Kortney Garrison

Homeschooling With Ease

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Memorizing Poetry

10 October 2019 by Kortney

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.

The point is the poetry.

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Prayers at the Beginning of School

6 September 2019 by Kortney

Joyful Mystery #2: Visitation

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

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Homeschool Planning for Rest

7 August 2019 by Kortney

My friend Tresta says that the best ideas are the ones that follow her around, when she traces the same idea in different places. That’s exactly what happened to me this morning! Tonia quoted Wendell Berry on peaceableness and it struck me as very good homeschooling advice:

Curriculum Planning meets gluebooking

What leads to peace…is peaceableness,

which is not passivity,

but an alert, informed, practiced, and active state of being.

Maybe we begin by creating more margin in the schedule. We plan less because we know that things tend to take longer than we assume and good opportunities will come up. Like a spring cleared from debris, our days will fill from behind with good things.

Homeschooling isn’t simply about location–the same work being done in a different place. It’s a different model of learning. In World Enough and Time: On Creativity and Slowing Down, Christian McEwen says our society and the traditional model of schooling values “action over stillness, light over shadow, sounds over silence.” Through homeschooling we have the opportunity to craft rhythms and spaces that are “calm, unhurried.” This is where people can do their best creative work.

In planning our weeks and months for learning and rest, we can ask, where are the times of quiet resonance? Remember, Wendell Berry says this takes practice. Nothing in the dominant model of schooling values rest. But at home we can learn to become alert to the vibrant emptiness that will ripple out through our seasons and years.

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Lent Means Spring

4 March 2019 by Kortney

Let’s welcome this new season with simple practices that make space for what’s most important.

I’ve written a wee book with a few ideas. Just click on the picture to download the book!

Lent Means Spring

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