This is only the second edition in this slimmer, more frequent version of my letters and already I’m well-north of two-thousand words. Indeed, if this introduction were the five-hundred words my ending is, the whole piece would be over three-thousand words. So much for slimmer!
Okay — no more. Let’s just jump in.
Welcome to my garden! (Constantly overgrowing with weeds.)
With Our Fathers
About a month ago now, I wrote about how our three-year-old was starting reading lessons. The reading lessons have stopped. She was having problem moving from seeing R-A-T and being able to say r[pause]a[pause]t to saying without pause rrrrraaaaat. As that’s what the lesson called for, and as I could see how she found it impossible to advance without that skill, I stopped the lessons. They were just making her cry, and without even the eventual compensatory joy of bursting through her blocks and allowing me to celebrate her. (Not that I didn’t celebrate her hard work, but you know as well as I that that is not the same.) In the end, she just would cry and cry and never get it.
It was no fun, and a recipe for hatred of reading besides. So I stopped.
Now, no one is worried that a three-year-old hasn’t learnt to read. No one is worried she isn’t learning to read even if she’s closing in on four. I don’t know when the exact proper time is when we must sit down and force the issue (or seek professional help, an ever more dicey position in this our contemporary culture), but it’s certainly on the far side of four. It’s on the far side of six. Probably on the far side of seven, and maybe even on the far side of eight.
Our three-year-old does not need to learn to read, but she does want to learn to read. So the failure with this lesson brings to mind some questions.
Is the curriculum at fault? It is possible (possible even if or maybe even because their tagline is “100 million children taught”) that this curriculum is just not very helpful. It’s needlessly confusing, either to her or to me. It confuses issues or rushes issues or jumps over questions about how to read which should be more fully explained and need an explanation before she can progress. Perhaps that’s it.
But I don’t think so. I really enjoy this method. Indeed, with the “tasks” my daughter understands — she enjoys the lessons. There is this ‘repeat fast and slow’ task, for example, where I say rrrrrrrraaaaaaat (that’s the slow bit), and she then repeats that slow bit before going (fast) “RAT!” It’s great fun, or at least she seems to think it is. Indeed, the only part of the lessons she does not seem to like is when I ask her to do the actual reading.
Is her resistance to instruction at fault? My wife and I were talking about this the other night. Our three-year-old does not like to struggle. Now, in fairness, most people don’t, and (as far as I can tell) all of those who do like to struggle only like it after teaching themselves to struggle through dislike. But our daughter hates it something unusual; she won’t even struggle to reach a goal she wants. Our younger daughter, for example, may get angry quickly as our elder does not, and so she may throw the toy she can’t figure out across the room in a snit fit, but she will then walk over to it again and sit down, plunking away endlessly until she figures it out. Our elder will try something for never much more than half a minute before she does something far worse than throw it across the room; she’ll walk away.
Now both girls are resistant to instruction. With the younger, when we try to help out she screams “no” and continues to try and figure it out on her own. But with the elder, she just won’t listen to us. By that I mean, she will stay where we are, she will even not speak or sing or play while we’re speaking, but she simply seems to be in her own world. And then, when we’re done speaking to her, she will go on with what she was doing, which, in this case, is usually walking away from a problem she does not know how to solve.
Not only is this behavior a bit more than a bit infuriating, it boggles the mind. She is normally an exceptionally well-behaved little girl. She is helpful, indeed eager to be helpful, and she is mindful of what we say. But when there’s something to ‘learn’, she won’t have it.
Is she just not old enough? I wonder if she’s too young to understand the concepts, or, perhaps more accurately, if we explain them in ways too complicated for her to comprehend. I try to think of when she is obliging and when she is resistant, and it seems to me that she’s obliging when she has a discreet task she understands how to do and is resistant when she has a more involved task. This means we should be breaking up her longer tasks into shorter sequences. Which is exactly what her lesson book seems designed to facilitate!
And this holds true even for tasks she knows how to do. For example, she knows how to pick up and she sometimes does with the request “Please pick up now.” But she also seems to want the moment-to-moment instruction we give her sister. When we’re getting the girls to pick up the toyroom before bed, the elder consistently asks us to give her a discreet task, like ‘Pick up Kitty and put him in the box. Okay, now take the wagon back to the hearth.’ &c. As I say, this is how we treat our younger daughter; our elder has been beyond it for a year at least.
We cannot dismiss the idea that the complexity of tasks may be overwhelming. We all know the feeling of staring at a tasks and asking ourselves ‘Where do I even start?’ The difference is that most of us have enough experience (or training?) to discover a way (if not exactly the best way) to start. My wife and I want to give our elder that experience, letting her try things on her own. It’s why we ask her to draw a house or a person, without explaining exactly how one might do that. Yet even though she’s both seen and even drawn houses and people before, she just... doesn’t. She’ll ask us to do it for her, but, if we refuse, she doesn’t even want to try. She just stands up and walks away to go play a safe, tidy game which she knows well.
It’s very perplexing. I feel like there must be something fairly obvious we’re missing, but I can’t figure out what it is.
Despite how aggressively in favor of homeschooling I am, this is one of those moments when there is value in the institutional memory of a school. If I were a teacher in a school, I could walk up to an older teacher and say, ‘Have you ever seen this?’ And, since that older teacher would have taught hundreds if not maybe thousands of children, she probably would have seen “this”.
And possibly it is just an age thing pure and simple. I keep balming my soul with memories. I remember how she went (seemingly overnight) from struggling to put on her coat on even when I helped her to putting on her coat perfectly without help. I remember how she went (seemingly overnight) from asking “Is this [shoe on] the right feet?” and being more often than not wrong to still asking but being (almost) always right. That happened about three weeks ago.
I remember her going from staring at more complicated puzzles in complete bewilderment to organizing her pieces and checking the color and shapes on each piece against the picture of the completed puzzle on the box. Now, may she still regularly going for a middle-piece when she needs an edge-piece, but (still!) the attention is there where it wasn’t before. And nothing we did contributed to the change (at least, as far as I can tell).
This change was only this past week, and, Saturday, she put together a puzzle with thirty pieces. She had us there talking her through it, but she never got an answer from us, she never got so frustrated she up and walked away, and she did completed it in the end. Th next day, doing the puzzle again, she started exactly as we had taught her, without having us remind her. All of these were seemingly overnight changes. Something in her brain had clicked while she dreamt.
So then I remember how I would put ‘A’ and ‘T’ blocks together and add ‘C’, tell her it’s “cat”, then add ‘R’, ‘M’, ‘F’, ‘S’ and go through all of them with her. She’d repeat after me happily. Then I’d ask her, ‘Which one was “mat”?’ and she’d just... walk away, ignore me, not want to have anything to do with the game anymore. Not want to even try.
That’s the worst of it, for we are not in any way bothered if she fails. We just want her to try.
We ourselves will keep trying and (I hope) eventually succeed with her. When we discover what worked (that’s assuming a lot… if we discover —), I shall dutiful report it to you all. Until then, if you have any ideas, please do email me or leave a comment below.
A Bench Under the Trees
“The Fairy Tale Wars” by Vigen Guroian
In this magical essay, Professor Guroian launches a defense of fiarytales for their own sake. He starts with a critique of those in the “guild” of fairytale scholarship who fail to understand the stories, either by misconceiving their nature or by indulging in the “chronological snobbery” C.S. Lewis was so adept at exposing. Indeed, to the observations about fairytales from that luminous trio Dickens, Chesterton, and Lewis, Professor Guroian adds his own wisdom, which is not so negligible.
The article is a joy to read. “Disney Studios is by no means the only offending party. A ruinous reduction and brash bowdlerization of the fairy tales appears in a seemingly endless stream of often lavishly illustrated adaptations. Recently, I borrowed from our local library a handsome volume titled Treasured Classics, edited and illustrated by the well-known illustrator Michael Hague. The pictures are lovely. The retellings of the dozen or so fairy tales and nursery stories are literate but so stripped down that the meaning of the originals has invariably been altered or lost.”
We here in this garden wish to reclaim our lost Tradition. Few better places to start than with fairytales. And few better thinkers to start with than that luminous quartet: Dickens, Chesterton, Lewis, and Guroian.
The Amphitheater
“Oak, and Ash, and Thorne” is a perfect example of traditional music which isn’t old music. First recorded by Peter Bellamy for his 1970 album Oak, Ash and Thorn, the music is modeled off folk songs while the lyrics comes from “A Tree Song”, a poem Kipling published in his 1906 collection Puck of Pook’s Hill.
As I’ve written before, I love to sit and listen to a dozen variations of every song. If you are likewise inclined, here are three different musicians (well, one group and then two separate musicians) performing “Oak, Ash, and Thorn”. The first is The Longest Johns, who do a contemporary take on it. Very proficient, and indeed far more than proficient, but lacking the raw power; the instruments distract from the voice and it’s all very “mixed” (or whatever the proper sound engineering word is). The next is from Davin Coffin, which has some of the raw power but is slower and more meandering than the original. The third is from Peter Bellamy himself (and two accompanists). This is both raw and earthy, and (as you all can no doubt tell) my personal favorite.
The version of the Bellamy I offer is a remixed one, so it lacks some of the original clicks and bumps I associate with records. I find it more haunting for its cleanliness. It also has lyrics on the page, if you feel you must just start singing this song, as I always do. Indeed, the reason I’m sharing this song with all of you is because of all the songs I sing regularly (we have about a score in the rotation), this is currently our elder daughter’s favorite. Everyday she wants to hear “All the trees”. I feel the same, and I hope you will too.
The Loud Music Played Way Too Late Into the Night
I have over the last several letters been advertising my article on TikTok. If you have somehow managed to escape it, it’s called “Why TikTok Should Be Banned or Sold” and I bet you will never guess what it argues.
But I realize that many of you were not around when I first advertised my short stories. I have three published and the links to them can be found on my website. But as I recently finished a class on fairytales, and as I included in this letter an article on fairytales, I figured I’d advertise my fairytale. Called “Magicians for Good & Ill”, it’s a straight up, traditional, literary fairytale. I’d like to thank The Fiarytale Magazine for publishing it, and I’d like to hear what you all think. Here’s the beginning:
“Long ago there lived an old king who when young had married a woman he deeply loved. She bore him one daughter and then she died. All the king’s advisers told him to take another wife, one who might bear him a son. All told him this but one tall and gaunt adviser, known as a skilled magician, who said that it was an ill-omen to marry with a heart sore sick with grief. And so the king refused every lady of the realm. Now in time the princess grew, and all the gentlemen of the kingdom wanted her. Not only was she as beautiful and witty as her mother, not only did she have the strength and tenderheartedness of her father, but any man who wed the princess would inherit the throne upon her father’s death. And yet still many advisers cautioned him to take a new wife. And yet still the magician said that it was an ill omen to marry with a heart sore sick with grief. The king still missed his wife dearly, and so he did not marry. Now this magician had a son not much older than the king’s daughter, and he so contrived it that his son married the king’s daughter..."
Reviso et Peroratio
Emily Oster, in her book Cribsheet, talks about changes in the timing of potty training through the years. Specifically she notes that as disposable diapers became more available, parents moved back (and then moved back again) the start of potty training. Nothing gets a parent forcing potty training on a child like having to clean cloth diapers! Except pre-school, for now that we have two (three, really, but one is still ‘on the inside’), I would argue with moral certainty that parents would push potty training back further still if they didn’t have to contend with the near universal rule in pre-schools for potty trained children.
Potty training illustrates what seems to be a general rule about raising children. One can start earlier and fight or one can start later and have a smooth road. In Charlotte Mason’s Home Education, she quotes a Mrs. Wesley as an authority: “None of mine [Mrs. Wesley’s children] was taught to read till five years old, except Kezzy, in whose case I was overruled: and she was more years in learning than any of the rest had been months.” It’s a joke among parents that our children wake up having mastered a skill they couldn’t complete going to bed.
I think this insight is what’s behind the child-led educational philosophies, most notably (or at least most obviously) the Unschooling Movement. Yet I think in this we deal with an ideology, that is an idea which people fixate upon as the truth but which is in truth the myopic half-view of a full-grown philosophy. Our eldest happily picks up now (even if we sometimes have to instruct her), and our younger will happily throw out anything you give her now, but in both cases we had to power through their refusal to do the task. Several weeks ago, our younger daughter literally threw some cheese on the ground, and I had to sit there with her for half an hour or forty minutes while she cried until she gave up and threw the cheese away. (After which, we celebrated her with clapping, fanfare, and hugs.) Our girls also now expect to clear the table, but only after a week of us demanding they do so.
Perhaps the rule (if there is a “rule” at all) would be something like this, ‘Expect all the correct behavior a child can manage, none she can’t.’ Of course, as with many rules, this merely shifts the question to the next plane: ‘At what age can she manage which behaviors?’ And while I’m not even going to try to attempt to parse that here, getting our attention from one plane to the next is not wasted effort. Rules may and should be tossed out a top-story window when they prove unhelpful, but life would be paralysis (and parenting especially) without journals full of such rules. Journals of such rules, kept in pencil.
I was absolutely serious. We do not know how to get our girl to work hard at things. If you have any ideas, please click
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Until next we meet, I remain your fellow,
Scriptor horti scriptorii, Judd Baroff