On Just A Couple Acres: ~More on Habits~

Hannah contrived this little seat for the birthday boy last month to celebrate the day

After dealing with the habit of attention, Charlotte Mason in Home Education goes on to deal with six more habits that we ought to endeavor to instill in our children. I shall address five of them today with the sixth, and most important habit, obedience, concluding our discussion on the matter next time. Going through these has been very difficult and painful for me as I come to realize more fully my shortcomings and am spurred on to apply change to my own habits.

{Application}

His zeal (towards lessons) must be stimulated; there must always be a pleasing vista before him; and steady, untiring application to work should be held up as honorable, while fitful, flagging attention and effort are scouted.

Aim steadily at securing quickness of apprehension and execution

He felt like a king!

I fear this habit will be much easier said than done for me! To achieve a quickness to the completing their lessons, the teacher is to be quick herself, alert, and anticipating speedy answers. Often, it's all I can do to stay awake during lessons what with the bodily strain of caring for the smallest of people within or the sleepless nights with new little babes. But to be fully alert myself in order to train it into my children will be quite a feat for me.

Another hint to training for a quick application is to discourage grumbling about the lessons. I've learned Philippians 2:14 and quote it back to my children often, that they are to do all things without murmurings and disputings. (Sometimes I use the language "grumbling" or "arguing" to help convey it in easier terms.) It usually works to stifle the complaints at the time and hopefully, one day they'll hear that verse in their heads before they begin to whine.

{Thinking}

By 'thinking' let us mean a real conscious effort of mind, and not the fancies that flit without effort through the brain... a tracing of effect from cause, or of cause from effect; a comparing of things to find out wherein they are alike, and wherein they differ; a conclusion as to causes or consequences from certain premisses.

And they should be doing this at nearly every lesson. This is yet another struggle for me. I liken it to teaching my toddler to wash windows and letting them do the job more slowly and imperfectly than I would- it's just easier to do it myself. It's also easier to just give out the answers rather than making them think it through themselves. When I do take the time I'm always rewarded with knowing that it was better for their minds to have worked that out themselves, but I'm lazy and selfish and prefer to move on to the business that I was about. I'm finding this book is more and more about training me than training them.

Thinking comes by practice- The child must think, get at the reason- why of things for himself, every day of his life, and more each day than the day before.

Every walk should offer some knotty problem for the children to think out

A bit of grain field success yielded 3 1/2 pounds of cornflour and a bit of fun times picking kernels

{Imagining}

All their lessons will afford scope for some slight exercise of the children's thinking power, some more and some less, and the lessons must be judiciously alternated, so that the more mechanical efforts succeed the more strictly intellectual, and that the pleasing exercise of the imagination, again, succeed efforts of reason.

"Say, 'Cheeeese!'" and there's a face only a mother could love. And I do!

Books of 'comicalities' cultivate no power but the sense of the incongruous; and though life is the more amusing for the possession of such a sense, when cultivated to excess it is apt to show itself in a flippant habit

Dr. Seuss anyone? I was reared on Dr. Seuss and one of the most exciting parts of becoming a new mother for me was to crack all those old titles and share them with my son. But over the years, I've been increasingly convicted that nonsense books are a waste of the few precious moments I have to spare reading aloud to my littlest of ones. It's been challenging to find stories for them that either nonsense or based on cartoons without spending money- they are practically all my library carries- but I'd rather repeat the same few we own and keep checking out the same old stories over and over than waste what time I do have. Thankfully, they never seem to tire of listening to Winnie-the-Pooh and neither do I. You should see how tattered our copy is!

But let them have tales of the imagination, scenes laid in other lands and other times, heroic adventures, hairbreadth escapes, delicious fairy tales in which they are never roughly pulled up by the impossible- even where all is impossible, and they know it, and yet believe.

(A brief interjection here- We do avoid fairy tales in our home, despite the CM love for them. I worry that fairy tales often border on being occult and would rather air on the side of caution. There are plenty of exciting stories that fire the imagination without needing to dance around that fine line. Just a personal conviction.)

The children should have the joy of living in far lands, in other persons, in other times- a delightful double existence; and this joy they will find, for the most part, in their story-books. Their lessons, too history and geography, should cultivate their conceptive powers. If the child do not live in the times of his history lesson, be not at home in the climes his geography book describes, why, these lessons will fail of their purpose. But let lessons do their best, and, and the picture-gallery of the imagination is poorly hung if the child have not found his way into the realms of fancy.

I turn my back on her for just a minute and I'm down half a loaf.

{Remembering}

Memory is the storehouse of whatever knowledge we possess

The children learn in order that they may remember

This memory which may be drawn upon by the act of recollection is our most valuable endowment

A spurious memory- facts and ideas floating in the brain which yet make no part of it, and are exuded at a single effort

This is what the current educational model used in public schools fosters and we must not adapt for our own! This gets us "A's" on the test this week and allows the knowledge to move out next week to make room for the next set of facts. Raise your hand if you can remember most of anything you were taught during your school years.... I know that a desire for knowledge on a particular topic and experience have been my best teachers and give the facts sticking power in my memory.

A hard working man shoveling compost on chicken butchering day

Any object or idea which is regarded with attention makes the sort of impression on the brain which is said to fix it in the memory

You want the child to remember? Then secure his whole attention, the fixed gaze of his mind, as it were, upon the fact to be remembered; then he will have it: by a sort of photographic process, that fact or idea is 'taken' by his brain, and when he is an old man, perhaps, the memory of it will flash across him.

It is not enough to have a recollection flash across one incidentally; we want to have the power of recalling at will: and for this, something more is necessary than an occasional act of attention producing a solitary impression

Fix his attention upon each new lesson, but each must be so linked into the last that it is impossible for him to recall one without the other following in its train.... Let every lesson gain the child's entire attention, and let each new lesson be so interlaced with the last that the one must recall the other; that, again, recalls the one before it, and so on to the beginning.

Would we call this 'Unit Studies' these days? I'm not very good with organizing that all, so they are certainly not for me, but even the poorest of organizers among us can make the Bible the link between our lessons and I know our children would benefit the most from that.

{Perfect Execution}

I do believe the Lord has something to say of perfect execution....

Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; Ecclesiastes 9:10

and,

Whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men; Colossians 3:23

Now what does Miss Mason have to say?

Our children are allowed to make their figures, or their letter, their stitches, their dolls' clothes, their small carpentry, anyhow, with the notion that they will do better by-and-by.... if the children get the habit of turning out imperfect work, the men and women will undoubtedly keep that habit up.

No work should be given to a child that he cannot execute perfectly, and then perfection should be required of him as a matter of course.

If he produces (faulty work), get him to point out the fault, and persevere until he has produced his task; if he does not do it today, let him go on tomorrow and the next day, and when (the perfect work) appear, let it be an occasion of triumph.... Let everything he does be well done

Closely connected with this habit of 'perfect work' is that of finishing whatever is taken in hand.

Ouch.
This one I think is more painful for me than all the rest! I am so guilty of lazily excusing their slip shod work and accepting it as immaturity that will develop more fully as they age. I didn't do that with my oldest and now I'm all too easily able to see the fruit that is reaping in the lives of my younger children. Their work is poor and because their eyes are trained to see poor looking work, my task is made all the more difficult to retrain them. As I begin to approach the beginning of our school year, I'm feeling the need to start entirely from scratch and retrain them to a more perfect execution of their work.