The Christian Homemaking Podcast: Simply Convivial with Mystie Winckler

Gregory posits not only that review and application are the “essential conditions of all true teaching,” but also that “not to review is to leave the job half done.” The aim of reviewing material is threefold:To perfect knowledge.To confirm knowledge.To render knowledge ready & useful.Reviewing can include a number of different aspects, as well:Review is more than repetition.Review involves making fresh conceptions and new associations.Review revisits knowledge so understanding becomes vividReview is best spread over days and weeks.Review breeds the habit of thinking things over.Review creates a fresh vision.Review is rethinking and relearning.Thus, Gregory notes that it is difficult to overstate the importance, the necessity, of review. In fact, he goes so far as to say, “No time in teaching is spent more profitably than that spent in reviewing.” Our reviewing should not be mere repetition, but should involve fresh conceptions and new associations. There is a spectrum of types of review, from the simple repetition to the complete restudy; each point upon that spectrum holds value and has a place in our efforts. Reviews should be frequent, thorough, and interesting. In fact, going over information after a lapse of time allows the opportunity for a fresh perspective and new connections. Not only that, but it also allows for “mental incubation.” Our brains work without our conscious effort (Gregory says this, but this statement is in fact the thesis of the interesting popular economics book, Blink), so when we come back to a thought after time has passed, we are more prepared to receive it and incorporate it or respond to it properly.Gregory especially elaborates upon the necessity of a final year-end review. The final review, he says, should never be omitted, should be searching, should be comprehensive, and should demonstrate masterful competency (by teacher and student alike). Often, Gregory says, our teaching is pouring water into broken cisterns. Review will not affect the quality of the water, but it affects the cisterns, patching them up, repairing and preventing leaks.

We have a small practice that saves the state of our house, almost every day. It’s simple and effective – as long as we do it. When I keep the time in the late afternoon regularly carved out for it, I can handle the intermittent chaos that descends as the kids work and play throughout the day. I know order will be restored, so I can take a deep breath and let them strew blankets and play food everywhere.

What is a teacher? What is teaching?According to Gregory, the art of education — that is, teaching — is two-fold:Teaching is the art of training. Teaching is leading the students into paths of physical, mental, and moral fitness.Teaching is the art of instructing. Teaching stimulates a love of learning and forms habits of independent study.Thus, a successful teacher is working himself out of his position. He is moving his pupils not into but out of dependence on his guidance.We can only train by teaching and we teach best when we train best.Every act of teaching — purposefully or not, done rightly or not — trains the student in good or bad habits of work and thinking. Likewise, every act of skills-training teaches knowledge, even if there is no lecture.The work of teaching, says Gregory, is the work of assigning, explaining, and hearing lessons. These days we don’t generally speak of “hearing lessons,” but when we hear an oral narration after independent reading, when we give feedback on a written narration, or when we prompt a discussion, we are hearing lessons. So, “lecture” is only a third of the work of teaching.Gregory also writes thatTeaching is the communication of experience.Experience includes facts, truths, doctrines, ideas, ideals, skills, art.Communication includes words, signs, objects, actions, and examples.By this definition, then, it is clear that the homeschool mother is not the students’ sole teacher. It is the books used more than the mother that teach. This relieves a lot of the pressure. Even more pressure can be relieved if the teaching we do give and the books we provide work with the grain of nature rather than against it. That’s why it’s important we know these laws.

We moderns tend to compartmentalize our lives, thinking of what we do – and who we are as we do them – as unrelated segments and pieces. So there easily becomes the church me, the hanging-out-with-friends me, the homeschooling mom me, the wife me, the internet me, and the tedious-chores me. What the tedious-chores me thinks and how she behaves seems irrelevant to the wife or hanging-out-with-friends me, and likewise the church or internet me seems to have nothing to do with the tedious-chores me.

This, claims Gregory, is the most widely recognized rule among good teachers. Although there may be times to disregard this law — when time is of the essence, when the child is ill or weak, or when the child is discouraged, for example — however, for the most part, the teacher is to “make [her] pupil a discoverer of truth” — make him find out for himself. The teacher’s role is “awakening and setting in action the mind of the pupil, arousing his self-activities.” If we can learn without a teacher — and we can — then the teacher is not essential. The teacher is an aid, an ally, a support, facilitating the process of learning within the student’s own mind — lighting a fire, not filling a bucket, as the saying goes. In fact, the knowledge which is most permanent, claims Gregory, is that which is discovered unaided. Therefore, the true function of the teacher is to create the most favorable conditions for self-learning. These conditions are threefold:setting an ordered path (“curriculum”)providing leisure and quiet for studyfurnishing materialsTeaching is not telling, but leading. It is not the vigorous telling nor the hard work of the teacher upon the passive student that evokes learning, but the active student’s hard work. The student taught without learning for himself is like one who is spoonfed but not given exercise — the meager nutrition cannot work out toward its natural end and the body will not gain its full benefit, will not properly grow. In this task of teaching, then, the self-confidence of the student is essential. It is gained by self-prompted independent use, but such use is usually first motivated through external pressures (such as “Mom making him”) before maturing into internal self-promptings. Moreover, “thoughtfulness deepens and grows more intense with the increase of knowledge.” The increase of this appetite will grow by what it feeds on — the more effort is expended toward learning, the more one is motivated to continue. The teacher’s job is to do what is necessary to begin the child on that path, but once the child is following the path with a will, pushing and shoving him along is more counterproductive than beneficial. Though the child may get to the end early, he will not have gained the experience and strength he could have derived from the journey. We, the teachers, are to keep our children on the path and keep them moving, but we should refrain from either rushing them or carrying them. Instead, let each exercise strengthen their own muscles of self-prompting, self-discipline, self-learning.

Many of us are task-driven. We want to see things done, accomplished, finished. This is what the world tells us is productivity. In this view, homemaking 101 would simply be about menial skills.

Gregory begins with a defense of his position that children possess the innate ability to think, which I will simply assume and not summarize. If you aren’t sure if your children are able to think, you’ll have to read that part yourself.The law of the lesson has its reason in the nature of the mind and in the nature of human knowledge.Nature of the Mind — The mind connects thoughts through graded steps and linked facts; each mastered idea is equipment with which to continue on in “fresh advance.”Nature of Human Knowledge — Knowledge is organized and connected inherently; it is not simple and independent loose facts: “Each fact leads to, and explains, the new. The old reveals the new; the new confirms and corrects the old.”So, in teaching, our goal is to lead the student by such gradual steps that the pupil “who has mastered one lesson knows half the next.”It is a serious error to keep the studies of pupils too long on familiar ground under the assumed necessity for thoroughness.Only deeper understanding, new lessons, should be sought when covering old material. Yet, you must also have mastery of the old before you proceed to the new:Imperfect understanding at any point clouds the whole process.Of course, we must also keep in mind that “mastery” is a relative thing, for no man actually possesses true and complete mastery of any subject or skill. So, what we are seeking is wisdom in our own particular situations with our own particular charges. The best way to teach new through old is through metaphor, for all figures of speech “are but so many attempts to read the unknown through the known.” Metaphors are attempts to flash light from the old upon the new. Each person tends to use objects and language and concepts from his vocation as his metaphor-light, as his familiar key to unlock or grasp the mysteries of that which is unfamiliar. Be aware of this and try to use metaphors of the children’s world and not of worlds they do not know (this is the law of language again). The difficulty in answering children’s questions lies not in the complexity of the question or the answer, but in the children’s lack of experience and vocabulary you can draw upon to explain.

If you’re like me, you try – at least occasionally – to become better, more effective, more competent in your roles and responsibilities at home. And then after a period of trying, you peter out because it turns out it’s quite exhausting to grow and change and fight entropy and bad habits.

Gregory speaks in this chapter of language as a vehicle of instruction, an instrument of learning, and a storehouse of knowledge. Briefly, he means that through common language we communicate experience, by speaking we appropriate what we perceive, that without adequate words we cannot think through ideas clearly, and that what we know we will name. Beware, he warns, words with multiple meanings or homophones — children easily pick up confused meanings, unaware that their perception is inaccurate. It is what the student interprets in his mind, not what the teacher intends, that matters:Not what the speaker expresses from his own mind, but what the hearer understands and reproduces in his mind, measures the communicating power of the language used.Remember that children do not yet have nuanced and weighty vocabularies:Men’s words are like ships laden with the riches of every shore of knowledge which their owner has visited; while the words of the child are but toy boats on which are loaded the simple notions he has picked up in his brief experience.Thus,It is as necessary for the teacher fully to understand the child, as for the child to understand the teacher. Oftentimes a pupil will load ordinary words with some strange, false, or distorted meanings, and the mistakes may remain uncorrected for years. Children are often compelled by their very poverty of speech to use words with other than their correct meanings. The teacher must learn the needs of the pupil from his words.So, choose your own words carefully when you are teaching. There is a place for broadening and deepening the child’s vocabulary through exposure, but a lesson is not that place. Listen to the child’s words as well, correcting and honing his speech gently. The very process of thinking it fitting an idea into words. We master truth by expressing it, so the pupil himself should do much of the talking. Lecture should be given a small place in instruction. In doing the talking himself (through narration or discussion), the child must make the knowledge his own by putting words to thoughts and through his speech, the teacher sees what the child sees and knows where to lead him and what correction and strengthening he needs. Moreover, language gives us the very categories we use for thinking and perceiving. The language at the student’s disposal is no small matter. One cannot think about something one does not have the words for. Giving children words is a vital part of teaching.

Have you yet discovered Auntie Leila at Like Mother, Like Daughter? She has a great series called The Reasonably Clean House. I have a weakness for reading articles and blog series that claim it is possible to have at least a semblance of order and cleanliness while homeschooling a brood. Keeping things clean does not come naturally to me, but I cannot shake the idea (try as I might) that it is an area I am to grow in, and that at least keeping things decent and presentable is possible.