Bookworm – rigorous CM education

I’m kind of old and my earlier years homeschooling predate a lot of what is on SCM.  I was an eager follower as soon as they started putting things up here  but had done quite a few things beforehand.  I started out doing a classical type education, which didn’t work for us.  It STARTS with the rigor and sometimes skips the heart, the habits, the inside.  I then ended up doing Ambleside Online for a few years and liked that but found doing different periods and different years with different kids very hard to keep track of.  THEN SCM got started.  As soon as they put up the basic, free plan, I reorganized what we did, keeping a lot of the AO books and things and putting them in the SCM “framework”  I’ve only used one of the guides here (it was very well done!) one year but we already had books and things and a pattern that was working for us, so we just continued doing this, benefitting all the while from the excellent materials here for so many good things–habits, scriptures, dictation, etc.  I wish this would all have been here when I had more “school” in front of me!  I very much like SCM’s very good and practical beginning and I fully understand this good approach to a practical way for busy moms to do CM, but I do myself add in lots more Shakespeare and Plutarch and stuff like that.  Other than that, I’m happy to be a Karen and Sonya wanna-be.  🙂  

One thing that helped me was just to take a prayer time, sometimes periodically during the year but especially right after, to contemplate each child, what he had accomplished, what I thought he might be capable of, and where I needed to stretch him this coming year.  I wanted my sons to feel like they could DO what I put in front of them–but I also wanted them to know that I knew they could accomplish a LOT and it was time to gently put some more effort in here or there.  CRITICALLY IMPORTANT with older kids, especially older boys—at some point, bring THEM into this process!!!!!  They need to be on board, as well.  They know when they aren’t putting in full effort; they know there is a gap between what they WANT to be able to do and what they are doing.  Dh and I tried to have a mini-retreat with each teen boy. Whereupon we usually decided they needed to put a lot more effort into writing!  LOL  I am fortunate in that I rarely had to nudge much in math or science; they came curious and ready in those areas.  Lit and writing were their “Do we have to do this???” things.  

Then I would just watch.  When they turned something in to me in record time, when they were clearly not working hard, I would start considering if it was a good time to up the difficulty a bit in some way.  Perhaps move a little faster in math, or challenge them to come up with a “why or how” in science, or give them a stretch-y narration “mission” for a reading.  Now, one doesn’t want to do this with all subjects all at once.  That feels to the child like being “piled on”.  And I don’t like to think of it as poking or prodding–rather as coming alongside, putting an arm around the child, and encouraging a little faster pace or more challenging path.  

I want to emphasize, and this is tough with some children, that you don’t want this to be just a top-down process in the later years, and you don’t want to discourage or depress a child in the earliest years.  Those early years are ALL ABOUT opening to joy and wonder and curiousity and building the basic skills they will need later.  And the later years need to be a team effort.  If your child does not share your vision, then this needs work.  Perhaps child and parents need to seek and pray and counsel together for a spell.  I found it very, very motivating for my sons to think about what they might like to DO.  They don’t have to pick a career or a major–just consider a possible future path.  Spend time with adults doing different things.  Get a vision for adult life.  THEN take it down to “Well, then, how are you going to get there?”  IMO, this is where a lot of the drive for the student to do hard things comes from.n  I love a story about John Adams.  He was objecting to the difficult course of Latin in his local Latin school.  He decided he’d rather be a farmer and skip Latin.  So his dad essentially said “OK, then, farm” and put him right to work.  In a time, Adams decided this wasn’t really what he wanted after all (very honorable work, but it wasn’t the work God had prepared for him) and he went back to school–with renewed motivation OF HIS OWN to do well.  And became a powerful and influential man at a critical time.  Love this story!!!!   This is NOT a pass for girls.  I believe in maximum education for girls, as well–they will at least be mothering their own children, and as we know who were public schooled—-every single bit is as valuable as gold when we are teaching!!!!!  A girl who really doesn’t want to do biology needs to picture herself as a mom of a son who wants to be a doctor.  A boy needs to decide whether he wants manual labor, a trade, or a profession and re-evaluate his education accordingly.  Then, at times, you may find your student pushing YOU.  

I also feel it is important that Christians not neglect intellectual rigor.  Yes, the very MOST important thing is conversion to a Christian life.  We can help that, but not MAKE it.  That does deserve our very best efforts.  But there is no reason then to reject or fear or shy away from intellectual knowledge, academic work.  If it’s true, it’s of God.  If it’s of God, it is fair game for a Christian to study and learn.  In fact, it is our duty, I think, to do our very, very best while here to hone our minds, so that God will have our best effort to use.  God CAN and daily DOES use the weak and simple to accomplish His purposes–but if we know we want to be his intruments already, then we should be polishing away.  🙂  

thank you for starting this thread! last night i was thinking about pm’ing bookworm to ask the same sort of questions!  now i can take notes and grill her with the rest of y’all!

I’ll try to answer more later.  But Claire has done a bang-up job already.  I want to just point out–we all have to do our BEST.  If we do that how can we fail?  Thoughts of failing are from the enemy.  Do you know–my kids are afraid of water.  My 14yo still can’t swim.  Swimming is TERRIFIC.  But he picked up my fear.  If he learns that, someone else will have to do it, like with my older ones.  Claire has a point–they can tell when we are interested, involved, caring, even if we haven’t read it all and can’t remember it all.  And we can tell when they are sloughing and not engaging.  If they tell a fact wrong, and we don’t have an answer key 🙂 then we won’t know always.  But we can tell if they are paying attention.

Hello, ladies.  I’ve been following these two threads pretty closely too.  I, too appreciate the admonition and insight Bookworm and others have given.  I hope to follow this advice (I’ve marked these threads as favorites too) with my younger children coming up so that I can avoid some of the pitfalls I faced with my older children (namely not handling upper level science well) as a result of not giving them a CM quality education.  I’ll just share how it is playing out in our home, in case that may be a help to others sifting this all through…like I am.  Some years ours was closer to uncshooling, I’m afraid.  We didn’t manage to narrate much other than what came of it’s own accord, didn’t always have a good plan, didn’t always manage to work it when we did.  Just about the time I got a plan figured out, everything would change and throw me for a loop.  But, I still knew when they were sloughing off.

I would encourage all teaching mothers to consider carefully your own “shoulds”…or “oughts” within the framework of your present situation.  Those of us with several little ones in addition to high school kids do have a different set of “oughts”.  Mine, personally, are not the same as ALL of the ones expressed here.  These are very good, and when my little ones reach high school, I hope I can attain them.  But to try to do that now, would be a complete disaster.  Right  now, I must focus the lion’s share of my time and energy on training my little ones, and my older ones are not getting the level of academics they would if I had done the things recommended here.  However, my older ones have had many experiences that my younger ones, and many other children who have the privilege of a rigorous academic education do not.  They have had the responsibilty of caring for several younger siblings, milking 200+ goats and feeding the accompanying kids for a couple of years, putting up 100 acres of hay with me helping only to run them from one 30 acre farm to another to coordinate and move tractors and several pieces of equipment and keep them fueled, etc….all with Dad working full time and travelling a lot besides.  I know I am not alone in living under conditions like these for years on end, and it seems to be the path the Lord has led us.  We trust it is.  My older kids did not have the privilege to have a CM education in their early years (or the later ones really…we never quite got there), and while they obviously learned a lot from all this other “life”, their mom was also just hanging on to sanity by a thread.  So…end of story is, my older children did not get rigorous college prep science.  We compromised that.  If they choose a path that requires it, they may have to remediate.  But they are well-equipped to do that.  They did not even narrate regularly on all subjects.  But whatever we failed at, we did manage to teach them how to learn, and to work hard with their bodies, if not their minds to the extent they could have.  They learned to survive, if not thrive under exhausting and overwhelming conditions.  And, in the end, they scored incredibly high on their achievement tests, oldest who has done the ACT now, scored in the very highest range (32 out of 35 possible, if I remember right).  I have failed in many ways to be the mother and teacher I should have been, but I’m still fairly sane, I have another 18+ years to go with baby number 7 on the way, and I can’t beat myself up for a failure.  It won’t help anything.  I do hope to manage Apologia or something similar with my younger set by starting much earlier on science, and I hope I can do better at implementing CM ways early on so they will be better equipped to do hard things.  But I don’t know really whether that will be more effective than the farm…it may provide a different brand of what the farm provided at a time when we no longer have the farm to teach it.  Really, this is my hope.  But there is no way for many years ahead that I will be able to read even most of the things that my older kids will read.  If learning and teaching Physics ever makes it to my list of “oughts”, it won’t be for a very long time.  In the mean time, they can and will do it on their own if I have given them the tools.  Just don’t fail to teach them how to learn and how to work hard one way or another.  They’ll make it fine then.

I hope this makes sense…and offers added perspective with hope for those who started too late, like I did, and  operate under a set of circumstances that doesn’t allow for every aspect of the ideal education, to do your own personal best…and figure out your own personal set of “oughts” that the Lord will enable you to accomplish.

I am learning a lot from Tristan also, about how to manage with all these little ones, and begin to achieve the CM goals I’ve always wanted to, but not been equipped for.  She seems to have a gift for managing her home and school in very practical ways that facilitate a CM education very well.  This is where my reading “oughts” are right now.  Self-help to align my will and equip my mind, heart and body for this great work…these many “oughts” the Lord has laid on my heart and I am still ill-prepared for.  Best to all of you…and thank you ALL for contributing! 

Thank you all for your responses!  There are so many quotes here I could put on my wall, thank you. 

I, too, needed the encouragement to be diligent.  We’ve had a couple of “easy” years where I could have made better progress on science and many other things than I have.  And putting science on the back burner is exactly what got me to the place where we couldn’t handle Apologia when the time came.  We muddled our way through by choosing a different path…but I hope not to put us there again.  My middle child is still at risk with 4 little siblings to keep her and Mom busy.  But, she is making progress.  She’s had the advantage of getting an introduction to biology and chemistry with her older brother’s light version.  I hope she’ll be ready soon to tackle some hard things.  And I’m starting better with my little ones in the “habits of the good life”.