Learning by Chance

The turn-of-the-nineteenth-century novelist and educational theorist Maria Edgeworth co-wrote with her father Richard Lovell Edgeworth a manual for parents educating their children at home called Practical Education (1798).  Throughout this text, they advise parents to build on their children's chance encounters and impressions because these operate with more force on children's minds than irrelevant tasks or lectures.  The idea that children learn best when encountering an idea by chance (or seemingly by chance) is central to the Edgeworths' pedagogy and they advocate maximizing or even manipulating chance occurrences for educational ends.  In Practical Education, a father explains centrifugal motion after his children happen to see its effects; in Maria's novel Belinda (1801), when a group of children wonder whether their goldfish can hear, a learned family friend tells them the history of a scholarly dispute on this subject.  The title character in one of Maria's stories called "The Good French Governess" "knew how much of the art of instruction depends upon seizing the proper moments to introduce new ideas" (Moral Tales p. 305).

I was reminded of this aspect of the Edgeworths' pedagogy as I noticed a couple recent instances in our homeschool of Edgeworthian chance instructional moments.  A couple months ago I was reading aloud The Gammage Cup and its sequel The Whisper of Glocken by Carol Kendall (which N. loved!) and the words "warp" and "weft" came up.  I told N. what they meant and reminded him we'd seen a weaver making rag rugs on a large old loom at the fair several years in a row.  Like Edgeworth's Good French Governess, who stocks her school room with miniature printing presses, basket-weaving kits, radish-seed kits, magnifying glasses, etc. to be ready for whatever chance instructional opportunities arise, I had purchased a little weaving kit years ago; I dug it out and N. set about making a small rug.  He was thrilled to see a pattern emerge as he wove the colored yarn through the loom.

In another instance, a few weeks ago, N. asked me if I knew what a mail-order bride was.  He had learned about nineteenth-century mail-order brides going West in A History of US, the American history textbook he and Tim have been reading together.  Aha!  Not only did I know what a mail-order bride was, but I handed N. that wonderful book about a mail-order bride, Sarah, Plain and Tall, which I'd bought at the local used bookstore long ago in hopes N. would someday enjoy it.  He began to read it immediately and was utterly absorbed; he read the whole book more quickly than usual and wanted to get the sequel.

I was glad in each of these moments to have something on hand that extended N.'s learning.  I am not sure that he would ever have picked up the weaving kit or Sarah, Plain and Tall had his interest not already been piqued and had not the loom and the book been available at the very moment of its piquing.  Just as the Edgeworths knew (Maria helped educate many of her 22 siblings and half-siblings!), chance connections are compelling.

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Notes: 

• The material in the first paragraph of this post is drawn from a chapter on Edgeworth in my book The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel.  
• The Edgeworths were influenced in part by the work of Rousseau; you can read about their friend Thomas Day's doomed attempt to educate a wife for himself along Rousseauvian principles in Wendy Moore's recent book How To Create The Perfect Wife.
• I briefly discuss Samuel Johnson's similar belief in the pedagogical efficacy of chance in a previous post on "dipping in" to books.  

What's Not on the Test

Will this be on the test? 

This week we are fulfilling one of our state's few homeschool requirements by administering a nationally normed standardized test of our choice.  We chose the Iowa Test of Basic Skills because it is diagnostic, meant to show areas where a student's skills might need additional attention in the coming year.  Last year, N.'s first time taking the test, we had no idea how he might do since he'd never taken a standardized test or filled in a bubble sheet.  And we aren't particularly familiar with what kids are "supposed" to be learning in second or third grades, so we wondered if the knowledge and skills we knew he had would register on the test.  For example, he spent a lot of time in second grade learning about early twentieth-century chemistry via the biography of Marie Curie and the autobiography of Oliver Sacks.  We figured it was pretty unlikely that that knowledge would be captured by the test. 

Standardized tests can only measure a very narrow kind of learning or skill and of course one of the major reasons we homeschool is to escape the dominant regime of testing and assessment in American education.  If N. had not scored high on the test last year, we would have been concerned, but also ultimately dismissive, reasoning that he knows all sorts of things and has all sorts of skills that are not measured by the test.  As it happened, however, he did exceptionally well, so we felt (somewhat hypocritically!) vindicated, even though his performance might simply be demonstrating yet again the common truism that standardized tests favor privileged upper-middle class males.

This year, we've been joking about all the things that N. studies that are not going to show up on the test, making long lists over breakfast: the history of trains in America, technical information about how trains work, technical information about mills and water wheels (thank you, David Macaulay!), Victorian and early 20-century architectural styles, other building-related facts, music theory, music composers, music history, Harry Potter, Tintin, Calvin & Hobbes, the history of our city, how to draw buildings, trains, and other vehicles, French vocabulary, ballet, detailed American history from the Revolution to the Civil War, how to make paper airplanes, sailing, art appreciation, old movies, the history of the piano.... etc., etc.  Any child could make a list of all the things they care about and are experts on that will never show up on the tests they take.

However useful standardized tests may or may not be, I am at least very pleased that we are able to give them in an utterly no-stakes environment.  No teacher will be fired as a consequence of N.'s test results!  No school funding is dependent on the test outcome!  Indeed, we are required to administer the test but not to submit the score to any state agency or body.  So we try to glean what information we can from the test about N.'s learning and his test-taking skills to guide us as we learn together in the coming year.  Happily, N. thinks the tests are really fun!  The other night he begged to do another section before bedtime and we wouldn't let him because we wanted to preserve some kind of uniformity of test-taking conditions.  "Please, please can I take another Iowa test???"       

Field Trip: Memphis, TN

Woodland Poppy

In April we took a road trip to visit old friends over a long weekend in Memphis, TN.  Neither Tim nor I had been to Memphis before.  Our friends sent us a big box of books in advance of our trip, so Tim and N. read a lot about the history of Memphis before we set out.  This was contrary to our usual practice when we travel, where the trip is the beginning of learning rather than the culmination, and this reading gave N. a great sense of context for the experiences he had on the trip itself.

And our visit was packed full of experiences!  N.'s favorite part was getting lots and lots of time to play with the children in the family we visited.  It is so fun to see like-minded, creative kids get to know each other.  It was rejuvenating for us to have meals and long talks with our friends (and friends of our friends!) -- and I got some much-appreciated tutoring in both knitting and chicken-keeping. 

We toured the Woodruff-Fontaine House in the "Victorian Village" area near downtown Memphis.  We spent hours at the Zoo.  We saw some of the excellent permanent collection and a special exhibit called "Angels and Tomboys: Girlhood in 19th-Century American Art" (review here) at the Brooks Museum of Art.  We took a gorgeous walk through the Old Forest in Overton Park where our friend introduced us to woodland poppies, may apples, trillium, and other beautiful wildflowers in bloom.  We went to a performance of As You Like It (N.'s second Shakespeare play!) at Rhodes College.  The adults (but not the kids) went to lecture on "Walt Whitman's Civil War" by Randall Fuller at Rhodes.  We drove through downtown and caught glimpses of the bizarre Pyramid Arena and tourist-thronged Beale Street from the car.  We spent a couple hours on the banks of the Mississippi, where the kids drew pictures and we watched barges churn by.  We drove across the river just to say we'd been to Arkansas.  We ate fried chicken (and lots of other good food). 

It was a stellar visit, rich with learning, socializing, and intellectual stimulation for all three of us.  We feel lucky to have such good people in our lives and to have had the chance to spend a few days with them on their home turf.   

    

Screen-Free Week 2013: Using YouTube to Teach Musical Interpretation

This week is the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood's annual Screen-Free Week.  I'm writing a couple posts about how a restrictive approach has helped us maintain a mindful, engaged relationship with screen technology.  (I wrote about our viewing of old movies together here.) 

A significant element of N.'s work at the piano this year has been developing his interpretive skills.  Now that he has a very responsive piano to play, he's been learning to hear differences in interpretations and to achieve those differences in his own playing.  All year he's been working on his own (not in lessons, because the piece is really above him) on Mozart's Piano Sonata No. 11 in A major, K. 331, first the Rondo Alla Turca and more recently the first movement.  We have several recordings of different pianists playing this piece (including one featuring an early nineteenth-century piano with built-in tambourines for the "turkish" effect!), so we've talked a lot about differences in phrasing, pedal, and dynamics in the various recordings.  N. has experimented with trying to play like Pletnev or like Gould.

But most of the time N. plays student pieces, and we don't have CDs or records of those.  Here's where YouTube is a gold mine.  Tons of proud parents have uploaded videos of their kids playing the standard student repertoire, so after N. has worked on a piece for a while, Tim will often find some YouTube videos of it to help him hear some interpretive possibilities, or just to hear better what he is doing by contrast in his own playing.  These online videos give N. the opportunity to hear many competent students playing the pieces he plays, an experience he'd be unlikely to have in real life. 

I remember being shocked (and upset!) by the radically different interpretations of Bach's cello suites recorded by Yo-Yo Ma and Pablo Casals when I first heard the latter in high school.  I loved the Ma version so much that it seemed like Casals was ruining the suites.  I'm glad N. is learning early on to appreciate a range of interpretations and to experiment with his own.  Making music is not just playing the notes, but speaking through them.

Screen-Free Week 2013: Old Movies

The Kid

This week is the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood's annual Screen-Free Week.  As I've mentioned before, we are screen-free zealots.  Screen-Free Week has its critics, but I think it is useful for encouraging parents and teachers to be mindful about how children use screen technology, to use it as a resource for engagement, and in limited quantity.  I've written about our extreme restriction of N.'s use of TV, movies, and video/computer/iDevice/online games in absurd detail here.  As I've also noted, in the past couple years (beginning when he was 6), he's watched a few movies in the theater and at home, most recently The Kid, Top Hat, and Young Mr. Lincoln.
 
As we've slowly added movies to N.'s diet, N. has really enjoyed them.  I would posit (without any more than anecdotal evidence) that the less one watches, the more open one may be to a wider range of visual productions.  Because N. has not watched children's TV or been immersed in a visual world designed precisely for his demographic, he is not judgmental or dismissive of older works not focus-group-tested on 6-to-9-year-olds: silent films, black-and-white films, films in which people suddenly start singing and dancing.  In contrast, most of my college students (many of whom have never seen a black-and-white film) would find all the movies N. has seen except Mary Poppins unbearably strange.  (I know this from repeated experiences of showing clips of older films in class accompanied by students' protests).  My students have access to every movie on Netflix or in the library, but they tend to confine their viewing narrowly to the familiar: Hollywood fare of the past decade. 

Our viewing tastes are (at least to some extent) shaped by what we watch.  When we sat down to watch Young Mr. Lincoln after N. and Tim had been learning about Lincoln's life, N. was at first a bit disappointed to find it wasn't a silent movie, because he loved The General, The Kid, and the films of George Méliès.  But he loved Henry Fonda's portrayal of the jokey young Abe.  We restrict what and how much N. watches so that we, not Disney, Pixar, or toy companies selling products via movies, shape our son's visual experiences and taste.  Because N. hasn't seen many films, each one he has seen is memorable and visually powerful.

A Day at the Library

Mondays tend to be N.'s most unschoolish weekdays.  On Mondays, he usually reads for a while before breakfast, finishes eating by 10 a.m., warms up for his piano lesson for 45 minutes, and goes to his hour-long piano lesson.  He's often so inspired by his lesson that he plays for a half hour more when he gets home.  After lunch, he reads or draws, then sometimes does a bit of math or history reading aloud with Tim.  Then he often plays with a neighborhood friend until supper.  After supper I read aloud to him and eventually he goes to bed.

Last week N.'s piano lesson was moved up to 9 a.m., which is practically dawn for us.  So when he came home a bit after 10, he felt like he had a wide open free day stretching ahead of him.  He asked me to take him to the library, so I dropped my work (giving Tim an unplanned day off!) and we took a long leisurely walk there in the cool breeze and bright spring sun, wending our way through downtown to look at N.'s favorite buildings.  At the library, N. found the picture books he'd come for and promptly read them all.  The children's room was completely deserted.  We often feel rushed at the library, having wedged our visit in with other errands, but this time we had no particular schedule, so we sat at the tiny table on tiny chairs and read silently.

Eventually we got hungry so we checked out our books and had lunch at a bakery-cafe downtown.  At one point while we ate N. said, "History quiz: what's the oldest English settlement in the U.S.?"  I guessed "Roanoke" and he didn't know what that was.  So I told him briefly, but then wasn't sure what in my account was myth, so I looked it up on my phone and read him this retelling.  We talked about why Jamestown counts as the first settlement and not Roanoke.


This conversation reminded N. that Sunday night he'd wanted to know more about the Henry Burden Iron Works in Troy, NY.  He'd been looking at a cool little book he has called Smithsonian in Gear and been arrested by a photo of a huge abandoned water wheel.  He wanted to know why and how the factory buildings collapsed.  Was there a fire or explosion?  So we decided to go back to the library to see what we could find.

I poked around in the library's online catalog while N. sat at a table and drew trains.  I'd prefer not to do research for him -- it's good for him to practice this skill himself! -- but he hadn't had any time to draw all day, and he simply needed to.  My computer search turned up nothing; while I waited for N. to finish his drawing so we could ask a reference librarian for help, I googled on my phone and found via the Library of Congress a wonderful 26-page essay on the Burden Iron Works written by historian Samuel Rezneck in 1969 for the Historic American Engineering Record.  I read it aloud to N. while he continued to draw.  Rezneck's account tell us not only about Henry Burden, his inventions, and his factory, but it effectively gestures at larger contexts.  For example, after describing Burden's invention of a steam-powered horseshoe machine that produced 3600 horseshoes an hour without a human hand, Rezneck notes that "unhappily machine-made horseshoes facilitated the conduct of large-scale wars in Europe and America during the nineteenth century, from the Crimean and the Austro-Italian wars in the 1850s on, and particularly the American Civil War..."  As I came to these kinds of analytical moments in Rezneck's essay, I paused in my reading and we talked about what they meant, about why machine-made horseshoes might facilitate large-scale war, or why in 1861 Burden built a huge expansion to his factory after receiving the Union horseshoe contract, or what was happening in elsewhere in the country at the turn of the 20th century to make water-power less economical than coal and to stop the great water wheel. 

Finally N. decided he was ready to go home, and we took the bus instead of walking, an uncommon treat for N. since our city's public transportation system rarely offers the most convenient way to get where we are going.  All in all, this was an ideal day, the kind that makes me so grateful that we are able to homeschool, learning interesting things and hanging out together.

MEN OF PROGRESS, by Christian Schussele (1824-1879).  National Portrait Gallery. 

"The quick, laughing gurgle of water under the forefoot of a boat of their own..."

I recently finished reading aloud to N. the eleventh Swallows and Amazons book, The Picts and The Martyrs. As I finished a chapter describing the first outings of the sailing neophytes Dick and Dorothea in their new little boat Scarab, N. said to me with a big dramatic sigh of pleasure, "Don't you just love sailing?!"

N. has in fact never been sailing. But so evocatively does Arthur Ransome bring sailing to life in this wonderful series of books that his own lack of any physical experience of sailing is to N. entirely irrelevant.

Field Trip: Charleston, SC

Not a typical Charleston house, but one that N admired.

We drove down to Charleston, South Carolina, for a weekend visit in early March because I was participating in an eighteenth-century studies conference there.  We'd never been before and we loved walking all over the historic downtown and Battery areas, admiring the 18th- and 19th-century houses.  Though he still loved the few Queen Anne houses we saw the best, N. especially enjoyed the side porches hiding behind formal doors on the antebellum houses.  We went to two house museums, the Calhoun Mansion (a post-Civil War house packed to the gills, Victorian style, with art and objects collected by the current owner; the highlights for us were the gorgeous vaulted ceiling of the music room and the 1907 Bosendorfer grand piano that N. longed to play) and the Heyward-Washington House.  In visiting the Heyward-Washington House, I was happy to be inside an 18th-century structure (almost every house tour we've gone on with N. has been a late 19th- or early 20-century house!) and I especially appreciated the collection of Charleston-made late 18th- and early 19th-century furniture (including card tables, one of my obsessions due to my research on 18th-century gambling).  One of N.'s favorite moments in touring the Heyward-Washington House was when the guide brought up the Grimke sisters, Charleston-born abolitionists whom N. had read about in A History of US and who lived in the house for some time; it's fun to experience that reinforcing flash of recognition: "Hey, I know who they are!"

"In Memory of the Enslaved Workers..."

Tim and N. have been getting closer to the Civil War in their chronological reading in A History of US, so he was especially interested in that aspect of Charleston's history.  Although we didn't have time to visit Fort Sumter on this trip, N. liked seeing the cannons at the Battery.  As we walked through the city, we talked a lot about ways in which the history of African-Americans is both commemorated and effaced throughout the Charleston.  We learned from a historical marker on the waterfront about the remarkable achievements of Robert Smalls, an enslaved sailor who commandeered a Confederate steamship to deliver his wife, children, and other enslaved people to the Union and freedom and later served five terms as a U.S. Congressman.  But traces of the more ordinary lives of the enslaved were not as evident unless you seek them out.  We stumbled across this moving marker at the Unitarian Church in Charleston, which reads "In Memory of the Enslaved Workers Who Made these Bricks and Helped Build Our Church, C.1774-1787."

N. has long been interested in maps and geography, so he thought Longitude Lane was especially cool: a seventeenth-century stone-cobbled lane that runs exactly on the 79th parallel.  

The final highlight of our short visit was an evening concert we attended at the First Scots Presbyterian Church, which hosts the annual Bach Festival of Charleston.  We sat in the beautifully austere early nineteenth-century church and listened to an absolutely incredible performance of "Membra Jesu Nostri" (BuxWV 75) by Buxtehude.  The stunning sounds of seventeenth-century music sung in the plain early-music style and played on period instruments formed the perfect culmination to our weekend encounter with history in Charleston.

Walking down Longitude Lane

The Passion(s)

We're not religious but we do believe that knowledge of the Bible is central to Western cultural literacy.  Tim read to N. from the Old Testament a couple years ago, which N. really enjoyed.  This week he's been reading him each gospel's version of the Passion, one per day.  They began with Mark and ended today with John.  Tim reads to him from the King James translation and they occasionally look words up in the NRSV.  N. loves the King James language, and he likes comparing the four accounts.  They talk about context, audience, and effect: Luke's telling is longer and gives more details about Jewish rituals for his later non-Jewish readers, for example.  N.'s favorite line is Mark's "before the cock crow twice thou shalt deny me thrice" and we've talked about why Peter denies Jesus.  We also talked about the dramatic effect of Luke's differentiation between the two sinners -- one jeering, one repentant -- crucified on either side of Jesus.  What kind of dimension does this detail bring to the scene and the depiction of Jesus that is absent in Matthew and Mark?

Now we're off to enjoy some of the ancient pagan rites of the spring festivals onto which the Christian celebration of the Resurrection was grafted: egg dyeing!  Bunnies!  And around three a.m. on Sunday we'll be woken by the Moravian brass band that circles through our neighborhood playing hymns to (as a horn-player once explained to me) "waken all the sinners" and call them to sunrise service in the nearby Moravian cemetery.  Even in this we can see a wonderful amalgamation of ancient traditions reinterpreted by Christianity.  For me, this is the essential value of historicism, to examine the accretion of custom and to marvel in our constant adaptation and reinterpretation of our fundamentally human passion-tales. 

Ballet Shoes Read-Along

Melissa Wiley started a Noel Streatfield read-along and I was eager to reread Ballet Shoes.  I remembered loving this book and others by Streatfield as a child, but little else other than that it was about performing orphans.  I was a bit disappointed on rereading, I'm sorry to admit, because the novel seems to focus more on plot than on representation of interiority or reflectiveness.  That is, I found myself wanting to know more about how the girls felt as their lives changed radically, as they encountered the enormous challenges of becoming child performers, as they developed their distinct identities.  One of Melissa's readers mentioned that Streatfield wrote an adult version of this story first, The Whicharts, and I'd be really interested to read that and compare the two. 

That said, I enjoyed so much about this novel.  Pauline's lesson in humility is an excellent scene.  The description of the girls' daily schedule of lessons and classes at the arts academy is compelling and interestingly unsentimental.  There's no lamenting their lost childhoods but instead a rather British, no-nonsense account of the girls' ability to put their shoulder to the wheel as needed for the family finances, whether they have inborn performing ability or not. 

Ballet Shoes offers rich food for thought on the relationship between talent and work, or between genes and practice.  All three girls, genetically unrelated adopted sisters, have distinct natural abilities and interests: acting for Pauline, engines and mechanical things for Petrova, and ballet for Posy.  Each girl is driven by her natural talent to practice hard; none is ever tempted to rest on her innate ability.  Posy goofs off when forced by circumstance to take a ballet class that is below her ability only because she is so frustrated not to be able to take a more challenging class that will really help her develop; she's bribed to behave and get something out of the easier class by the prospect of tickets to the performance of a major ballet star from whom she is sure she will learn much.  Petrova spends every spare moment reading about cars and airplanes, and she lives for the precious Sundays when she can work in the mechanic's garage owned by one of the family's boarders.   

Petrova doesn't like acting or dancing, but she becomes quite proficient in both (especially ballet, which requires a physical precision that hours of practice provides) nonetheless.  So the book offers an example of becoming technically proficient without any natural talent as a complement to the depictions of talent- and passion-driven achievement.  Posy and Paulina become successful performers because they've worked incredibly hard to develop their talent.  Petrova becomes a proficient chorus actor and corps-de-ballet dancer by dint of hard work without any talent or desire, and she "practices" as hard at her passion -- engines -- as ever Posy does at ballet.  It's the 10,000 hours rule long before Gladwell. 

For a book about dancing girls, I found Ballet Shoes refreshingly free of gender stereotypes.  There's surprisingly little sense that Petrova's love of engines, cars, and planes might be odd or outside the gender norms of the time.  No one frets that she's unladylike in her interests.  In fact I can't imagine her mechanical passion passing with so little notice in our own era of highly polarized pink-or-blue gender norms, for all we think we're superior to the gender politics of earlier times.  The other Fossil sisters downplay their own achievements as mere performers compared to the historical greatness they expect of Petrova.  She's the one who will do something truly important.

Finally, as an academic, I loved the depiction of the two women professors who board at the Fossil house (again, the book makes no comment on how uncommon women with literature and mathematics doctorates were in the 1930s, not to mention two women in some sort of domestic partnership).  My favorite lines in the whole book were clearly written by a woman who knows literary academics well:

"In the dress circle, Doctor Smith and Doctor Jakes enjoyed themselves as true Shakespeareans always enjoy themselves, arguing between each act about the reading of the parts, and the way the lines were said.  Fortunately they found plenty to disapprove of, or they would not have enjoyed themselves at all."