familiar, and put the words he already knows into different and yet sensible order, and the sense of power gained will be tremendous!

There will then be (supposing the child to learn to recognize five new words a day, build up others on them, and finally make them up again out of loose letters and put them into sentences of his own) no gap between reading, spelling, and composition, they follow one another in natural and reasonable sequence.
This is followed by grammar, which is also learned contextually at first, rather than through workbooks, through the introduction of names for the ideas with which the child is already familiar- we use words to make sentences and convey thoughts. Sentences which are about nobody or nothing are not sensible and do not convey complete thoughts- and so on (more in volume one)

Foreign Languages- taught by immersion, orally, not through textbooks and worksheets, best learned from a native speaker.
We believe in the necessity of learning as many languages as possible, because we believe in that "open-door" policy, and though a language may not be learned fully during school-days, even a slight familiarity with Italian, for example, may lead to --Dante?

Languages are valuable, not only as an end in themselves,but as tending to give us wider interests and sympathies with our fellow-men, and a more cosmopolitan insight.

Geography: The educational value of geography, both as alone helping us to understand all the intricacies of the former (how Holland's dykes kept her free, and how France had her two languages--the Langue d'oc and the Langue d'ocil) and as enlarging our conception of the wonderful, beautiful world in which we live, and of helping us to understand contemporary issues as well.

Maps should be part of daily life.
Comparison with what they know at home, on a smaller scale, or comprehension by contrast, as for example, "Imagine those green fields to your left reared straight on end, and they would be like the South Downs, etc,"--are valuable as bringing facts, very remote in themselves, within the children's experience. The first beginnings of geography--its foundations will be laid long before the schoolroom days, at home, for geography is essentially a subject which must progress outwards from the circle of the child's experience, he begins by learning to know a hill, a river, a field, a village, and to reproduce them in sand or clay.

Science: "teach the thing before the name."

"Go out," we say, "into the country, learn its sights, its sounds, its smells, learn the flowers by sight and by names, the creatures in their homes and by their customs, the stones of earth by their look and from touch, and the configuration of the country."

Then you will have learnt at first hand from the most wonderful books, and have something to classify and amplify in your later studies.

From their earliest babyhood children can and should be given interests and pursuits, therefore we encourage them to note their observations and to reproduce, however roughly at first, in their nature note-books, the treasures they have found, and above all we want them to have that loving interest in "birds, and beasts, and butterflies" which will teach them that life is a sacred cycle, not be tampered with, so that the protection of an apparently valueless lady-bird means fewer green-fly and therefore more roses and therefore more pleasure in life.

Astronomy (taught by identifying the stars you see in the night sky) should give ideas of awe, wonder, reverence, and our own insignificance. In the same way, in every branch of science the children will be led to see the Creator in the created, to reverence life and enjoy it, and to gain that largeness and sympathy and catholicity of interests, which an open-air life or the love of it seems to bring.

Mathematics.--We turn from the sciences of facts as we see them to the science of facts as they must be.

Truth is the key-note and core of mathematics.

There is no "nearly right" or "probably is so" or "certainly may be" about 2+2=4.

Logic, the putting of two and two mentally and inevitably together, and truth in all her majesty and tidiness are to be the mental acquisitions gained from arithmetic, Euclid and algebra.

How then do we teach them?

Why we try to crystallize the idea of numbers by treating each fresh number that the child learns to count to an analysis comprising the four great processes, for example, 6=5+1, 6+2x3, 6=8-2, 6=3+3, 6=4+2, 6= 12/2, 6=2+2+2, 6÷2=3, etc.

Concrete before abstract

Geometry trains the mind to severe reasoning, the hand to absolute accuracy, and it lies at the root base of many important and honourable professions, which is a real though utilitarian reason why we should teach it.

The child begins to learn geometrical truths when he finds out that the top of the table is a flat thing with edges (a plain surface) and that the parallel hedges of the high road do not meet together in the far distance.

It is on this common and already existing knowledge on which we must base our first lessons on geometrical definitions and axioms.

Art:
The recognition of the beautiful and the cultivation of taste are, we hope, to form part of our children's education and character.

It is only what we have truly seen that we can truly reproduce; hence, observation is enormously trained by art-teaching.

We want the children to get form, colour, and gesture, so we sit them down before some flower or object, already interesting to them...

Nature Note-books

But execution is only one side of art, appreciation is the other, and this we try to give the children by putting them in the way of seeing beautiful pictures which convey noble ideas.

Manual Training.--But art is a wide word, covering many fields, of which painting is only one.

The child is only truly educated who can use his hands as truly as his head, for to neglect one part of our being injures the whole, and the learned book-worm who is ignorant of the uses of a screwdriver, also lacks that readiness and resourcefulness, mental neatness and capability, and reverence for labour and its results, which a knowledge of practical matter gives.

Any work which employs the creative instinct to good purpose and produces a reputable and artistic result (not mere exercises which waste the children's time and material for nothing) finds favour with us.

Basket work, wood carving, etc., all so adapted to the children's age and capabilities that they may be able to attain a habit of perfect execution, and that sense of the mastery of our spirits over matter which is surely part of our divine heritage.

Music: Here we plead that children may be taught its wonders and its history from the first, and get idea of key, scale, etc., by ear as well as by mere telling and teaching.

Physical Education: Grace, and health, and development are the children's right, and necessary if they are to have healthy bodies and healthy minds.

We would also have that prompt obedience to command, that quick self-discipline which, when they become habitual, will influence the whole, not merely the physical life.

Swedish drill, military dumb-bell exercises, and the old Greek deftness and grace with the ball, will clear away mental cobwebs by their delightful alertness, and prepare fitting temples for the beauty of character.

However- these are our ideas and goals for educating children.

We don't train "prize pigs," we educate children in keeping what whatever we dimly discern are God's gifts to them of especial environment, circumstances, talents, and disposition.

The personal influence that one good life may have, widening out from generation unto generation, is an inspiration, and if the child in our care will only be what God meant it to be, we shall be amply rewarded.

We cast our bread upon the waters, and often sow in tears of discouragement, but we believe that after many days we shall find it again and return rejoicing.

A Charlotte Mason education is a wide and generous education because we wish to have broad or wide and generous minds. It isn't always easy, especially to those of us who were defrauded of a meaningful education.  It is worth the effort.  The rewards are also wide and generous.
Take heart.  You can do what you need to do.  This will not look like exactly what I did, or precisely the same as that person with the lovely pinterest board or the perfect nature study book. It will look like it ought to look for your family. Start with the principles and build from their. Practices are useful, but they will vary.

Adapted from and often quoted directly from this 1899 article of the Parents' Review.    Since it was 1899, the nationalistic fervor was a bit strong for my tastes, as was the optimistic view of the messianic nature of education.  WW1 would later put that optimistic spirit to shame and even break its heart and shatter its hopes.

Next (soon to come)

Historical Encyclopedia Entries, Comparing and Contrasting

Possible writing/thinking assignment for your high school students.

Pick a topic.  Look it up in this 1911 encyclopedia and make a general list of salient facts.
Look it up on wikipedia or infogalactic and do the same.
Google it or look it up in a recent book at your library and do the same.

What has changed? What's been added, what has been removed?  What are the reasons? Why do you think so?

Here are some possible topics:

Islam (in older references it might be called Mahommedan Religion)
1911
Infogalactic (a replacement for Wikipedia that attempts to avoid the silliest Wikipedia editing wars, like 8,000 edits over yogurt/yoghurt or over 20,000 edits over the proper way to refer to the Wii, or....)

Echinoderms (sea urchins, sand dollars, sea stars and so on)
Infogalactic

Christmas
Infogalactic


Christianity
Infogalactic

You can find Wikipedia.  If you're searching for some unusual but interesting writing topics for your teen, you might look into becoming an editor at either or both of the above sites, and then pick a topic and research it and write an entry.

Vocabulary and Knowledge

Once upon a time I had a period of time where I supervised teenagers who were supposed to be doing certain quiet tasks of their own, but who often didn't.  I liked them. They were charming, engaging, and quite lovable, even the rascals among them. But I didn't have any support or back up or even any real input on what exactly were the expectations for the time period.  The exception on input was when the teens or I fell afoul of the oft confusing and contradictory rules.  Then I heard about it, but I didn't really hear what or how I was supposed to have done differently.

Sometimes some of them didn't want to do the tasks the adults had said they were supposed to, and preferred to engage in behaviors the adults had said they shouldn't do.  This was not necessarily bad behavior in and of itself, and a couple of the rules were incredibly arbitrary and not conducive to cooperation- like... the only students allowed to study together were the honor roll students.  A student not on the honour roll could not ask to quietly work in a study group with a student or students who were on the honour roll.  They also were not supposed to nap or stare into space or various other things, some of which were more easily defensible restrictions than others.  Many of those rules I found even more frustrating than the teens did, although I don't think they knew just how much.  I did my best to understand and enforce them as they were explained to me, but it was pretty soul-sucking and depressing.

A couple of times some of the teens got mouthy over it, but there were no adults who had my back, so I was on my own in dealing with it.  I did feel like I'd been asked to help and then was pushed into the deep end while holding weights and ordered not to let go of them.  And then while treading water with weights in my hand, I was told to go catch fish while floundering in the deep waters. 

"How?" I asked more than once.  Mostly, nobody answered me at all.  I heard through the grapevine that these questions were annoying.   "You're the teacher," one authority figure finally told me.  "You'll think of something."  But I wasn't the teacher. I wasn't a teacher. I had not been asked to be a teacher and I hadn't said I would be a teacher.  I was a homeschooling mom.  I have a great admiration for classroom teachers, immense.  I have no ability in that direction and I know it.  Because I know very well how hard that job is and how much talent is required for it, I had never desired to teach other people's children in a classroom setting, and, in fact, that wasn't what I'd been asked to do.  I had merely agreed to provide some adult supervision when asked because I wanted to be helpful.  I had not accepted the request because I had nothing else to do, and I had definitely not volunteered to be a teacher.

To add to the difficult of what I was asked to do, I was the face of the new rules to the kids. They did not know I hated them. The people who created those rules and sent me private emails telling me to enforce them would come in occasionally and ignore the rules themselves and allow the students to do the same.  So that made me look even more like the bad guy than ever.  If I sound frustrated, and maybe a little bit bitter, let's just think of this post as therapeutic.  I am sure the other side was just as frustrated and would write a very different version, but I was the one floundering in a sea of angry teenagers every day.  But that's not the point of the story.

One morning one of my favorites of the students was a bit fed up with the restrictions.  Said student was chafing at the bit a little and just starting to be mouthy.  I knew my student was just bored and lashing out and while I couldn't blame the kid, I also couldn't let this continue.  There had been smaller signs of breaking out before, and by now I knew I was on my own, so I'd been thinking about my options.  We'd had a conversation about something else a few days previously, and I'd been surprised by a word he didn't know.  I happened to stumble on an article on the joys of browsing old encyclopedias, and I  remembered something similar I'd done with profit out of sheer boredom as an adolescent and so I had a plan to implement the next time he started complaining.  I was ready.

 I brought him an old dictionary I'd seen in the room.  I opened it seemingly at random, although actually, I opened it to the page with the word he hadn't known (petition).  I grinned at him.  "Since you've done all the things you can think of today that the school allows you to do, and since you don't want to do the things the school says you can do, for the remaining 10 or 15 minutes of class I'd like you to start copying this page."  He didn't have to include all the pronunciations, etymology, and so on, just the word and the definition.

He didn't want to, but he wasn't really an insolent kid at heart, just an immensely frustrated, very smart, and very creative kid being squeezed by a tightening band of senseless bureaucratic mandates. He sat down and started doing it, although not without some huffing, puffing, and eye rolling.

I saved his paper for a long time, although it eventually got lost,  much to my disappointment. It was a delight.
He started by making editorial comments that were less than complimentary- 'this is dumb.  This is supposed to be school, why I am doing this dumb thing?' and next to one more obscure word and definition, "Who cares?"
But then something happened.  About the third word in, his editorial comment was, "Well, I guess that is kind of interesting." and then two or three entries below, another word was annotated with "I didn't know that.  This is educational after all." and then he started sketching little comic pictures illustrating some of the definitions.  They were clever, witty, a little on the sassy side, but quite entertaining and they showed he had gotten interested in spite of himself and was making connections.  I was delighted, and he enjoyed himself more than he'd expected to. He learned something, and he stayed out of trouble.

A couple weeks later a different youngster in a different class started acting up and I assigned him the same task. He refused to cooperate and, as I said, nobody had my back at all, so when push came to shove, he was excused, and I was told I was being 'punitive' and he shouldn't have to do what I asked, and as you can imagine, that was the end of any illusion that I was somebody the students had to work   I was, not long after that, abruptly told they weren't going to need my help anymore and the whole thing ended on a somewhat sour note, although not without relief on my part. 

It bothered me, of course, to feel like I'd been kicked off the deep end and left to flounder. It bothered me that nobody had my back.  It bothered me that it wasn't important to anybody else to support my authority. It did not take long before I could laugh at this experience and see the dark and funny side and even sympathize at the dilemma of professional educators in their twenties who had to figure out what to do when a homeschooling mom in her fifties was foisted on them.

  But what bothered me the most  and the longest, and that I could never be amused about, was that an educator would see learning about new words and their definitions as 'punitive, as a waste of time.

Punitive was the last thing from my mind.   I wasn't punishing them with a whip, I was presenting them with a treasure chest for their perusal.  As a child I had occasionally been in circumstances where I was bored and frustrated and in the pre-screen days of my childhood, the only thing open to me was a dictionary and I had discovered it was a wonderful place to while away a few minutes. You could always discover something new and interesting.  I knew I was not the only young person who had discovered treasure in an old dictionary. I had read of others.  I hoped this irked young man could be distracted and redirected from his frustrations (which were not wholly unjustified) enough to make this discovery for himself, as had happened in the earlier class, and meanwhile, the other students who wanted to study could do so.

I intended the exercise as a two fold project - one, to redirect the bad attitude and the pent up energy into something more productive, an activity they could do without distracting other students, and mostly, because I knew it had immense value to these students- many of whom English was their second language.  They were seen as fluent, and they were, but they also had odd gaps.  Few of them liked reading at all, even many of the honor roll students. 

There's been a lot of research on the reading gap between underprivileged and middle to upper class kids.  There is a 30,000 word gap when they come to preschool. We now know that the 30,000 word gap between underprivileged children and their peers from reading families is a knowledge gap.That vocabulary gap isn't a gap in test scores and word lists. It's a gap in things the children know and have the language to talk about and to think about and picture in their mind's eyes.  These kids weren't underprivileged, but because English was often not their first language, they had many of the same deficits in English that underprivileged kids do.

 E.D. Hirsch (Core Knowledge, Cultural Literacy, and 'What Your __ Grader Needs to Know' author) once wrote:
 The most harmful idea is that children do not need a knowledge-rich curriculum to become proficient readers. The word reading, of course, has two senses. The first means the process of turning printed marks into sounds and these sounds into words. But the second sense means the very different process of understanding those words. Learning how to read in the first sense, as vital as it is, does not guarantee learning how to read in the second sense, comprehending the meaning of what is read. To become a good comprehender, a child needs a great deal of knowledge.   http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/issues/spring06/hirsch.htm

I would never recommend copying a few entries from a dictionary as the best way to fill a knowledge gap. But as a disciplinary tool, it's quite useful- educative, distracting, without being punitive at all.  I use disciplinary here in the fuller meaning- discipling.  Here is a useful way to distract a youngster from the mischief and mayhem he wants to engage in while giving him something to think about instead, and if he will only engage in the task, he will be thinking in no time at all, provided he's not set to do it for hours.  Ten or fifteen minutes is just about the outside of long enough for one session, and not daily at that.


 Anthony Esolen (Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, Defending Marriage, and many others) explains the value of reading literature: (Hint: It's not to pass vocabulary tests) “Anyway, the gist of the solon’s objection to my criticisms was that we want students to be able to cite evidence when they make a claim about anything. My objection to his objection, as I was running out of time, was that, as worthy a goal as that might be, that’s not what a literature course is really about. He was thinking about tests, and I was thinking about David Copperfield. He was thinking of technique, and I was thinking about the imagination and truth. Now that I have the benefit of some time for reflection, and for looking at the page in question, I see that I missed an opportunity to make a crucial point. It has less to do with literature, to which I’ll return in a moment, than with the whole aim of an intellectual life—even of a human life. That aim is to behold the truth, and to love it for its beauty.”  (here)

It could be argued that a dictionary is not literature (although I might disagree if we are speaking of the OED). However, it is a place to behold small and beautiful truths.  Words themselves are beautiful, lovely, meaningful little jewelboxes encapsulating ideas. They are the way to knowledge, as without words, we cannot know.
Knowledge cross-pollinates. The more you know, the more you can know, and words are the signs along the way.  What you pick up from a few minutes reading an old dictionary is likely to show up again in another context, which is how we learn vocabulary naturally- seeing words used in different contexts over time.

 Professors have been lamenting for some time that American students come to college without knowing much. It might be because we emphasize knowing 'how to learn' over actual knowledge and  literacy over actually reading literature:
"Such a thought was recently echoed in The New York Times by University of Virginia professor and reading expert Daniel Willingham. Pointing out the obvious fact that reading scores have remained dismally stagnant for the last 30 years (roughly a third of high school seniors are proficient in the subject), Willingham notes that our issue is not with teaching students to know their letters and sound them out. Instead, reading proficiency becomes a problem when students fail to comprehend the meaning of the text: “Current education practices show that reading comprehension is misunderstood. It’s treated like a general skill that can be applied with equal success to all texts. Rather, comprehension is intimately intertwined with knowledge.” Unfortunately, that knowledge is not being passed on to students. For that reason, Willingham suggests “decreasing the time spent on literacy instruction in early grades,” using it instead to build knowledge of other subjects: “Third-graders spend 56 percent of their time on literacy activities but 6 percent each on science and social studies. This disproportionate emphasis on literacy backfires in later grades, when children’s lack of subject matter knowledge impedes comprehension.”

Unfortunately, this state of things is ingrained in the American education system, a fact explained by educator E.D. Hirsch his book Cultural Literacy:

 “The theories that have dominated American education for the past fifty years stem ultimately from Jean Jacques Rousseau, who believed that we should encourage the natural development of young children and not impose adult ideas upon them before they can truly understand them. … He thought that a child’s intellectual and social skills would develop naturally without regard to the specific content of education. His content-neutral conception of educational development has long been triumphant in American schools of education and has long dominated the ‘developmental,’ content-neutral curricula of our elementary schools.”

 Clearly, Rousseau’s philosophy of education isn’t working for America’s public schools, for American students increasingly appear to “know nothing.” 

This is because we value so many other things above knowledge.

 This next article excerpt is long, but it's one of my favourites because of the  demonstrated link to school and post-school success:

" our schools need to figure out how to encourage vocabulary growth. They should understand, for starters, that word-learning occurs slowly and through a largely unconscious process. (you need multiple exposures in a meaningful context, not lists of words and their short definitions to match up) The sense of a word that a listener or reader gains from multiple exposures to it isn’t a fixed and definite meaning but rather a system of meaning possibilities that get narrowed down through context on each occasion. As Miller showed, knowledge of a word is a memory residue of several meaningful encounters with the word in diverse contexts. We retain bits of those past contexts in memory as part of the word’s meaning-potential. Almost all the word meanings that we know are acquired indirectly by intuitively guessing new meanings as we get the overall gist of what we’re hearing or reading. ... So the fastest way to gain a large vocabulary through schooling is to follow a systematic curriculum that presents new words in familiar contexts, thereby enabling the student to make correct meaning-guesses unconsciously. Spending large amounts of school time on individual word study is an inefficient and insufficient route to a bigger vocabulary. There are just too many words to be learned by 12th grade—between 25,000 and 60,000. A large vocabulary results not from memorizing word lists but from acquiring knowledge about the social and natural worlds. .... To make the necessary school changes in the United States, an intellectual revolution needs to occur to undo the vast anti-intellectual revolution that took place in the 1930s. We can’t afford to victimize ourselves further by continued loyalty to outworn and mistaken ideas. Of these, the idea that most requires overturning is how-to-ism—the notion that schooling should concern itself not with mere factual knowledge, which is constantly changing, but rather with giving students the intellectual tools to assimilate new knowledge. These tools typically include the ability to look things up, to think critically, and to accommodate oneself flexibly to the world of the unknowable future. How-to-ism has failed because of its fundamental misconception of skills, which considers them analogous to automated processes, such as making a free throw in basketball. In English class, young children are now practicing soul-deadening how-to exercises like “finding the main idea” in a passage and “questioning the author.” These exercises usurp students’ mental capacity for understanding what is written by forcing them to think self-consciously about the reading process itself. The exercises also waste time that ought to be spent gaining knowledge and vocabulary. The increasingly desperate pursuit of this empty, formalistic misconception of reading explains why our schools’ intense focus on reading skills has produced students who, by grade 12, can’t read well enough to flourish at college or take a good job

The following demonstrates the result of the lack of content in our curriculum. I don't remember where I read this, but it's something a current professor says about his incoming students every year. When it comes to history, this is basically all they know:
 * There's all the stuff today
 * Before that there was Hitler
 * Before that was some sort of Game of Thrones thing
 * Nothing before that

 "As a rule," says Charlotte Mason, "things and persons have each one distinctive quality; to see what that is in a flash, and to express it in the fittest word, is a proof of genius, or of the highest culture."

Words fitly spoken are like apples of gold in settings of silver.

Read books that use words like that.  Don't be afraid to try to use words like that yourself. And in the pursuit of knowledge, sometimes, let children be bored, and sometimes, suggest they read a few entries in an old dictionary.  This will not be wasted time.  Knowledge cross pollinates.

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