New Book

I'm starting a new book. For the moment, I'm just going to paste a couple quotes from its Preface without even divulging the title of the book...

Having now had an opportunity to study schools as a headmaster as well as a teacher, I would argue that the teacher, not the curriculum, needs to be the focus of reform. The greatest value of the curriculum proposed in this book, I now believe, is that it sustains and nurtures teachers as practioners of the art of learning while discouraging non-learners from entering the profession. (What non-inquisitive, discipline-bound person would want to teach in such a school as I have outlined in the second part of this book?) The classroom should be no place for teachers who are afraid of change, who are willing to talk about ideas ad nauseum but unwilling or unable to act on them, to experiment, to grow, to absorb new disciplines, to teach beyond themselves, their college lecture notes, their State-approved lesson plans, their textbooks.

[My book] presents a formidable challenge to schools controlled by administrators and teachers who simply want to be left alone and allowed to maintain old habits in the midst of a rapidly changing world. Some will defend their traditionalist stance as a means of protecting time-honored values or of avoiding educational fadism, but underneath, I suspect, indolence and insecurity have not a little to do with it At any rate, this type of conversation is contrary to the spirit of learning. Schools are places where students learn because they are places where teachers learn. Only a school (and by extension a curriculum) that encourages teachers to be always learning will keep its teachers fresh and fearless and its students happy and motivated in their studies, ready to test their lessons against life.

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There is a disturbing trend these days, in this era of hyphenated Americans, to seek to motivate students and to build their self-esteem by devising ethnocentric studies tailored to their race or creed or to some high-sounding social agenda. Until now, the American school -- for all its shortcomings -- has embraced the idea of a common American culture and has acted as a powerful centripetal force in American society. The new craze for ethnocentric studies, however well intentioned, erodes the school's power to help our nation forge out of many, one.

American culture is, like all cultures, derivative. Its sources are sundry and varied, but they are not different for Latinos and Afro-Americans and Euro-Americans. It is one culture characterized by racial and ethnic diversity and, yes, by predominantly Western and European influences, but none of these sources or influences is as worthy of study as the common landscape and history, the shared political creed and social identity, the mutual aspirations and disappointments of the American people. Intellectuals, the media, and ethnic leaders tend to dwell upon our differences, which are often more interesting (for some reason) than our similarities. This makes it all the more important for schools to define in their curricula a common American culture and in this way to frame the debate that will naturally arise in a pluralistic society like our own.

One must ask, if our schools fail to believe in a common American culture and to teach it, what will become of us? This question would certainly perplex the ancient whose language, perhaps wisely, could not distinguish between education and culture. It is -- as this book attests -- the sacred duty of the school not only to believe in our common inheritance, but to teach the unfolding truth of that inheritance. Respect for truth -- not the self-esteem of our students or our regrets about the past or our hopes for the future -- must guide us in the quest for that common inheritance and in our definition of the curriculum.

Song of the Valley

To be sung in the manner of Chesterton

Splendid rides the sunset o'er the garden of the Lord
Where summer spreads its colors on the hills like emerald wine
And the mowers raise the incense of the grass and of the soil
And the ponds and trees and houses gleam like grapes upon the vine
In the sun that smites the valley with the brightness of a sword:
In this cool and quiet garden in the center of the world
Where the people's death and living makes a song of righteous toil
In this precious piece of nowhere in a corner of the world;
In this garden of the people which is sacred to the Lord.

Summer's End

I'm sitting on the lawn outside my dorm at school. That may sound lifelessly urban, and I suppose it would be in a lot of schools: but my school is settled right in the middle of a country Tennessee community, without a fence and sometimes without even a road separating them. There is beauty in this place and moment. The sun has set and the sky is glowing russet and pale blue. The woods are so close across the road that I can hear the cicadas humming. A flock of geese just flew overhead, calling the evening bugle of summer as they sped southward. I guess this is really my Beginning of Autumn post, which seems to have become something of an annual tradition. I didn't intend it that way; but for some reason there is a day or a set of days as summer ends that remind me of the season changing and make me want to write about it. Perhaps it is because, as Chesterton said, you realize how much you love something when you begin to lose it. I don't notice how much I enjoy summer until a cool evening or a red leaf on the ground reminds me that it is passing. Perhaps that is why I love autumn so much. After the peace of summer, it is a reminder that the seasons change; that the years turn; that time passes. And that reminder makes me enjoy the seasons, and the years, and time itself, all the more.

Mystery Eggs

Miss M and I were looking in the yard for caterpillars and instead we found a leaf with some black spots on it. I once found a leaf with red things on it - and after I looked it up, I determined that the red spots were a growth from a fungus or something. I thought this was the same thing - a fungus that makes tiny tumors on the leaf. But then I looked under my Radio Shack 30x lighted magnifier and they look like tiny raisins; some even have tiny hairs stuck to them. And each black raisin has its own smaller spot of what looks like mud next to it. So I think they're eggs, and the hairs are probably from some kind of caterpillar.

This is the leaf:

And this is a close-up of the black spots accompanied with a smaller brown dot:

Maybe if I keep them all winter, they'll hatch in the spring.

Ah, life.

Well, here I am back in my school dorm room again with the semester's first classes waiting for me in the morning. A great deal happened this summer, and I wanted to blog all about it all before the summer ended, but there you have it. Life waits for no man. And it's too big to fit into a few blog posts, no matter how thorough your writing is. Some things will always slip through the cracks. In my case the cracks just happen to be several months wide...

There was the Taming of the Shrew, for instance--rehearsals, and production week, and the performance in our backyard, and the reception and cleanup afterward--which all ended more than a fortnight ago. There was the ChildLight conference, of course, which happened months ago; I wanted to blog about it in more detail but I still haven't. There was my sudden sightseeing trip to Washington, D.C. last week, with visits to the National Gallery and the National Cathedral and the Shakespeare Library and more. And above all there's a story involving Regency dancing and midnight Poe readings and lots of prayer and a rainbow for good measure, which if told in full would be quite tolerable evidence that gentlemen and ladies still exist--and still end up together.

So, yes, that was my summer. The Unblogged Summer, one might call it, except I can think of so many better names for it.

School Schedules

It's that time of year again!

I've finished L's schedule for next year; he'll be doing AO Year 7. I broke his readings and things down into 180 daily increments and posted it here. J's is still to come.

Update: Here is J's schedule; he'll be doing Year 10. And here is Miss M's K schedule.

Maybe there are some good ideas buried in those textbooks, after all.

I was doing homework for my (summer school) speech class today, reading from a textbook about how to improve one's listening skills. The writing for the most part is efficient, scientific, and dry as dust. As I read, however, I realized that some of the ideas sounded familiar:

There are four major techniques [for remembering information]. The first is organization. Find a pattern, structure, order, plan, format, or framework.

Of course, I said to myself, because the mind feeds upon ideas. If you understand the overall structure of a thing, every detail of it will make more sense and you will be able to remember the whole more easily, because you will know how each piece fits within the whole. CM knew that: she didn't hold with the classical method, which taught facts first and ideas later; she started with ideas, and let the facts follow them. I thought to myself, "Ha! A CM reference!" and kept reading. The next sentence:

The second is association. Make the things you want to remember relate to each other or to categories you already understand. Group them, if possible.

Well, certainly, I said. Education is the science of relations, after all.

The third technique is vizualization. Picturing what you want to remember creates a strong, vivid memory of it.

This sounded quite prosaic and scientific until I got about halfway through and realized that all it means is use your imagination. I began to get curious. Were there any more good ideas beneath all that scientific language? I read on:

The fourth is repetition. When you repeat ideas, you burn them into your memory.

At this point I threw up my hands and laughed--or at least, I would have if I had been the sort of chap who does such things. An old truism, and one that sounds suspiciously like habit formation, to boot. I suppose I must reassess my position on textbooks a little. I still hold that they are mostly dead and require Miracle Max or a reader trained in CPR to breathe any life into them. After today, however, I must admit that they at least know where to go to find good ideas. Even if they do it unintentionally.

A proposal

My mother suggested it, and I really think it is an admirable scheme. One merely needs three hours of time to reflect for every fifteen minutes of life lived, and one would get along quite well. Why, say I, cannot so simple a proposal, whose benefits are so obvious, be adopted? Difficulties arising from hasty decisions and pressing deadlines would almost disappear. The increased volume of poetry alone that the scheme would occasion should be enough to recommend it to anyone. I think I shall contact the People In Charge and see if such a thing can be arranged...

Conference Notes on Narration

Friday of the conference offered a three-part series of workshops on narration - six full hours, and we still could have gone longer. Laurie Bestvater did the first couple of hours, Dr. Carroll Smith did two hours, and the laast session was looking at samples and narrating ourselves. These are the notes I took that day.

Narration is a subset of literacy. It seems too simple to work. But it does work. L.B.'s son used primarily narration throughout his school years and went to college on a scholarship. [My son used narration but with even less creative direction, and also went to college on a scholarship; it does work.]

Definition: Narration is a process of taking information. It's more than mere recall. It requires the internalization of ideas.

Why narrate? CM said, "in the act of narrating every power of his mind comes into play, that points and bearings which he had not observed are brought out; that the whole is visualized and brought into relief in an extraordinary way; in fact, that scene or argument has become a part of his personal experience; he knows, he has assimilated what he has read." (vol 6) Narration is not the same as memory work. When you narrate, you re-create and internalize in your own mind. It's a way of knowing, not of memorizing.

G.F. Husband wrote, "Properly dealt with, it produces a mental transfiguration." ("Some Notes on Narration," Parents' Review, 1924) It requires attention/engagement of the mind. Being able to answer a teacher's questions doesn't guarantee that the student really knows.

Narration is an all-purpose, extremely powerful activity. Transformation occurs that physically changes the brain. "The Power of Retelling: Developmental Steps for Building Comprehension," and "Read and Retell" by Hazel Brown and Brian Cambourne encapsulate all the principles of the wholistic/natural learning model.

Narration has linguistic spillovers: meaning, phraseology, vocabulary, punctuation, spelling. Children can retain phrases, styles, etc. that they pick up from narrating even after a year.

Narration enables learners to "own" their learning. "Learning that is not accompanied by transformation is shallow and transitory." (Cambourne) "Reader-Response" by Louise Rosenblatt. The learner "reproduces such Knowledge touched by his own personality; thus his reproduction becomes original." (CM vol 6)

Narration enables students to:
- write better sentences
- better solve math word problems
- increase vocabulary
- have a much higher level of comprehension

Narration improves concept of story, critical thinking, oral language development.

Critical thinking requires background knowledge and concepts to think critically about.

Narration reveals what a child remembers and what he thinks is important. It shows whether his organization matches the text - and more.

Narration in History: For generations and throughout centuries, history has been passed on through oral narration. People who are forced to increase their oral mind have better mental capacity than those who rely on printed text, note-taking, etc. Jewish Rabbis used oral tradition to relay God's truth to generations. See "The Singer of Tales" by Albert Lord for studies. Oral tradition is as literary as printed text. The art forms of literature/story-telling were already set and styled before any of the tales were ever written down. Songs, stories and poems can be kept in people's minds for centuries - intact - with no notes! The more you rely on notes, the less you use your mind.

Emotion drives learning because emotion is what transforms and engages. When the "amygdala" part of the brain is activated by fear or emotion, learning can enter long-term memory instead of short-term memory. Stories, not dry facts, engage our emotions.

Research on Narration

Olaffson and [Nietfeld?] (1999) said that a child's memory at age two predicts his later reading ability.

Zimmerman, Christakis, Metcalf (2007) found that television and DVD/video viewing in children younger than 2 years hinders later vocabulary.

Wise, Savelli ? -- found that oral language skills relate to later reading skills. Children only know vocabulary they have used - not what they have only heard.

Early listening/comprehension skills help with word recognition later.

When Adam named the animals, language was used as intellectual capacity to order his world; it wasn't just to communicate. "Giving a name is more than labeling. It is, as Gerhard von Rad puts it, "'an act of appropriate ordering, by which man intellectually objectifies the creatures for himself.'" Man conceives and orders his environment through words. He needs language in order for his mind to make things real. Internally, the mind forms the concept and imagines it after he has a word to frame it on.

What about a child who isn't used to narrating? There are ways to engage his active mind before reading:
- Build on prior knowledge by having the child look at the picture on the cover of the book, or maps inside, to et them interested. Go over two or three words they'll come across in the text that they might not know.
- Have the child mentally put himself somewhere in the setting, like in a corner of the room, and watch the story unfold in front of his eyes. Show the child how people in the story would have dressed so their mental image is accurate.
- Have the child describe in detail how he lines up at school to go to lunch. This forces him to sequence events and tell them.
- Read a paragraph at a time for narrating rather than a whole chapter.
- Ask the child to predict how the story will go.
- Before the next reading, ask the the child to re-create the scene read previously.

Oral language is contextual: we say what's going on. But written language is removed from our personal here-and-now reality.

Narration should be done immediately after the reading, before it dissipates. At the high school level, students might be able to narrate later than immediately after reading - perhaps during the next period, or the next day.

Narration is "the act of knowing." (CM vol 6, pg 99)

Information is not the same as knowledge.

"Because knowledge is power, the child who has got knowledge will certainly show power in dealing with it. He will recast, condense, illustrate, or narrate with vividness and with freedom the arrangement of his words. The child who has got only information will write and speak in the stereotyped phrases of his text-book, or will mangle in his notes the words of his teacher." (CM Vol 3 pg 225)

Ours is not to train. "ample ground for discussion not for lectures or for oral lessons, but for following for a few minutes any opening suggested by 'current events,' a feature in the children's programme of work. But they must follow arguments and detect fallacies for themselves. Reason like the other powers of the mind, requires material to work upon whether embalmed in history and literature, or afloat with the news of a strike or uprising. It is madness to let children face a debatable world with only, say, a mathematical preparation. If our business were to train their power of reasoning, such a training would no doubt be of service; but the power is there already, and only wants material to work upon." (CM Vol 6 pg 147)

Critical thinking matures from within. "Therefore children should be taught as they become mature enough to understand such teaching that the chief responsibility which rests upon then: as persons is the acceptance or rejection of ideas presented to them. To help them in this choice we should afford them principles of conduct and a wide range of fitting knowledge." (CM vol 6 pg 139)

Scaffolds vs Bridges: Many a teacher "believes that children cannot understand well-written books and that he must make of himself a bridge between the pupil and the real teacher, the man who has written the book." (CM vol 6, pg 260) But in a CM education, the teacher is not the bridge between the child and information. "Let the boy read and he knows, that is, if he must tell again what he has read. This, of telling again, sounds very simple but it is really a magical creative process by means of which the narrator sees what he has conceived, so definite and so impressive is the act of narrating that which has been read only once." (vol 6 pg 261)

It sounds simple. "All the acts of generalization, analysis, comparison, judgment, and so on, the mind performs for itself in the act of knowing. If we doubt this, we have only to try the effect of putting ourselves to sleep by relating silently and carefully, say, a chapter of Jane Austen or a chapter of the Bible, read once before going to bed. The degree of insight, the visualization, that comes with this sort of mental exercise is surprising." (CM vol 6 pg 304)

As students mature, their narrations become more abstract. "they will respond to such a question as,––"Write twelve lines (which must scan) on 'Sir Henry Lee,' or 'Cordelia,' or Pericles, or Livingstone," or, to take a question from the early days of the War, "Discuss Lord Derby's Scheme. How is it working?"; or, (IV) an essay on "The new army in the making, shewing what some of the difficulties have been and what has been achieved." (CM vol 6 pg 193)

A student's ability to narrate develops over time. And there are many ways to narrate: "But this is only one way to use books: others are to enumerate the statements in a given paragraph or chapter; to analyse a chapter, to divide it into paragraphs under proper headings, to tabulate and classify series; to trace cause to consequence and consequence to cause; to discern character and perceive how character and circumstance interact..." (CM vol 3 pg 180)

Narration is relational: "The teacher's part is, in the first place, to see what is to be done, to look over the of the day in advance and see what mental discipline, as well as what vital knowledge, this and that lesson afford; and then to set such questions and such tasks as shall give full scope to his pupils' mental activity." (CM vol 3 pg 180)

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Samples of one student's narrations over the course of twelve years were shared, and we were given the opportunity to narrate ourselves either by writing, telling or acting out a chapter we read in a book.

How Firm a Foundation: The Life and Works of CM

These are notes taken from a lecture given by Jennifer Spencer, titled How Firm a Foundation. The conference notebook describes this as "an introduction to the ideas behind Mason's methods. The main focus of the lecture is that techniques like narration and picture study are not the nucleus of the Mason model. The paradigm of education with which most of us grew up was rooted in classicism and industrialism, both of which are very humanistic and materialistic. If we simply add Mason's methods to those existing ideas, we fall way short of the mark..."

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This was one of the highlights of the conference; there was a slide show presentation that went with it; these are just the notes I took. I think this lecture is a must for every teacher, especially a teacher in a CM school.

Educational problems are like a leaning tower - everyone has ideas about why it's leaning, but nobody knows how to fix it. If you don't address the problem at the foundation, you won't really fix it. In education, new books, computer programs, adding another new idea/tool without getting rid of bad ideas/tools don't address the foundational problem. Even in many "CM schools," CM's ideas are layered on top of traditional educational methods. This is how hybrids are born; by adding narration or picture study to a traditional program, the school identifies itself as a CM school, when it's really a hybrid.

Following a list of CM methods (narration, picture study, composer study, dictation, history as the hub, copywork, short lessons, hands-on math, classic literature, handicrafts, narrative books) can become like legalistic religion. Where's the relationship?? CM methods should be something that results from her foundational ideas, not something you apply to become a CM educator. It's like doing Christian works to become a Christian.

Here is a short history of education.

(Early?) classical education believed in the "tabula rasa" - the child's mind is a blank slate to be written on. Knowledge is the result of experience. There are three stages: grammar, dialectic, rhetoric. There is an emphasis onrote memorization of facts, and on a body of knowledge to be absorbed by the student. It's a bottom-up model (CM is a top-down model.) There is a dualism because the mind is seen as spiritual and the body is seen as secular matter, so mental pursuits are considered higher than physical pursuits. Pre-Indusrial Revolution, children learned from teachers and recitation. Churches often housed schools. Students often left school early to care for siblings or to go to work. Rich students went on to a university to learn how to use their leisure time responsibly. This kept class lines separated because only the rich had access to culture, while the poor were the workers. Hirsch's "What Your __ Grader Needs to Know" is based on classical ideals.

Then came the Industrial Revolution (1830-1900?). Entire families were often employed, which took children away from school. Books on management by authors like Frederick Taylor showed how to get more productivity from workers. Profit and efficiency were the buzzwords, and this attotude infiltrated even the schools. Dollar economy became the most important aspect of education. Could businesses train employees in schools with their own financing, instead of using school resources? To this day, businesses donate money to educational institutions to make students more useful to their businesses (CM said this was immoral!) The thought of the day was utilitarian: "Whatever helps industry helps the community." Even President Roosevelt supported vocational education/efficiency in foreign trade. People wanted to be productive like Germany and admired Germany's goal of loyalty to the company and to the state.

Charles W. Eliot and David Snedden led the way to American efficiency in the name of patriotism. Masses needed to learn to trust experts instead of themselves. Education needed to train students to respect authority and to be fit for their purpose (in the workplace). Teachers became public servants presenting the ideas of the controlling majority. Standardization was valued over individualization. Lessons were scheduled in rigid time-clock blocks of time. Children were sorted by IQ, social status and probable destiny. We still use many of these sorting techniques: SAT's, uniform textbooks, teacher certification, guidance counseling, mechanical discipline (behaviorism), strict schedules, isolated skills, qualifiable results and grades - all used to sort and diminish the individual personhood of each child.

Two groups opposed industrialization. Humanitarianism was against industrial slavery. They placed people above profit and felt that education should equalize opportunity. The NEA wanted to reform industry because they felt that "teaching is an art, not a science." But they were silenced when WWI demanded more goods and productivity. Then John Dewey took up their cause. He wanted a democratic ideal. Democracy should serve people. His ideas are based on relativism: man is the measure of importance, and a good life on earth is all we can hope for. Sensory experience builds knowledge. He didn't think of mind as spiritual and body as matter. To him, it was ALL matter. He felt that education should improve society, an idea which places society over the individual. Even religion, he felt, needed to evolve through slow social revolution, science and experimentation so that a new morality and new reality would become rooted. This resulted in child-centered teaching and "learning centers" based on inquiry/experience, "learning environments that foster learning," developmentally graded unit studies for thematic integration, democratic atmosphere in classrooms, co-operative learning, character-building lessons. Unfortunately, right/wrong isn't decided by majority vote. Character is internal and grows through ideas; it can't be applied from the outside. Dewey's style of education results in a foundation that shifts like sand. Morality under this atmosphere changes with the times.

CM is different. CM believed that children come to us as complete persons who have an innate desire for justice, and who were created for a special purpose. They already have a fully-developed soul and intellect. It's not our job to trim or prune them to make them conform to society's ideals. Skills are not equal to ideas. With CM, no information is presented without an informing idea. The teacher's job is to provide a rich feast of living ideas via books. The goal isn't cultural literacy, but critical literacy through reading, extracting ideas, weighing them with a constant measure or standard (the Bible), and forming their own judgment. CM is rooted in constructivism. Attentiveness revolves around making connections and expressing the child's own ideas, and partaking in the "grand conversation."

CM is built on --
- The child as a person
- The nature of knowledge as relational
- Ideas as the food for the mind.

CM does not need the bricks of trivium, grades, behaviorism, isolated skills,. But it's not enough to add the good aspects of CM over everything else. You have to also remove the bad in the same way that a gardener removes weeds before letting good plants take root.

The final question is -- should education be based on the changing demands of society/industry, or on the needs of the child?