Lessons from books

I've learned more life lessons from novels than from real life. After all, my life has been rather boring and uneventful. Novels have far more interesting plots, more noble heroines, and satisfying outcomes. Plus, most of my personal reading hasn't developed beyond a sixth grade level, so character's and situations aren't very complex, and threads are easy to follow.

In my recent foray into homeschooling, I've been going to the library for every homeschooling book that I can get my hands on. I spend hours on the internet reading tidbits about homeschooling. I'm currently on a Charlotte Mason kick.

A few Charlotte Mason ideas reminded me of bits of books read long ago.

One Charlotte Mason idea that I like is the idea of short lessons: about fifteen minutes. How long is too long? How short is too short? I'm reminded of a bit from "These Happy Golden Years" by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Laura a fifteen year old schoolteacher. One of her students, Clarence, is older than her and has serious attitude problems. He is smart, but lazy. He keeps falling behind in his lessons, and Laura assigns him more and more pages in the History book to keep him with the rest of his class. He ends up not even pretending to learn the lesson. He feels no shame for not knowing the material when called upon. After talking to her mother, Laura finds a new strategy. She asks Clarence only questions that he can answer. Then she ignores how far behind he is and asks how many pages he thinks he can learn, and tells him to make it shorter if it is too much. The strategy works, and history lessons are no longer a mockery and eventually Clarence decides on his own to catch up to the rest of the class.

How short a lesson should be depends on the student. If a student can't manage the length of the lesson it is too long, regardless of how much work other students are doing.

I've also been reading up on reading and writing. So much of elementary reading and writing is about the mechanics of decoding and encoding the printed word: phonics, sight words, punctuation, capitalization, spelling, handwriting. However, the books and web sites that I've been reading have revealed to me that the true heart of reading is reading for comprehension. The true heart of writing is writing to communicate with a reader. Although the mechanics are important, they are best mastered separately from comprehension and communication. What makes for good reading comprehension isn't just decoding the words; it's having the background knowledge to understand what is going on and how the pieces relate. A good writer must not only know the mechanics of spelling and capitalization; a good writer must know about what he wants to write and must care about it. Fluent reading and good writing both require a wealth of background knowledge. As a teacher, part of my job is to help my child build her personal storehouse of background knowledge.

I'm reminded of a bit from "Heaven to Betsy" by Maud Hart Lovelace. High school freshman Betsy is a talented writer. She has a flair for putting words together, so she is chosen to represent her society in the end of the year essay contest. However, she doesn't do her research and all of her skill with words cannot compensate for that absence of knowledge.
"But unfortunately today she could not write entirely by the light of inspiration. Her essay was supposed to have a solid core of knowledge based on six weeks' study. Instead of going happily where her fancy led, she was obliged in every paragraph to conceal the absence of facts." (She looses the contest.)

In order to write well, a writer must understand the mechanics of writing, must have a command of words, and must have a knowledge of the subject matter.

I think that I'm doing fairly well teaching Sparkle the mechanics of language. She is making great progress in decoding words (I've added in Webster's Speller) and her spelling is coming along nicely. However, I'm currently not doing much to build that background knowledge. True, she's just in kindergarten, so I'm not feeling very anxious, but I want to keep it in mind. Mostly all I'm doing now is letting her explore life and checking out lots of books from the library. Her most recent find is a book of gross things. We found out that there is a medicinal use of maggots to eat rotten flesh off of patients with horrible bedsores. Yuck. I guess that is background knowledge.

Oh, but I am digressing. Well, I would be if I had any point. Mostly this post is a random brain dump. I guess I wanted to say that I think that reading is the most efficient way of obtaining a large store of "general background knowledge" and discussing what is read is the most efficient way of tucking that knowledge into the recesses of the brain. I need to do more of this.