Homeschooling With Ease
Often when we’re out and about, she gravitates toward younger girls. They quickly construct imaginary worlds or play tag or climb trees.
This girl’s mama said it was a gift. Her girl is an only child and often lonely. They played together until the sun went down.
Mabel Nadine turns thirteen today.
Sally Thomas turned my mind to memorization again. It’s a big part of our everyday learning together.
Billy Collins says that one of the high points of his teaching career was when a stranger approached him on the subway. The man recognized him; Collins had been his teacher years before. One of the assignments had been to memorize a poem. And the man recited the poem right there on the train.
After all the intervening years, the poem wasn’t lost. It was “carried in his head, and maybe in his heart.”
That’s really what we’re after! Not word perfect memorization but hiding good words in our hearts. This year we’ve been learning real poems. Not poems written for children: Auden, Milton, Donne, Frost, Yeats. There’s no reason to spend time with less.
The point is not to make sure we drill some list of classic poems into our kids. It’s to listen carefully each day to the rhythm and words, to quiet our hearts and enter the liminal world of the poem, to let it do it’s work on us.
(Yes, this title is a clear rip off of a book by Ivan Illich, a mostly forgotten Catholic education philosopher.
There’s a worthy assignment–read some Illich!)
Twice this year I’ve had the chance to meet with far away women friends who are also on this writing journey. And each time I’ve come home and scribbled a list of resources that I wanted to share with them, trusted guides that have illuminated my path.
But instead of just sending them an email, I thought I’d share a bit more widely.
This weekly newsletter from the Gottman Institute aims to give a tiny bit of marriage advice that you can act on in just a minute. I keep one up on my desktop that entreats me to Be Kind. This isn’t rocket science, but I can often use the reminder.
Another email newsletter. This one comes every week day from Ryan Holiday. It applies his interest in Stoic philosophy to being a better dad. I’m not a dad, but I know some! And I’m raising boys. I haven’t read this long enough to know if it’s something I’ll use long term. But it’s very interesting.
This six week audio series by Julianna Baggott is all about using your quirky creative process to your own advantage. It’s about noticing when you get ideas, developing strategies to capture them, and even ways to deal with writer’s block. Get these lectures because Julianna is an excellent writer–funny, smart, and self-deprecating. She’s wonderful to spend time with. But along the way you’ll also find ways to enrich your writing life.
Shaunta is a novelist who publishes nearly everyday on Medium about writing and productivity. She’s serious about helping people become authors and shares her experience and expertise freely. Her work is the basis and inspiration for my own Homeschool MFA. Her articles are behind the paywall on Medium. So you can only read a few each month without paying–enough to get a taste for the work she shares. Then you can join her email list, and she’ll send a friend link that will give you free access.
Joyful Mystery #2: Visitation by James B. Janknegt
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.
—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ
