Classical Writing

A couple of months ago, I talked about consistency as related to homeschooling little ones. I talked about how we need to do a regular daily session of language arts every day just 30 minutes (and perhaps only 4 days per week). A little adds up to a lot over time, and consistency will count for a lot more than just random marathon sessions.

As mentioned between reading, spelling, letter formation, and simple copybook and writing, in the early years that 30 minutes, distributed amongst a few simple tasks, such as our Primers provide, is all you need in those early grades.

Some people questioned me, relating to this, about scheduling it all, and I do recommend one source that I used way back many years ago. It is a book called “Managers of their Homes”. It has its title from Titus 2 in the Bible. This resource has now expanded and I don’t know what all it includes, but it may be worth a look to see what the books they offer there are now.

Now, I would say, even if you are not a Christian, or if the flavor of Christianity at this website is not the one you subscribe to, I would still recommend looking at the organizational resources available there. You can study organization and become organized regardless of most of your religious, political, or moral convictions. It is a matter of learning a few principles.

This particular web site is really good at teaching step by step management (in particular) of your time. You get to evaluate how much time you have in your week, prioritize how you would like to spend it, balance that with the tasks you must do (including homeschooling each child and time with the toddler), and then their books help you REALISTICALLY draw up a schedule that it would actually be possible for you to follow. I think I started this when my oldest was in about 6th grade or so, and it made a huge difference in my homeschooling. Even just the time inventory—learning how much time I actually have and learning how I actually spend it vs. how I would like to spend it— was worth the whole book for me, at the time.

So back to writing, which is the topic of our blog here— the most important thing you can do in writing education is to be consistent. A lot of little writing assignments spread over weeks and years do a lot more for a student than a couple of inconsistent killer projects.

Young students should read and be read to — not A LOT, but consistently. Young students should do regular copybook work — not A LOT, but consistently. And as the language they read and hear during read aloud time and also absorb during copybook work is cemented in their brains and hearts as proper speech pattern they will ‘by osmosis’, if you will, begin to form writing habits of their own, simply as a result of the language habits they hear consistently.

In short, there is much you can do in homeschooling in terms of the 3 Rs, in terms of sports, in terms of music, in terms of social studies and science — in my opinion there is nothing as important in education as the 3 Rs. You can short change computer science or history, perhaps, but do not short change the 3Rs. Get them done consistently every week, all the time.

🙂 Your students’ long term academic performances will attest to this.

A couple of blog posts ago, we talked about editing student work. I want to revisit that topic this morning.

Obviously there is a difference between editing the essay of a 12th grader and editing the essay of a 4th grader, in terms of content, in terms of how picky you choose to be, and in terms of how carefully you scrutinize the arguments the student puts forth.

In spite of that, there are some elements of editing that are common to all editing processes.

At Classical Writing, we divide our editing steps into macro editing and micro editing.

By macro editing, we mean looking at over all content and arguments of the essay. By micro editing, we mean looking at the details of the essay: spelling, punctuation, dotting your i’s and crossing your t’s.

There is NO POINT in microediting an essay (or a writing project/narration) unless you and the student are in agreement about the global issues of the essay.

In other words, if a fourth grade student is writing a narration of a complicated long story like Andersen’s The Fir Tree, and if the student has some issues in terms of writing the story sequence wrong, or perhaps his story is too long — there is no point in trying to correct his spelling or his punctuation at this point. — First the student needs to agree with his teacher on the big issues of the essay, getting the title, purpose, and content right (macro editing), and once those issues are settled, it is worth working on the details (micro editing).

We recommend that your students turn in essays/writing projects at least twice. Once for macro editing (helping the student with big issue content and organization) and the second time for micro editing (sentence structure issues, word choices, spelling, and punctuation).

Now, if you are a ‘grammar nazi’, stifle yourself on the details in the first edition of the writing project. Even if you do see an apostrophe missing or realize that the student has used affect where he should have said ‘ effect, stifle yourself and let it go. You need to help your student look at the big issues of his essay,and pointing out spellos is distracting to the student and may derail him from paying attention to the issues he needs to deal with. It is important to teach the student to focus on the major issues, and to focus to the point where he engages with those issues before he turns his attention to details.

After all, details in the essay will not matter if whole sentences and words will be scrapped after the first rewrite.

We offer two sets of tables in our books, tables which aid you in editing. They can be found in all our books from Aesop and up.

One table is a macro editing check list, another table is a micro editing check list.

Those tables are our answer to the rubrics. But unlike rubrics which are meant for just one iteration of the assignment, these are meant for at least two iterations of the assignment: the first time the student turns the essay in, we help him improve content, arguments, and big issues. The second time he turns the essay in, we edit it for details. That way, the last time the student turns in his essay, most of the content, organization, and style issues of the essay are resolved.

We often get questions about editing student essays, or questions like, don’t you have a rubric for the writing projects?

Yes, and no, and maybe. We are not huge rubric fans, but we understand the need for them.

There are a couple of purposes for rubrics.
1. standardization of grades
2. mass editing
3. aid to the novice teacher or teaching assistant, who is not an experienced essay grader.

Rubrics work to assure that everyone is held to the same standard. They allow for three or four instructors to grade the same types of paper and more or less come out with grades that are evaluated similarly.

Rubrics also serve as guidelines for mass education purposes. They allow a teacher to grade a ton of essays with a standard in his hand so he can browse through (without totally reading the content), look for the components that the essay is supposed to include, and then he can quickly assign the points the student deserves and move onto the next essay. That is the sort of thing you see on the ACT or SAT essays where instructors are quick trained to assess such essays.

Finally, if you are a novice writing instructor, a rubric is a nice thing to lean on as you learn how to assess writing.

So, do we have rubrics? Well, we don’t call them rubrics, but we provide editing checklists for each essay, and if you want a rubric, go through our macro and micro editing check lists, assign points to each check point, and voila, you have a rubric.

But let me also warn you against rubrics. We have all seen the ‘if Shakespeare had submitted this to today’s English teacher’ type of articles, where a major marvelous work of his would have been torn to shreds by a teacher who follows a rubric. Any standardized rubric can totally miss artistry or ingenuity on the part of the writer. In addition to going through your rubric to make sure the student follows the assignment, you need to read the work globally, carefully, and discern with your own judgment (rather than with a rubric) whether the student followed the spirit of the assignment, whether the student completed the assignment, and how well the student did so.

Here is a pretty typical rubric: http://www.readwritethink.org/files/resources/printouts/Essay%20Rubric.pdf

This pretty standard rubric does a lot of good stuff, but the one thing I see missing is an evaluation of the supports for the thesis. Nowhere does it cover the arguments inside the essay and evaluate how well they support the thesis, how strong or innovative or new they are, which order they are presented in, and whether they come from a variety of sources of information.

So yes, you can start with a rubric, like the one listed above. It is a good baseline for evaluating an essay, but the substance of the essay is its content. The content is the arguments that are put forth to support the thesis statement, and they need to be looked at most closely.

More on that in the next installment.

Educational theories are hard to articulate, and most parents who home educate do not precisely care. Their goals are more practical. I want Junior to be able to read, write, and do math at a level that will get him into college. PERIOD.

Allow me to dig just two inches deeper, and let’s pick a topic, Math, and talk about concept teaching or example teaching in conjunction with math — a prime topic for example vs. concept teaching.

Most students get through public school education by learning a concept in math, say how to solve a quadratic equation
a x^2 + b x + c =0

the solution is x = (-b +- Sqrt(b^2 – 4 a c))/2a.

Most students learned that in 8th grade (likely you did too), and most students know how to use it in patterned situations with lots of examples of applications for how to use the quadratic equation, but most students have no clue what the solutions mean, what the equation i s really good for (physically in real time and space or mathematically). They have simply learned an equation, and they have followed umpteen examples with a certain pattern, and when they see a problem that looks like one of the examples they went through, they can imitate what they remember from their examples and actually do the problem more or less correctly.

HOWEVER, if the problem they are faced with is somewhat unlike the examples they have gone through in class, they do not have a clue how to solve the problem because conceptually, they have no understanding.

This is public education’s big down fall. When students have to think outside the box, because they were never taught conceptually but only via examples, they cannot extrapolate from their understanding of the bigger picture and figure out how to solve a problem.

Teaching with examples is weak teaching, which produces students who cannot think very deeply. It is the malaise of our primary and secondary education, and it is largely a product, in my opinion, of 1. the fact that our classes are too big and so we do not have time to engage with students individually to really teach to where they need instruction and 2. a product of an educational system that makes use of standardized testing to evaluate performance.

There is no fixing of those problems in a blog, but what I will discuss in the next blog is how to center your teaching (you the coop teacher, home educator, or teacher at a school) around student learning needs…. around where the student conceptually does not understand the problem, rather than teaching by giving students examples which he or she needs to imitate.

Let me close with this for today. We discuss analysis and imitation in Classical Writing as a means of learning to writing well… imitating great writers. CLEARLY we believe in imitation, so why am I ‘knocking’ examples. Isn’t looking at an example and doing what it did, a form of imitation?

Yes, it is. When we study an example we are engaging in principles of imitation, and that is one important learning strategy, but note this — the word imitation in our books is always preceded by ANALYSIS.

We analyze first, we find out ‘conceptually’, what the passage consists of in words, sentences, and paragraphs. We analyze at the word, sentences, and paragraph level for content, organization, and style. We want to know the HOW and the WHY of the author’s choice to write the passage the way he did.

Analysis precedes imitation…. imitation without analysis is not only poor writing, it is rote and pointless writing. Analysis learning is conceptual learning, and it must precede imitation, or the imitation is not worth engaging in.

I will discuss conceptual learning more in the next blog.

With the holidays here, I wanted to mention all the meaningful writing activities that you can engage your students in.

Not that essay writing and curricula are not meaningful, but that students more so love to write for a real occasion.

For elementary age (and this is particularly for homeschoolers, but also possible in schools), get them involved in writing letters of thanks, both thanks for gifts they have received, but possibly also notes of thanks around this season of Thanksgiving–notes that are ‘out of the blue’ pleasant surprises to persons whom they are grateful to. These should be hand written, on paper, and sent in the mail, in my opinion. Email and text are handy communications devices, but hand written letters in the mail are rarer, more treasured, and they add a level of solemnity to the thank you that a text message over the phone just cannot convey.

It is a mother’s life long struggle (at least it was mine) to teach her kids to write notes of thanks for gifts received on birthdays and at Christmas. I recommend incorporating some of that writing in your early writing assignments when you start up after Christmas. — Letter writing is a bit of a lost art, and thank you cards no less so.

I don’t think the thank yous need to be on a formal card, necessarily. A neatly written letter on white paper, neatly addressed on the front of the envelope looks tactful and thoughtful.

Here are a couple of links to ponderings on the lost art of letter writing.

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/charlottehigginsblog/2012/oct/23/lost-art-letter-writing

http://www.npr.org/2013/11/20/245052225/the-art-of-letter-writing-isnt-lost-on-these-scribblers

We don’t have to live in the 19th century to be thankful and thoughtful towards other people.