Tricotomania and more

There have been some good posts about what a good learning day looks like on some of the blogs I read (and some I don’t read regularly). Karen has collected them here. I got there via Willa’s comment in Lissa’s entry, which I went to from one of Willa’s posts … Very convoluted but glad I made it. These posts are very interesting and there are lots of things to ponder in all of them.

However, as I read, I began to wonder if there wasn’t something underlying the initial question — “What do you consider a good day of learning?” — that we should question a bit more. Is there a sense in the question that every day should be a good learning day? Or even that it is only a good day if lots of learning happened?

While I recognize that learning is always happening in one way or another, I am also bothered by a sense that it is only the learning that is valued in our children’s lives. Or maybe that the learning is valued over other things. This has bothered me for a long time in respect of “educational toys”. Lots of them are fun, but shouldn’t kids get toys regardless of the educational value?

So this tendency to overvalue the learning aspects of children’s lives is in no way a criticism of homeschooling parents (much less these homeschoolingn parents) because it is pretty clear that this view is pervasive in our culture (both in North America and in Europe, and probably Australia and New Zealand but I couldn’t say for others). And it would be odd if we didn’t get caught up in it, but I think we need to question it, nevertheless, and consider whether we want to accept this view or whether we want to consciously try to subvert its dominance in our lives.

I also wonder whether as homeschoolers, we feel some pressure to identify all the learning that happens and claim it for part of the homeschooling process. I suspect those who follow a more structured curriculum don’t feel the pressure to do this but those of us who are more unstructured (including unschoolers but also those who feel uncomfortable with the unschool lable but are not very structured, as many of those linked in Karen’s collection seem to be) may feel that we need to identify the learning in an activity to demonstrate that the unstructured approach does lead to this culturally desirable outcome.

When Tigger was small (and even sometimes now), I would often claim that I was a “bad mother”. Sometimes people would (unnecessarily) reassure me that I wasn’t. My claim was not a sign of lack of confidence in my ability but, rather, a statement that my approach went against the cultural grain of “good mothering”.

I guess, for me, part of the reason I homeschool is that I don’t wholely accept the basic premises of school. I don’t accept that there is a certain body of knowledge that all children need to learn. I certainly don’t accept that parts of the knowledge must be aquired by certain ages or in a certain order. I don’t accept that reading, writing, and arithmetic are more important than history, music, art, physical activity, etc. I don’t accept that the knowledge and skills a child possesses can be solely attributed to the quality of the teaching (or parenting) nor that the faults a child possesses can be blamed on the quality of the teaching (or parenting). Life is just more complex than those views allow. And they do more harm than good in the school setting so I have no desire to import them into my home setting.

To return to the original topic, I do recognize good days. But not all of those days are good learning days. Some good days are good because Tigger learns a lot. Some good days are good for other reasons.

My response to the original question might challenge the terms of the question and address the “elephant in the room” which is a certain amount of understandable anxiety that homeschooling ignites. I might say, not every day will be a good learning day. But that’s okay. Observe your children. Approach the task of parenting, schooling, and just being in relationship with them in a thoughtful and loving way. Trust yourself to do the best you can. And forgive yourself when you make mistakes. And maybe that is what some of the other contributors to this discussion meant when they said that they know one when they see one.

1. Go wish Doc a happy birthday if you haven’t done it yet.

2. Go read this great piece on body image. Not only some great points but very well written. HT Andrea

That’s all I can think of for now. I’ve been busy but will post soon. BTW my birthday is on Sunday. I’m older than  Ron but only just.

One of the reasons for our trip out west was that my partner was the Cecil and Ida Green Visiting Scholar at Green College, University of British Columbia. This means that the last 10 days of our trip were spent on a university campus. And UBC is a big university that covers the full range of disciplines. We were in the bookstore one day (looking for a notebook because Tigger had an idea for a different set of stories and didn’t want them in the same notebook as the ones about the dolls) and I browsed the education shelves. UBC has an education department. I even know people who teach there (though their research is on higher education). So I was unsurprised to find a good selection of books about education and how to teach things. I was also unsurprised that many of these books were wholly unsuitable to homeschooling (in general, much less to my tending-towards-unschooling approach). But I did find one gem and I would like to share it with you.

Myra Zarnowski (2006) Making Sense of History New York: Scholastic. (Yes, I’m an academic. How could you tell? Also, I’ve linked to the publisher’s information but this is available on amazon and elsewhere.)

This book is not addressed to homeschoolers and does not mention them at all. However, the content is easily adaptable to a homeschooling environment. There are some examples of classroom activities that include group discussions that might not be possible unless you were working on history with other families or in a co-op but this does not diminish the overall value of the book. The one thing that makes it really clear that her approach will work is on page 38 where she addresses obstacles and opportunities to good teaching through a set of questions she is often asked by teachers. I will quote the first of these:

Teachers Ask Me: How can I teach history well when I don’t know all that much about history?

My Response Is: Teaching history isn’t about what you know. It’s about what you do to help your students think about the past. Certainly, knowing information doesn’t hurt, since it provides the raw material for thinking. But you can seek out information along with your students and help them make sense of it. In other words, you can share with them the process of digging into history.

I think maybe we are on the same page. (For those who need to meet standardized curriculum requirements that is her second question)

Zarnowski starts from the premise that the point of studying history is not to memorize a bunch of dates and random facts, but to use those facts to understand more about a place, a people, how things got to be the way they are, etc. She does not discount the importance of facts and indeed gives lots of information about how to present those facts in engaging ways using high quality non-fiction literature written for children and young people. She agrees with most of what I’ve seen in homeschooling discussions about how children will remember material that they have engaged with meaningfully. And she even talks about how to use historical fiction with children both to deepen their understanding of a historical topic and to help them understand the difference between fact and fiction and how to read critically, an issue Becky raised back in February.

Zarnowski characterizes good history teaching as having 3 elements: Historical Thinking, Historical Literature, and Hands-On Experience. The book is structured around 5 concepts basic to the discipline of history (which she calls “Historical Sense-Making Concepts”): Historical Context, Historical Significance, Multiple Perspectives, Historical Truth, and Historical Accounts.

She treats each of these concepts separately providing examples of how you might approach the teaching of the concept with good examples of books on several topics in American History that might be used. She also provides one in depth example of teaching the concept through a particular topic in one 5th grade classroom. Examples of children’s work are included and reproducible versions of some of the worksheets (which are more like forms for organizing note taking) are included in an appendix. There are also lists of additional books on the topics mentioned for both elementary and middle-school students, as well as a full bilbiography of the children’s literature mentioned (separate from the academic literature she draws on in her general discussion).

One drawback of the book for me is that the examples are all American History which is not a big theme in our education, though we will touch on some of the topics. I will need to go and find similar resources for the Canadian history that I want to cover. Similarly, those of us who want to cover other periods and geographical locations will need to find our own resources. However, the ideas about what to look for in history resources, where to find good resources, and what to do with them once you have them are useful in themselves.

One thing that is odd about the description on the publishers web-site is that it stresses “building reading skills” while learning history. This is not an inaccurate description of the book but could be misleading. Zarnowski addresses up front the tendency to treat the reading skills necessary as about basic comprehension issues and how to read for information. She is very clear that historical thinking requires more than this. The reading skills that her approach develops are critical reading skills — how to evaluate information, how to use evidence to generate an account, what to do when crucial pieces of evidence are missing, how to deal with conflicting accounts of the same event, how to decide whether an event is important, etc.

Zarnowski demonstrates that children are capable of engaging with material in this way, both by referring to research with students in this age group and by examples from her own experience. And she provides some concrete strategies for helping them to do so, including pointing out elements of writing style that accomplish particular tasks. For example, in Chapter 3 (on Historical Context) there is a discussion of how an author might indicate the similarities and differences between the historical context and the reader’s context: the extended now-and-then contrast; the mid-narrative jolt; the sensory description of the unfamiliar; the thought experiment. Each of these has an extended example from a quality non-fiction book on a historical topic.

For the homeschooler, I think this book not only provides important information about what it is we might be trying to cover when we teach history, but also provides clear links to our teaching of writing and literature. I can imagine, for example, taking some of her examples and using them as copywork that illustrates a particular element of good writing in the way that July Bogart suggests in the Writer’s Jungle. And the discussion of historical fiction in Chapter 6 provides a good basis for connecting our history teaching our studies of literature.

And as a sociologist, I can see that many of these strategies are also useful in other disciplines. I still remember a comment that a cultural studies student made about one of my courses. She said that my course was the first time she had realized that she could read scientific texts using the same critical tools she employed when reading media texts. Previously, she had just accepted the authority of “scientists” even though the basis of science is the evaluation of evidence and the recognition that new evidence might change our explanations. Zarnowski provides a clear approach to crtically assessing evidence and accounts that enables students to go beyond simplistic notions of “truth” and “lies” to evaluate evidence and arguments and develop questions for further exploration.

I think I might check out her earlier book History Makers.

I became a writer
when I came to Vancouver.
I became a writer
to have something to do.

I started out with stories
(they were NOT about tories).
I started out with stories
about 1880s people.

Then I went to Lucy
(a very pretty girly).
Then I went to Lucy,
a contemporary character.

She sketched into her sketchbook
with pretty sketching pencils.
She sketched into her sketchbook
the week I began to write.

I am still writing these stories
(and shall continue to write them, too)
I am still writing these stories
About Lucy’s art. (and the 1880s, too).

When Tigger went to bed last night (late because we had been out for dinner), she suddenly asked me for a pencil. She said she had a good first line for a poem and wanted to write it down before she went to sleep. It turned into a whole poem.

In the comments to my last post Debbie said something about them all being learning journeys. But I think this trip feels more like school than our normal life. One more paradox of unschooling, I suppose.

In particular, I notice that here I am not only willing to pay admission to things several times a week but feel some urgency about seeing the local museums. Even outdoor (free) activities like hiking happen more frequently. I think that at home, although we have ready access to great natural areas and museums, it is easy to think we will go tomorrow or next week or something. The deadline of a short visit adds impetus.

But being “out of context” also leads to finding new and different things to do. The friends we were visiting in Victoria are very child-friendly but have no young children of their own (nor do they know any to borrow). So Tigger was often in a group of adults wanting to talk about adult things. I encouraged her to bring a book and a notebook and find something to do on her own sometimes. At some point she started designing dolls for an 1880s doll house (this Little House thing just goes on and on) — 2 complete families with regular clothes, Sunday clothes, and special occasion clothes.

Then at some point I suggested that she could write stories about them. This was an offhand suggestion and I have no recollection of how she responded at the time. But she got a new notebook in a museum shop and has now filled over 15 pages with stories based on these characters she has created. She has experimented with telling about the same event with different narrators. She has tried more descriptive stories. Apart from the original off-hand suggestion, the only other instruction I gave her was to avoid her usual “he said, she said” style. From what I have heard of the growing collection, she is doing very well at it.

The college where we are stying has a very nice common room and she has been spending a lot of time in there sitting in a comfy chair and writing. I walk in to find her perfectly at home amongst the graduate students spread about the place working on their own studies or writing. Today we bought another notebook because she wanted to reserve the first one for stories about her 1880s families. Again some off-hand suggestions that I made have been sown in fertile ground and she is beginning a series of stories about a little girl on holiday in British Columbia. She is very clear about the differences between her character and herself, but is drawing on some of her own experiences as the basis of her stories. She wrote a lovely sketch of a girl encountering a totem pole for the first time while we were in the Museum of Anthropology this afternoon (she also sketched a portion of the same pole in her sketch book and I took a photograph). Some of the comments I’ve made about good description seem to have had some impact. She has just returned to say that she can’t finish the story she is working on because she has to go back to the museum to look at the totem pole outside and describe it properly (as well as the walk over there).

She has written more in the past few days than she has in months. There was a time when I was mildly concerned that she wasn’t writing. I encouraged her to write letters to friends in England and she has started a brief correspondence with another homeschooled girl with similar interests. But this has been sporadic and the letters are often short. I had decided not to worry and to leave it for a bit trusting that the rich and varied reading that she was doing would stand her in good stead when she did write. I am feeling vindicated. But also glad that I have at least skimmed the Writer’s Jungle as the ideas found in it have helped me make small but helpful suggestions. Most importantly, I think she is developing an identity as a writer.

I had also suggested (before we left) that we read books set in the area while we are here and she wholeheartedly accepted that suggestion. In addition to those that we brought, we have purchased a few novels set here in a bookstore in Victoria (I got the staff person in the children’s section to recommend a few) and I bought Emily Carr’s Klee Wyck on the recommendation of a friend. Tigger was already familiar with Carr’s painting and even if you aren’t I highly recommend this collection as a stunning example of descriptive writing. The edition I have linked to is the one I have and it is a reissue of the original 1941 edition with a new introduction by Kathryn Bridge. Apparently, although it has been in print continuosly, it is the 1951 educational edition that has been reprinted which had several sections removed (for fear of offending teachers, according to the correspondence between the publisher and literary executor reported in the new introduction). Many of these sections were highly critical of the attitude and actions of missionary groups and the government of the time towards the First Nations people of the Northwest. I think their idea of “educational” was focused on the writing style rather than the content.

So, the trip is turning out to be productive as well as a lot of fun. I am learning a lot about artistic traditions in the area (native and non-native). The weather is gorgeous. The people have been very welcoming. I’m sure there will be more posts about various aspects of what we have seen and learned.