Here are some things we’ve done to minimize the number of outright harmful or merely lame books our kids read without (too many) power struggles:

1. We read, enjoy, and talk about books together. Bedtime read alouds mostly range from classic children's lit to classic classics. Sometimes we get on a kick of reading as much of a single author as we can stand, like our year of Lloyd Alexander. Sometimes we read a few P.G. Wodehouse short stories as a break between Homeric epics. Sometimes we all take parts and read a Shakespeare play and then watch a movie version when we are done.1
   
   When you read aloud a lot together over time you develop a useful repertoire of references and inside jokes. You quote book lines like movie lines.2 You find that you own a bunch of animals named things like Penelope, Telemachus, Rama, Sita, and Hamlette. Eventually, with a little nudging, the kids notice that the references and inside jokes aren’t just in the family, but actually the books are referencing and inside-joking each other! And now the kids are in on it!

   

2. We intentionally curate a large home library starting with board books all the way up to adult fiction and non-fiction. Instead of spending money on homeschool curricula, I buy books. We have a lot of books. We do not have any more wall space for any more bookshelves. You can always find something to read.
   
   The composition of our home library is a high-stakes endeavor. The books our children read can be some of their most formative the aesthetic experiences. From those books, they can learn that even small persons can be strong and capable, beauty is real and not an illusion, and good ultimately triumphs over evil but usually only at great personal cost. Or they may learn that the most powerful always triumph, ugliness is the rule, and our actions have no meaning in the face of life’s hardships. Above all, the quality that I most seek to avoid in the literature I offer is hopelessness. Despair is far more damaging to the developing soul than than the mere depiction of any particular vice or evil.

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3. So many audiobooks. Especially when you are stuck in the car and especially for longer, older, or slower books. A skilled narrator can go a long way towards making those more difficult books come to life. Experiencing a book via audiobook first can make it much less intimidating to take off the shelf and experience again from the page.

   

4. No book bans. We only rarely forbid the kids from reading books and when we do, it’s usually a deferral until they are a little older rather than an outright ban. But we do have rules about what books come home. When we are at the library, kids can browse and read pretty much whatever they want, but books have to be approved by Mom before they are checked out.
   

5. Most kids are naturally completists. When you find a good author they like, find everything that author wrote. For us, these have been authors like L.M. Montgomery, Tolkien, Marguerite Henry, and Lloyd Alexander. Then, you can suggest stuff that influenced those authors or that they alluded to in their work. A Narnia lover could try The Princess and the Goblin or The Story of the Amulet. A Prydain or Susan Cooper fan might surprise you by dipping into the Mabinogion.
   

6. We play it cool. Sometimes bookish moms can be a little intense about introducing their favorite books to their children. I get it - I also get very excited about introducing my kids to the books that shaped me, like A Wrinkle in Time or The Culture of Narcissism.3 But the kids are not me and different books will strike them differently. I don’t want them to feel like I am overinvested in their reaction to any one book. I do want them to feel free to experience books for themselves and develop their own likes and dislikes.
   

7. Through 8th grade, the kids have to read 30 minutes a day from a book I select. These selections are often, but not always, made in consultation with the child. Sometimes they resist mom’s choice, but generally after a few selections turn out to be better than they expected (and with Mom open to taking feedback when a book truly doesn’t land), they have mostly come around to at least giving me the benefit of the doubt. Kids here have been surprised to discover they enjoyed doorstoppers like The Silver Chalice and The Count of Monte Cristo. Sometimes when the kids have a book they want to read but are a bit intimidated by, they will ask me to assign it, which is why Nicholas (age 10) is currently reading David Copperfield.

   

8. Finally, every once in a while, we do make exceptions. Sometimes every single one of your friends is reading and talking about some really stupid book. Well, okay, fine, you can read the really stupid book. And everyone once in a very great while, the kid will come to me at the end and say, “You know, Mom, that wasn’t a very good book.”

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This is mainly because, for the first time in years, I did not maintain a daily log. I can see the skeleton of our days, math workbooks completed, books read independently and together, AP exam scores confirming that the high schooler learned something, but the texture of our days is missing. In failing to keep a log, I often felt mildly discouraged at the end of the day1: able to see uncheck boxes on the lesson plans, but unable to recall with any definition the aspects of homeschooling that give me the most pleasure: funny things the kids said, interesting conversations sparked by a read aloud, notes of pedagogical problems needing to be solved, practical work accomplished, things learned that were not on the plan.2 So new school year resolution #1: get back to keeping a daily log.

Looking back at my plans for the year jogs my memory a bit. I did work on spelling with the little kids, with some progress made, though that remains a priority for the year ahead. The little kids all finished their readers and (mostly) finished another year of Math Mammoth. Kateri’s vet science study was a success, though our friend the newly-minted veterinarian ended up taking a (hopefully temporary) job in another state, so the end-of-year presentation I was hoping she could evaluate never happened. Benedict did not embarrass himself on the BC Calc AP exam nor his US history-trained mother on the AP US History exam. The three oldest kids had another good year in the homeschool music program we’ve participated in for three years now (and Benedict started driving everyone there, which has been amazing).

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One big change I made after Christmas break was to switch some of the reading I had initially assigned to be done independently to group read alouds. I was having a hard time reading ahead and preparing adequately for discussions, and also reading aloud is just more fun. We went more slowly and didn’t read everything I had originally planned as a result, but what we read, we discussed better and referenced more in other conversations outside of school time. I ended up reading aloud to all or small groups of the children: Johnny Tremain, about half of The Last of the Mohicans, Huck Finn, parts of Walden, “Bartleby,” and…a couple of other things I’m forgetting.

Though I originally assigned it to Edmund to read independently, we also ended up reading aloud Daniel and Ruth Boorstin’s Landmark History of the American People. I LOVED this book. Not at all dry, a good mix of political and social history, it managed to interest the 4th, 6th, 8th, and even 11th grader (the 2nd grader drifted in and out, but mostly out). I learned all sorts of interesting things myself about the role of balloon framing in settling the frontier and the earliest development of mass production systems.

Another hit from our American history studies was Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary. Man, do my kids all hate George McClellan now.

However, the biggest success of the year may have been–to my great surprise given years of failure in this area–drawing lessons! True, we did not quite make it all the way through the book, Mark Kistler’s You Can Draw in 30 Days, but everyone really enjoyed this and were delighted to see their drawing improve.

A final part of this past year that bears mentioning: Benedict started the college application process in earnest. He took the PSAT in the fall and the ACT in the winter, and in the spring, we did our first out-of-state college visit.3 He has just about finalized his college list at this point, and it all feels very, very real.

Well, I had considered skipping a year in review post given my scanty records and vague sense of dissatisfaction with how the year went, but collecting what I can recall of our studies all in one place turned out to be a worthwhile exercise. My memories may be sketchy, but I think it actually wasn’t too bad a year!

Next up will be an overview of plans for the 25-26 school year (which is already underway here at the Gothic Homeschool), and I have an ambitious running list of other things I’d like to find time to write about this year: the college application process as a homeschooler (honestly, though, this might be too traumatizing and need to wait until I have recovered somewhat next year), how I’ve prepared kids for AP exams at home, our unique (I think) approach to Latin, a series of posts on educators who have influenced our homeschool, the big question of AI and education and how we’ve been talking with our kids about it.

But first comes writing goal #1: I will keep a daily log!

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There is an old, terribly unfashionable idea that the education of the child should recapitulate the history of mankind. Here’s how Herbert Spenser explained it:

The education of the child must accord both in mode and arrangement with the education of mankind, considered historically. In other words, the genesis of knowledge in the individual must follow the same course as the genesis of knowledge in the race. …it follows that if there be an order in which the human race has mastered its various kinds of knowledge, there will arise in every child an aptitude to acquire these kinds of knowledge in the same order. So that even were the order intrinsically indifferent, it would facilitate education to lead the individual mind through the steps traversed by the general mind. But the order is not intrinsically indifferent; and hence the fundamental reason why education should be a repetition of civilisation in little. It is provable both that the historical sequence was, in its main outlines, a necessary one; and that the causes which determined it apply to the child as to the race. Not to specify these causes in detail, it will suffice here to point out that as the mind of humanity placed in the midst of phenomenon and striving to comprehend them, has, after endless comparisons, speculations, experiments, and theories, reached its present knowledge of each subject by a specific route; it may rationally be inferred that the relationship between mind and phenomena is such as to prevent this knowledge from being reached by any other route; and that as each child’s mind stands in this same relationship to phenomena, they can be accessible to it only through the same route. Hence in deciding upon the right method of education, an inquiry into the method of civilisation will help to guide us.

You can maybe see why this idea fell out of favor.

Nevertheless, I find it appealing enough to take seriously, if not literally. If nothing else, it serves as a useful alternative argument to a more lasting 18th century contribution to our educational thinking, the idea that learning is natural and that things can be learned naturally. Given how infrequently the subjects of our academic curriculum, even at the most basic 3Rs level, have arisen naturally in human history, we should hesitate at this claim. If history and anthropology are any guides, it seems to be very easy for a human to get by naturally without any formal mathematical system or written language at all. If all human societies have a spoken language, but only a small number have developed a written language, just how natural can learning written language be?

Learning a spoken language seems to be truly natural - it starts in the womb! All normally developing human children become fluent speakers of their mother tongue, with no explicit instruction. The same is not true for written language, as the last couple of decades of reading instruction shows.

Written language is a tool, a kind of technology. Its primary power, the one it was invented to enable, is to take human communication out of time and place. Before written language, to receive a communication from another person, you either had to be there to hear it yourself or take the risk of trusting a message from a third party. Writing frees communication from this limitation, but it comes relatively late in the history of human language and only gradually erodes its connection to time- and space-bound speech. Silent reading was still uncommon enough in the 4th century that St. Augustine found it notable when he walked in on St. Ambrose reading scripture to himself. Spaces between words were the innovation of medieval monks to make the visual recognition of words easier without having to pronounce what you were reading aloud. Much of our punctuation is only as old as the printing press.

Awareness of this history can help us design more effective and efficient reading instruction argues Diane McGuinness in Why Our Children Can’t Read and What We Can Do About It, which for my money remains the best single book out there on teaching reading. It is history, not, as is more common today, cognitive science, that McGuinness starts with, tracing the development of writing systems more generally and then English specifically, exploring what this history suggests about the best pedagogy for early literacy.

The key insight underlying McGuinness’ analysis is that true writing systems are codes for oral language, not direct representations of things themselves. “Dog” is not directly a representation of Fido but of the thing you hear when someone says the word “dog.” A system like this only becomes necessary under certain circumstances, and most human societies have done just fine without one. However, in settled agricultural societies of growing social complexity, written language has developed independently several times in human history.

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First, comes a pictographic proto-writing, in which symbolic pictures of concrete things (grain, oxen, wine, Fido) are used to store information, like inventories and ownership. This works fine for a while, but before long, the information needing to be captured becomes too complex and abstract to represent in this way. As McGuinness says:

You can't draw pictures of laws. Laws are just talk… It's not easy to try and represent talk in symbols. What part of the talk to you choose? The most obvious units are words. You could symbolize words with the pictures you already have from the warehouse inventory control system, but this doesn't get you very far with statements like this from a hypothetical plaintiff:

Hewazpickinmygrapesoudamyfield. Iknowidwuzim. Isawim.

It needs a sharp ear and a keen understanding of the language just to find out where the words start and stop. And anyone smart enough to do this and to begin to develop a writing system will known in a hurry that pictures won't work:

The pictures could mean: "He was picking grapes in his field," or "We're hiring men to pick grapes in the field," or "The man planted seeds in Fred's grape field.”

The bits of talk that do not correspond to concrete things turn out to need their own symbols, necessarily more abstract that those for grain or river. This brings an iteration, the hybrid logographic system, Egyptian hieroglyphics being one such example, a particularly appealing one to all children I have taught.

This turns out to be a barely adequate solution, however. Very quickly, these systems in which one symbol matches to one word hit the first design constraint on writing systems: human memory’s ability to store abstract visual symbols. There is a mis-match between our capacity for oral vocabulary - the average American adult has a speaking vocabulary of about 15,000 words - and our capacity for matching those to abstract visual symbols - the limit seems to be around 2,000. English, a particularly vocabulary-rich language, includes about a million words; a logographic writing system is not going to get the job done.

Having already cut individual words out of the flow of speech, writing systems now take another step of abstraction, carving words, which on their own have some meaning, into parts of sound, which have no meaning on their own. Here enters the second constraint on writing systems: the structure of the language as spoken, the use of specific sounds to convey meaning in ways specific to the language.

The easiest bit of sound to isolate is the syllable, a “pattern of sounds in words with only one vowel.” When babies start to babble, they babble in syllables - if you can say da-da, you are well on your way to being able to design a syllabic writing system. The number of possible syllables is generally well under the threshold of 2,000 abstract visual symbols that humans can keep track of. In Sumerian, for example, there are only three possible syllable patterns: consonant-vowel (CV), vowel-consonant (VC), and consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC), resulting in a relatively small number of actual syllables. There are hundreds of syllabic or “diphone,” as McGuinness terms its, writing systems, usually requiring only about 400-500 symbols to cover all the possible syllables of the spoken language they represent.

Interestingly, one of the oldest devices for teaching English is the syllabary - if you were into the Felicity, the colonial American girl, you remember her “hornbook,” a board on which was printed the alphabet and often some examples of English syllables - closed syllables with “short” vowel sounds and open syllables with “long” vowel sounds (you might also have noticed that my pfp is holding a hornbook out to her pupil as she unlocks the door to the tower of learning).

But these English syllables are different; they all have to be written with at least two symbols. The phonemic structure of English syllables make a syllabic writing system totally impractical. Unlike Sumerian, with its three simple syllable patterns, English allows for clustering many consonants together in sequence, resulting in 15 different syllable patterns: CV, CCV, CCCV, CVC, CCVC, CCCVC, CVCC, CVCCC, CCVCC, CCVCCC, CCCVCCC, VCCC, VCC, VC, V. This makes it very easy to invent new words in English, as any mom who has read her kids a Dr. Seuss book can attest, but it also gives us over 55,000 possible syllables, pushing us back over the 2,000 symbol limit if we were try to give each English syllable its own symbolic representation. So the two constraints on writing systems - the structure of the oral language and our memory for abstract visual symbols - combine in English to require an alphabet, which McGuinness calls the least natural of all writing systems: “nobody used an alphabet unless they absolutely had to.”

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“We are not conscious observers of how we speak,” McGuinness notes. Alphabets are the least natural writing system because they require their users to become most aware of their use of oral language and the sounds that comprise it. Each individual sound, or phoneme, is given its own symbol. On the one hand, this allows great economy of symbols - most languages are made up of only about 40 phonemes, and English is no exception, with 43 or 44 depending on how you count. But it is very difficult to isolate consonants from vowels. Vowels are what give our voices volume, and “consonants split off from a vowel don't sound like speech at all, but more like chirps and wheezes.”

Alphabetic writing is unnatural because it splits sounds in speech in a way they don't normally split. Consonant clusters hang together. Consonants are very hard to unglue from vowels. Many consonants in English are hard to *say* separately from a vowel sound, even when they are isolated from words. Try saying /b/ all by itself without saying "buh." This is exactly what you must be able to do to use an alphabet efficiently.

The surest path to fluency in an alphabetic writing system is first becoming a conscious observer of one’s own speech, and so learning to read does not turn out to begin with text at all, but with oral language and all its sounds. Educators now refer to this as “phonemic awareness” - the ability to isolate the individual sounds in words, to glue and unglue them in writing and reading. This is the hardest subskill in learning an alphabetic writing system; once a student can break up the sounds of words and blend them back together, the rest of learning to read is a breeze. McGuinness says it should take about 4 to 8 months.

Or rather, it would be the hardest part, if we were teaching our students Italian or Esperanto. But unfortunately, English spelling is not a normal code, in which one symbol corresponds to one, and only one, thing. Observant readers will have noticed that English has over 40 sounds, but only 26 letters, resulting in its two complicating features, which McGuinness calls code overlap and spelling alternatives.

When the monks were adapting the Latin alphabet to transcribe English, they ran out of letters before they ran out of sounds, and rather than inventing some new letters, they just reused what they had in different ways. So the same letter may be used to represent more than one sound, either on its own (all vowels, c, g, s, y, and z) or in concert with another recycled letter (ch, sh, th, ng, ph). This is code overlap, when one symbol can potentially represent several different sounds.

We also have the opposite problem of spelling alternatives, when one sound can have several different spellings (eg, the so-called “long a” sound can be spelled seven different ways: a, ai, ay, ea, ei, eigh, ey). It’s hard to blame students frustrated by this, although the teaching profession, which also seems to have thrown up its hands in surrender, is more at fault for failing to bring some pedagogical order to this mess.

And there is an order to it, which McGuinness painstakingly describes. The common spelling rule gotchas - i isn’t before e except after c, nor does the first vowel always do the talking when two go a-walking (see ae, ei, eigh, and ey above) - certainly disprove easy to apply spelling rules (and McGuinness is adamant that teaching rules is only an obstacle to mastering the English writing system), but there still exist regular, knowable spelling patterns. Certain spellings are far more likely in certain situations, and these probabilities can be demonstrated to children and can be reflected in the course of instruction.

So, how to begin and then how to proceed in a way least likely to cause difficulties? Here is how we have done it at the Gothic Homeschool:1

1. Before you really start: develop oral language through labeling objects in the child’s world, oral storytelling, and read alouds. Through read alouds, children also pick up on important aspects of how English text works, such as which way to turn the pages, which way to read the text (left to right), and how spaces function to separate words visually (these last two are helped if you, some of the time, draw your finger along under the text as you read). Read alouds also give children exposure to a wider vocabulary than commonly used in speech. The greater the child’s vocabulary when starting to read on her own, the easier the process will be because she can match the written representation to a word she already knows.

2. Starting for real: Start with sounds. Teach the child to hear all 44 phonemes of the English language. I start this with the “I spy” game as found in Montessori classrooms. Starting with one object held in your hand, say “I spy something that starts with the sound /b/.” Try really really hard to say as little vowel sound as possible! Work your way up to two and then three objects. Then play the game with final sounds, and then middle sounds, the hardest of all to hear. I print off a list of the phonemes and check them off as we go through them (here’s an example, but make sure whatever you use adequately represents your regional accent).

   

   From here, you can play other sounds games to teach “blending” and, just as important, ungluing sounds, to form and take apart words. Ask children to tell you all the sounds in words, starting with simple two- or three-sound words, and working up to longer, five-sound words with tricky consonant blends. And do the opposite, giving the child sets of sounds and asking them to glue them together to make words.

   You can also develop phonemic awareness through what McGuinness calls “tracking.” Take a set of sounds (they can form a real word or a nonsense word) and ask the child to change one at a time: “Take mop and change the /o/ to /a/. Now take map and change the /m/ to /t/. Now take tap and change the /p/ to /g/.”

3. As the child starts to get the hang of this aural/oral manipulation, you can start to teach the alphabet. Explain to the child that a letter is a “sound picture” and that we can use these sound pictures to write down anything we can think of. Teach the child one sound picture (also known as a phonogram) for each of the 40-something English phonemes; McGuinness calls this the “basic code” of the English language.2 You will need all 26 letters of the alphabet (I go ahead and teach k even though it duplicates the sound of c) and a bunch of digraphs (I use ai, ee, oa, ie, ue, oi, ow, oo, sh, ch, th - you’ll need to teach it voiced and unvoiced, have the child put her hand on her throat and feel the difference - er, ar, air; McGuinness recommends using the e-controlled “long” vowel spellings instead). I like to use sandpaper letters for this, but you could use flashcards. McGuinness is strongly, strongly opposed to teaching letter names, and I have never done so. Later when you teach dictionary skills, you can teach them the alphabet song.

   

4. Let the child encode. Montessori observed that when children are taught a spelling for every sound, there is often an “explosion into writing” even before the child starts reading very much, and this has absolutely been my experience. Because you have taught a representation for every sound in English, the child has the amazing power to put ANYTHING they may think of into writing; my oldest’s first written word was “octopus.”

   Here we come to one of only two major differences I have with McGuinness. She is, understandably, concerned about children habituating themselves to the wrong spellings of words, but my experience suggests that, in her legitimate opposition for the sorts of things that are allowed under the heading of “invented spelling” in many classrooms today, she perhaps goes a bit too far in this concern.

   All of my children have made use of invented spelling as they learned to read and write, but because they were given the complete basic code from the beginning, with a legitimate spelling for every sound in the English language, their invented spellings were always phonetically possible. Every time they practiced encoding with just the basic code, they were practicing the alphabetic principle, ungluing the individual sounds of the word, matching them to a symbolic representation, and encoding them in writing. Four of the five went on to be excellent spellers as they read more and more, getting more and more visual exposure to authentic English writing and the pattern and probabilities of its spelling system.

   One has always had remarkably good spelling. Two of them had their spelling improve dramatically right after they went through the phase that all of my kids have gone through when learning to read: once they are pretty fluent decoders, they binge on series books (Redwall and the American Girls books have been popular here). My theory has been that the formulaic plots frees up working memory from focusing quite so much on comprehension and allows more space for “orthographic mapping,” the process of matching individual words to their spellings in memory. The fourth’s spelling improved after she undertook a summer-long, self-chosen “research project,” which involved copying pages and pages of horse facts from library books.

   The fifth’s spelling is still a work in progress, though we seem to have made a break through this year (he is in 6th grade). He is my only kid to need speech therapy, and I think those two things are related. McGuinness does say that invented spellings can be useful diagnostically, revealing problems in how the child understands the alphabetic system. I think probably if I had been paying closer attention to this child’s invented spelling, I could have picked up on that and remediated it more easily, but alas, I was having babies at the time and assumed he would follow the same course as his older siblings.

5. Practice from “decodable text” that only presents the child with parts of the code she has already been taught. Bob Books are omnipresent, and your library probably has a bunch of other options in addition. I also really like this old book, Reading Without Tears, which notes syllable divisions, helping children notice how those interacts with pronunciation and spelling.3

   McGuinness seems a bit over the top about decodable text, to be honest, though given the limited time in a classroom setting and the abuse of “real books” in whole language reading instruction, I think it’s understandable. And I do agree that decodable text is best for formal reading lessons. But in a homeschooling family, there is no way to make traditional children’s literature “off limits for the child reader,” as McGuinness recommends.

6. Keep reading aloud lots of other, non-decodable things.

7. Ok, now it gets really tricky. You have to teach all the code overlap and spelling alternatives, McGuinness’ “advanced code.” Some kids get this quickly; others need many, many repetitions. Reading Without Tears gets into the advanced code as it progresses, and I also like to use bits of Webster’s Blue-Backed Speller.4 I’ll give the child a sound and a page of text from their reader or a fable and have them find and sort all the spellings of that sound. Copywork and dictation (can use a movable alphabet if the child’s fine motor skills aren’t ready yet) are also helpful at this stage. Once the child has been exposed to the entire code, we start the Free and Treadwell readers. I also do teach the syllabary at this point, having the child practice “open” and “closed” syllables, which is not in McGuinness’ system, but I have found helpful for leading into the next and final step in the mechanical path:

8. Teach multisyllable words. McGuinness only gestures at this stage, but I have found it to be very important. It can be tempting to stop explicit instruction once a kid is off and reading chapter books fluently, but most kids benefit from teaching multisyllable words of the type unlikely to appear in the series books children tend to pick up when they first become independent readers. Here is where you can really start talking about etymology and also the place to look at how syllables and spelling intersect, how suffixes change some word spellings, and so on.

9. It’s also fun to read, here and there, children’s books about the history of written language systems in general and English in particular. Kipling has two just-so stories on this, “How the Alphabet was Made” and “How the First Letter was Written,” which aren’t strictly historically accurate, but get at the idea. Ox, House, Stick: The Story of Our Alphabet is a more recent option. We’ve also enjoyed reading aloud some of Elizabeth O’Neill’s Stories That Words Tell Us.

As you can see, I like to do things the hard way, so I’ve never used a packaged program. I don’t really recommend that, however, since there are so many good options out there. But I do recommend keeping the stages I’ve outlined in mind with whatever program you do use, so you can troubleshoot when progress seems to stall or your student is struggling.5

I’ve been through this process five times now, and while it has its tedious moments, it remains absolutely magical the first time you catch a child reading to themselves. Unlocking the door to the tower of learning has been one of the greatest privileges of being a homeschooling mother. I hope this post greases the lock a bit for you!

Do you ever wonder why debates over education from the last century or so seem to eternally return to the same obviously false dichotomies? Student-centered or teacher-driven? Critical thinking or content knowledge? Relevant or timeless? Lecture or exploration? Telling or doing? It’s both, duh! Why do we have to keep having this conversation? 

It’s because we don’t beat students any more.

As if that hadn’t already made classroom management hard enough for teachers, we also want everyone to learn more in school than ever before - much more. For a very very long time, the formal curriculum for students at the ages we now know as K-12 was nothing followed by Latin, Latin, and more Latin. Even if you want to count all the classical liberal arts - the famous trivium and quadrivium, which were not actually universally taught throughout the middle ages - you are up to seven subjects: grammar, logic, rhetoric, music, arithmetic, astronomy, and geometry. 

Today, high school graduation in my state requires four years of English, four years of math (including algebra I and II on top of geometry), biology, chemistry, physics, computer science, history (US and world), civics, economics, personal finance, physical education, fine arts, and foreign language. Also three elective credits. And don’t forget all the ancillary aspects of K-12 education, from drivers ed to health class, those things designed to produce, as Jacques Barzun once wrote, "ideal citizens, supertolerant neighbors, agents of world peace, and happy family folk, at once sexually adept and flawless drivers of cars."

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The problem is not everyone actually wants to learn all those things, at least not enough to put forth even minimal effort.1 The problem of mass education is the problem of motivation, or what used to be called docility, the degree to which one is able to be docere-ed, to be taught. St. Thomas says that docility is an essential cognitive habit for acquiring knowledge by teaching, but one that seems to be in short supply.2

I collect vintage school readers particularly those from the early 20th century, when the serious study of vernacular literature was beginning to take its place in the post-classical school curriculum. In very many of these readers, students encountered the fable of the blind men and the elephant - a varying number of blind men take hold of different parts of an elephant and then, each convinced they have grasped the whole of the creature, argue bitterly about its true nature.3 

I know of no fable that better describes educational theorists in the age of mass education. 

The arguments between progressives and traditionalists, with hands clamped firmly on tail or ear will never, ever end. Progressive educators often tackle the problem of motivation by way of adjusting the curriculum to the student - making the material to be studied actually or apparently more "relevant" to students lives, interests, and desires and/or giving students more autonomy to determine what they will study.4 E.D. Hirsch calls this the “sentimental absurdity that each child must have his or her own special curriculum suited to his or her special personality,” and, in addition to justifying the elective system in higher education, these ideas have doomed millions of K-12 students to frustrating group projects, depressing "issue novels,” and never internalizing their times tables. Among homeschoolers, you find radical unschoolers counting on baking enough triple-batches of cookies to produce proficiency in fractions.

Hirsch was right that the progressive approach, by denying students the opportunity to acquire cultural literacy, ultimately has undermined mass education’s own egalitarian goal “that schooling should enable every person to stand on his or her own two feet, equal to every other person of similar talent and virtue, rather than, as in the past, having one's role in life determined by the status, wealth, or education of one's parents.” But he himself has never been particularly interested in the pedagogical problem progressives try to address, leaving that to other educators - such as Siegfried “Zig” Englemann.

Engelmann was the progenitor of capital-D, capital-I Direct Instruction, an application of behaviorism to pedagogy and curriculum design.5 He retired as a professor of education at the University of Oregon but started his career in marketing - specifically, significantly, marketing to children - and while cognitive scientists moved on from behaviorism in the 1970s, Engelmann never did. Today, his organization, the National Institute for Direct Instruction publishes programs primarily for elementary math and language arts, including some that will be familiar to homeschoolers.

Engelmann declares at the outset that he is “not really concerned with unbounded ‘learning,’ but only with the type of learning that is caused by teaching.” His essential insight is that - contrary to the assumption behind every reading comprehension curriculum that has ever existed - making inferences is not a skill that students need to be taught, but that “children’s minds are wired to draw inferences.” This ability is “part of the data processing mechanism that children inherit.” Engelmann sidesteps the problem of interesting students in learning by arguing that learning is basically effortless and automatic because human minds are inference-making machines. Education, it turns out, does not have to require much demotivating mental toil - at least on the part of the student.

Here is the catch: students will always make inferences “consistent with the example sets” they are presented with; in fact, they cannot do otherwise, any more than you, a fluent reader, can decline to read any text that enters your field of vision. Ambiguous examples are what add friction and confusion to the learning process; “if the examples presented generate more than one meaning, not all learners will learn the same thing.” The job of the curriculum designer (not, Engelmann is clear, the teacher) is to undertake a meticulous analysis of the material to be taught, breaking down the content into the smallest possible inferential jumps, placed in the most logical sequence - which may or may not correspond to how the discipline has traditionally been taught - and then to assemble “example sets that generate only a single inference” to lead the student through the material.6

Engelmann presents the example of teaching students the color “blue.” The last thing you want to do is have them memorize a definition; a student who can recite that “blue is the hue of that portion of the visible spectrum lying between green and indigo, evoked in the human observer by radiant energy with wavelengths of approximately 420 to 490 nanometers” won’t be very successful in actually picking blue out of a ROYGBIV line up. Instead, students need to be shown many examples of blue things, all varying in every respect except color, and also, just as crucially but often neglected, many non-examples of blue. Most efficiently, those will be examples of not-blue that are closest to blue without being blue. “If we show the difference between blue and green,” Englemann writes, “yellow is automatically not blue because it is less like blue than green is.” A student who calls purple “blue” can only do so because he has encountered ambiguous examples, an easily solvable design problem rather than a thorny puzzle of human psychology.

Once the curriculum has been designed and tested, the teacher - who, again, Engelmann emphatically separates from the curriculum designer - is given a script for presenting the material and left with the task of applying behaviorist techniques to drill the students. Engelmann’s curricula specify exactly how often students must produce a correct response on the first try to consider a given bit of information or specific procedure mastered; only then is the foundation set to layer on more advanced material. He also sets a ratio for how much new material and review each lesson should contain: about a 10/90 split. Engelmann found that the typical student requires far more practice to reach mastery than is included in most educational programs, a finding I have replicated in my own homeschool.

To Engelmann’s credit, he seems to realize he only has hold of the elephant’s tail and the tail of an elephant raised in captivity at that. He states up front that he will not treat (or rely upon) “variables that lie outside those the teacher can control,” such as what an individual student might find interesting or motivating. Still, he promises a fool-proof method for teaching Dumbo some circus tricks and concludes that “the program is at fault if observations reveal that students fail.”7 I share Engelmann’s belief that all children can learn and admire his deep sense of teachers’ responsibility to their students - all of their students, regardless of background or innate ability:

The major difference between higher and lower performers is the rate at which they learn the material, not the way they formulate inferences… This difference does not support designing one sequence for higher performers and another for lower performers, but rather providing more repetition and practice for the lower performers.

While they have lately been rediscovered and given new names by cognitive science,8 the principles that are at work here are quite old. My favorite Jesuit pedagogue often advises teachers to “give a minimum of precept, a maximum of practice” and to teach from examples rather than rules and definitions. Lengthy drill was a technique used along side the switch in the bad old days; repetitio est mater studiorum, as Fr. Donnelly would have said. Though Engelmann, like the cognitive science of learning folks, seems to have no sense of himself as working in any pedagogical tradition, his work can be seen as an attempt to systematize the application of these principles through “logico-empirical analysis,” and it seems to work well for at least some definitions of work well.

But what if exclusively pursuing outcomes the teacher can control undermines other, more elusive educational goals we might have, ones that we can only work toward indirectly? What happens when Dumbo graduates? Does it matter that we all hate using 100 Easy Lessons? 

“Well, for goodness’ sakes!” said Aunt Abigail. She turned and called across the the room, “Henry, did you ever! Here’s Betsy saying she don’t know what we make butter out of! She actually never saw anybody making butter!”

Uncle Henry was sitting down, near the window, turning the handle to a small barrel swung between two uprights. He stopped for moment and considered Aunt Abigail’s remark… Then he began to turn the churn over and over again and said, peaceably: “Well, Mother, you never saw anybody laying asphalt pavement, I’ll warrant you! And I suppose Betsy knows all about that.

Elizabeth Ann’s spirits rose. She felt very superior indeed. “Oh, yes,” she assured them, “I know all about that! Why, I’ve seen them hundreds of times! Every day as we went to school they were doing the whole pavement for blocks along there.”

Aunt Abigail and Uncle Henry looked at her with interest, and Aunt Abigail said: “Well, now, think of that! Tell us all about it!”

“Why, there’s a big black sort of wagon,” began Elizabeth Ann, “and they run it up and down and pour out the black stuff on the road. And that’s all there is to it.” She stopped, rather abruptly, looking uneasy. Uncle Henry inquired: “Now there’s one thing I’ve always wanted to know. How do they keep that stuff from hardening on them? How do they keep it hot?”

The little girl looked blank. “Why, a fire, I suppose,” she faltered, searching her memory desperately and finding there only a dim recollection of a red glow somewhere connected with the familiar scene at which she had so often looked with unseeing eyes.

“Of course a fire,” agreed Uncle Henry. “But what do they burn in it, coke or coal or wood or charcoal? And how do they get any draft to keep it going?”

Elizabeth Ann shook her head. “I never noticed,” she said.

Aunt Abigail asked her now, “What do they do to the road before they pour it on?”

“Do?” said Elizabeth Ann. “I didn’t know they did anything.”

“Well, they can’t pour it right on a dirt road, can they?” asked Aunt Abigail. “Don’t they put down cracked stone or something?”

Elizabeth Ann looked down at her toes. “I never noticed,” she said.

“I wonder how long it takes for it to harden? said Uncle Henry.

“I never noticed,” said Elizabeth Ann, in a small voice.9

Englemann’s insights are real and really useful. Anything we require a student to learn, it seems only fair to teach them in as efficient and effective a way as possible. And yet, if Engelmann’s approach avoids many pitfalls, it also minimizes potential aids to the educator’s task - interest and curiosity among them - but perhaps more fatally, if relied on exclusively, if taken for the whole elephant, it undermines the development of other intellectual virtues besides docility. 

“For modern youngsters there is no tedious climbing of the hill of knowledge, for an escalator takes them from kindergarten to high school graduation without their ever knowing the joy of honest, sustained effort,” Ella Frances Lynch warned a century ago. What happens to students who are spoon fed their education? For whom all knowledge comes carefully pre-measured, prepared, even predigested? They remain forever intellectually children, at the mercy of whoever is willing to teach them - to whatever end. They are doomed to a life of intellectual dependence, slurping education - in a cup!

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Some links!

For more on this pedagogical problem from a slightly different, more ancient angle, see John Psmith’s review of The Education of Cyrus. 

Nadya Williams on the necessity of a family library.

Dixie’s piece on imagining history through sound was really neat - we’ve done a fair bit of listening to music from historical periods we’ve studied, but she goes beyond that. 

Audrey Watters, author of Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning, is back writing on ed tech again, and I am excited.

First thing on the first Monday morning, I sat down with the youngest three students and helped them set up their work journals. They are keeping all their work in a single composition book divided with post-it note tabs for different subjects: an English section subdivided into “exercises” and “word hoard,”1 a history section for summaries and outlines, a science section for written narrations, and, for Edmund only, a Latin section.

The word hoard puts into writing something we did orally last year - students write down new-to-them words from their readings, look up and record the definitions, and the use each word in an example sentence. Sometimes students claim they didn’t encounter a single unknown word all day, in which case their readers have handy glossaries of new or difficult words at the end of each reading that I use to quiz them. During such a quizzing this week, I asked Nicholas to define “barrier.” He offered “a guy who sells berries?” Nope. Agnes piped up with an alternative - “a guy who buries people?” So we got a little lesson on homophones out of it too.

After our first week ever of formal spelling lessons, Edmund has gone from misspelling “cake” as “cack” to misspelling “cake” as “caek.” Progress!

Agnes’s math book still hasn’t turned up, so I had her do some review of adding and subtracting with regrouping via worksheets from this useful website. Edmund jumped right back into Math Mammoth, Nicholas reviewed multi-digit multiplication with my new favorite math material, and Kateri got some fraction reps with Ray’s Intellectual Arithmetic, which I continue to think is a totally slept on math resource for middle school.

I can tell the schedule I put together will need some serious tweaking. I need to reorder the little kids’ lessons and possibly move my meeting with the big kids to before lunch, because when I wait too long Kateri has a tendency to finish up her independent work and slip outside to rollerblade or into her room to practice music for the rest of the afternoon.

There were other first week snafus, of course. Edmund’s history book was supposed to show up on Monday, but they sent me the second volume instead of the first, which I already had and, in any case, comes second. Coordinating the timing of instrument practice and baby naps is going to take some work.

Kateri and Benedict did some final preparations for attending the national convention of the Junior Classical League, the highlight of their summer. They are both mythology specialists for their respective Certamen2 teams so every morning I came out to a coffee table covered with Ovid, Hesiod, and various mythology dictionaries from the previous night’s study sessions.

Benedict spent his days at a summer camp related to a potential future career field, and on the last day, the whole family showed up very conspicuously to take in the exhibit of the students’ work from the week. Part of the exhibit was a display of each student's thoughts about the future impact of AI on our city. The other kids’ responses were all stuff like "AI will allow for more creativity, efficiency, and platitudes.” Benedict’s was something like, “If used wisely, AI may improve our future - or perhaps it will kill us all.”

Coming up next in this space: some thoughts on direct instruction, how to think about what we do as home educators, and Siegfried Engelmann and John Carnine’s Could John Stuart Mill Have Saved Our Schools?

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A few links!

I loved Ivana Greco’s piece asking “When We Outsource Every Hard Thing, What Do We Lose?”3 A mantra the Principal and I have is “the point of the task is building the relationship.” Work isn’t just work, and what we do is who we are.

Related, Alan Jacobs on one thing we might lose if we outsource certain hard things to AI: the ability to detect human voices. I would only add that perhaps our appreciation for human voices necessarily must already have been lowered in order to even begin to accept AI ones as a substitute.4

Nadya Williams notes, correctly, that “It Takes a Lot of Tape to Raise Kids.” I try not to spend too much money on curriculum in part so we can afford all the tape, stamps, index cards, and hot glue gun sticks. What supplies do your kids burn through?

Little Kids

My three youngest students will be doing a few things together - a dedicated morning read aloud while the teenagers get to sleep in a bit,1 some Montessori language presentations, poetry study,2 and spelling.

This will be the first time I’ve bothered with teaching spelling formally. My first two kids’ spelling suddenly and dramatically improved without intervention after a few years of fluent reading in large quantities - generally around 5th grade after they have passed through the series-binging phase. In Kateri’s case, she will tell you that her spelling was also helped by a massive research project she undertook on her own initiative that mainly consisted of copying several thick horse books from the library into a spiral-bound notebook.

With these precedents, I was hoping that Edmund’s spelling would also evolve over the past year, but alas, it has not. The bright side is that I now have a chance to try out Words Their Way, a word study program that has long intrigued me. And if I’m going to the effort of printing and cutting out a ton of word sorts, might as well have Nicholas and Agnes3 tag along.

Agnes - 2nd grade

Agnes loves lessons until she doesn’t. Especially math, which will start this year with the Miquon Green Book if we can find it, because she’s been carrying it around for weeks begging me to let her begin and now we don’t know where it is.

Agnes will be reading the Free and Treadwell Third Reader aloud to me every day, and I expect her to get through it before the year is over. After the Third Reader, I consider my students to have completed the “learning to read” process and ready to “read to learn.” When she is ready to move up to the Fourth Reader, she’ll read it independently and then narrate the day’s reading to me.

For handwriting, Agnes and Nicholas will be learning cursive with Handwriting Lessons Through Literature. They will also be reading the same history spine, A Child’s First Book of American History and continuing UD’s delightful Latin program with their dad.

Nicholas - 4th grade

In addition to all that he is doing with his siblings, Nicholas is continuing with Math Mammoth and starting the Fourth Year Language Reader. He might be starting band - the Principal and I have yet to decide if we think he has the necessary maturity to practice with adequate diligence. I’m skeptical.

Edmund - 6th grade

Edmund is peak upper elementary child right now and so delightful - I think he is really ready for more academic challenge. He’ll be working through Math Mammoth 6 and this Sixth Year Language Reader, reading the Landmark History of the American People by Daniel and Ruth Boorstin and various botany books, and learning to write outlines from his reading.

6th grade is when kids start formal Latin studies around here, so I’ll be embarking on my third time through Familia Romana. I’ve found the pace of the exercitia to be too fast with not enough repetitions for my students, so this time around I’m experimenting with some different ways of practicing the grammar based on Jesuit Paul Distler’s excellent book Teach the Latin, I Pray You.

Big Kids

Kateri is old enough this year that I’m grouping her and Benedict together for some high school content so that we can hopefully have some discussions that feel more like discussions and less like interrogations. The two of them are going to go through A Workbook for Arguments and will be driving together to math classes taught by a friend (Kateri for Algebra 1 and Benedict for BC Calculus).

But what I’m really, really excited about is American History, the field in which I did graduate work and about which I have many opinions. After much, MUCH agonizing, I’ve decided to use Wilfred McClay’s newish textbook response to Howard Zinn, Land of Hope, which conveniently comes in high school and middle school variations. The teacher’s guide includes a solid selection of primary source supplements, and the whole thing is compact enough that we should still have plenty of time for me add a few things I think could use more attention.

Kateri - 8th grade

Kateri will be working through her last school reader this year, the Everyday Classics Eighth Reader, practicing sentence composition with Model English Book 1, and, if we don’t dawdle, finishing Familia Romana. She’s continuing to play violin with our local homeschool music program and is also picking up, sigh, the saxophone.

Kateri is most excited about a vet science study we’ve put together for this year that, if all goes well, will feed right into 9th grade bio next year. In addition to studying a textbook, she will be managing our Jersey cow’s prenatal and postpartum care over the next few months, keeping a logbook of all the homestead livestock care that happens this year, and making an end-of-year presentation to our former babysitter, who is graduating from vet school this spring.

Benedict - 11th grade

I resolved my high school science angst by putting Benedict in a dual enrollment chemistry class with the local four year university this summer. The class is all online, which has been underwhelming. On the bright side, the state is paying for it, he’ll be done in just a few more weeks, and we won’t have to worry about science at all this academic year, except for some reading about the history of science I’m going to assign. I was kind of hoping that dual enrollment would turn out to be a good enough solution for high school science for everyone going forward, but based on how this is going so far, I’m not sure that it will be, alas.

After a really intense year of Latin preparing for the AP (scores came out this week - it went well! I’m not a complete failure as a Latin teacher!), we’ll take it a little easier this year: some prose composition and reading Roma Aeterna, possibly with the Principal joining us. For English, we have Intensive Studies in American Literature and Model English Book 2. Benedict is continuing with flute and singing tenor and maybe joining the concert band of the local youth symphony, if he can get his driver’s license and get himself there for rehearsals.

We’ve reached the age when I have to think about preparing a student for standardized testing - Benedict will take the PSAT in the fall, and I guess the ACT at some point (I grew up in an SAT region so I really need to figure out what is the deal with the ACT), and the BC Calc and US History AP exams in the spring.

All Together Now

For years I have wanted to do more4 fine arts, and this is finally this year! For real this time! For about a few minutes after lunch every day we are going to work through a list of beginner drawing books - starting with Mark Kistler’s You Can Draw in 30 Days - and some of Sadie Hoyt’s Classical Encounters modules.

Everyone will also be working out of Trail Guide to US Geography. This is a neat resource with daily short assignments for elementary, middle, and high school along with an extensive menu of other longer projects. I’m not totally sure how much we will use it beyond the daily geography drills, but I can imagine some of the kids really getting into based on how much everyone enjoyed our world geography year.

So that’s the plan! Excelsior!

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A Twitter mutual and Direct Instruction enthusiast recently pointed me to this fascinating LessWrong post, which echoes many of my own gradually solidifying conclusions about the relationship between teaching and learning2 and provoked me to try and capture those conclusions in one place. Each of these points could, of course, be discussed at length, and I hope to do that, with specific attention to the homeschool setting, gradually over time.

1. The student’s motivation is (almost) the whole ballgame.

   1. Learning requires some effort from the learner. A teacher can do their best to make that effort as pleasant and efficient as possible, to provide a little extrinsic motivation, but the teacher cannot do the work of learning for the student. An unmotivated student will not put in the effort and so will not learn.

2. The most ambitious instruction, the instruction we really care most about, teaches things to do, not stuff to know.

   1. It is almost impossible to learn to do something without watching someone else do it.

   2. The most important part of learning to do something is trying to do it many, many times.

   

3. A “knowledge-rich” curriculum is necessary for learning…

4. …BUT the actual number of things all students really need to remember for the long haul is truthfully pretty small.

   1. Repetition, which, sure, you can try to space to maximize efficiency if you want, is the best way to learn those things.

5. A lot of teaching is training attention -

   1. In terms of stamina, but also, maybe more importantly:

   2. What to attend to; what is important and what isn’t.

6. Some subset of things need to become an automated response to certain stimulus, and there is no way around drilling those things.

   1. To bring us back to the beginning of this list, here is where motivational deficits cause some of the biggest problems for learning.

      

These are all things I’m pretty confident hold true at the broadest possible level. I would add more details for specific domains and disciplines. And I would have a different list for the thing we call “education” more broadly. What about you? What do you know to be true about teaching and learning?

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How about a few other interesting education links?

• Dan Meyer is my favorite guy writing about AI and education, and this, on truly personalized education, is worth reading, as usual.

• I loved this about reading War and Peace aloud so much. Some of our best family read aloud and audiobook experiences have been big books, with David Copperfield topping the list, and I suspect the Principal would definitely be up for tackling War and Peace before our oldest flies the nest. The advice is so commonplace, and yet it simply remains true that shared read alouds are probably the best thing you can do for your family culture.

• The discourse moved on long ago, but I want to register that this Scott Alexander post makes me sad.3 I think our current compulsory attendance laws are bad, but “schools” are too many different things to be bad or good. Meanwhile, Americans seem to be withdrawing more explicitly than ever from the public goods of education, and that is definitely bad.

  I get that a lot of smart kids were bored in and even damaged by schools, but I was a smart kid who got a lot out of the schools I went to, and I’m very, very wary of one idea that seems to be behind some anti-school sentiment, which is that without schools, smart kids will know how to educate themselves. That idea hasn’t worked out great in higher education, to say the least.
  

  The educational reform we really need is curricular; we are way overdue for a deep rethinking and streamlining of our extremely bloated curriculum, which is driven by college entrance requirements and thus affects college-bound homeschoolers almost as much as kids in brick-and-mortar schools. Less, more efficient school would be better for all kids, “gifted” or not. But it’s hard to get people to agree on a relatively tiny set of universal essentials and easy to pretend that a different way of arranging or delivering what we’re already trying to teach would make a meaningful difference.

• On that last point, an old article by the late Grant Wiggins: “The Futility of Trying to Teach Everything Of Importance.”

The standard argument I have seen - and relied on to make my homeschooling plans until last year - is that general education should include knowledge of the scientific method and basic scientific facts and the correction of common scientific misconceptions in order to produce “scientifically literate” citizens. E.D. Hirsch has had me convinced for years about the importance of cultural literacy, and surely some knowledge of science is required to be culturally literate.

But it turns out, there’s a difference between the core of Hirsch’s argument - that some shared body of knowledge among citizens in a democracy is necessary for successful civic communication and deliberation - and the standard argument for “scientific literacy.”3 Here’s a pretty typical elaboration of the idea:

All of us have a stake, as individuals and as a society, in scientific literacy. An understanding of science makes it possible for everyone to share in the richness and excitement of comprehending the natural world. Scientific literacy enables people to use scientific principles and processes in making personal decisions and to participate in discussions of scientific issues that affect society. A sound grounding in science strengthens many of the skills that people use every day, like solving problems creatively, thinking critically, working cooperatively in teams, using technology effectively, and valuing life-long learning. And the economic productivity of our society is tightly linked to the scientific and technological skills of our work force.

Last year, for 9th grade science, I attempted to use a textbook specifically designed to impart scientific literacy through an integrated approach to the major scientific disciplines. It was co-authored by the physicist responsible for the scientific portions of Hirsch’s Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, and if anything would be the best possible representation of the scientific literacy approach, I thought surely this would be it.

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The textbook bored Benedict enormously. I found it to be barely “integrated” and much more like much briefer versions of my high school survey classes strung together in an order that may make sense as a catalog of scientific knowledge, but I found in practice to not be pedagogically optimal. We were disappointed, and I returned to the idea of “scientific literacy” with a bit more skepticism.

It occurred to me - when was the last time any average citizen has been acknowledged by gatekeepers of the Science to have adequate scientific literacy “to participate in discussions of scientific issues that affect society” anyway? Even though the last four years certainly offered a great many opportunities, I cannot remember a single time. But the more I thought about this, the more reasonable it seemed. Answering actual scientific questions4 requires a great deal of scientific expertise developed through many years of dedicated study. I can’t even remember what the Krebs cycle is.5

And it's not enough to master the current state of scientific knowledge; scientific expertise, requires staying atop of and evaluating current research. The content of the sciences is subject to more frequent changes than any other discipline in the high school curriculum. I once encountered a Montessori guide who was deeply, deeply upset that some Montessori schools were still presenting their elementary students the five kingdoms and had not updated to the tree of life.6 She saw it as an appalling example of Montessorians’ unwillingness to depart from the dogmatic presentation of their founder’s materials and, even worse, teleological worldview and a gross failure of their duty to their students. However the tree of life may be on its way out, and the reticulate phylogenic network on its way in.7 If “scientific literacy” is anything, surely it is not memorizing information that can be out of date by the time it trickles down into K-12 textbooks.

Ok, maybe scientific literacy is not about accumulating enough actual, up-to-date scientific knowledge to weigh in on scientific questions, but maybe the important takeaway from high school science is learning what science is and how it works, learning how to “think like a scientist.” Here I think we get closer to the actual formative effect of high school science.

Every year, it seems, students review the idealized scientific method - hypothesis - experiment - observation - results - around and around again, ritually initiating students into a certain view of reality and knowledge. Something called “science” is exclusively associated with such broad aspects of reasoning as observing, inferring, and classifying. Responsible science educators will say they aren’t doing this - and I tend to believe that they really don’t think they mean to. They will do things like at the beginning of the textbook I used and discarded last year - talk about “different ways of knowing” and assure you that you can still have your art or your religion because that’s a different way of knowing about a different thing than science. But “science” claims all knowledge certified as universally accessible and thus admissible as evidence in the public square. I think this - if anything - is what students generally take from their high school science studies: a vague sense that scientific knowledge is one to which we all must defer, that we must all listen to the Science.

As a result - one apparently unanticipated by the advocates of scientific literacy - this actually exacerbates rather than helps resolve public controversies touching on scientific questions, as historian Steven Shapin has noted:

The problem we confront is better described not as too little science in public culture but as too much. Given the absurdities and errors abroad in the land, it may seem crazy to say this, yet the point can be pressed. …like the Moon-landing deniers and the Flat-Earthers, their rejection of Right Thinking is not delivered as anti-science. Instead, it comes garnished with the supposed facts, theories, approved methods, and postures of objectivity and disinterestedness associated with genuine science. Wrong-headedness often advertises its embrace of officially cherished scientific values — skepticism, disinterestedness, universalism, the distinction between secure facts and provisional theories — and frequently does so more vigorously than the science rejected. …you can reflect on why it might be that students of the human sciences are deluged with lessons on The Scientific Method while chemists and geologists are typically content with mastering just the various methods of their specialties. The Truth-Deniers find scientific facts and theories shamefully ignored by the elites; they embrace conceptions of a coherent, stable, and effective Scientific Method that the elites are said to violate; they insist on the necessity of radical scientific skepticism, universal replication, and openness to alternative views that the elites contravene. On those criteria, who’s really anti-scientific? Who are the real Truth-Deniers?

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that my goal for all my students was not that they have adequate scientific literacy to weigh in on scientific questions, still less that they think they have adequate scientific literacy to weigh in on scientific questions, but that they have the epistemic literacy to answer the more fundamental question “Is the problem or controversy before me an actual scientific question or is it something else?” What I wanted was a humane study of science coherently integrated with our general education goals of developing my kids’ human faculties in pursuit of wisdom and eloquence.

There doesn’t seem to be a textbook for that.

To be continued…

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My first five children are all roughly 2 years apart. This meant that for many years we were in something that one might generously call a routine that could relatively easily accommodate the somewhat regular arrival of new members. But it has now been 6-1/2 years since there was last a newborn around here, and it turns out that only parts of it are like riding a bicycle. My plan for the week was to park myself on the couch with Sexta and conduct all the homeschooling around our large, heavy coffee table. This mostly worked, and I feel pretty good about how our first week back went, at least as far as the homeschooling goes. The laundry remains a troubling problem.

So what did we learn this week?

Read alouds: Since I’m spending a lot of time sitting on the couch, I added up a few new read alouds to Dryden’s Aeneid (our pre-baby selection): Stories That Words Tell Us by Elizabeth O'Neill, The Book of the Ancient World by Dorothy Mills,1 and The Human Body, a vividly illustrated Golden Book.

English: Benedict and Kateri and I are reading The Tempest aloud together. This is part of a unit I'm calling "Man, Nature, and Technology.” We started with Prometheus Bound then read Doctor Faustus. Next up is "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” which I've been wanting to get to for years. Benedict is also working on a paper comparing Faustus and Prospero.

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With everyone working around the coffee table, I’m trying to keep a closer eye on the younger students’ handwriting practice. They are all still working through their readers.

Latin: Latin AP prep with Benedict continues; with the exam eight weeks away, I am starting to feel the time crunch. Kateri continues to work through Familia Romana, and the Principal got in two Latin through Stories lessons with the younger kids in the evening.

Math: Agnes has been working with my favorite math manipulative, the golden bead material.2 She's pretty quick with her basic addition facts at this point, so she resisted initially when I showed her how to use the golden beads for addition and subtraction, because they slowed her down. But when we started addition with regrouping, she realized how helpful they could be. By Friday of this week the she seemed to have gotten the idea and was happily adding four digit numbers with regrouping just with paper and pencil.

Nicolas finished Math Mammoth 4B, and before moving on to 5A, we are spending a little extra time practicing multi-digit multiplication. He seems to understand the distributive property and is pretty quick to mentally multiply multi-digit numbers by single-digit numbers, but hasn’t quite made the connection between those things and the standard multiplication algorithm. I've never had the opportunity to use the Montessori multiplication checkerboard, but I think that time has finally come - fun!

Edmund is about halfway through Math Mammoth 5B and spent the week reviewing simplifying fractions and multiplying them by whole numbers. Kateri finished the chapter on solving one-step equations in Math Mammoth 7A. I have no idea what Benedict is doing in his precalc class - he has officially moved past the math I vaguely remember into the math I don’t remember at all.

There was other stuff, but this is what made it into my notes, and the rest is kind of a blur. The week really went better than I expected; now if only there were a solution for the laundry.

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I’m sure I’ll have lots of time and energy for homeschool blogging now.

Homeschooled High Schoolers MIA

Something Dixie Dillon Lane said recently got me thinking about the question that occurs to all homeschooling mothers sometime around when their oldest turns twelve or thirteen and hits about “seventh grade” - where are all the high schoolers?

That kid who was just two grades ahead of your oldest, the one who’s mom you used to ask for advice on teaching reading or getting math done every day, has vanished from your homeschool group’s park days. Your favorite homeschooling influencer’s oldest child, who’s so pretty delight-directed elementary school days inspired despair at the unaesthetic flat lays your own homeschool produced, has vanished from her feed.

The reasons are all reasonable enough. Some families find school a much better fit for these years. Others stay home but outsource most of their academics, making for boring homeschooling “content” - mom now checks in once a week to make sure teenagers are on track or drops them at co-op or maybe is herself too busying teaching at co-op to document their secondary education journey.

And, of course, there’s the universal sense that our children’s privacy demands we fall silent when they hit adolescence. I sympathize with this sentiment, and yet it leads to the erasure of middle-aged mothers from the homeschooling public square and the near-domination of that square by mothers with, at oldest, middle school aged children. To be fair, their homeschools are all lovely and they are probably better homeschoolers than I, but still, there’s no substitute for the voice of experience. I think there must be a way to talk online about homeschooling high school without trespassing overmuch on our teenagers’ privacy or retreating entirely into generalities.

Not that I’m a voice of experience to be sure. My first is only - and also already! - in 10th grade, and over the past couple of weeks while the Principal has been home on parental leave, I’ve taken the opportunity to unburden myself of all my worries and frustrations with regards to educating our firstborn. Just when you think you’ve got this homeschool thing figured out, suddenly you hit high school and then you also have a baby and whew, things do not seem so figured out any more.

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We’ve decided to make three large-ish changes to how we’ve been doing high school, and describing those changes and why we’re making them seems like a great way to get back to writing in this space. But caveat mater - this is just one family’s iterative homeschooling process in pursuit of one family’s possibly quirky goals for secondary education.

Change 1: Accommodating the adolescent circadian rhythm

Getting Benedict up in the morning was ruining our day.

Nobody likes to nag, but the first interaction I found myself having every morning with Benedict was to nag him to get out of bed, nag him to hurry up and get himself going, nag him to be on time to the family morning meeting, which he moodily tolerated from the deepest corner of the couch. Having been a night owl myself until accumulating a certain number of children, I sympathized with the energy he got in the evening, once the house was quiet and dim. He put that energy to productive use on personal projects: writing, reading, working on his invented language. But I wished that late night energy didn't result in his inability to rise pleasantly at a time that worked best for the rest of the family’s daily schedule.

The whole issue came to represent for me one of the big challenges of homeschooling high school: helping a teenager individuate while still remaining a member of the family and - for a few more years - the household. When can you give and let them do their own thing? When do you need them to be a team player and stick with the group still?

The Principal and I hashed out the issue, trying various strategies to help Benedict get going in the morning - some morning exercise, some time outside getting fresh air and sunlight. While both of these have helped us adults to seize the day, neither seemed to improve Benedict's morning mood nor increase his inclination to leap from his bed the moment his alarm went off.

So the Principal started reading about the sleep needs of the average adolescent, which are subject to a developmental change in the daily production of melatonin, the hormone that is supposed to make us sleepy. Melatonin levels rise several hours later in adolescents than in younger children or in adults, leading to late night young adult energy combined with a correspondingly later morning rising time. Now, I've never seen a melatonin, but Benedict’s insistence that he just isn’t tired until late at night and doesn’t go to sleep earlier just because we send him to bed earlier certainly mirrored my younger self’s experience.

We went went back and forth on the issue. The Real World does not operate according to teenagers’ circadian rhythms.1 Shouldn't teenagers get ready for life in the Real World? Didn't we all have to get up at 6am as teenagers ourselves to get to school on time while managing an early morning paper route or attending early morning extracurricular meetings? Wouldn't letting Benedict have a dramatically different rising time from the rest of the family interfere with the daily schedule we need to maintain for the common good? And also leave him not enough time to complete his schoolwork and pursue his other interests?

But despite some hesitations, we've decided to trial a more teenager-friendly sleep schedule for Benedict and, to the extent she wants to follow it, his younger sister, who is only now 13 and still seems inclined to go to bed earlier and rise earlier than her older brother, though not as early as her younger siblings. We've landed a bedtime of 11pm and a rising time of 8am. The later rising time means Benedict will have to shift an hour of his school work into the evening, but he was so enthused about the overall change that he happily agree to that adjustment.

The condition for keeping the schedule is that Benedict adheres to it with no more nagging. If I still find myself every morning getting off to a terrible start with him, because eight o'clock comes and I have to go and harangue him out of bed, then the schedule change will not be accomplishing my goals, and we will revert to bed and rising times that are more convenient for me. So we will see how this goes.

Sexta is stirring so tune in next time for the second exciting installment in High School Adjustments: block scheduling!

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Actual reference books have been an endangered species at least since I was directed to an Encarta CD-ROM in my high school library in 1996, and I’m not opposed to googling things as needed, but I prefer to start with some sort of paper-based reference material for questions like “how do cameras work?” or “where is Mongolia?” Books lend themselves to browsing serendipity while asking Siri does not. Furthermore, the children are free to use any of our books at any time independently, whereas they require my assistance and/or supervision to make use of the internet.

What counts as a reference book as opposed to any other sort of book? In my mind, these are the sorts of books you wouldn’t tend to read straight through and that you read for the sake of some other extrinsic purpose, not just for the sheer enjoyment of the reading experience itself.

Still, even instrumental reading can be more or less appealing, and the more appealing the material, the more likely one is to find themselves reading on about the re-discovery of Machu Picchu, even if you started out just wanting to know the population of Peru. I try to select books that invite this sort of browsing, whether through attractive illustrations or compelling authorial voice (often hard to come by in reference works).

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I tend to think of reference books as falling into two broad categories: one type of book you turn to in order to know something and the other in order to do something.

Things to Know

If I had to pick just one set of reference books, hands down it would be a vintage World Book encyclopedia. We had one from the 60s when I was growing up, and I browsed it A LOT. My kids use these multiple times a week; they are pretty much always spread out all over the floor, often with two different volumes open to related articles left next to each other. Our set is from the 80s - I cannot speak to how the presentation may have changed in more recent years.

We have a copy of the second version of a 15th edition Britannica, too, and I also like it, but it doesn’t entice you to browse in the same way. I actually think the micro/macropedia arrangement is neat, though, and the more in-depth information is good for older kids who have already been reading the World Book for a few years.

I remember clearly the day I noticed the set of very thick books high on a shelf at the used book store run by our local Friends of the Library - could it be an Oxford English Dictionary? It was! For a mere $125! I’d coveted a set since high school, when my extremely cultured English teacher had told us it was the only dictionary worth consulting.

To be sure, it is a rare child who will pull one of these volumes off the shelf on their own initiative, but they have been invaluable in our homeschool, and I think the kids are starting to see the utility. At the very least, they all get a real kick out of it when we go to look up a word from something we are reading and discover, in the quotations, the very work we are looking at!

While most of our reference collection I’ve picked up used,1 I did buy a comprehensive atlas new so we would have one fairly up-to-date geographical resource. About a decade ago, the Principal collected all of Colin McEvedy’s historical atlases, and I recently added a fun baby’s first historical atlas by DK to introduce the younger kids to the concept. Also frequently browsed are Material World and Hungry Planet.

One good field guide for your region is probably a good idea, but I think only families with a real naturalist bent need more specialized volumes. Our collection is a random assortment of what I’ve picked up used over the years.

I try to keep DK and Usbourne books of the disconnected, factoid type to a minimum in our permanent collection (we do check them out from the library), but I have made space for a few of DK’s “visual dictionaries.”2 These are excellent to pull out as a visual supplement to any verbal description of pretty much anything - layers of the earth, parts of a plant, aircraft of World War I.3 I have some kids who have been inspired by these to make carefully labeled drawings of their own. Along similar lines, we also have an older edition of The Body Atlas.

As my kids are getting older, I’ve started collecting high school and introductory college textbooks covering a variety of disciplines. We haven’t made extensive use of any of these in our formal academic work, but I am finding them useful to have around to supplement our less-conventional high school content studies. It’s slow going, though, as I’m trying to poke around a bit and see which textbooks actual experienced instructors in these disciplines like to use and why.

If you do any foreign language study, I recommend having more than one good grammar to reference - sometimes a slightly different explanation of a grammatical concept can really make the difference. For Latin, we have Allan and Greenough and Gildersleeve. Benedict’s godmother gave him a hardback Lewis and Short for his birthday a couple of years ago, and I will have to replace it if he takes it away with him to college.

Finally, religious reference books: A Bible, duh. Or several, to compare translations. And a Vulgate, if you study any Latin at all. We also make regular use of a catechism and a copy of the Summa.4 ETA: I forgot our liturgical year reference books! And collections of lives of the saints!

Things to Do

I have a history of overbuying these sorts of books, and I’m here now to tell you what is actually worth having around: books that give good explanations of general techniques and books that provide a lot of inspiration, particularly visual.

Less used are books that just have narrow instructions for a handful of very specific projects - rarely do the projects in the book match up with the usually much more ambitious projects that exist in a child’s mind. At the very least, I would recommend previewing these sorts of books from the library before purchasing.5

For techniques, we have many old Reader’s Digests volumes, which are cheap, quite comprehensive, and generally have good photos, although the actual projects in them are quite dated. We have a variety of drawing books, including some good general ones from Usbourne, several from Lee Ames’ Draw 50 X series, and a few by Ed Emberley that the Principal is very partial to.

For crafting inspiration, honestly the kids love Martha Stewart. In addition to the two craft encyclopedias we own, we often check her seasonally-themed books out from the library (Edmund is using a Halloween one to plan decorations for a bonfire, donuts, and spooky stories gathering next week). Also inspirational/aspirational if your family has a large-ish outdoor space are books written by Daniel C. Beard (a founder of the BSA) and his sisters; we own the American Boy’s and Girl’s Handy Books, the Field and Forest Handy Book, and The Book of Camp-Lore and Woodcraft.

You’ll perhaps have noted that there are no books of science experiments in our collection. I’m not a fan - these are almost universally books of disconnected projects that don’t always work well and don’t seem to serve any greater purpose but are easily marketed by slapping STEM! on the cover. I’m sure there are some decent ones out there, though - please let me know if you’ve found them!

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How to get your kids to actually use your reference materials:

• What specific weird unique thing might your weird unique kid ask about? Tailor your collection to the types of things your kids actually wonder about or want to do. For example:

• When a child asks you a question, unless it’s something you have a particular expertise in or unique perspective on, tell him to look it up. Yes, he will find this irritating at first, but also yes, he will get over it in time. Sometimes he will decide it’s not worth the effort and drop the whole thing - at this point, you must resist the impulse to answer the question for him after all! If he does investigate his question, make sure you ask him later about what he learned and find it deeply, engrossingly fascinating. And now you can feel free to add anything important he missed or point out a connection you’d like him to notice.

• If he is too young to use the right book himself, ask him to bring you the book and have him stand next to you as you narrate aloud the process of finding the right entry in the book. “Let’s see, how do we spell Hereford? H-E-R, so I turn to the Hs, and I open it to, let’s see, ‘Holland.’ That’s spelled H-O-L. Does O come before or after E in the alphabet? Right, so I actually need to go back to the words that start with H-E. Okay, here are the H-E-Ts, I need to go back still further, aha, the H-E-Rs, hm, but there’s no entry for Hereford. That’s a type of cow, though, so what if you bring me the C volume and we look under the entry for cows or maybe it will be under cattle?” Eventually6 he realizes he can do all this much faster than you can and stops asking you for help.

• Put the heavy books on low shelves that are easier for small people to access. This is prudent for structural bookshelf engineering reasons also, though I’m sure you’ve anchored your bookshelves to the wall, right?

• Don’t freak out about multiple encyclopedia volumes being left out all the time, which they will be. Just calmly ask the responsible party to come back and reshelve the books properly.

  

• Consult your reference works when you are reading aloud. Not sure what a doublet or a Spanish arcabucero is? Or where to find Flanders and why Miles Standish might have been there? Often the only thing between us and the actual enjoyment of some slightly older work of literature is just a little bit of background knowledge.

• Require their use for formal academic purposes. Much of the academic work we do here in the “content subjects” for grades 4-8 involves students doing independent research with reference materials. The earlier editions of The Well-Trained Mind contained helpful guidance for this,7 though as time has worn on, I’ve tended to make more use of Montessori-ish research templates.

• Let the kids see you using your reference books. I use many of the books in our family collection, but also have a few things that are more specific to me, like Home Comforts, a comprehensive book of knitting techniques, and many, many cookbooks.

At this point, we have a pretty good general reference collection, but I am always on the look out for volumes to fill gaps or address an individual child’s weird unique interest, so if there is a reference book in your home that is never where it should be on the shelf because it’s always in use, I’d love to hear about it!

BUT FIRST! I wrote a book review about the history of scientific investigation into the act of reading and how it has brought us to our AI doom…or has it? I hope it edifies you!

Ok, so last Monday was Labor Day, and my children couldn’t believe I was giving them the day off lessons, and maybe I shouldn’t have because some of them were at loose ends for much of the day. But Benedict did go to his dad’s school to help with a small construction project, and the Principal did a little Latin with the three youngest. He’s using the University of Dallas’s new K-5 curriculum, Latin through Stories, which is totally scripted and quite delightful, almost exactly the sort of thing I’d wanted to put together for elementary ages for years but hahaha, somehow never found the time.

On Tuesday, the six lambs we sent to the processor the previous week were ready, so we had to drop everything and pack it all into the freezer while Kateri, as usual, took an inventory. It just barely fit. We also kept two of the hides for Edmund, who spent the week diligently salting, fleshing, and brining following the directions in his favorite book.

Some day I will write up a whole post about how I teach reading, but one thing we do is start with letter sounds rather than names. Honestly, I never really get around to teaching letter names explicitly, and I have found the kids have all just picked them up with only one exception, which is that Edmund insists on calling “y” “u.” I decided this week that 5th grade is really too old to still be doing this, and I’m going to have to put it on the schedule to work on it for a week or two.

I haven’t quite finished a literature reading list for this year and we didn’t quite finish Macbeth last spring, so we took it up again last week. We all take a part and read a scene, then I let the three youngest leave if they want, and Kateri, Benedict, and I discuss the scene further. We’re studying ancient and medieval history, and Benedict is reading Virgil for AP Latin, so when we’ve finished this, I’m leaning towards reading Dryden’s translation aloud to everyone, and then maybe we’ll undertake Chaucer this year? As You Like It? Idylls of the King?. The Principal has pre-ordered Emily Wilson’s new Iliad so that will be a bedtime read aloud later this fall (currently he’s reading The Neverending Story - which neither of us had read before).

I really enjoyed Dixie Dillon Lane’s essay from last week about the foundations of teaching history. We’ve never made hardtack - though now that I think about it, I’m surprised Edmund’s never suggested it - but we do read lots of stories from different times and places and make it a priority to visit historical sites and living history museums when we travel. We also don’t go out of our way to memorize dates and names before high school, though my middle schoolers have done varying amounts of timeline-making.

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However, one new thing I’m doing with Kateri this year that she has been very enthusiastic about is having her fill out guided notes I’ve made for the books she’s reading. Incidentally, I thought these books were just okay, but she really likes them? Anyway, guided notes are really just glorified worksheets and a close cousin to the graphic organizer, but my idea is that they are nearer than either of those to a worked example for note-taking. The plan is to include less and less as time goes on, and maybe by sometime next year she will be taking all her own notes.

This is an experiment - I’ve only ever had kids narrate assigned history readings to me through middle school before, and Kateri still often talks about what she is reading for history over dinner (in fact, she came in four or five times while I’ve been typing this to read me various anecdotes about the Ptolemies). Will it yield better note-taking skills than Benedict had going into high school? Does that even matter because he doesn’t seem to have suffered too much from the lack of middle-school note-taking? Am I overcompensating for the fact that, unlike the Principal, I was never explicitly taught study skills in middle school to which I am subconsciously and ridiculously attributing my eventual dropping out of grad school? I guess we’ll see! If nothing else, Kateri really enjoys working on them as she reads, and surely they must make her actually process what she is reading a little more and think about the things in the reading that are actually most important.

After doing the same thing for primary math with my first four kids, I’ve switched it up with Agnes and am using Miquon this year. This was partly for my sake - a change is as good as a rest - and partly because Agnes was more motivated by having a math program with a workbook like her older siblings. Benedict’s math teacher had recommended Miquon some years back, and Agnes and I are enjoying it. We already own Montessori bead bars, so I did not get Cuisinaire rods. They would have worked a bit better given Miquon was designed for their use, but we’ve been able to make it work without adding yet another math manipulative to our school room. However, I did re-buy a set of golden beads, having made the mistake of giving away my first set a few years back. I also gave away my bead cabinet at that time, which was not a mistake.

Well, there’s more that was done, including Benedict’s first Latin verse scansion and some completed research reports on South American countries, but it’s Wednesday, the sun is westering, and I should be cooking dinner, so I think it’s time to close the books on last week lest this post linger a draft forever. I’ll see you next time!

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The so-called content subjects - science and social studies - everyone studies the same thing every year. This year we’re all doing biology and world history, ancient through 1492 for the younger kids, a little later for Benedict, who hit the Age of Exploration pretty hard a couple of years ago.

Agnes (“1st grade”): After the first week of lessons, I got on Rainbow Resource and ordered her stack of workbooks to do independently because she keeps asking for more schoolwork. What I really just want to do with her this year is the next couple of Miquon books, Webster’s Speller, Learning Handwriting through Literature: Primer , and memorize “Hiawatha’s Childhood” (a rite of passage for all six-year olds here). I was on the fence about having her do some light biology output with her older siblings, but I think I am going to have to make that work. I have a list of history- and biology-related picture book read alouds to work through with her.

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Nicholas (“3rd grade”): Nicholas is catching up to his brother in math, and I’m a bit unsure about how to handle that. Maybe it would be no big deal for them to continue in the same program even if Nicholas starts to move ahead of his older brother, but I don’t know that want to chance it. On the other hand, I like Math Mammoth, I’ve taught it four times now and am comfortable with it, and the thought of learning another curriculum is not appealing. I have a little time before Nicholas would completely catch up, so I’m just going to keep thinking about that one for now.

Nicholas is also doing the LHTL: Primer, but in cursive. He’ll be reading the Horton-Carey 4th Reader with me and sharing a stack of old narrative history books with Edmund - mostly Mary Macgregor’s two books on Greece and Rome. They’ll just read and narrate those. I’ve got lists of books to check out from the library for biology and some very simple research templates for each of the five kingdoms (I know, I know, I’m sticking with five kingdoms, sue me). Nicholas will also continue piano lessons with my mom.

Edmund (“5th grade”): He should get through at least Math Mammoth 5A and 5B this year, the Baker and Carpenter Fifth Year Language Reader, a mash-up of Montessori materials and KISS grammar, and a lot of copywork. He has his own biology research templates and is particularly looking forward to some botany studies. Finally, he is playing trombone in homeschool band again this year

Kateri (“7th grade”): Kateri should finish up Math Mammoth 6 and move on to 7 at some point this year. Also planned for her: the Everyday Classics Seventh Reader, KISS grammar, Model English Book 1, biology research (including putting together a vet care reference notebook), and ancient history studies using some of the OUP World in Ancient Times series and Dorothy Mills’ books on the Greeks and Romans. She’ll also continue with Familia Romana - my goal is to get through the second third of the book and have her take the Beginning Latin NLE in the spring. And she will continue with the violin.

Benedict (“10th grade”): Benedict will continue his math studies with a local friend who is teaching precalculus this year. She has warned the kids to expect a significant increase in difficulty this year, so we’ll see how that goes. Also on the more time-consuming side, Benedict is preparing for the AP Latin exam with me. Biology will be a mix of a conventional textbook and some hopefully engaging trade books, plus a few homestead-oriented labs (eg. doing fecal parasite counts). For history, he’s reading the first half or so of Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s world history textbook with various supplementary readings. I’m, um, still finalizing his English reading list, but he’ll be practicing composition with Model English Book 2. Rounding out his sophomore year, Benedict will be finishing Athenaze, playing flute, singing in Honors Choir, volunteering at his dad’s school, and, yikes, learning to drive.

I also have some plans for a few more posts around here beyond week-in-the-life round-ups. I’ve long wanted to make myself really think through and articulate what I’ve taken away from a few key educational thinkers. Also half-written are some musings about how science fits into general education, the strange history of the teaching of English, how we use Familia Romana, and an overview of my thus-far successful method for teaching children to read.

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First off, this was my first year homeschooling all five offspring, and it was insane. I had barely enough time to do laundry and meal preparation in addition to lessons everyday; lots of things I would previously have fit into school days got pushed to the weekend or, uh, not done. Some things I noticed about this:

• I spent way more time in one-on-one lessons with Agnes than I should have. Guys, I don’t even believe in kindergarten. But she begged for lessons this year, and then every day (until about April), she begged to read just one - no, two! - more pages or do five - no, ten! - more math problems, and suddenly I’d find I had spent an hour with her. Next year, she gets 30 minutes a day max.

• Juggling so many students, there is a strong temptation to take the path of least resistance and let more independent learners drift away to their bedrooms and do their own thing. Agnes is begging for time with me; Benedict is…not. Certainly, some of this is right and just and developmentally appropriate. But there is a lot I’ve been waiting years for the kids to be old enough to learn and discuss, and if I blink, or spend an hour a day with Agnes doing simple addition problems, I am going to miss my opportunity.

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• In addition to increased activity inside the house, we also upped our activity outside the house, from orthodontist appointments to a homeschool band program to volunteering commitments. Some of those activities - like band - happen on a mostly regular schedule that our routines changed to accommodate. Others - like orthodontist appointments - happened at random and could throw off a whole day, or even week. Next year, I’m setting aside a week every 6 or so weeks to confine and corral as many of those random obligations as possible.

• Somehow we have got to find a way to do just a little more housework during the week beyond basic food prep (granted, for us “basic food prep” involves making all our own dairy products) and laundry. I’m trying not to despair, but this one I have yet to come up with any brilliant solutions for. With three more years before my eldest graduates, it seems safe to assume these will be the three busiest years of my homeschooling career. Still, I’d like to enjoy these in a somewhat peaceful environment rather than always seeing things I’m not getting to everywhere I look.

  

Ok, moving on from global observations to specific subject areas:

English: something you should know about me is that I’m not sure we all really need to study vernacular literature or how. As far as academic subjects go, it’s quite a newcomer and still doesn’t seem to be quite sure of its purpose. So we go quite light on formal English literature studies here.

This year, my K-6 students read a combination of the Free and Treadwell readers and the Everyday Classics series and many classic children’s books. But they just read them and told me about them - no writing assignments, no comprehension questions, no literary devices, none of that. Benedict read MANY short stories and some sonnets, we all read Midsummer Night’s Dream,1 and Benedict and Kateri read Macbeth. Family read-alouds and audiobooks included Great Expectations, Taming of the Shrew, Pilgrim’s Progress, and some other stuff I neglected to write down.

If I’m a little skeptical about spending a lot of time analyzing English literature, I’m extremely enthusiastic about spending a lot of time practicing English composition - once students have had a good grounding in classic children’s lit and decent exposure to the great stories of the canon (various mythologies and epics, folk and fairy tales, Shakespeare). Thus far, Benedict has been my only student to do much formal composition, for which I use the once-quite-popular books by Francis Donnelly, SJ, Model English vol. I (The Development of Thought) in 7th and 8th grade and vol. II (The Qualities of Style) in 9th and 10th grade. I love these books so much, and they deserve a post of their own at some point.

Math: Benedict was in an algebra 2 class taught locally by a friend who is a terrific, thoughtful math teacher. Great experience, no complaints. Kateri, Edmund, and Nicholas all continue to work their way through Math Mammoth - K ended the year in 6A, E finished up 4B, and N completed Multiplication 2. I kept Agnes busy with some Miquon and Ray’s Primary using an AL abacus.

I got sort of opposite ends of the math student spectrum with Benedict and Kateri, and it took me a while to (1) notice and (2) do something about it - perhaps because I was had three very small people to keep alive while Kateri was doing primary arithmetic. Last year, it finally dawned on me that she didn’t need math explained differently than her brother had, she just needed more practice. This year, she drilled the heck out of her times tables just using MM’s online practice program (and actually seemed to quite enjoy it). Unsurprisingly, it has made a huge difference. I also spent some time this year collecting a list of resources to pull extra practice from as needed going forward, and I feel a lot more comfortable identifying when my students just need more reps.

Latin: I feel like we have hit our stride here. Benedict finished Familia Romana about halfway through the year and then we read Caesar. Kateri read through capitulum IX. They both took the NLE and participated in a JCL chapter, including attending regional and state conventions, which was great fun.

World Geography: this was put in the curriculum at the Principal’s request, as he had a fondly-remembered world geography class in 9th grade, and by the time I was done planning for it last summer, I felt totally cheated that my own education skimped on geography so much.

In addition to some assigned readings and group read alouds, I made research templates for my fluent writers, and they gradually built their own atlases over the course of the year. Kateri and Edmund in particular loved this project; there is something about that upper elementary age and research. And they took complete ownership of the process; all I did was provide them with the templates, help put needed library books on hold, and do a round of editing with them on their rough drafts. We will be doing more with this format in the future for sure.

Science: uuuggghhh. Ok, I’ve never really done “formal” science with K-6 students. We simply garden, do some nature watching, care for livestock, cook, do home repair projects, and have an extensive library of science-related children’s books.

But high school. Benedict started the year with The Sciences: An Integrated Approach, a textbook by Robert Hazen and James Trefil, the E.D. Hirsches of science.2 Hazen and Trefil adapt Hirsch’s arguments to advocate for what they call “scientific literacy,” which, they say, is needed for Americans to make well-informed decisions on policies touching scientific questions and wise consumer choices in the face of scientific-sounding marketing claims.

This felt very persuasive, and, given that my own high school science courses left barely a trace in my brain, I was game to give it a try. But as we got into the “integrated” sciences textbook Hazen and Trefil wrote to produce scientifically literate citizens and consumers it felt just like…a dumbed down version of my high school science courses. Which certainly didn’t leave me capable of evaluating “the science” on even one, let alone all, public policy controversies touching on scientific questions.

And anyway, are public policy questions touching on scientific matters generally reducible to scientific questions? Will knowing more about science lead a citizen to make a prudent choice on such a thing? And are citizens, well-informed or not, really running things around here at this point? But I digress.

Disenchanted with the scientific literacy approach (which was also, according to Benedict, really, really boring), I dropped the textbook, set Benedict up with Khan Academy physics and a stack of pop physics and physics-adjacent books from the library,3 and proceeded to think more about what exactly is the purpose of high school science. And that is another post for another time.

Music: as mentioned above, the three oldest students joined a homeschool music program this year. It had us out of the house for much of the day on Fridays, a big change we were a bit apprehensive about. But this program has turned out to work really well for us. There are bands and choirs at different skill levels that meet throughout the day, so we can go once a week, and all the kids can each participate at their level (the program starts in 4th grade, so Nicholas and Agnes will be able to join also in a few years). The Principal was a band teacher himself at one time (two of the kids are playing his old instruments), and I think he has enjoyed it almost as much as the kids. Except for the driving.

Well, despite my doubts at times, it seems like everyone did learn a few things after all. And now on to the best part of every homeschool year - planning for the next one.

Calculating: Let’s start with math because that is totally actual school. We did some of our math program, but also, in an amazing example of ✨living math✨, we compared the volume of two new ✨laundry hampers✨ I was considering purchasing. And I have to hand it to the living math people - the kids are in fact weirdly enthusiastic about these sorts of math applications.

I assigned a laundry hamper each to Benedict and Kateri and, of course, made them predict which would be larger before we started because you have to squeeze every last drop out of Teachable Moments. We immediately realized we did not actually know how to calculate the area of an ellipse, so we even learned something totally new (reassuringly intuitively, it turns out to be the product of half of the major axis and half of the minor axis times pi). And I have a new, high-capacity laundry hamper1 heading my way, so wins all round.

Reading: Motivated by beating grandpa last week, Nicholas has been hitting the chess books. Other than that, everyone is reading Brandon Mull at every possible moment (except Agnes, who is reading the first couple of Betsy-Tacy books). Younger me would not have approved these books, but older me is still trying to keep the Marvel movies from entering our home and feels like she has to give a little somewhere.

Listening: We met friends at the big city park for an outdoor big band concert. The kids were delighted to hear “Green Onions,” a tune also performed at their year-end band concert. Other highlights were a “Proud Mary” sing-along and a soulful take on Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.

Watching: Human Planet (to wrap up this year’s study of geography) and Victorian Farm (because we like it). The Principal is a sucker for nature documentaries and the like, so we’ve been watching these with him in the evenings.

Full disclosure: a few sequences in Human Planet were later revealed to be staged, and the BBC (but not our local library) withdrew it from circulation. To be honest - with the exception of one bit in which the film makers perpetrated a true distortion rather than simply a re-enactment - this doesn’t particularly bother me any more than, say, your average historical fiction.

By the end of this week’s episode of Victorian Farm, one child had decided to be a basket weaver and another a blacksmith when they grow up.

And speaking of Ruth Goodman, I quite enjoyed Jane Psmith’s review of her book about how coal changed domestic life. The closing paragraph also serves quite well as an explanation for why we do many of the odd things we do here at the Gothic Homeschool and Homestead-ish:

Making and doing things, even when you don’t have to, is practice in believing that you can change your own world. It’s weightlifting for agency. You can outsource the making of your physical world, but social worlds — the arrangement of your family life, your personal relationships, the organizations and institutions you’re involved in — must be created by the participants themselves. A good society would be one where the default “builder-grade” scripts lead to human flourishing, but unfortunately that isn’t ours, so you have to be able to decide on your own changes. Start practicing now: find one little thing about your physical environment that annoys you and fix it. Put the new toilet paper roll actually on the holder. Replace the burned-out lightbulb. Hang the artwork that’s listing drunkenly against the wall. Pull some weeds. And then, once you've warmed up a little bit, go and make something new.

Partying: We attended two graduation ceremonies, an end-of-year poetry recitation, the Principal’s school’s year-end happy hour, and my baby brother’s birthday celebration.

And that’s a wrap. In a few days, I’ll have some end-of-year reflections and then plan to blog my way through the process of preparing for next year.

Monday: Since it’s warmed up in the mornings, the the youngest three or four kids tend to slip outside to play after breakfast, and this morning I for sure did not drag them back in for a prompt start to the school day. But we got going eventually. Edmund is starting decimals. Read Macbeth I.vii with Benedict and Kateri and suggested to them that perhaps Macbeth wants Lady Macbeth to convince him to kill Duncan. The reception of this idea split exactly along gender lines.

Tuesday: It’s getting hot in the afternoons, so the kids were tasked with some weeding in the morning, while I made pancakes with some of the never-ending supply of ricotta for breakfast. The end-of-year band concert was this evening, so excitement was high and focus was low all day. But the concert was so much fun, and the kids are all so proud of their work this year. We are pretty slow to sign our children up for activities, and I’ll admit to some hesitation about band at the beginning of the year. But the Principal turns out to have been totally right about the benefits of playing with an ensemble - an experience I did not have growing up, but that was very formative for him.

Wednesday: After being out late for the concert + celebratory ice cream, everyone slept in. Nana and grandpa came over to visit for a bit, and Nicholas bested his grandfather at chess for the first time. I triumphed over Nicholas in Stratego shortly after to keep it from going to his head.

I decided this week I would finally play around with ChapGPT so as not to get left behind lol. Benedict and I used to it generate explanations of various physics topics he’s been curious about. He thought they were pretty good compared to the wikipedia and actual encyclopedia articles he had been reading previously, perhaps because we asked it specifically for an explanation suited to a high school student who has only studied algebra-based physics. We also had it generate an explanation for a high school student of calculus-based physics to compare them side by side, which was an interesting exercise.

Thursday: Books for next year started to arrive - Benedict’s precalculus textbook and some zoology books for the middle schoolers. I made the rookie mistake of not hiding the latter immediately, and the children they were intended for had read them by Friday afternoon. Well, too bad, I’m assigning them next year anyway! Agnes told me “I’m really getting quite capable” as she cut out biscuits for dinner. I wrangled everyone through the Ascension Mass all by myself since the Principal was out of town at a conference. This task was made easier since Benedict and Edmund were serving and Kateri sang in the choir

Friday: There were tears over adding and subtracting centimeters and meters in a unit on decimals, in an apparent instance of concrete —> abstract gone wrong. The lesson introduced adding and subtracting decimals of the same place value and had the student practice that. Then there was a reminder that 1 meter equals 100 centimeters, followed by word problems that required converting one to the other prior to adding or subtracting.

Edmund just couldn’t wrap his mind around this until I drew picture of a “measuring tape”/number line, but he had zero problems on the next page that presented the same concept more “abstractly” as converting to equivalent fractions (ie. think of 0.5 as fifty hundredths to add to 0.03). My hunch is that the lesson was set up this way to give a “concrete” experience before an abstract one, but in actuality, it seems like word problems involving units of measurement (as opposed to actually measuring things) is already somewhat abstract. Not all of my kids would have balked at this, but this one did.

We had a little meeting to discuss any summer projects the kids want to undertake and what help they might need. Agnes wants to learn to bake brownies. Edmund and Nicholas want to learn to start a fire without matches and do some campfire cooking. Kateri wants to do an embroidery project. And Benedict wants to get a head start on precalculus, ha.

If this report seems a little light on formal academics, that reflects the reality of this week. The kids carried on with math and research and writing projects, which they do largely independently, and there was plenty of recreational reading. But the time I otherwise would have spent in instruction, I mostly spent starting to assemble booklists for next year. About which more soon.

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Homeschooling before Instagram

Before my kids were old enough to homeschool, I read homeschooling blogs. Moms with a few kids, many kids, big kids, lots of littles, on acreage, in the city - all cataloging their days for other moms in an effort to convince themselves that it really happened, it really counted, and it was all worth it.

I now find myself needing to convince myself that it really happened, it really counts, and it’s all worth it.

Dramatis Personae

Moms gave all their family members pseudonyms back then, often revealing their literary taste or religious affiliation, and being somewhat of a traditionalist, I’ll do the same.

The Principal - the old school homeschool mom would often refer to her husband as “the principal,” which was extremely cringe. However, my husband actually does run a brick-and-mortar school, so…

Benedict - 14yo generalist. Truly his mother’s daughter. Sorry, kid.

Kateri - 12yo future veterinarian. Truly her father’s daughter.

Edmund - 10yo future gardening monk.

Nicholas - 8yo who, having been born fourth in an already quite lively household learned early that if he wishes to be heard, he must speak up, and he does.

Agnes - slightly precocious 5yo with the Caesarian habit of referring to herself in the third person.

What we learned last week:

We have entered fall-across-the-finish-line season. Benedict, Kateri, and Edmund had the dress rehearsal for their final band concert. I am trying to make myself make everyone finish out their final projects but am increasingly distracted by planning for next year.

Benedict: Having finished up Algebra 2 for the year, he has turned his attention to completing Khan Academy physics. Latin has shifted to summer maintenance mode; he’ll be extensively reading Fabulae Syrae and the Epitome Historiae Sacrae over the next couple of months while I gear up for AP Latin next year. He still has a English paper on Macbeth and a geography paper on Ukraine to finish for me. The next installment of his online Greek class is underway and will take him through the summer.

Kateri: Still plugging away at Math Mammoth 6A. She and Benedict and I are reading Macbeth together, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how much she has gotten into the discussion and is very seriously taking notes in her book. She’s also enthusiastically reading Lady Macbeth with what she thinks is a Scottish accent. She continues to spend every spare minute writing…something.

Edmund: He and Kateri are working on North America research projects to add to the atlas they’ve been building on this year. This project will extend over the summer because we still have six continents to go. He is nearing the end of Math Mammoth 3B. He’s done a great job maintaining his two garden beds so far this year and has started snacking on snap peas.

Nicholas: The big thing still to go for this kid is passing his First Holy Communion test this weekend. I’m really congratulating myself for having put all his Baltimore Catechism questions into Anki, which has, I’m told, maximized the efficiency of our drilling through the magic of Retrieval Practice via Spaced Repetition. He finished up Math Mammoth Add & Subtract 4 and is on to Multiplication 2.

Agnes: She is so over the lessons she pleaded for at the beginning of the year, and so am I, so I’ve declared an official end to kindergarten.

Just this week and next week to go, and then the 2022-23 school year is in the books. I think I’m going to make it!

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