Making One Lesson Count

What if you only have time to read one book with your student this year? Should you throw your hands up in despair and enroll him in the local government school?

Well it’s up to you, but you might be missing a great opportunity. You would be surprised at how powerful that one lesson can be. In fact, a well-designed discussion of a single book can dramatically affect the way your student reads all other books for the rest of his life.

This is because a good discussion focuses not only on the content of the book at hand, but also on the structural and stylistic elements that the book shares with every other book in the world. This means that engaging in a good discussion of a single great book can equip a student to grapple with a dozen others unassisted.

Remember the adage, “Give a man a fish and he eats for a day; teach a man to fish and he’ll never go hungry?”

In a way, a good lit discussion teaches students to fish. By asking thought provoking questions about the basic elements of fiction, you’ll show your students how to think for themselves about any book whatsoever.

Here are a few examples:

• What does the protagonist want most in this story? Is this desire shared by all people, to some degree? In what way do you, the reader, share this desire?
• What is the central conflict in this story and who or what are the main antagonists (In other words, why can’t the protagonist have what he wants)? What other stories have you read that feature the same type of conflict?
• What is the climactic moment of this story’s plot? How does it resolve the main conflict?
• How does the setting of this story underscore the author’s theme? How is the setting uniquely suited to the author’s purpose? (In other words, could this story stress the same theme if the setting were different?)
• What changes does the protagonist undergo during this story? Is he humbled or exalted? What causes these changes? Based on your own experience, can you identify with these changes?
• Does the author use literary devices such as symbolism, metaphor, imagery, allusion or juxtaposition to emphasize the story’s themes? How effective are these devices?
• If you had to summarize the main idea of this story in a single word, what word would you choose? What other stories have you read that could be summarized with the same word?

Questions like these can be asked of any book, of course, and they yield a thoughtful discussion every time. The best part is, you can introduce them in a single lesson. No need to send your kids to the school down the road, then, unless you just want to.

While were on the subject, though, take another look at the list above. Can you imagine any of those questions leading naturally into a discussion of worldview assumptions, life-changing decisions, or questions of identity, purpose and meaning?

If so, do you really want a stranger helping your student answer them? Wouldn’t you rather teach him how to fish yourself? Once he learns, he’ll never go hungry again – even if you only taught him one book.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Don’t look now, but summer is just around the corner. It is almost time to engage in that most ridiculous of all homeschooling rituals: planning next year’s curriculum while simultaneously trying to finish last year’s curriculum. It’s totally unrealistic and invariably overwhelming, but most of us do it anyway – or at least feel guilty for putting it off.

No matter when you get finally get started, however, plotting a scope & sequence for your homeschool can be a daunting task. Those of us who attempt it in reading and literature always confront the same basic question sooner or later:

How many books is enough?

What qualifies as a full term of reading? Is it OK to pick a number of books at random? These are disheartening questions for most of us, because they bring up a deep-seated insecurity: We are most likely not doing enough, and there’s no realistic way to do more.

Missy and I have wrestled with this very insecurity for years, especially when it comes to literature. The homeschool lit teacher is stuck between a rock and a hard place – no question about it.

The Rock

The first problem is that teaching and learning from literature requires thoughtful oral discussion. It turns out that talking about the books you read is the only way to learn anything from them. This is because every author writes for the express purpose of sparking thoughtful discussion. If, as a teacher, you don’t attempt a thoughtful discussion of a book, you are not teaching that book – and your student probably isn’t learning anything from it.

Additionally – and here’s the worst part – you cannot thoughtfully discuss a book you have not read yourself. I wish this were not true, and I would love to announce that there is a shortcut to being a great lit teacher, but I would be lying. There is no easy way around this mountain. Leading your student in an intelligent discussion of a book requires that both of you read it first.

The Hard Place

The second problem, of course, is that you cannot personally read as many books as you want to assign to your students. Even if you are teaching only a single class, there is no way to keep up. Too many books, not enough time – simple as that.

Missy and I have six children, with no twins. That means six different grade levels at all times, in all subjects. The burden of teaching Math alone is staggering, to say nothing of the other subjects. Add in the myriad non-homeschool activities involved in raising a family of eight, and it is a wonder we ever sleep.

But it’s not just the crowded schedule that makes this impossible – it’s the fact that reading is slow, time consuming work all by itself. Even if all we did was sit and read ahead of the kids, we couldn’t possibly read everything we assigned to them. It would take both of us studying literature 24 hours a day. We love literature, but not that much.

So I get it. We all want to do something valuable and worthwhile with literature, and maybe we even know what it is, but the limitations of our situation always prevent it. There’s just not enough of us to go around.

Good news – we found a solution.

The solution is as simple – and as difficult – as telling the truth.

Here’s how you do it:

Begin by deciding how many books you can realistically read in the course of a school term (a month, a semester, a year, whatever). Be honest and specific. Ask yourself when you can take time out to read and how much time you can devote to reading each week.

Can you read for a few minutes before bed at night? Can you read when the little ones are napping? Can you listen to books on tape while driving the kids to soccer practice, or while folding the laundry? If these snatches of time became part of your consistent routine of teacher preparation, how many hours per week would they add up to? How many books could you read if you used these snatches of time consistently?

DO NOT overestimate this number. Instead, underestimate it. Make this number small enough to be absolutely realistic, given the demands on your time and attention. Come up with a number of books that you can read next term, come hell or high water.

Got your number? Good. Now you are ready for the tricky part. Here goes:

Whatever your number is, plan to discuss exactly that number of books with your student in the upcoming term – no more and no less. Assign additional books for your students to read on their own, unsupervised.

That’s it. Discuss exactly as many books as you can read yourself and let the student read the rest on his own.

I already know what you’re thinking. “You cannot be serious, or you don’t know my situation as well as you claim. I did your little calculation, and do you know what number I came up with? ONE. That’s right, my number is ONE. Are you saying I can teach my kids literature adequately by having ONE discussion with them in the upcoming term?”

Yes – exactly!

If you invest the right kind of attention and preparation into a single discussion, you will be amazed at its effect on your students. The lessons you can teach about how to handle literature and ideas in that one discussion will dramatically affect how they read the rest of the books on their list, and can permanently affect how they read for the rest of their lives. When it comes to designing a book list, it turns out that the important question is not how many books you discuss, but how well you discuss them. In a future post I’ll explain some key techniques to help you lead great discussions every time.

In the meantime, I encourage you to continue telling yourself the truth when it comes to curriuclum planning. Set realistic goals. You have already been honest in calculating the number of books you can read for next term. Why start lying now because the number feels too low? Stick to your guns. Tell the truth. You may not be just like that brilliant overachiever down the street who apparently has 36 hours in every day. Instead, you are the one God has appointed to teach your students – and therefore, you are the one they need.

Freedom from the Law of the Booklist

It was spring of my oldest son’s eighth grade year, and I, like homeschool moms all over the country, was planning for the fall. Except this time, my son would be starting high school. This time, it would “count.” Panic replaced my usual plenary excitement as I wondered what colleges would be looking for on high school transcripts and how I was going to prepare my homeschooler to convince them that he had mastered everything. I flew through reams of paper creating a plethora of booklists, each one longer and more ambitious than the previous, and frankly wore myself out with worry in the process.

In the midst of this confusion, my phone rang. To my surprise, I heard the voice of a favorite college professor on the line. After raving about the providential nature of his call, I asked him this question: If you were able to prepare a student to sit in your classroom, what would you have him read? He was very gracious and accommodating. He could give me the list right now, he said. Did I have a pencil? He suggested three books: The Bible, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and a little known book by Richard Mitchell called The Gift of Fire. I should read the last one first, he said. It would make everything clear.

One week later, I was halfway through Mitchell’s book, a philosophical treatise on education. In it, I discovered a liberating truth: Education is not a booklist! Education comes from the Latin root educere, which means “to lead out.” Out of what is the student led? Himself, of course! Education is the process by which an individual is led out of the narrow confines of his own mind in order to gain perspective on both himself and his world. By way of education, he learns to use his rational faculties, to assess his own thoughts and to know his own mind. He begins to watch himself thinking, and he becomes acquainted with the limits of his own knowledge in the face of the infinite and the larger world. In this way, education provides opportunities for the student to come to terms with his creature hood, thereby gaining humility.

Mitchell illustrates this truth by appealing to Socrates. He suggests that Socrates is notably one of the most educated men that ever lived, and yet, he argues, he read relatively few books. In fact, most of the books that would inevitably appear on current reading lists had yet to be written when Socrates lived. Even so, Socrates is still considered a highly educated man. This is because Socrates had a grasp of his own mind. He had learned how to think, and he thought all the time. As he asked universal questions and pondered logically sound answers, he better came to know his world and his place within it. Education, Mitchell argues, is not a booklist after all.

Education is not a booklist. This simple truth changed the way I approached planning my son’s high school career. Of course I still worked to choose books that were worthy and challenging, but I realized that a long and challenging booklist was ultimately not the measure of an education. This notion is quite different from current trends which view education as the accumulation and mastery of facts or the completion of ambitious booklists. What is the measure of an education, then?

Education in a Single Book

Like many, I can look back on a few pivotal books as landmarks in my own intellectual journey. These are books with which I connected at particular times, which challenged my ideas or illuminated important, universal truths. My encounter with these books was, for me, an education. Engaging with these works, I came to know both myself and my neighbors better.

I craft booklists for my students with these moments of insight in mind. While the lists themselves provide my kids with context in a literary and cultural tradition, cultural literacy itself is properly viewed as a species of education, perhaps even a vehicle of real education, rather than its equivalent.

The kind of self-sight available through good books simultaneously fosters humility and empathy. Humility comes as we discover our own finitude in the face of infinite knowledge. Empathy is achieved when we learn to accurately diagnose our own natures, making us more human (and hopefully more humane). This experience bears little resemblance to the “education is the perfect booklist” model, which sometimes produces the unfortunate side-effect of pride and self-importance.

The Law of the Booklist

When education is equated with a booklist, the booklist becomes a law; wherever we find the law, we can be sure to find death. (2 Cor. 3:7) Just as the “capital L” Law of God is beautiful and perfect, so is the “little l” law of the booklist. However, when we misuse the booklist to gain from it what it cannot deliver – identity, peace and life – we inevitably become miserable.

“The Law is our schoolmaster to bring us to Christ…” says the Apostle Paul. This is true regardless of where the law appears, even if that is within the throes of homeschooling. A beautiful, ambitious booklist can educate us, but not, perhaps, in the way we might expect. Far from fostering self-importance, a look into the “law of the booklist” reveals that we are finite creatures who will never know (or read) it all! As another educated man, King Solomon, told his son, “Of making many books there is no end; and much study wearies the body” (Ecc. 12:12). Try as we may, we will never master all there is to know about the world or even ourselves. We will never create or complete a perfect booklist. There will always be one more book we have not read, one more idea we have not encountered. If we make a booklist the measure of education, we set ourselves up for failure; the law of the booklist will inevitably shame us.

An Education in Grace

Re-examining the purpose of the booklist, I propose that its proper end is Christ. Identification with Him liberates me from the bondage of the law of performance and infuses my life with joy. Because of Jesus, I am freed from the bondage of the booklist. My identity and the identities of my children are safely rooted in the wisdom and work of Jesus, rather than in the superior mastery of knowledge or the achievement of cultural literacy. True education reveals the implications of this reality in every discipline of life; a beautiful booklist is merely a means to this end.

As you turn to the task of planning next year’s perfect booklist, remember two things: 1) Your identity and the identity of your child are rooted in Christ, and not in anything you do, and 2) Education is not a booklist. Education is the process of coming to know yourself and your relationship to the world around you. Choose books toward this end – books that confront your child with his creaturehood in all its weakness and glory, meanness and magnanimity, baseness and beauty. If you still don’t believe me, read three books: The Bible, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Richard Mitchell’s The Gift of Fire. Start with the last; it will make everything else clear.

Plagued with Doubts

We discussed Great Expectations the other night in our online class. Great stuff! The kids had a million comments – in fact, they waited online for an hour after class to read their favorite parts out loud, just to laugh at Dickens’ crazy characters. I even got a call or two from pleased Moms, saying their kids really enjoyed it.

Still, this morning I am plagued with doubts.

I was teaching without Missy for the first time in a while, and I left the class feeling pretty insecure. Basically, I think our classes turn out better when the two of us teach together and I am afraid last night’s class wasn’t any good.

This does not happen to me all that often, since I am a pretty confident guy, but I have talked to hundreds of homeschool Moms for whom it is a daily struggle. It seems that we homeschoolers labor under a constant burden of guilt and anxiety. Nagging questions plague the backs of our minds all day: “Am I doing enough? Is it good enough?”

Worse than that, the answers won’t let us alone: “You have certainly not done enough, not by a long shot. And what you have done is shoddy, half baked, ill-prepared and worthless. Again, you fail!”

It probably comes in part from the fact that by choosing to homeschool, we attempt something for which our society pays billions of dollars to legions of trained professionals, and we try to do it right by ourselves, for nothing.

But I think it also comes from the fact that in addition to helping the kids in this noble work, we are trying to create an identity for ourselves. We want to do more than give them a good education for their sakes; we want to become successful homeschoolers – for our own sakes.

We strive toward two goals, not one. And here’s the rub: while one of the goals lies within reach of any loving parent, the other will always be misguided and completely impossible. To make matters worse, the impossibility of the second goal obscures the reachability of the first – with the result that we feel only failure.

By doing more and doing it better, can I create an identity for myself as a successful homeschooler that will satisfy my spiritual and emotional needs and give me peace, confidence and a sense of accomplishment and self-worth?

Nope. I can’t.

Those things don’t come from what I do, no matter how successful I am. In fact, things like peace and confidence and self-worth come more often through my failures than my successes, because they are the gifts of God to sinners. If I look to my online class to give me my identity, I’m looking in the wrong place. Succeeding there doesn’t make me better. Failing there doesn’t make me worse.

But I look there anyway, all the time. If I am honest with myself about last night, I’ll admit that I did not doubt whether the kids had a good learning experience. Instead, I doubted whether my own performance made me look good enough. It’s true with all of us. More often than not, our discouragement comes from fear that we haven’t “become somebody” yet, and aren’t likely to “become somebody” in the future. Much less often are we afraid that our kids will suffer real educational neglect at our hands.

I thank God I haven’t become somebody yet, and am not likely to become somebody in the future. He knows I would be an insufferable so-and-so if I ever got the self image I’m looking for from my earthly successes. Thank God, too, that because I bear His name I have all the identity I need. I just hope next time we fire up the mikes I can remember that, and get myself out of the way.

A Homeschooling Mom’s New Year’s Resolution: Part 2

Is it possible that even our deficiencies as a homeschoolers are part of God’s gift to our children?

I don’t know about you, but my kids are turning out a lot like me– not that they’re carbon copies, but there are, say, family resemblances.  Realistically speaking, my kids are sinners, and no amount of spit and polish, no quantity of education will change that.  Although it’s painful to see my sins reflected in my children, it has historically proven to be a blessing in disguise. Deficiencies, sins, are what we all have in common.  When I look at things right, familiar sins are opportunities to extend the miracle of God’s forgiveness to my kids. Sharing my own stories of failure and redemption with them, I testify in practical ways to the present and very practical reality of grace.

For example, in my role as a homeschool mom, I have often been tempted to find my identity in my work with my children. When my kids succeed, I consider myself a success. When they are failing, I call myself a failure. This performance construct has placed a burden on my kids to make me successful, setting both of us up for stress and disappointment.

I shouldn’t be surprised; this is a logical consequence of breaking the first commandment: Thou shalt have no gods before me. When I seek identity and place in anything smaller than Jesus, I turn that thing, regardless of its seeming nobility or goodness, into an idol.  Idols have a way of turning on us and devouring us whole. Remembering the gospel, however, sets me free to participate in all my activities from my secure and acceptable place as the beloved of God.  The gospel restores homeschooling to its proper role of activity.  That’s good; it was never meant to be an identity anyway.

When viewed in light of grace, my daily sins and failures become “teachable moments” for me and my kids. What are we learning in these moments but the love of God?  Because Jesus succeeded for us, we are free to fail.  Because Jesus performed perfectly for us, our imperfect performance doesn’t count against us.   The gospel sets us free from the law of sin and death by reminding us that we are not what we do.  It declares that our identity is rooted in the person and work of Jesus Christ, who loves us and pronounces us good works of God.  When Jesus was baptized by John in the Jordan so long ago, the Father evaluated Him before the world:  “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”  These words spoken to Jesus are ours as well when we trust in Christ’s performance rather than our own.

God’s pronouncement that we are acceptable in the Beloved is more than a proclamation; it’s a promise. This is because God’s word always produces what it commands.  Consider the creation account:  God commanded the light to shine; His word caused it to be so.  God’s creative word effected what He commanded, and that’s good news for the likes of you and me.

I pray this year for gospel memory. I pray that I will remember the evaluation of the Father, and repeat it for my children:  “These are my beloved children, in whom I am well pleased.”  And He is pleased, because His word creates what it requires both in us and for us.   May the truth of the gospel fill us with hope in the New Year and sets us free to pursue homeschooling excellence apart from the fearful curse of the law.

A Homeschooling Mom’s New Year’s Resolution: Part 1

The New Year is a time for reflection and resolutions the world over, and it’s no different for us homeschooling moms.  This week, I’m knee deep in the evaluation stage of things:  How’s Charlie doing in Math?  Does Molly Kate need to retake that SAT test for college entrance?  How about Calvin; is he progressing?  Will he ever learn to write?  Maybe we need some new curriculum.  That old program just doesn’t seem to be working…

That’s how it goes around here, and would that it stayed so simple.  My next series of evaluations always turns inward: I’ve got to do a better job of record keeping.  Putting Molly Kate’s transcript together was like doing archeology; it was a virtual historical dig in my attic.  How can I revise my system and be better organized?  And maybe the problem with Calvin isn’t the curriculum at all.  Maybe the problem is his teacher – me!

One year during the evaluation stage I realized that my eldest son, Ian, had been skipping his Math assignments – for a year!  You might wonder how this could happen.  Well, it went something like this:

Me – How’s Math going?

Ian—Great!

Me—Good!

That’s right folks.  It’s the verbal check.  He said it was going well; I believed him — and moved on!  For a year!  When my husband heard about this, he rolled his eyes and relieved me of all math responsibilities.  Sigh.

The evaluation stage often leaves me feeling like a big, fat failure, and I know I’m not alone in this.  A friend of mine, also a homeschool mom, often calls me singing this same sad tune.  Her issue isn’t record keeping; it’s follow through.  Although she begins each year with big plans and shiny new curricula, by Thanksgiving, she’s skipping days.  Christmas break sets the tone for the New Year, and she despairs:  My kids are going to be illiterates, she says to me.  I’m a failure, she says to me.

I’m always grateful when she calls, because as I try to encourage her, I find that I’m the one really in need of encouragement.  Here’s what I tell us:  It’s good to see our deficiencies.  Recognizing the problem is the first step toward fixing it.  When we protest (…but I won’t fix it.  I know myself.  I’ve been trying harder to do better for 17 years, and I’m still the same.  I think I’m stuck with me, and so are my poor kids.), I tell us that that’s okay because God gave us our kids on purpose.  We, with all our gifts and deficiencies, are just what our kids need.  Yep – even our deficiencies are a part of God’s gift of us to our children.

You might be asking how I can say this. Here’s a hint:

Psalm 76:10 reads, “Surely the wrath of man shall praise You…” and Romans 8:28 says, “and we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.”  Considering these two verses together, I gather that in His own secret counsel, God has ordained that everything we bring to the table will be used to further His good plans in the end.  Even our sins work together for good in God’s sovereign economy.

Nothing is lost.

The Lesson of Job: Literature’s Luckiest Protagonist

Post-holiday doldrums can be a drag, especially for homeschoolers. After all, you don’t just send the kids off to school – you have to produce it, starting now, every day. It can make you long for spring break before you even take the tree down.

During these dark days of winter, Missy and I try to remind each other of the big picture before we delve into the minutiae of textbooks, lesson plans and weekly schedules. We try to remember our overall goals for the year and the progress we hope to make – not in our students’ notebooks and report cards, but in their hearts.

You can do the same by asking yourself this question:

If you only had one hour to give the kids an education this year, what lesson would you teach them?

Obviously, Missy and I always turn to literature in answer to this question, and we invariably decide upon the lesson of Job, hero of the world’s oldest classic. Job’s story reminds our students what an education is and which part is theirs to play. It also forces us to reexamine our motivations as parents and teachers and helps us keep the day-to-day work of homeschooling in perspective.

So what is the lesson of Job? You can learn it (and teach it!) by asking the basic questions of literary analysis: First, who is the protagonist? Second, what does he want? Third, why can’t he have what he wants? The answers to these three questions produce an astonishing view of one of literature’s most famous personalities.

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Who is the protagonist?

The main character is Job, of course – a wealthy landowner in an ancient Eastern country who fears God and makes religious sacrifices of all kinds on behalf of his family. What kind of person is he? The first chapter of the story describes him as “righteous,” “blameless” and “upright.” This suggests that he is concerned about his relationship with God and that he concentrates on behaving correctly so that God will be pleased with him. You might say that he knows how to press God’s buttons so that blessing and prosperity will rain down from heaven. And at the beginning of the story, it seems to be working.

But not for long, of course. For some reason, God allows Satan to afflict Job with disasters of all kinds and destroy all that he has. Satan takes Job’s family, health and possessions and eventually leaves Job sitting on the ground, sprinkling dust on his head and scraping his boils with a potsherd. His only comfort is a small band of friends who hear of his distress and come to help him make sense of his dire situation.

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What does the protagonist want?

 Here’s where the questions begin to lead us into uncomfortable places. In every work of literature, the story revolves around a protagonist striving for a goal. Understand the goal, and you understand the story. Well then, what does Job want? Does he want his possessions and children back? If so, he never mentions it. Does he want to be relieved of his physical pain? Not to hear him tell it – he hardly mentions those, either. Does he want to die and have it done with? No – even the complaints of his wife, who urges him to curse God and die, can’t convince him to end his sufferings. So what goal does he press for? What desire drives him to the very end of the story?

We can see Job’s goal clearly if we notice that 35 of the story’s 42 chapters concern an argument between Job and his comforters about whether Job deserves the calamity that has been visited upon him. All of Job’s comforters say he does deserve it, while Job maintains that he doesn’t. This is it – this is the crux of the story. And here we find the thing that Job wants more than anything else: justification.

Job wants his reputation as a righteous man to remain intact. He wants credit for all of the good things he has done, all of the sacrifices he has made. He wants God to admit that Job’s calamities are undeserved. Job eventually grows angry with God, who seems not to be playing by the rules that Job has mastered:

“If only I knew where to find him!… I would state my case…but He is not there…He does whatever he pleases.” (Job 23:3,4,8,13 – NIV)

Job wants to be the one to decide how Heaven will look upon him. He wants to force God’s hand of blessing by means of his sacrifices and obedience. He wants to make God’s decisions, to be God himself.

When we look at the story this way, Missy and I always realize that we have something dark in common with Job. We want to be God, too. Part of our enthusiasm for homeschooling is a hidden desire to control the world around us and force God to yield the results we want. We pass this desire directly on to our children, of course, in everything we teach.

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Why can’t the protagonist have what he wants?

 When you understand Job’s real desire, the answer to the last question is straightforward: Job can’t be God because God is God already. Job can’t control the world because he did not create the world, nor does he rule it. It turns out that God is not manipulated by the sacrifices of his creatures, or by their behavior, good or bad. The justification that Job strives after is a Divine gift, and the prosperity that supposedly signifies it is nothing more or less than God’s unmerited favor.

In Job’s case, even the calamity that gave rise to this story is a gift from God, for it gets Job’s attention and saves him from idolatry. Job admits that he has learned his lesson as the story comes to a close:

“I am unworthy – how can I reply to You? I put my hand over my mouth…Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know…My ears had heard of You, but now my eyes have seen You. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.” (Job 40:4; 42:3,5 – NIV)

He ends by repenting of his idolatry and spurning his previous attempts to usurp God’s place in the universe. He has learned the most important lesson of all: there is a God in heaven, and I am not He.

Missy and I count ourselves lucky in that the calamity that was necessary in Job’s case has not been visited on us. And yet, it is fair to call Job lucky, too – for his troubles produced repentance and humility, which are the best goals of a good education.

If you had only one hour to give your kids an education, what lesson would you teach them? The lesson of Job reminds us that all of our day-to-day work should be aimed at repentance and humility as overarching goals. In all we do, we hope to teach this one lesson over and over again.