Education is the Science of Relations ... so's baking

Charlotte Mason, a woman brilliant in her day, "ahead" of her time (which, in my opinion, means we moderns are surprised to find her relevant -- sheer hubris), made several good statements of educational fact. She taught that "children are born persons," and that "the mind feeds on ideas, and therefore children should have a generous curriculum." She also taught that

Education is the Science of Relations

and she was right about this. Understanding the relationship between one thing and another is what makes musical intervals, healthy bodily habits, poetry, horticulture, and commandments functional. Nothing works without proper relationships. And that includes the baking of a loaf of bread.Rarely do I purchase brand new books, and even more rarely do I purchase these books in hardcover. But this is one I intend to purchase as soon as possible. Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking, by Michael Ruhlman.

Made for This

When I was young, I knew that some things made me happier than other things. Some activities satisfied me deeply (music-making, reading, babysitting); other activities were, variously, either diversions (like birthday parties), or semi-interesting chores (folding laundry), or loathed activities forced upon me (vigorous sweaty exercise done in teams or groups or classes, which is most certainly the most horrid use of time ever invented). When I was young, I knew my likes and dislikes.

What I did not yet know, because I had not yet found the full measure of my own self, was the experience of that deepest, most permeating, most rooted and transcendent moment which has this name: I Was Made for This. Yesterday, I had such a moment.

There have been a few of these over time. When I had the whole running of the classroom for the first time as a student teacher, I knew. I was made for this. I was not in control of it; the phenomenon which is teaching and learning and education is much larger than anything any one person can (or should try to) control. I did not make it; I had entered it. And I knew that I was home. As surely as if I had entered a house with all the cupboards exactly where I would put them, full of precisely the right things, and windows, doors, stairs, and roof lines arranged in elegant proportion, I knew that I was home.

The day my husband proposed to me - that was another day when I knew that I was home.

"If ever two were one, then surely we.

If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me ye women if you can."
(Anne Bradstreet, "To My Dear and Loving Husband")

That was a day when I knew for sure that I stepped into my future with the first steps I took after he got up off his knee so we could kiss each other, and walk together out of the park near the Rose Gardens. In him, I found my home - and in me, he found his.

Cradling my tiny newborns - those moments too were moments when I knew, I was made for this. With each new baby, something inside of me shifted, came together, met. Whatever it takes, whatever I need to do or be or cease from, while this child is in my care, this is a life I want. Some people take to it easily and calmly, and whether it's a matter of personality, genetics, or the years of babysitting combined with the fact that my older sister conveniently had her children while I was still a girl, I took to mothering as easily and calmly as if I were popping a sweatshirt over my head on a chilly day -- (and as totally and stubbornly and fiercely as a mother lion). Instinctively, I knew, I was made for this.

Made for this. For classrooms, teaching, learning, education ... and now a return to school. For marriage, and for this man, come hell or high water, feast or famine, kids here or not, when it's funny and when it shreds our souls. Made for writing too. Impassioned journal entries, and earnest "notes" to friends and sweethearts when I was so relentlessly, earnestly, hopelessly young. Lesson plans and catechism and poetry and letters. Blog entries and school assignments and love letters to my husband even now. Always made for writing. And yesterday - yesterday I knew the moment again, with a kind of mild and laughable surprise.

Yesterday, I sat in my pew at church with two tiny little girls, one on either side. Kids from my class - their daddies serving at the altar - their mommies home for family reasons. Yesterday, in church, the two little girls were mine. They stood and followed the words in the hymnal with only a few (loudly) whispered "where are we?" times, and they sang with gusto. They knelt beside me until they couldn't quite stand any more nose-to-pew contact, and then sat back. They sat beside me ... and in a quiet moment, when both little girls were trying with all their might to hold still and pay attention, it came to me again.

Lately, my life has been expanding so quickly in every direction simultaneously. My own children grew up and got lives of their own. I have gone back to school, and my brain is opening from the inside so enormously that it feels like some kind of bursting out into the open even though it is all interior and invisible. The tectonic shifts and cataclysms and seasons and tidal waves have all seemed so huge that I thought the tiny little girls and boys in my life might be moving out of range and disappearing from my view. I do not recognize anything around me anymore, and I do not recognize even my own self these days. The small children, I thought, are probably gone too - or will be soon.

But no. Yesterday, I looked down and saw those petite little hands folded together in perfect imitation of my grown up hands. In that (brief) moment of stillness, I realized, I was made for this. These two little girls, and all the goofy, worried, clueless, squirmy, serious, silly, random, hilarious little girls and boys who ever cross my path, or sit in one of my classrooms, or participate in one of my programs (every one of which is an echo of the "plays" we used to inflict on our parents when we were young and goofy and random) -- all of the boys and girls who are ever near me -- they are all mine, and I am theirs, and I was made for this. And I am very glad to know it.

(the clipart is from here -- isn't it good? Makes me think of Farrell's Ice Cream)

February in Mrs. Seal's class

It is the ninth day of the dreary month of February ... for years I have hated February. All kinds of bad things have happened in February, and it just seemed like it was bound to be a horrid month every year. But this year, for some odd reason, it feels like third grade.

In the third grade, Mrs. Seal (the "meanest teacher in the school") started every morning with a pledge to the flag and a patriotic song. I'm nearly fifty years old now, and I wonder in amazement at the fact that Mrs. Seal had not gone deaf in self-defense. Oh, we children could sing all right. But some of us also took piano lessons. There was always a student accompanist for the patriotic song. I remember because I was one of them.

There was a calendar in Mrs. Seal's class. A big one. It was on the wall across the room from the big windows, and every month there was a new one. The students took turns putting the date (a number on a construction paper circle) onto the calendar each morning. This special privilege entailed the use of rubber cement. I adore rubber cement. Have you ever used it? Nothing else smells like rubber cement, and nothing else does that particular kind of gluey, stringy, stickiness. The lid has a brush on its underside, so you have to lift out the brush, all heavy with the wonder of the stickiness, and you have to break the string - like getting honey out of the honey pot and onto your toast. Then you paint the circle (on the back), and then you put it in the next square on the calendar (right side up), and it sticks. There is it, in all its red circle-y perfection. The next day in February.

February used to have three big days in it. There was Valentine's Day (admittedly a bit confusing, but there were cookies) and there was President Lincoln and President Washington. The presidents have black construction paper silhouettes for the calendar instead of numbers on a circle. And we had to put those up early - we weren't in school on those days.

How odd that third grade's February was the month of patriotic songs, rubber cement, and Presidents' Days. I do not remember gloomy weather, rain and sogginess, or trudging back up the hill to go home in it. I remember the red circles and black silhouettes on the calendar. I remember Mrs. Seal - the meanest teacher in the school. I remember how horrified I was on the first day of school to discover that I had to be in her class (everyone knew she was the meanest teacher, and my mother simply did not care!), and I remember a hundred things about being her student that year. I remember order, and calm, and creativity in music and drawing and even square dancing, and I remember my reading book. Today, while I look out my window at the bare tress and the chilly, soggy mud underlying everything, all at once I've got the urge to find some construction paper and open a pot of rubber cement.

Education

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aritstotle

Know

"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory,
or even how much you know.

It's being able to differentiate
between what you know and what you don't."

Anatole France

To plan or not to plan ... that is the question

Out in the vast and varied homeschooling world, there is a debate the rest of the world knows nothing about. Right now, while the rest of you go blissfully about your business, you are completely unaware that in homes across the land there are slightly worried looking mothers trying very hard to be pleasant to their children, but not really paying attention to a word the small fry are saying. Why? Because it's the Season to Obsess Over the Plan, that's why. What if I don't cover everything? What if someone asks my kids to do long division? With remainders! Maybe I should buy this other math book this year. I mean, look at the results some of these people say they're getting with it!

The unsuspecting husband walks through the room.

Honey? What do you think? Should I just buy a whole program this time? Or should we put it together ourselves again?

What he thinks will depend directly on his experience of how best to reassure his fussy wife and how involved he wants to get in the business of all this choosing among what seem to be a thousand thousand choices -- but what I think is that the real reason the incidence of injuries spikes in the summer is - at least in part - because of the tower of homeschooling catalogs.

Of course, there is a smaller group of people inside this large group. This is the group of "un-schoolers." The stereotypical unschooler is a breed of his own, and actually exists mostly in homeschooling mythology, although I've met some in real life. The theory here is that the little child will lead - and he'll lead everything. The child will pick what to study each day, for how long, and why. The child will follow his pristine instincts, unsullied by the unfair and prejudicial Expectations of Society. (If you didn't hear a sonorous echo in that title, read it again.) The pure, clean, unspoiled child will know what to do if we just leave him to do it. All I need to do is make sure he's got whatever he needs.

Mmmm-hm.

I suppose that if you've got a pint-sized Einstein there at your house, and if most of your house is taken up with lab equipment, and if the adults in the house are users of the equipment and are doing a whole lot of study and experimentation for their own daily work, and if the whole of the environment is all about the science ... well, then you could make a case that the child-led learning is the way to go. That child will probably end up being able to do long division if someone shows him how.

But someone still has to show him how.

Aye, there's the rub. Someone still has to show him how.

Okay, fine. But when? It doesn't do any good to teach the squirt long division before he's learned that 3+4=7, right? There is an order to these things. And some kids are ready before other kids are. Isn't that the whole point of schooling at home? Aren't we trying to fit the education to the kid and not the kid to the education here?

Yes. That is, in my opinion and experience, the one best true reason for schooling at home. More conventional schools could do a better job of this if they tried to, but there is only so much you can do with a room full of same-aged kids. Individualized instruction, so touted in "small class sizes," is indeed The Big Benefit of being at home to learn long division - or reading - or a lot of other things. (And one of the first things I learned when my kids were little is that it's possible to learn math while wearing pajamas. Who knew!)

But now what? Not lock-step, but not planned either? How is a mother supposed to deal with that expectation? And by the way, that's all the homeschooling mother needs -- one more thing she knows perfectly well she will never be able to achieve. Instruction, but not too soon, and practice, but not too much ... and not too little. Criminy!!! Why on earth are there more and more homeschoolers? Why aren't they all in insane asylums? Or roaming the streets, murmuring, "Plan? Don't plan? Plan? Don't plan?" while flipping the pages of the newsprint catalogs with the slightly fuzzy pictures of products in them?

Because kids learn, that's why. Gardens grow, kids learn, and the summer comes again every year. There is some stuff we can depend on.

Now the homeschooling mom can breathe again, and if she's gone through the Obsession Season before, she knows what's going on. This panic attack lasts for less and less time each year, and now she knows - she just sets everything down and walks out into the yard to watch her kids for awhile.

She knows a lot of things now - this more experienced mom does.

She knows, for instance, that that the lesson plans are really just the day's rough first draft. I think this is true whether we're schooling or not, now that I've had time to reflect and I'm not schooling any more. We make an outline or at least get a rough idea of what we want to "write" with our days, and then we begin to write.

We do make plans - and we learn that the plan is just a draft. The plan doesn't get graded. It's just a plan. After awhile, you can begin to enjoy the process itself. The revisions don't scare you any more. You realize editing your work is part of the deal. You give up on the idea that it will ever be perfect - because perfection is only possible where there is no change - which means there is no life.

Raising kids is a living thing. And schooling living minds is a living thing. And planning for living things and what they do (and the fact that you have only limited control over what they do) is what keeps gardens from becoming wild and lets them produce useful food. (That was Adam's job, right? To tend the thing?) Planning is what keeps meals from becoming unhealthy last minute snack affairs eaten whenever and wherever, and lets them become communal echoes of the Great Feast. And planning is what keep schooling from becoming a series of distractions instead of real learning. Planning does not ignore the child -- it provides for the child.

So this is my note to all the homeschooling mothers out there this summer. Go ahead and plan -- and know for sure that stuff will happen in your house that you never ordered out of a catalog. And then do a little happy dance. We work with living things.

Welcome, 4Real-ers!

This is just a little note of welcome to all the Catholic Charlotte Mason and 4Real Learning visitors coming here lately! I keep up with the homeschooling world a little bit, checking in every once in awhile with some of my favorite folks via their blogs. I'm glad to have you here! You lead beautiful lives - I'm honored to be a part of them today.

Universal Charlotte

Shortly before the end of our homeschooling years, I discovered the teachings of the British educator Charlotte Mason. Here's en.Wikipedia's synopsis - it's a good one.

Charlotte's philosophy of education is probably best summarized by eighteen principles given at the beginning of each book mentioned above. Two key mottos taken from those principles are "Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life" and "Education is the science of relations." She believed that children were born persons and should be respected as such; they should also be taught the Way of the Will and the Way of Reason. Her motto for students was "I am, I can, I ought, I will."

Now, the incomparable Miss Mason and I could easily attend church together (if you leave out the fact that she departed this life in 1923 ... that does make it a bit more difficult) because she and I share the same expression of the Christian faith - a traditionally Anglican one. But her ideas about children, and the way they develop, and what they are and what adults ought to do because of what children are ... these ideas are so universally solid and the results of teaching within her philosophy are so universally wonderful in the formation of minds and souls that my Anglicanism didn't do much to divide me from the Roman Catholics discussing Charlotte Mason in home education over at Catholic Charlotte Mason, which morphed into 4RealLearning.com while I wasn't looking. The book spawned by all these discussions and the passionate and compassionate writing of Elizabeth Foss is called Real Learning: Education in the Heart of the Home. I have a treasured signed copy of this lovely tome.

Okay ... so religiously unaffiliated people like over there at Ambleside Online, and Anglicans like the people at Charlotte's Daughters, and Roman Catholics like those at 4 Real Learning ... that's a pretty diverse population. But now I find that there's a wonderful discussion of Charlotte Mason's ideas from the point of view of the Eastern Orthodox as well! She calls her blog "Life in the Onion Dome," which is pretty funny to start with, and she's quite interesting to read.

I wonder if the diligent Miss Mason had any idea at all that so many many moms would find her ideas to be so rewarding and satisfying and universally adaptive. But I doubt it. She was just trying to get her job done.