teaching our own

Let Us Remember

24 February 2020 by Kortney

…that we are in the holy presence of God

….that we are dust and to dust returneth

One way to think about the coming season of Lent is that it’s a season of remembering. Remembering that tending what is hidden is holy work, remembering the life and death of Jesus, remembering that his death is not the end of the story.

For a few years, I’ve been using the four-fold image of a compass to help me conceive of practices that will draw me closer and help me remember. Help turn my heart of stone into a heart of flesh. Here’s what I’m contemplating for this year.

North :: Scripture Every Day

I want to read each day’s scripture + reflection in Sacred Space. I have last year’s edition, so I have to juggle the dates. But it still works! Pray As You Go is another excellent way to experience scripture as a touchstone, a way to remember and return to our North Star.

East :: Digital Sabbath

From sundown on Saturday to sundown on Sunday, I want to have my computer and phone turned off. This is going to be the most disruptive practice! I use Sunday afternoons to both work on lesson plans for the coming week + to listen to lectures in my poetry class. Of course these good uses of technology tend to slip into mindless scrolling, and that’s the opposite of remembering. I’ll have to find alternate places for this work to live, and I don’t know where that’s going to be yet.

South :: Meatless Fridays

Mostly I’ll need to rethink lunches and make sure that we have meatless options. We eat beans + rice every week already, but I’m moving them to Fridays so that we can be more mindful of this choice.

West : Sacred Reading

Along with a class on formal poetry with Sally Thomas and monthly workshops with Holly Wren Spaulding, I stumbled into a wonderful Shakespeare class at Schole Sisters taught by Kelly Cumbee. It’s weaving together a few different strands of study for me–fairy tales, Greek myths, as well as some Lewis + Tolkien lectures. You can listen to interviews at Schole Sisters and The Literary Life podcasts to get a taste of Kelly’s gentle, erudite teaching.

My work as a poet + home educator is my vocation, part of my path to Heaven. Learning myself and being a lively guide for my children are spiritual pursuits at heart. Through them I am being renewed and transformed. Attending to them in a focused way helps me remember.

If you’d like to read a few more simple ideas that will help you keep Lent with your family, I’d love to send you my ebook called Observing Lent with Our Families. Just click here to enter your email, and I’ll send it right over!

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.

Prayers at the Beginning of School

6 September 2019 by Kortney

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

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:

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.