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Homeschooling "substitutes:" Building your own network.

Here's something on the co-schooling spectrum that I will bet any reader with older kids could start setting up now: a personal network of online "substitute teachers" to help each other out when one of the moms get sick, but older kids have tasks that need completion.

From the very smart Rebecca Frech at Shoved to Them:

Yesterday morning, as I curled up on the couch under my snuggly blankie (You know you have one too), I started making my calls.

"I'm sick," I told one of my homeschooling friends. "I need a sub today. #2 has a paper due later this week and needs his rough draft proofed."

"Have him send it to me," she replied.

I contacted another mom by email and asked for their help fielding math questions and called the only one who lives near me for help with the littlest kids, before I let myself begin to doze off.

There were a lot of years in homeschooling that I would have let my own sick day be an excuse for the kids to take a day off. As they've gotten to higher grades and more work, it's not always feasible for them to take a break. Add to that the battle to get back on track once we're off our schedules, and having subs begins to make a lot of sense.

 

I, personally, have a superpower that lets me fall ill on Friday afternoon, be sick all weekend, and be better on Monday morning. It tends to ruin my weekends but keeps me on track.

Nevertheless, I am not perfect, and occasionally I fall ill at 10:30 am on a Wednesday. This is not a terribly big deal for elementary school kids -- it is entirely workable to lie on the couch and watch nature movies with them, for instance, or let them start a big art project and call it a day -- but as they get into high school, even though they can do much of their work independently, they still need feedback. And often they need that feedback NOW or they can't go on to do the next thing. And then you're stalled out.

One of the things I love about this idea is that most of the homeschooling parents in such a network could be people you have never met in real life, since assignments can be emailed so easily, and we have things like Skype and FaceTime for direct questioning. I do a lot of this in my regular, real-life co-schooling arrangement, but I never thought about having a less formalized, more emergency-based reciprocal arrangement. It should be relatively easy to set something like that up, and could be fun, too. You might find yourself calling on each other in non-emergencies as well.

Younger children really need direct attention, so the online thing won't work so well, but it really strikes me that it would be a good idea for a mother of younger kids to identify another homeschooler living nearby who has children in the same age-range to serve as emergency substitute teacher. Here is what I would do if I found such a person and I was trying to build it from scratch:

1. Get together for two planned play dates a year to stay in touch.
2. Have a "basic lesson plan" that can be picked up at a moments notice. Will you squirrel away the materials for a big multi-age arts and crafts project, to be used only in case of emergency? Will the substitute teacher fold the "temporary students" into her own children's lessons? Will the children all do worksheets and reading interspersed with an educational video or play math and language board games together?
3. If you're troubled by the question, "But what if I get sick 4 times this year and she only gets sick once or not at all? That's not fair!" you could agree in advance to "even it up" at the end of the year by having the "freeloading" family offer a few afternoons of free babysitting, or host a couple of pizza-party playdates.

Hey, before you know it you may even be regular co-schoolers! But even if you aren't, think what you will gain in peace of mind.

 

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Battle of wits.

H. and I were dismayed at some of our seventh- and eighth-graders' writing recently.  We thought we had mostly mechanics problems, but some careful probing of their paragraph-composing ability revealed that they needed a refresher course in constructing logical arguments.  

So H. spent some time working with them on syllogisms.  

You know the sort.  All men are mortal.   Socrates is a man.  Therefore Socrates is mortal.  (Although it turns out that there are lots more kinds that I never learned about in school.  Fortunately H. is on the case.)

"Might as well do it anyway," I theorized.  "It's the sort of thing that lots of people get in school.  Can't hurt.  Might help."

Today H. gave them a copy of Vizzini's speech from The Princess Bride -- the one with the Battle of Wits over the iocane powder and the two cups of wine -- and challenged the kids to find and articulate as many syllogisms -- explicit and implicit, valid and not valid -- as they could.

 

It was a very fun lesson to overhear while I was making lunch.

 

This is the kind of thing they came up with:

• If you are strong, then you trust your strength to save you.  You are strong, therefore I can not choose the glass in front of you.
• If you have been to Australia, then you are used to people not trusting you. You have  been to Australia. Therefore you are used to not being trusted.
• If I can find out what kind of man you are, then it is simple.  This is not simple, therefore I can’t find out what kind of man you are.
• Iocane comes from Australia and Australia is populated by criminals.  You obtained the iocane.  Therefore you are a criminal.

 

We were amused to discover that the entire battle of wits includes one incorrect assumption (that one of the goblets is not poisoned) but that Vizzini repeatedly comes to the correct conclusion anyway ("Therefore, I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me" and "Therefore, I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you.")

 

 

Frederick Douglass and an inspiration: a rhetoric-based approach to high school history?

First, the Douglass.

Randy Barnett of the Volokh Conspiracy has posted the entire text of Frederick Douglass's speech of 160 years ago today, "What July 4th Means to the Negro."

Since this is a blog of religious practice among other things, I am excerpting (emphasis and some paragraph breaks mine) this part about the Fugitive Slave Act (which, among other things, required all states to enforce within their own boundaries the property "rights" of slaveholders):

I take this law to be one of the grossest infringements of Christian Liberty, and, if the churches and ministers of our country were nor stupidly blind, or most wickedly indifferent, they, too, would so regard it.

...But the church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors. It has made itself the bulwark of American slavery, and the shield of American slave-hunters. Many of its most eloquent Divines, who stand as the very lights of the church, have shamelessly given the sanction of religion and the Bible to the whole slave system. They have taught that man may, properly, be a slave; that the relation of master and slave is ordained of God; that to send back an escaped bondman to his master is clearly the duty of all the followers of the Lord Jesus Christ; and this horrible blasphemy is palmed off upon the world for Christianity.

For my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! welcome atheism! welcome anything! in preference to the gospel, as preached by those Divines!

They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke put together have done! These ministers make religion a cold and flinty-hearted thing, having neither principles of right action nor bowels of compassion. They strip the love of God of its beauty and leave the throne of religion a huge, horrible, repulsive form. It is a religion for oppressors, tyrants, man-stealers, and thugs. It is not that “pure and undefiled religion” which is from above, and which is “first pure, then peaceable, easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and with out hypocrisy.” But a religion which favors the rich against the poor; which exalts the proud above the humble; which divides mankind into two classes, tyrants and slaves; which says to the man in chains, stay there; and to the oppressor, oppress on; it is a religion which may be professed and enjoyed by all the robbers and enslavers of mankind; it makes God a respecter of persons, denies his fatherhood of the race, and tramples in the dust the great truth of the brotherhood of man. All this we affirm to be true of the popular church, and the popular worship of our land and nation-a religion, a church, and a worship which, on the authority of inspired wisdom, we pronounce to be an abomination in the sight of God. In the language of Isaiah, the American church might be well addressed, “Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me: the new moons and Sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting. Your new moons, and your appointed feasts my soul hateth. They are a trouble to me; I am weary to bear them; and when ye spread forth your hands I will hide mine eyes from you. Yea’ when ye make many prayers, I will not hear. Your hands are full of blood; cease to do evil, learn to do well; seek judgment; relieve the oppressed; judge for the fatherless; plead for the widow.”

...The sin of which it is guilty is one of omission as well as of commission. Albert Barnes but uttered what the common sense of every man at all observant of the actual state of the case will receive as truth, when he declared that “There is no power out of the church that could sustain slavery an hour, if it were not sustained in it.”

Let the religious press, the pulpit, the Sunday School, the conference meeting, the great ecclesiastical, missionary, Bible and tract associations of the land array their immense powers against slavery, and slave-holding; and the whole system of crime and blood would be scattered to the winds, and that they do not do this involves them in the most awful responsibility of which the mind can conceive.

In prosecuting the anti-slavery enterprise, we have been asked to spare the church, to spare the ministry; but how, we ask, could such a thing be done? We are met on the threshold of our efforts for the redemption of the slave, by the church and ministry of the country, in battle arrayed against us; and we are compelled to fight or flee. From what quarter, I beg to know, has proceeded a fire so deadly upon our ranks, during the last two years, as from the Northern pulpit? As the champions of oppressors, the chosen men of American theology have appeared-men honored for their so-called piety, and their real learning... [G]reat religious lights of the land have, in utter denial of the authority of Him by whom they professed to be called to the ministry, deliberately taught us, against the example of the Hebrews, and against the remonstrance of the Apostles, that we ought to obey man’s law before the law of God.2

My spirit wearies of such blasphemy; and how such men can be supported, as the “standing types and representatives of Jesus Christ,” is a mystery which I leave others to penetrate. In speaking of the American church, however, let it be distinctly understood that I mean the great mass of the religious organizations of our land. There are exceptions, and I thank God that there are....

...[T]he anti-slavery movement in this country will cease to be an anti-church movement, when the church of this country shall assume a favorable instead of a hostile position towards that movement.

The whole speech is long, covers many more points than this one, and is a wonderful piece of argument.

+ + +

Now, the inspiration.

I am preparing to teach 19th-century American History again this fall with a crop of late-elementary school kids, and Frederick Douglass is one of the personages whose biography we'll highlight; this piece makes me wish it were easier to teach 19th-century American rhetoric directly to kids under eleven or so.

In my vision for homeschool high school, I have generally assumed that a "survey of American history" course would be a necessary evil -- you know, pack the entire thing into one school year, anchored by a text that necessarily runs broad but not deep. I thought the best I could hope for would be to find a really well-written text (and that not necessarily a text made for schools).

I wonder now if, especially given the way I taught elementary school history, if I couldn't put together a sufficiently informative U. S. History course based primarily on pieces of rhetoric. I think you would still have to have the history spine to hold it together, provide a time-sequence, and give context, but perhaps I would not have to work so hard to find a wonderful "main text" if the intellect and imagination were fed by primary sources -- not meta speech, but speeches. And pamphlets, and laws, and opinion-pieces, and court opinions, even advertisements.

I suspect I would have to cut back a bit on other literary analysis in order to fit it in -- or conversely, I could make that the same year that "literature and writing" focuses on persuasion, analysis, satire, and the like -- er, rhetoric, I suppose -- so that History and Literature/Language Arts dovetail.

Thoughts?

Our own, and not our own.

Last week, the 13-year-old whom I co-teach two days a week, the daughter of my good friend M., did not come to my house with her younger sister to learn Latin and History with me, or English with my other friend H. She was off all day "shadowing" a ninth-grader at a high school near her home, a well-regarded "classical academy," because she and her family are trying to discern whether high school for her, instead of homeschool, is the best choice for their family next fall. So I gave a quiz in Latin (so she wouldn't miss anything), and her "classmates" (H.'s sixth-grade son and mine) worked on history by themselves -- an ordinary sort of lesson, I saved the art project for the next time -- and we thought about her all day while we were serving lunch and later making tea.

Yesterday, we asked her how it went. "It was really fun," she told me. "The girl I was with was one of those really fun, bubbly types. She had a weird schedule. We sat with her friend at lunch, and the friend had been homeschooled. Pottery class was fun -- I made an ear. I went to an astronomy class, and that was really interesting."

M. told me: "She really liked it. It's only four miles away from the house, too -- she could ride her bike to school."

H. told me with no little pride: "They were studying the Iliad in English class, and she got to participate in the discussion." I found a brochure in their kitchen she had brought home: "Why Study Latin?" explaining all the benefits to logical thinking, future language study, and vocabulary building. I wondered how I -- I mean she -- would do when she took a placement test before beginning school.

If she takes the placement test, I mean. "She isn't in yet. But she probably will, because they have a lot of attrition and turnover between eighth and ninth grade. And of course it isn't decided yet."

There is so much to think about here.

First, the inevitable: Can our kids really be this old? When I met this girl she was barely walking, toddling around with a piece of cake that fell off her plate and that she subsequently trod upon. I watched her learn to talk. She was the little girl whom I looked to to learn what I, the mother of a firstborn a bit younger than she, had in store for me in a year or so. It was bad enough when she turned thirteen last year, but can she really be getting ready for high school work? I guess I had better start getting our family ready too.

Next: if she goes to school next year, I will miss her so much! You might think that it would be more work to teach three than to teach two, but it really is not so. She is so delightful and adds so much to the discussions we have. The kids do a lot of teaching each other, of course, and it warms my heart to see someone so serious about printing labels on her maps clearly and legibly, about making the sketches and diagrams so detailed and beautifully colored. She loves writing verse that doesn't just tell the story, but that sounds elegant to the ear and has accurate meter. She loves composing sentences. And I truly enjoy working with her -- it is a real motivation to create a good lesson, for a young woman who will be eager to do the work and learn from it. I had been planning to teach the kids proof-based geometry when they had all finished enough algebra -- I just know she would love it, all those constructions and careful logical steps, and I was more excited about teaching her and sharing that (admittedly really geeky) passion I have for the subject than I was about teaching anybody else.

But: Whatever is best for her, well, I want that too. I will be so sad to see her leave our little school group. ("She'll come back around three in the afternoon," H. said to me hopefully this morning. "The boys won't be done with their work yet. Maybe she'll want us to tutor her.")

Still, the school exists for the child, not the child for the school. We don't send our children into the schools of any kind to spend hours per day just so they can improve the general environment. We send them to school to learn and grow and to gather, not to spend themselves for someone else's benefit. I know this. Most homeschoolers do. We are familiar with the accusation leveled at us that we, the involved parents, are selfishly keeping our children to ourselves instead of sending then away to strengthen the peer group at the neighborhood public school, instead of sending them out to float a foundering diocesan school system, instead of employing them to prop up the fragile charter-school movement. And of course we hope that the public school system will be stronger, that the diocesan schools will thrive, that the charter-school movement will flourish, because everyone is better off when there are plenty of good choices.

But every family's first responsibility is to its own health, safety, and growth. That is the whole purpose of being in families: to know and be known, to grow and to thrive, protected and cared for as someone's "own." Communities, extended families, even "chosen" extended families like our little tribe, all exist to support those little cores of "own-ness," not to supplant it.

So I want what is best for this young lady who is not mine, even if I have to do some work, letting go and standing back, learning to watch. As with so many other things, she is still teaching me what I have to look forward to.

Perceived deficits in the homeschool.

There are some good conversations going on in the comments on the recent post about the "one-room" schooling techniques and in the post about deficits in the homeschool.

I want to talk a little bit about perceived deficits in the homeschool.

What are you comparing your homeschool to, anyway?

If you think you are comparing it to an institutional school, do you have a realistic idea of what goes on in your average institutional school?  Sure, many high school students have access to excellent teachers and a great peer group, but even in the good schools there are often mediocre teachers and bad classes.  I went to a pretty good high school, and I encountered some really excellent teachers there -- my French teacher was absolutely top-of-the-line, my English literature teacher was memorable and engaging, my chemistry teacher could have taught Bill Nye how not to bore people.  I learned a lot in those classes.  But I also had some really bad teachers -- substandard ones, or mean ones, or incompetent ones, or lazy ones, or possibly-mentally-ill ones -- whose classes were a waste of time or worse.  A lot of it is hit-or-miss.  Few schools of any kind excel at everything.

Is the problem that you cannot give enough one-on-one time to each student?  How much one-on-one time do you think students get in an institutional school?  It is not the equivalent of a full-time tutor every day of the week.  

Certainly there are efficiencies in an institutional school that a large-family homeschool cannot match.  When one teacher teaches all the English classes and the curriculum is always the same, he just does not have to spend as much time on preparing and planning as we parents do when we are designing our curriculum and schedule to fit a family which forms a new configuration basically every year.   When there is a fully stocked chemistry lab available all the time, laboratory prep time is minimized.  It's easy to put together group learning experiences, like discussing literature or putting on plays or holding debates or setting up games, when there are many other students at the same level.  

But there are different kinds of institutional schools with different strengths -- set up purposely! -- and that's often something we celebrate.  Magnet schools!  There's a performing-arts K-8 public school up the street from me, and within close walking distance is a small public high school specially organized for students who speak Spanish in their homes.  There are language immersion schools and schools designed as interventions for students at risk of dropping out.  There are vocational schools which specialize in turning out students who are already prepared to enter the skilled-labor workforce at age eighteen.  And yes, there are college-preparatory schools.   They all serve different purposes, promise a different educational experience, and turn out young people who are prepared for life in different ways.  Even within those broad categories there are wide variations in style.

And this is a good thing.   People don't typically complain that their child graduated from a college-prep program without also learning in school how to rebuild an engine (though maybe they ought to).  It's not the college placement rate, but the job placement rate and job performance, that we're interested in when we measure whether a vocational-technical high school program is adequately preparing its students.  

The homeschool, too, has its own essence, its own reason for being, its own niche in the educational ecosystem.

 The essence of homeschooling is not academic excellence (although homeschools can provide that).  The essence of homeschooling is not preparation for a job (although homeschools can provide that).  The essence of homeschooling is not "special" education for students with particular challenges that make institutional schools a poor fit or a toxic environment (although homeschools can provide that).  The essence of homeschooling is not that it can set its own schedule rather than being tied to external ones (although homeschools can provide that).  The essence of homeschooling is not its freedom from externally imposed ideological structures (although homeschools can provide that).

The essence of homeschooling is simply that it happens within the family.

That schooling happens as an outgrowth of family life and family work.  

That the young person is surrounded by people with whom he has meaningful and permanent relationships:  parents, siblings, perhaps grandparents and cousins, friends who are connected to him through a web of relationships between families rather than a single point.  

That the "curriculum" and schoolday is designed neither exactly to suit him as an individual with the perfect environment for his own personal success, nor to shove him along in a faceless crowd that on average receives an education adequate enough to keep trouble away... but for the best interests of the family as a whole, the innate natural grouping of the human organism, the grouping in which we can truly be known as human persons and in which we can learn the art of balancing needs and wants of the self and others.

That is the essence of homeschooling.  That is its specialty.  That is where it shines.

+ + +

H. said to me yesterday, "My standard answer, when someone asks me, 'So, how is the homeschooling going for you?' is "Great.  I love having my kids with me all day.'  It's true, and it's the reason I do it."  Even though H. is confident that she is providing a really excellent education to her three children, she said, it isn't the academic excellence that she chooses to emphasize.  Because that isn't the primary reason she does it.

I laughed and said, "I could never get away with saying that I love having my kids with me all day.   Especially if it had been one of those days.  You know I have no poker face."  But I went on:  "My standard answer doesn't have anything to do with academics either.  I mean, if they press me I say so, and sometimes I tell them  that I enjoy the work of planning the curriculum and things, which is true.  

"But most of the time I tell people, 'What I really love about homeschooling is that my children spend all day surrounded by their siblings, and that they have wonderful relationships with each other.'  Which is also true.

"Sometimes I get the response, 'Oh, my kids drive each other crazy if they have to spend ten minutes in the same room.'  But it isn't hard for people to understand that if their kids spent lots of time together, they would probably understand each other better.  Most people get that."

+ + +

Why do homeschoolers judge themselves so poorly, so often?  I really think it's because we are constantly  judging ourselves based on external standards, sometimes imaginary ones, and often ones in which the homeschooling paradigm doesn't make sense.  

We shouldn't judge ourselves against the standards of the urban vo-tech high school, or against the wonderful parish school, or the impressive classical charter school out in the suburbs, or the neighborhood public school.  

We definitely shouldn't judge our homeschools against the imaginary standard of an imaginary school that somehow provides the best of all those worlds:  immersion in a foreign language, and valuable real-world hands-on job skills, and a broad liberal-arts education, and time to go deep into the subjects that are most loved, and an opportunity to learn to play a musical instrument, and connections with other young people who live in the same neighborhood, and education centered within the family's own system of values and philosophies, and preparation for the best colleges, all at once.  

Nor should we judge our homeschools against the imaginary standard made up of all the best things we read on the blogs of other homeschools, and none of their drawbacks, because who wants to write at length about those?  (Face it, homeschoolbloggers, we like to brag about our good ideas, not our bad ones, unless we can do it while sounding really Witty and Gritty and Real.)  So, please, let's not fret because we are not able to keep nature notebooks from age four through eighteen, and have all of our children in Suzuki lessons, and have a working wood shop, and collect and use all the official Montessori-method practical-life learning materials, and read the entire Ambleside book lists to the children, and co-school twice a week with another family, and have a field trip three times a month to a local museum/theater/zoo, and operate a working family business wherein the children will learn the Real Meaning of Money, and send them all to the National Spelling Bee...  because nobody else is doing all that either.  We can pick one or two things and do them really well and create massively cool experiences out of them.  We can't do it with everything.

We are families.  Families!  As different as families can be.  

We need to set our own standards for ourselves, and meet those.

That's all.

Deficits in the homeschool.

Lacking time this morning, I just want to pull an exchange out of the comments from the Moving the furniture post, and try to continue the discussion here more visibly.  It reminded me of a conversation I had on FB with another one of my commenters/friends.

Tabitha:

I am homeschooling an 8th, 6th, 4th, 1st, and preschooler. Next year I'll add in the now 3yo as a preschooler. I'll still have a barely 1yo at that time, too.
I consider this a one room schoolhouse, for sure.

We're trying to make decisions for next year for high school for my oldest. The thought that keeps running through my head is that "There is a reason one room schoolhouses ended in 8th grade." I want to be able to make it work, and many families do. I'm just not sure I'm capable of adding high school into this mix.

Any of your amazing readers have any thoughts?

I wrote:

Well, my plan for high school has been to try to get my kids as independent as possible before they get there! I figured that we would be spending a pretty big chunk of eighth grade working together -- the eighth-grader and I and my husband that is -- to decide what needs to be in the curriculum, which textbooks and other materials to use, and how we're going to put together his portfolio or whatever it takes for applying to whatever postsecondary institution he winds up being headed for.

 
I haven't ruled out enrolling any of the kids in a traditional or nontraditional high school, if that is what it takes, to be honest. We are fortunate to live in an area where there are many schooling options, even à la carte coursework at a small independent Catholic academy centered around our parish.

But we are also enjoying the benefits of co-schooling with other families, which has really opened up a depth of learning that I didn't think was possible to organize on my own, because we (the parents) have been able to specialize in areas of personal interest to us. But we're still maintaining the cozy familiarity of being among people who care about our kids and really know them.

 
I guess what I'm getting at, with all that, is that the high school student ought to be taking on a lot of the responsibility for his own learning. He's got to. He needs to have the kind of self-discipline that most people don't have to show until they are a freshman in college, when Mama isn't around to make him do his homework anymore.

I may be around, but I'm busy with younger kids, you know?

Tabitha again:

 ...My oldest 2 are already very independent.

I thought my high school plan was going to work. 8th grade has shown me all the deficits, though, and I don't know if I can overcome them. She needs some one on one time and it's hard to make that consistently happen.

I'm starting to see school through 8th grade as more general and high school as more specialized. I don't feel like I can do both justice. I've long envied your co-schooling set up. You are very blessed!

Me again:

"I'm starting to see school through 8th grade as more general and high school as more specialized."

My theory: yes and no. You have to be somewhat specialized by that time, because there simply isn't time in the day to do everything, and so your student is going to choose to study some things and not others (or be constrained to do so in order to meet requirements she may meet later).

But you can still be aiming for a strong liberal arts education, which is by definition well rounded and broad, with deeper "dips" here and there into areas of special interest to give a sort of taste of specialization. There is time for specialization in college or on the job.

The proper place of high school is to develop the child's mind into the adult one, and to fine-tune the skills of self-teaching, the "lost tools of learning" that Dorothy Sayers wrote about in her famous essay. The subjects are just the material on which the mind cuts its teeth.

Every school (home or institutional) has inherent deficits, and you could look at the ones in your own home school as teaching tools for learning how to learn -- because identifying and remedying deficits in the resources available to you is a basic tool for self-teaching. I would say, bring the 8th graders into the discussion of what seems to be missing from their environment, and work together on the challenge of restoring it.

 

There are a couple of different threads here worth picking up.  I wouldn't mind writing a co-schooling post discussing how it is that I (with my engineering degree) have so far "specialized" in teaching Latin and History to children, while my partner in co-schooling (with her English degree) has, maybe more predictably, "specialized" in literature and grammar, but also primary-school art appreciation, music theory, and handcrafts.  It all reminds me of the post that Amy Welborn wrote yesterday, "Gifts and Talents:  Overrated?"  To define my mission as "that for which I have been prepared" would be... rather limiting.   

But what do you think, readers, about the idea of embracing the "gaps" in the available educational resources as an opportunity to learn how to learn?  Bringing the young person into the design of his own homeschool, understanding that no school can specialize in everything, every school of every kind has inherent limitations, and the home school is no different?  

(Let's just take landscape as a starting point.  My homeschool is in the middle of the city, within easy reach of a huge library system, museums, theaters, historical sites, and parks... but I have a tiny postage stamp of a backyard, a neighborhood where people don't really send their kids outside to play, and not as much time as I would like to leave the city.  A rural child would get a lot more opportunities for gardening and in situ nature study, but maybe not so much museum and zoo time, or practice riding the city bus or walking to the library, or even my 11-year-old's beloved opportunity to study alone in a neighborhood coffee shop.)

Anyway, my thought is that as you are approaching eighth grade and the start of high school, it is time to have a frank discussion:  What does the young person want to learn?  What external requirements must be met?   What can the homeschool provide?  What are its strengths and weaknesses?  How can the strengths be channeled best, and the weaknesses compensated for?  What resources does the homeschool have which remain untapped?  Where can the parent and the young person work together to bring them to fruition?  

I know it's a bit cliché to recast a deficit as an opportunity -- but in the case of the homeschool it strikes me as really true.  We are preparing these young people for life as a human being in the world.  The world is full of barriers, and human beings are full of deficits.  Learning to come up against them, and either work our way around them or live, constrained, with acceptance and humility, is a good thing.

What grammar curriculum we use.

A reader just sent me a question:

What grammar book/series do you use? As you've noted on your blog about your dissatisfaction with pre-packaged science curriculum, grammar is my (and my husband's) "thing", so we're probably hoping for something that doesn't exist out there (grammar is so much my husband's "thing" that when he started teaching Latin at the local Catholic seminary, he wrote his own textbook because he wasn't satisfied with any out there).

But I long-distance respect what you do, and I just thought I'd ask. We register at Kolbe Academy, entirely for the paper-trail it affords us, and then proceed to apply their "principle of subsidiarity" to substitute just about every single thing in their curriculum--either for same-series-but-higher-level, or for completely-different-book. I'm not averse to supplementing, cobbling together, etc. 

My answer:

Oh goody, here is a question I can answer.

The big disclaimer here is that H., my English-major partner in co-schooling, has always managed the grammar. She teaches it from the (free! online!) K.I.S.S. Grammar books by Dr. Ed Vavra.

(Warning: the website looks like it was designed in 1995.)

You can download workbooks from the website and then print them. We printed them double-sided and took them to a copy shop to be spiralbound, and then worked with them as if they were conventional workbooks (which makes them not exactly free, I guess, by the time you pay for binding). The grade levels are not exact and have to do more with the reading level of the texts used for analysis

I personally find it hard to navigate the website. It is probably easiest to choose which workbook to use if you just download the workbooks as .doc files from the links on this page and then open them in Word and page through them.

I don't think H. even bothered to print out the answer key pages for the books, because she didn't need them, but they are there if you want them.

Check them out and let me know what you think. I really think the K.I.S.S. Grammar is a hidden gem.  We have been particularly pleased with how well it dovetails with teaching Latin.  I recognize that a traditional, analytical grammar curriculum doesn't please everyone, but if you're doing Latin or a similarly heavily inflected language, it really saves teaching time overall, I think.

 

UPDATE:  Here is a little extra information from H. who does the actual teaching, answering a mutual friend who was asking about using it for her 10-year-old son.

 ...It should work well to learn along with the kids. The first few levels of KISS are a level of grammar that any person literate in English will be familiar with, so the learning part will be to learn the marking procedures and vocabulary if that is rusty. Once you get the hang of the marking, it should be smooth sailing. Either review the provided answer key before he does the sheet or complete the exercise yourself and use that as the answer key. ( I cheat and don't often use the answer key because of unnecessary grammar nerdiness). 

In the first level, he'll only be explaining the basic 'skeleton' of the sentence: subject, verb, and the broad class called complements which includes direct and indirect objects, predicate adjectives and predicate nouns. KISS adds to the level of analysis fairly slowly. The kids get to watch themselves being able to explain more and more of the words in the exercise as they move through the program. [Our kids, age 12 and 11] have been working through it for three years. When they began they explained only two words in each sentence. Now they have gotten to the point that they can explain all the words in most sentences, even ones written by people like Jules Verne and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.

KISS doesn't spend a lot of time on explaining analysis-- it spends most of its time on making them perform the analysis, which is why I love it. 

The material covered with the program is found in the links at the bottom of the "workbooks" page that are called the Master Collection of Exercises. The material is divided into six levels, which are subdivided into concepts.

• Level One covers basic grammar, like subject/verb, prepositional phrases, adjectives and adverbs, pronouns, complements to the verb, compounding, and punctuation.
• Level Two helps the kids through problems they may have encountered when applying the concepts in Level One. It introduces concepts like understood subjects, embedded prepositional phrases, phrasal verbs, and infinitives.
• Level Three is primarily concerned with main and subordinate clauses in all their variations, and the function of subordinating conjunctions. 
• Level Four covers gerunds and infinitives (in all their grammatical functions as single words, and also when they function as ellipsed or reduced clauses in the conditional or subjunctive)
• Level Five practices everything they have previously learned and teaches the noun absolute as an extension of appositives.
• Level Six allows for integrating their grammar practice into their wider reading, writing,and literature studies.

The grade 2 workbook covers levels 1 and 2. The grade 3 workbook also covers levels 1 and 2 plus a few constructions from other levels. The grade 6 workbook covers levels 1-4.

The main difference between the grade levels is the type of text they are given to analyze. A typical grade 2 text is taken from Beatrix Potter, Thornton Burgess, etc. A typical grade 6 text may be from Howard Pyle, Longfellow, Frances Hodgson Burnett, or Robert Louis Stevenson.

The main thing to remember is that if you start with the grade 3 workbook, you *won't* repeat level 1 or level 2 when you move on to the grade 4, 5,or 6 workbook. You will skip the pages of that workbook that introduce level 1 and 2 concepts. You'll start at the level 3 exercises unless you think he needs review of the last concepts studied. They should never quit marking the things they've already learned about as they learn new things, so practice of older concepts is built-in.

...There's no particular reason to start [a 10-year-old] in [the 4th grade level] if his comprehension and vocabulary are advanced. I bet you could start with the 6th grade book. Here is the first question of the first exercise from four different grades:

Grade 2:

 1. The three little rabbits lived in the woods.

Grade 3:

1. Grethel shared her bread with Hansel.

Grade 4:

1. A King and Queen were perfectly happy.

Grade 6:

1. Her appetite grew amazingly.

So, not much difference there.

However, by the eleventh lesson in the sixth grade book the selections are more like this one:

Perseus wondered at that strange cloud, for there was no other cloud all round the sky; and he trembled as it touched the cliff below. And as it touched, it broke, and parted, and within it appeared Pallas Athene, as he had seen her at Samos in his dream, and beside her a young man more light-limbed than the stag, whose eyes were like sparks of fire. By his side was a scimitar of diamond, all of one clear precious stone, and on his feet were golden sandals, from the heels of which grew living wings.

The vast majority of the texts are taken from classics, and I can't think of objectionable material off hand in the sixth grade lessons outside of fairy tale violence like "Bluebeard", etc. I'm using a mix of 6th, 8th, and 9th grade lessons with the 11, 12, and 14 yr olds I'm teaching. Last year they all used the 3rd grade workbook, and they've had no trouble jumping from that to the higher grades material.

So there you go.

Spanish from Latin - more information.

Hannah's Google-fu proved worthier than mine this week:  when she typed search terms into the box looking for useful information to support our current project of building Spanish onto Latin, she found this in-depth article:  "Spanish for Speakers of Latin."  The author (who is not the site owner) appears to be a hobbyist rather than a professional linguist.   Probably for this reason, the article is concise and user-friendly (at least for me, a would-be language nerd).

(Because, really, I'm a would-be everything nerd who has not quite enough time on her hands.)

So the paper begins like this:

This page is intended to introduce an English speaker familiar with Latin and learning Spanish to the correspondences and differences between the two languages and the skills necessary to apply knowledge of Latin in studying Spanish.

 

1. The Historical Background
2. Orthography & Pronunciation
3. Patterns of Phonetic Transformation
4. Grammatical Development
5. Essential Derivatives
6. Portuguese

 

I am by no means an expert on the matter. I am not even fluent in Spanish. This is just my own set of observations, which may not be wholly accurate.

Come on -- doesn't that just make you want to keep going?  It does me!  

Here's a bite from each section:

Historical background:

[lots of stuff preceding it]

This is how Spanish has come to establish itself today. By a series of lucky coincidences, it has become more and more like English. First, note that the Goths, Franks, Saxons, and Vikings all spoke related Germanic languages. When these various tribes began to learn Latin, they naturally preferred ways of saying things that were closest to what they already knew. When the English were conquered by the Normans (Vikings from Normandy who spoke Old French), they subsequently replaced over nine tenths of their language with Norman French, and later imported a slew of words directly from Latin. Thus both Spanish and English derive from a base of Germanic language speakers learning dialects of vulgar Latin from adjacent regions. The upshot is that the feel of Spanish, including the structure, the vocabulary, and the very way of looking at things, is very much like English, much more so than Latin is, and far more so than, say, Sanskrit. But because Spanish is directly derived from Latin, whereas English has had Latin grafted on somewhat gradually and haphazardly, a knowledge of the original Latin still contributes a great deal more to understanding Spanish and is very helpful for dealing with both languages.

Orthography and Pronunciation has subsections on accents, vowels, and consonants.  Here is a bit from the vowel section:

The vowels of Spanish are the same as in Latin, except that all distinction of quantity is lost, and y is treated as identical to i. They are pronounced like the Latin long vowels but are generally held for only a very short time. This feature of the language allows Spanish speakers to comfortably speak at nearly twice the rate of English. English speakers should particularly be aware that there is no y sound at the end of the vowels e and i, nor a w sound at the end of o and u.

e.g.: lego as Latin lego (not as leygow)

Diphthongs are basically as in Latin, but ae and oe are written ai and oi, with the former no longer forming a diphthong.

e.g. traer as tra-ér, two syllables

e.g. traigo, as trai-go, two syllables

The letter u, when following g or q and preceding e or i, is silent, unless it has a dieresis (¨). This is the only silent vowel in Spanish. Otherwise u follows the same rules that apply in Latin, as for becoming a w sound. Note that instead of writing qü, Spanish simply changes to cu. Therefore remember that unlike Latin, qu always equals k.

The Patterns of Phonetic Transformation section includes vowel shifts, consonant shifts, initial letters, final letters.  For example:

A word beginning with a voiceless consonant followed by l, i.e., cl, fl, or pl, would usually change to begin with ll (likewise in Portuguese to ch and in Italian to chi, fi, and pi). This seems to be the origin of nearly all Spanish words beginning with ll. But in Latin, these combinations did not exist within a word, except in compounds; ll there usually derives from palatized ll within a Latin word.

e.g.: clamare → llamar

e.g.: flamma → llama

e.g.: planum → llano

e.g.: illa → ella

Grammatical Development covers a number of topics.  I thought the development of the Spanish adverb ending -mente was particularly cool, especially since it parallels the development of the English adverb ending -wise.

Vulgar Latin developed a new, simple way to form adverbs from adjectives. It was to use the adjective (in the ablative feminine singular, of course) to modify mente, in the ablative, to form the phrase with — mind, or rather with — manner. This is paralelled in English with the suffix -wise, as in likewise, clockwise. In Spanish, the -mente forms a suffix on the adjective.

e.g.: timida mente → tímidamente, fearfully (originally, with fearful mind)

e.g.: frecuenti mente → frecuentemente, frequently

Essential Derivatives tells you, among other things, how to spot a non-Latin word:

First it should be pointed out that about a fifth of all Spanish words were not derived from Latin. Most of these came from Gothic and Arabic (see the history above), though of course many others are from Basque (a peculiar little non-Indo-European language that somehow survived in a little pocket of the Pyrenees), French, English, etc.

The fortunate thing about Gothic words is that they tend to have old or everyday English cognates.

e.g.: norte = north

e.g.: guerra = war

And Arabic words tend to bear the distinctive al- prefix (Arabic for the), sometimes assimilated.

e.g.: al-manākh → almanaque

e.g.: al-roz → arroz

...and provides an extremely useful list of corresponding particles:

ille → el	ad → a	altero → otro	ad horam → ahora
illa → (el)la	de → de	nos alteros → nosotros	deunde → donde
illos → (el)los	in → en	vostra mercede → usted	inter → entre
uno → un(o)	cum → con	multo → mucho	magis → más
una → una	sine → sin	pauco → poco	minus → menos
sic → sí	per → por	tanto → tanto	tam → tan
ad sic → así	pro → para	bene → bien	tam bene → también
non → no	super → sobre	illic → allí	tam paucum → tampoco
si → si	quem → quien	jam → ya	toto → todo
et → e → y	aliquem → alguién	heri → ayer	tota via → todavía
aut → ot → o	quid → que	hodie → hoy	post → (des)pues
nec → ni	quando → cuando	semper → siempre	vice → vez
quam → que	quanto → cuanto	numquam → nuncuan → nunca	facit → hace
qui → que	qualis → cual	quomodo → quomo → como

And finally a word of encouragement: 

Once Spanish and Latin are learnt, it is no great feat to pick up at least a reading knowledge of Portuguese...

After reading through all that, I think I believe him!

This article pretty much gives me all I needed to make my "learn a little Spanish based on your Latin" project into a full-on introduction to practical linguistics.  What isn't included here, can be tracked down based on what is included here.  I'm feeling more and more optimistic about this actually working.

 

Spanish from Latin, update.

So I decided to move forward with my idea and experiment with building on Latin to learn about Spanish.  Or perhaps you could say I am trying to explore Latin by looking at how it appears in the Spanish language.  We're not really sure which it will be.

The first thing we have to talk about is basic pronunciation.  We have to know, at least in theory, what the Spanish words should sound like, or else we will reinforce the wrong pronunciation even when we talk about them.  

By "what they should sound like" I mean at the most basic level.  Accent on the correct syllable; a recognizably appropriate consonant sound (e.g., pronouncing the letter "z"  as /s/ and not as /z/); vowels approximately right.   I'm not talking about accent, just avoiding mispronunciation.

So I made a little chart of Latin words and Spanish words that are their cognates and that demonstrate the differences and some of the similarities between ecclesiastical Latin and Spanish pronunciation rules.  For example: 

• In Latin gens (tribe), the g is pronounced like English /j/.  In Spanish la gente (race, nation), it's pronounced with a throaty /h/.
• In Latin hora (hour), the h is pronounced as in English.  In Spanish la hora, it's silent.
• In Latin signum (sign), the gn is pronounced as in English "lasagna."  In Spanish el signo, the g sound and n sound are distinct.
• Vowels are similar: A: pater/el padre (father), E: cena/la cena (dinner), I: vita/vida (life), O: oculus/el ojo (eye), U: mundus/el mundo (world) and aqua/agua (water).

So I figured I would work my way down the chart with the kids.  The emphasis is on similarities and differences between ecclesiastical Latin and Spanish.  I thought maybe Hannah, who knows more about linguistics than I, could talk to the kids a little bit about consonant shift and things -- why filius became el hijo, why pax became la paz.

But I am taking seriously the need to hear a native Spanish speaker pronounce the words, so I went looking for an online audio dictionary.  I think I will be pleased with this one:  SpanishDict.com .  It has audio pronunciations for most every word I tried, and short video examples for quite a lot of words.  The interface should be easy for the tween/teens to manage.

One useful tip:  For most nouns, you can get it to give you audio with the definite article if you type in the English and ask it to translate (e.g. if you type in "rey" it will just give you an audio file that pronounces "rey," but if you type in "king" it will give you an audio file that pronounces "el rey."  

I think we'll start with just a few words at a time -- maybe some with "b" and "v" in them, just so that we attack a tricky phoneme right away.  My plan is to  recite the list of cognates in Latin first, and then listen to the recordings for each equivalent (or closely related) Spanish word, and then recite the Spanish words.  So we'll start like this for b's and v's:

bonus, ambulare, laborare, vox, convocare, novem;

(listen) bueno, (listen) ambulante, (listen) laborar, (listen) la voz, (listen) convocar, (listen) nuevo.

(Yes, I know that ambulare is a verb meaning "to walk" and ambulante is an adjective meaning "mobile, traveling."  Ambulare was the only word having an "m-b" combination in the kids' Latin lexicon and ambulante is the closest Spanish cognate.)

I'm going to incorporate these lists into our twice-weekly Latin oral drill sessions to begin.

A language-learning idea.

So I was sitting with Melissa and we were commiserating about how to teach our children Spanish -- a language that none of us took in high school or college.  

"The problem is basically that I don't think I can teach myself Spanish adequately," I summed up.  "With Latin, there's no need to worry about slang or idiom or accent or conversation.  It's all on paper.  I've always been confident I could teach myself Latin, and because of that I've always been confident I could help the kids learn it.  And I have taught myself Latin, and I think I'm doing a pretty good job with the kids.  But I can't teach myself Spanish.  Or at least I'm not confident that I could do it well enough to pass it on."

All the available Spanish curricula start with basic words and conversation skills.  The equivalent of what I learned in beginning French:  "Je vais au cinéma avec mes amis."  But the conversational approach is exactly what I feel I can't do.  I think people should learn to speak a language from a native speaker, or at least an expert speaker.  

Now, Latin is different.  Nobody is even pretending that we are trying to learn to speak Latin.  We are learning to read it and translate it and write it.  That's what you do with Latin (and the writing is optional; several older Latin texts that I found in the library contained zero emphasis on turning English into Latin, apparently because teachers didn't think you'd ever want to express yourself in Latin; they must not have listened to any kids, who love to express themselves as many ways as possible).  All this requires is for me to stay a few steps ahead of the kids, which is not only doable but fun.  And so it was not hard to find a Latin curriculum that I could use to teach myself and teach the kids.

"Maybe," I said hesitatingly, "though, maybe we could just accept that we cannot really teach how to speak Spanish.  What if," I went on, gaining momentum as I considered it, "what if we decided to teach writing and reading Spanish, and didn't bother with speaking and listening comprehension except, you know, just what was necessary to discuss the words we were learning?"

Melissa nodded.  "That would be better than nothing," she said, "and it could prepare them for taking a real Spanish course later on."

"I guess I would want to teach it just as we taught them Latin," I mused, "very grammar-based.  But there definitely aren't any curricula for Spanish that follow the same pattern.  That one DVD-based course* was okay, it started with grammar right at the beginning; but it was aimed at much younger children."

As we talked, though, the germ of an idea began to form between the two of us.  And at one point, I got out my tablet and started taking notes, so I wouldn't forget anything.  Because I realized it was a good idea.

The Memoria Press Latin programs that we are using -- Prima Latina, Latina Christiana, and First Form Latin -- all have a component that examines Latin-derived words in the English language.  It has seemed like a bit of a waste of time, sort of an afterthought, and we really haven't used it much at all.  But what if instead of learning about Latin-derived words in English, we looked at Latin-derived words in Spanish?  What if we studied Spanish as a specimen of late Latin -- very late Latin?  What if learning Spanish became an extension of our Latin study?

All the beginner's Spanish programs start from scratch.  But we're not starting from scratch:  we're starting from a few years of Latin.   Why can't we build on what they know already?  After all -- a great deal of the effort that English speakers have to make, when they learn their first Romance language -- we've already been through that.  Verbs are conjugated.  Nouns have gender.  Adjectives can come after nouns.  Adjectives agree with nouns.  And we've already talked about tense, and principal parts, and negation and interrogation... a lot of concepts that take up time grasping for the first time have already been grasped.  They just need to know how to do in Spanish what they already know to do in Latin.

We could learn the Spanish equivalents of the Latin words we have already learned, and notice the ones which are cognates and the ones which are not.  We could look at the differences in pronunciation of the different letters (and talk about language-development phenomena like consonant shifts and loss of inflection).  

 Just as we now recite amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant, we could recite amo, amas, ama, amamos, amáis, aman (or maybe it would be amamos, aman, aman -- we want Latin American Spanish, not Castilian.  Those of you who took high school Spanish with an emphasis on American Spanish, did you bother with vosotros?).  

Spanish nouns don't decline, but we could introduce Spanish prepositions in the context of the Latin cases that encompass their meanings.

And all that time, we could try to make up for our lack of emphasis on speaking and listening by using Spanish-language music, cinema, TV, radio, in our homes.  Maybe I'll splurge and get Rosetta Stone at some point.

As for vocabulary, we could start with the same lexicon that we use in Latin -- not colors and days of the week and numbers, but charioteer and soldier and commander  and hill  and river and eternal  and heaven and lamb and law and slave and ally and message and envoy -- that mishmash of military and ecclesiastical terms that you learn when you're aiming to read, not a menu or a bus schedule, but the Pater Noster and the Gallic Wars.

And we could use those words and find out how to make Spanish sentences as well as Latin ones.

But later, when we already have some grammar learned, we could use a "vocabulary-builder" program to begin learning those basic Spanish words.  Maybe it will all go faster when we know from the beginning how to put the words into sentences.

And eventually, perhaps we will be able to dispatch our charioteers to the cinema with their friends -- in Latin and Spanish.

______________________

*I have found one Spanish curriculum that is grammar-intensive despite being aimed at elementary school kids.  That is Spanish for Children sold by Classical Academic Press.  Its methodology is very close to Memoria Press's Latin.