7qt - teething

1

The washer is fixed!  A friend came over and tinkered with it, and now it isn't leaking.  Not entirely sure what the problem had been, perhaps some hoses weren't screwed in quite right or something.  I am now really enjoying laundry -- I am so happy to be able to dump in the clothes and walk away!  Though laundry has never been a dreaded chore for me anyway; it beats dishes hands down.

2

Miriam appears to be teething.  At least that's how I read extreme fussiness, poor sleep, and trying to bite my face.  I am a bit miffed because this girl has led me to believe all this time that she was an easy baby, and here she is pulling out the rug on me!  She wakes up every hour or two throughout the night, and I can't get her back in the crib so she has to sleep with me.  Which I hate.  Last night she added an extra feature, the three a.m. "it's totally morning, mom" awake time.  Plus the 5:30 final wakeup.  Not cool, Formerly World's Happiest Baby.

She won't fall asleep in her wrap anymore, she pushes against me and cries.  She will fall asleep while nursing, but then wake up if I move or if the boys make any noise .... and you know how often THAT happens.  I finally figured out, halfway through yesterday, that nursing her IN the wrap sort of works.  It's not my favorite, but it allows her to get some sleep anyway.

I picked the wrong week to try to give up caffeine.  (Thought it would help her sleep ... though it clearly isn't!)

3

Yesterday's post was intended to finally explain how I can be happy with being a woman.  And it works for me at the moment.  The trouble is, sometimes it doesn't.  Sometimes a prestige group simply appears to be a scam to get more work out of people.  To the question "why do I have to suffer more for the common good than others?" there is never any real answer.

But I think that one of the things that makes a big difference to how I view my life is having the right models and archetypes.  I have to be able to imagine myself as something I can admire.  For quite a long time it was Ma Ingalls; I love Ma.  But that stopped working.  And then for awhile it was Mother Earth -- the idea of being life-giving and growing helped me through some of my last pregnancy.  I don't feel I need that so much now.  My model at the moment comes from Lois McMaster Bujold.  (Yeah, when I like an author I talk about them constantly, you know how it is.)

In her science fiction books, the planet Barrayar is ruled by a warrior caste called the Vor.  Mostly they're just an aristocracy and nothing particularly special.  But from time to time you see that they are something more than that -- they are people raised with the understanding that they are always, always, always going to put Barrayar before themselves.  They are never allowed to be deficient in courage.  They are never allowed to follow sentiment before duty.  It's just their demanding culture, and it makes many of them rather unhappy.

But they are also heroic.  There is a scene in one of her books in which our hero, Miles, is negotiating a hostage situation.  A Vor lady is being held hostage so that the terrorists can finish their destructive plot that will kill all these innocents on a space station.  Miles chooses to call their bluff, risking the lady's life.  It turns out okay, but afterwards Miles apologizes to her.  He says that he really didn't want to risk her life, and he doesn't expect her to forgive him for putting the good of the space station first.  And she says something like, "Why did you have a second's hesitation?  I'm Vor.  Of course I would be willing to give my life for the space station, who do you think I am?"

Miles, being Vor himself, instantly understands.  Being Vor is tough and not much fun, but by golly, when you need someone to give their life for something, they're the ones you want.

And that's kind of how I am seeing being a woman right now.  It's about being called to something extra, something you didn't choose, but something that's desperately needed, so what can you do but accept it?  The knowledge that you are doing something vital makes it possible to see the sacrifice as worthwhile, even if you don't enjoy a second of it.

4

Speaking of womanhood, I wrote this post on my other blog which might interest you guys too.  It's about the joy and dignity of work.

5

This week's episode of Papal Hysteria is the rabbit edition!  Oh boy, panic and lament!  I am just ... not bothered by it.  At all.  (Enbrethiliel, though, feel free to skip to #6, I won't be offended.)

It seems to me clear enough what the Pope said.  Which makes me think sometimes that people are deliberately misreading him to have something to get mad about, but let's give them the benefit of the doubt that they really think he's saying something bad.  And to explain that you have to see the context.  The interviewer asked him about birth control, and the subtext (it seems to me) was pretty clear: You, Holy Father, claim to care about poverty, but the reason for poverty in the Philippines is all those dumb Catholics breeding like rabbits -- and that's your fault because you won't let them use the Pill!

And his answer was in three parts: First, the birth rate in the Philippines is not high, it's just over replacement.  Second, the Church does not either say that people must have the maximum possible number of kids, it's always been about generosity AND responsibility.  There's never been a teaching that you must have more kids than you can afford, or that you must get pregnant if your health is endangered.  And third, poor people want to have the kids they're having, they see them as a gift.  Don't give them pills, they don't want pills, they want help for their kids.

Not offensive to me, not at all.  He was never saying that Catholics think we are supposed to be like rabbits.  He was saying that some non-Catholics accuse us of having to be like rabbits (it's a slur many of us have heard before; I have) and that is simply not true, it's no part of our doctrine that we mindlessly reproduce, it has ALWAYS been a matter of discernment.  So when you see a family of ten, it's not that the pope made them have a bunch of babies they didn't want -- that family wanted and chose to have that many.

But what about his specific comment about the woman with the seven c-sections?  Well, there's two issues.  First there is the question of telling somebody's specific story.  When priests use this trick in their homilies, I always assume the story is either made-up or a composite, because it would be pretty awful to tell a real person's real story.  I mean, how would you feel to have your own problems trotted out, even anonymously, as a "what not to do" in the sermon?  And yes, if this is a real specific case, to the point that the woman could identify herself, the Pope shouldn't do that.  Not sure if that is the case.

The second issue is, is his judgment on the situation even correct?  Is getting pregnant after seven c-sections tempting God?  Well, it depends.  I do think it could be.  If your doctor has told you, "Look, after all those cesareans, your uterus isn't in good shape.  If you get pregnant again, I fear a rupture or placenta acreta," well, I'd listen to him if I were you.  The risks of pregnancy increase quite sharply with each c-section.  Two or three is pretty darn safe.  Seven, eight?  I wouldn't.  Personally, I wouldn't.  Not on purpose.  And that's with me having no other risk factors and living in a country with good maternal care in general.  The point stands -- we are not supposed to put God to the test, doing dangerous things and demanding that God make it all right.  He doesn't work that way.  And as a mother of seven, you do have a responsibility to the kids you have.  But if you are actually in that situation, ask your doctor what your specific risks are.  It might be no more dangerous than any number of other worthwhile things you do.

Unfortunately, the Pope makes it sounds like with all these wonderful licit means to avoid pregnancy, all Catholics can avoid pregnancy for sure whenever they want.  And that's not actually true.  Of the people I know with scads of c-sections and health risks, generally they try not to get pregnant and do anyway.  Agreed, the Pill has a failure rate just like NFP has.  But I am not sure what the Church would recommend in those cases.  Abstinence till menopause?  Or does it depend on just how bad the risk was?

And I suppose this is why the Pope also mentioned that confessors should be merciful in dealing with these issues.  Not that they should give people permission to break the moral law -- but that they should understand that couples face really strong temptations in their marriages, and instead of calling them names, accusing them of failing to love their spouses or God, they should give absolution and a merciful penance, and if necessary refer them to things which might help, whether it's a convincing argument for the Church's way or a doctor or NFP teacher who could help them out of their difficulty.  The Church's teaching is hard sometimes; we need the support of our priests.

6

Marko is OBSESSED with Doctor Who.  He'll wake up in the morning and demand gel for his hair so he can be the Tenth Doctor.  Then he goes and builds a Dalek out of tinker toys.  Later on he declares my room is the TARDIS and keeps running in and out of it on a mission of his own.  Anything stick-shaped -- ANYTHING -- becomes a sonic screwdriver.  I have to say I don't mind.  I like my kids following my fandoms.  And John can't complain -- last week it was battle droids.

7

So the other day he was monkeying around pretending to write, like he sometimes does.  It makes me feel bad, because unschooling's about following the child, not neglecting the child, and yet I hardly ever have the time to do letters with him, even though he's interested.  He has a letter puzzle, and I think by now he knows what all the letters' names are at least.  Earlier this week we had some fun making words with the letters from his puzzle, but only for about ten minutes because then the baby started to cry.

So  he is sitting at the table "writing," and I'm thinking about how he's nearly five and hasn't taught himself to read yet.  The kids in my family all read early, so I don't really know what the right timeframe is, but I've felt very strongly that I shouldn't push him yet.  I mean, why do kids have to read in kindergarten anyway?  So I resolve not to stress out about it, but also not to be quite so neglectful.  Maybe I should make some time to work on letters with him.  But first I should read up on literacy.  Reading first, or writing first, like in Montessori?  Print first or cursive first?  Why is this all so complicated?

In the middle of this he asks how to spell "golf ball," and I tell him, slowly, not really expecting him to write it because his most letterlike shapes so far have been a bit of a Rorschach test.  But when I go over there, what he has written actually does look like "HOLF BALL."  Not bad.  So he flips his paper over and demands I spell TARDIS.  So after about 20 minutes he and I -- with me mostly keeping busy doing housework around him, and just telling him what letter to do next -- have come up with this:

DOCT

       OR

[picture of the Doctor and his sonic screwdriver]

TARDIS

[picture of the TARDIS]

DALEK

[picture of a Dalek]

He goes on for another hour or two and fills up three more sheets of paper, front and back.  He refuses to write about anything that is not Who-related.  Some of the letters he doesn't know how to write, and I pull them out of the puzzle to show him.  Only after I do that a few times, he starts playing helpless and wanting me to do that with every single letter.  Oh well.  I play along, no biggie.  He's holding the pen right and his letter shapes are getting more controlled.  If he wants to pretend he suddenly doesn't know what an A looks like, whatever.  Ever since then he's been doing some writing every day, because he can.

I'm just pleased as punch.  I try not to care overmuch about literacy -- I mean, it's not one of the main skills for the under-six bunch, they have so much else to master that's important like self-control and empathy and not running into things -- but, well, it is awfully important in our society, and it's natural for every parent to worry a lot about it.

And there's my kid, proving unschooling really does work, and that in between all the toy obsessions and fandom crazes, everyone once in awhile kids go nuts about learning. 

Turns out we're unschooling already

The other day, I had the car. That's always exciting. Marko was crabby and bored and needed the exact right amount of sleep at the exact perfect time, and I decided a bit of driving around would be the cure. Of course I couldn't tell him that. So I told him we were going to the hardware store.

He has no idea what a hardware store is, but he was all over that idea. So we drove in the direction of the hardware store, he fell asleep, we dozed awhile in the Lowe's parking lot, and when he woke up we went inside. I'd guess we spent about 45 minutes in there, and we came out with one package of seed pots.

When I told John about our adventure, it went like this: "So first I wanted to look at something to stake my tomatoes with, and so we looked at 2x4's and fence posts. Then Marko wanted to look at the plumbing supplies. Then we went to the show kitchens and looked at those. Then I wanted to look at paint chips, and Marko told me what all the colors were. Then I decided to get the seed pots after all, so we counted them up and I told him what they were for."

"I see," he said. "So you're starting that unschooling thing already."

"No, we're just ... that's just how I shop ... I mean, that's what you do with toddlers ..."

Huh. I guess we kind of are unschooling.

It was the same sort of thing today. I took my teeny-tiny herb seedlings out of the laundry room to get some morning sun in the kitchen. The only sun spot was on the floor, so I set them there. Marko zoomed over. "Dirt! Dirt in containers!"

"Yes, here are the containers that we filled with dirt awhile ago. Remember how we put the seeds in? Now they're little plants."

"Little plants." He bent over them, touched them respectfully with a fingertip, smelled them.

"This one's cilantro. This one's basil. This one's oregano. That one's thyme."

"That one's thyme." He poked the containers. "One, two, four, five."

"That's a great idea, let's count them! One, two, three, four. Four plants."

He pointed to the pictures on the containers. "Cow. Cow. Cows on the containers. Sour cream containers."

"That's right, those containers used to have sour cream in them! Now they have dirt and plants in them."

"Plants in them."

"I put them out in the sunshine so they would grow."

"Sunshine?"

"Yes, see the sun out the window? It's shining on the plants. That helps them grow. Look at the sun shining on your hand."

"Sun shining on the plants."

How exactly is this not unschooling?

The way you normally teach a toddler is unschooling. You just do what you were going to do anyway, and explain it to the child. Or the child does what he wants to do, and you help him do it. Or he asks you questions, and you answer them. It's not complicated.

Marko knows about things that are important to him. He knows a lot about farm animals, because he's way into them. (I think my own fascination is contagious.) He can identify onion grass, purslane, clover, and mint in the yard. He can count (I never taught him that consciously, but I do count in front of him of course) and say his alphabet (the alphabet song is one of his favorites, though not one of mine). He can take his clothes off, but not put them on. He recently discovered how to put blocks and train tracks together. He knows large portions of his favorite books.

None of these have been "learning goals" of mine. This year, my learning goals have been "learn to use the potty" and "get better at talking." Everything else has been him exploring and asking questions. I don't read to him all day, though he would like it if I did. I probably read to him five or six times a day, when he begs me to. I sing to him and talk to him a lot. But mostly, he plays by himself. I just don't believe in trying to manage his playtime. He seems to have it covered. On crankier days, I try to plan a few things, like doing the dishes while he sits on the counter with his feet on the sink (gleefully turning the water off and on for me) or digging in the garden while he looks for bugs. But if he's happy, I see no reason to do a thing. He just potters around learning stuff and discovering things.

I'm sure, as Marko grows older, we'll do more, have more structure, plan more activities. But for now, this is just about right.

Teaching to the test

I've been thinking a lot lately about teaching (now that I'm no longer teaching, ironically). When I was a teacher, tests were one of those necessary evils I couldn't stand.

Here's why. Before I started my first year of teaching, I was tutoring. I taught remedial Latin to three kids who had failed previous years. I decided to do them each one-on-one, for an hour a day, for four weeks. At the end of it, I could easily see that they had mastered their previous problem areas. I watched them translate, had them recite noun and verb charts, and had them explain to me what various grammatical concepts were.

Each kid asked near the end, "When is the test? When will I know what grade I got?"

I told them each the same thing, "When I am confident that you know the material, you won't need a test. I will give you an A and you can stop coming. But until you know the material, you're not getting out of here."

They were all pleased to hear it, because they'd all been doing well and were happy not to have to study for a test. It just seemed obvious to me that, working on-on-one with them, there was no need to have them write anything down because I could easily tell how they were doing.

When I started teaching in the classroom, there was no way around testing, though. I knew how a few vocal kids were doing, but what about the quiet ones around the edges? I would ask them questions and they would just look scared. Sometimes they'd answer and sometimes not. But either way, I felt I didn't have the time or attention to focus in on each individual child and find out how they were doing. Hence the tests. I had them really frequently so I would know right away if anyone was falling behind.

But you can't just test. In my ideal world, I'd spot-test: quick pop quizzes with two or three random questions from the day before. Then I'd know what they got and what I needed to reteach. But kids hate that, for one thing, and for another the grading would take forever (I saw 120 kids every day).

So I gave quizzes every week. I told them what would be on them and reminded them to study. Periodically there would be bigger tests, though I made the quizzes worth more, cumulatively, than the tests because I think day-to-day effort is more important than an end-of-quarter cram session.

But invariably, in the middle of a lecture I thought was interesting, I would here these six awful words:

"Will this be on the test?"

I hate those words. With a passion. I'm pretty sure every teacher does. It basically implies, "If this is not going to appear on the test, we don't have to listen."

My goal was to teach those kids to read Latin (or, in the case of grammar, to write good English). Their goal was to pass my tests. There was no earthly way I could make my tests really test those skills -- and certainly no way I could help them study for a test that did. I could say, and sometimes did, "STUDY EVERYTHING. You're going to be translating/proofreading and will need to know everything."

Can you guess how that went over?

So I ended up testing the kids with a lot of charts to fill in, a lot of fill-in-the-blanks, a lot of matching. And that's all very well. Those are great learning exercises and they do show me what the kids know. But they're not the end goal. Being able to ace a test doesn't mean you know Latin (or grammar, or anything). And yet those kids thought it was their goal.

At exam time, those kids did what all high-school kids do: made study guides, swapped them around, and memorized everything on them. Then they went into the classroom and wrote it all down on my test sheets. Questions that made them think, apply themselves, have new ideas, use skills -- very few did well on these. Questions that had them repeat what they had memorized -- most aced those.

Then, every single one of those kids walked out of the room and promptly forgot at least half of what they had known. Don't tell me they didn't -- I have been a student too! We called it "deciduous knowledge." It's the stuff you cram and don't remember later.

I don't exactly have an answer to this except my perennial answer -- homeschooling. But I guess it's important to add that you can homeschool without taking advantage of any of the opportunities homeschooling gives you. When you are one-on-one with a student, you don't have to test. But many parents do anyway. Why? For practice? Then fine and good, so long as the kids realize that. But if every unit ends with a test, and the only way to assess their progress on the unit is with a test -- I personally think that's a really bad idea.

Yes, honestly and truly, I think learning works better with no tests. Too bad I could never figure out how to bring this belief into the classroom.

My old homeschooling folder

The other day, I got a package from home. It was my old "Sheila School" folder from my mom's filing cabinet. Since my family is moving to Korea soon, they've been purging that kind of thing from the house.

Yesterday I took the time to read everything in it. Of course it was a blast from the past, seeing my old handwriting and seeing my mom's homemade report cards. But it also really made me think about what things in my education were the best -- and, by extension, what I want my kid(s) to have the opportunity to do.

Most of the time, my homeschooling was very structured. My mom is a structured person, and she was also standing up to a lot of criticism from the outside, so we studied each subject for an hour a day, and at some points we also had homework time too! However, sometimes she really got stuck and didn't know how to teach me something, or else I (being a stubborn little tick, and I admit it) would dig in my heels about a project she had planned. Her usual solution was to say, "Okay, fine. You come up with a way to learn this, and if it's sufficiently educational, I'll let it count."

The first thing that I saw when I opened the folder was a piece of DNA, made out of dental floss and tiny post-it notes. I remember making that.

Then there was a science-fiction story about invertebrates which I wrote in the seventh or eighth grade. A biologist in the future gets himself shrunk down to half an inch tall in order to film an educational holo-movie. An excerpt:

Ericsson decided to leave the scene before the horrible hydra took an interest in more food. The cnidarian waved its three-quarter-inch tentacles and he realized that the only passage between two [tentacles] was through the fearsome monster. He drew his vorpal laser sword and activated it, but saw that even if he cut the tentacles, nematocysts would still spring out and paralyze him. Thinking brains would be in order, he picked up a pebble -- being underwater helped -- and threw it at the hydra. Nematocysts stabbed at the stone, but had no effect. He threw more until a large area was covered with hanging harpoons. He edged closer and cut off the stinging strands. But as he scooted through the safe zone, he discovered a fatal flaw in his plan. Even without stinging cells, tentacles are still quite capable of stuffing you in a gaping maw.

As Ericsson was lifted high above the pond floor, he could see the monster's mouth open hungrily, ringed by tentacles with mostly operating nematocysts and full of digestive acid. He brought his laser sword around and sliced at the tentacles. Soon he was on the ground, panting. He lept up, dashed toward his parked rocked scooter, and zoomed away toward a stream entrance.

I admit that I am still proud of that story. It's some of my best work.

Later on there's a newspaper, The Spanish Gazette, with a cover-page story about Columbus discovering the New World. The classifieds are the best: "For Sale: Two well-equipped caravels, slightly weathered." Years later, I still crack myself up.

Not included physically, though there are mentions, are my Monopoly-style game about cellular metabolism (as you travel around the board, you collect ATP and other necessities for completing the various cycles) and my role-playing game about exploring Washington State. Those were fun and actually were played for entertainment outside of school hours.

My mom says these things are just a tribute to my creativity and how I am a "born teacher." I'm not sure, though. I think it's quite possible anyone could have done the same if they were given the freedom to learn things how they liked instead of doing the same drudgery of lecture-quiz-paper-test over and over again.

Besides, I didn't flourish in other environments. I read, for the first time, a letter my mom wrote to my dad when I was almost done with sixth grade. I had been in public and parochial schools for three years and had begged to return to homeschooling. I was getting a few very poor grades, and my personality was also suffering:

Perhaps Sheila has toughened up in the last few years. Instead of crying, she glares. Instead of being sad and hurt, she is angry, sullen, and prideful. Her defenses make her almost unreachable, unteachable. Her speech sounds so much like her classmates -- it's maddening. She seems cliquish and far less inclined to sympathy for others. She says unkind things to David. She seems to have "gotten down" socialization. She seems incredibly vulnerable to it. She is an astute politician. If she weren't so good at socialization, I think, she'd be far safer.

Luckily my dad must have agreed with her, because I returned to homeschooling after that. I met some great homeschooling friends and developed my hobbies of writing, making music, and creating things -- dolls, clothes, a treehouse. I loved biology (still do, despite all this time I've spent since on the liberal arts!) and even dreamed of being a geneticist! My math grades, which were C's in my parochial school, were A's by the next time I went to school, in the ninth grade. It was a struggle for me, but left on my own with nothing but the textbook, I pushed my way through.

The rest of my learning experiences that I remember were mostly outside of "homeschool time" -- stories from my mom as we took walks or waited for the bus; learning to sew from a few ancient books; learning to knit, ditto; making up new lullabies to sing to the baby my mom nannied; painting my bedroom. While the most "schoolish" stuff in my folder, I don't remember at all. Short answers about Eisenhower? Drawing a total blank. Research from primary sources about the Vietnam war? I kind of remember that. Reading Veritatis splendor because it was assigned by my mom? I'll admit now I mostly slept with it on my face. Reading Dei verbum so that I could write to our priest (for credit) respectfully explaining why, contrary to his homily, the wise men did exist? Definitely remember.

I've been told the adage that whoever does the work, learns. In school, the teacher prepares and prepares, and the teacher learns a ton. But the kids learn only what they have to, and only till the next test. At home, I made the decisions and did the work an awful lot of the time, and I was the one who learned.

I like the idea of unschooling. But I like even more how someone I read recently called it "autodidactic homeschooling" instead. You could just say self-schooling. The parent is a source of information and help, and often the parent can set the goals as well. Mom says, "Here is the material we have to learn; how would you like to learn it?" She can still retain veto power if an idea is not really educational. But kids are endless sources of creativity, so it makes much more sense for the kids to come up with the ideas instead of Mom wearing herself out trying to keep school interesting -- or, alternatively, relying heavily on workbooks and the old lecture-quiz-paper-test format.

I suppose some children would come up with more exciting things than others. But I definitely think that allowing them to make more of the choices about how they learn would better preserve their natural creativity, independence, and industry. Yes, I said natural industry -- because kids actually love to work, if they choose the work! What they hate is being pushed to do something that doesn't interest them.

Of course all this takes a lot of time. But think of it this way: conventional schooling insists that kids learn dozens of facts every day, and yet it is taken for granted that they won't remember much of it when they're grown up. It took me all day to make my cellular metabolism game, and I still remember it fairly well, half my life later.

If our goal is lifelong learning and the development of creative, independent, hardworking adults, the more we involve kids in their own learning, the better.

Thoughts on education

So, I've been reading some more of this man John Taylor Gatto, whom I posted about below. I hit on him by accident in the course of my blogreading, but on further research, I'm discovering a thinker who voices (much more clearly than I) my own views on education. I'm reading one of his books, which luckily is available free online: The Underground History of American Education. It traces our current state of education all the way back to Plato, and with fascinating conclusions.

His basic point is that education, as practiced today, teaches very little that children cannot learn with relative ease outside of school. However, what it does teach is the concerning part: unthinking acceptance of information presented to them, the stratification of society (through class rankings and grades), blind obedience to authority, and sameness. These things are very useful to the leaders of society -- it is good for them to have a populace which is ready and willing to obey and slow to question, and handy as well to have adults appear on the scene already pre-sorted into "gifted" and "delayed." But they are not particularly good for the children themselves, and they are certainly not good for the American ideals of individual ability, responsibility, freedom, and self-government. We complain constantly of how the general mass of people accept unquestioningly what is offered to them by the media or the government. Yet I have not often realized that this acceptance has been taught to them from the age of six, or even earlier, in our schools.

(Note that I do not say public schools. Private schools fall prey to many of the same problems. In many ways, it is near-unavoidable that these problems be continued in order for school to do the job it is "supposed" to do.)

Anyway, that got me thinking about alternatives. Another part of my reading that has touched on school lately was my rereading of the Little House books. Laura Ingalls Wilder was a teacher, after all, and so education comes into her books a lot. In those days, school was pretty different from the way it is now -- John Dewey hadn't yet appeared on the scene, and there weren't any other interests deciding what children learned besides the practical interest. The school boards were local, and the purpose of the schools was basic: teach children to read, write, and cipher; have them learn something of history; introduce a little literature. The students were all the same building, but they weren't expected to be on the same level. The stratification of students didn't happen to the same extent as it does now.

So I pondered what qualities of the one-room schoolhouse might be introduced to today's schools. Would the mixing of grades together help? Small class sizes? Or can the results of those schools be duplicated without the universal standards of discipline and good raising that the children arrived at school with?

It occurred to me then that Laura Ingalls Wilder learned most of what made her a great writer outside the walls of any school. She didn't even go to school until Plum Creek, when she was around eight. She could not read a single word before she arrived at school, either. However, she knew dozens, perhaps hundreds, of songs by heart. She knew how the words came together to make something beautiful. She also knew more about nature, about everyday life, about basic survival, than most of us ever learn. If her education had been expected to come exclusively out of that one-room schoolhouse, she never would have been the great writer she was.

The book I read last was Farmer Boy. This, of course, is the story of Laura's husband, Almanzo Wilder, and his childhood on a farm in New York. What amazed me about that book was how little Almanzo went to school. He started at eight. Then he was allowed by his parents to miss school for his birthday, if there was work to be done at home, or to learn some new aspect of farming. Then he dropped out of school as soon as he could get away with it. Very little of the book takes place in school.

One day he is sitting at the dinner table, thinking about the business of the farm, and says absently, "Fifty bales of hay at two dollars a bale is one hundred dollars," or some such math problem. His father smiles and says he can stay home from school, because he is putting his learning to work. Many times Almanzo begs to stay home to bale hay, or break oxen, or go to town and sell their crop, and his father just says, "You won't learn any younger," and lets him. Almanzo learns how to follow his dream -- being a farmer -- by watching his father farm, by helping out on the farm, and by taking on responsibilities himself. Half the time he is not even told how to do what he does: he learns by doing the work wrong, and then figuring out how to do it right.

If there were an ideal educational system, this would probably be it: a small amount of book-learning -- preferably based on the child's interests as much as possible, as Almanzo is motivated to succeed in school by knowing a farmer must know math -- combined with a large amount of real life.

We tend to isolate our children from the grown-up world and give them special children's things to do and places to be. Instead of real things, they are given toys and games. This is all very well, but it does not force the child to stretch out and try something beyond him. He is given something exactly at his level -- and therefore he remains at his level. He further learns that what he does does not really matter. If he messes up, he will lose points in his game or perhaps break a toy, but none of his actions have serious consequences. This artificial children's world leads to a delay in adulthood. While maturity used to be considered reached in a person's teens, now it is pushed back, not just to eighteen or twenty-one, but indefinitely.

Grown children live at home years after they are capable of moving out. Then they do move out, but live a sort of bohemian existence with friends for years more. When they finally have their life "put together," at the age of thirty or so, they still don't have the air of an adult, of someone who takes full responsibility for his life. Instead they blame others for their failures, move from job to job and relationship to relationship, delay marriage and children, and in response to criticism, answer, "But I'm only thirty-five. But I'm only forty."

I know it is a little risky to allow children access to real, grown-up things. The world is not as safe as it was. And it's not just the children we worry about harming. We don't want to trust real things to children for fear of messing up our own projects. It is much easier for a mother to cook the dinner herself than to step back and let her child try to do it. She's got to keep an eye out for danger, to answer questions, to deal with the possible failure. She has to leave herself open to the possibility of having peanut butter and jelly for dinner, in case the pizza burns. And this is only a small instance -- what about bigger things? If we give children real responsibility, we will have to accept that they will not succeed on the first try. It is a good deal easier to give them a video game and go about our own business.

On the positive side, however, children are incredibly eager to get their hands on real responsibility. It seems to be innate, and indeed it makes sense for it to be: where would our species be if we were born preferring games to life, the false to the true, meaningless competition to meaningful success? These twisted preferences are born from habit rather than nature. It takes years and years of giving games to children to break them of their desire for work. But it is what we are teaching them, isn't it? Isn't this the way the average Gen X-er or Y-er is tending?

Now, I don't think I'm an unschooler in my outlook exactly, even though what I have laid out sounds a little like unschooling. I do think that book-learning is important, especially in our modern day when things like SAT scores can determine our destiny. And, though I think children should be encouraged to follow their interests, I know it is bound to happen that a child will truly need to learn something that he would rather not learn.

However, more of school needs to be directed toward life, and less toward "educational goals" or the framework of a certain curriculum. Obviously I am a fervent believer in homeschooling. But I will go a step further and say that there is no need for homeschoolers to "justify ourselves" by assigning twice as much book-learning as the public schoolers are doing, or spending seven hours a day on school and giving homework at the end, simply because the public schoolers spend that much time on it. I truly believe that, without the trouble of "classroom management" (a job which is 90% of any teacher's job description), the essential things can be learned in a fraction of the time schoolchildren spend. The rest of the time can be spent on other essentials: life skills, the adoption of responsibilities like chores and jobs, watching adults at their work, following interests, studying things not in the curriculum which might someday blossom into a career or might not.

This is just the overflow of my mind at the moment, filled with all I have been reading and pondering. Later, I hope to develop my ideas further and have a more organized statement of my educational philosophy. Suffice it to say that I have had a fire in my belly for years about education, and I am still waiting for a chance to try things my way. I am just hoping that, by the time the opportunity is ready for me, I am ready for the opportunity.

Interesting article on education

I'm sicker 'n a dog right now, as my grandma would say, so the book review I've been working on for you will have to wait until I recover from the virus that's got me down. (Yup, this time it's not the kiddo -- it's the side effects of being a teacher. I was sick all last winter, too -- one cold after another.)

So, to make it up to you, I'm posting a link to this intriguing article on education in America. If you know me, you know that I am in favor of homeschooling -- that all my time teaching in institutionalized schools has only served to solidify my distrust of them. As the writer of this article says, schoolwork is largely busywork. Learning seems to happen very little.

However, at least in the Catholic schools where I've taught, this isn't part of any conspiracy. It's simply in response to the fact that it is easier to teach large groups with busywork. Furthermore, it is easier to grade them with tests. And students raised on lots of tests learn for the test, study to the test, and forget after the test. Any time I would try to make them think, to analyze, to wonder, inevitably they would smack me back to reality with a raised hand. "Will this be on the test?" And if you answer "no," they tune out instantly.

Luckily the younger kids are not yet so conditioned, and I try to avoid doing so. Yet it is almost impossible to teach them without streamlining them more than is good for each of them individually. It's a case of "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few," so I have to hurry one up who is still struggling to understand and force one to wait who has grasped the material days ago, even though I long to teach to each of them.

I can't testify to what this author says about public schools, never having taught at one, and having little memory of anything I learned while going to one. In my experience, public school teachers are enthusiastic and try extremely hard to break the pattern of busywork and failure that cripples their students. However, there seems to be something intrinsic in the structure of schools, even in the nature of any school so long as it is institutionalized, that makes this pattern almost impossible to break. Schools seem to encourage mediocrity, blind and thoughtless acceptance instead of critical thinking, and learning that only lasts until the exam.

So, read the article and tell me what you think. I know it does seem a little extreme in parts. But whether there is an agenda behind the failure of schools or not, the failure is just as evident, and the author's solution is just as necessary.