I attended our local homeschool conference. I haven’t attended a full day for a few years but I was interested in a few of the workshops. One piqued my interest. “Teaching the Reluctant Writer” by a representative from The Institute For Excellence in Writing. I’ve only heard good things about this program and have it in my basement but never used it because I thought I was missing some component of it.

The presenter was a veteran homeschool mom who started using the program with her then 5th or 6th grade boy who was her “reluctant writer”. She made a few points that were revolutionary to me.

#1 Teaching writing is like teaching an art. (This is not her idea-it’s a principle promoted by the creator of the program but I never thought of it this way). Asking a student who doesn’t have the foundation of life experience, vocabulary, spelling, language, etc. to sit down and write on a blank piece of paper about a topic (“How I spent my summer”) is like sitting a child in front of the piano and expecting them to play a song. The idea of lack of requisite foundation wasn’t news to me, it was thinking of writing as an art rather than a skill.  But now I see it as an art that requires skill and practice, along with other things. She used a funny example. A teacher might say to a child, “pretend you’re a reporter and write a newspaper article about your summer vacation.” Journalists get a college degree to do what they do. We wouldn’t say to a kid “pretend your a concert pianist at Carnegie Hall and play this piece.” Admittedly, I have asked Hannah to write about an incident in a story as if she were writing a newspaper article. I have to say, though, it was pretty good-then again, she’s not a reluctant writer.

#2 Helping a child who needs it is not cheating, it’s teaching.  As homeschool parents, we can tend to feel like we’re cheating if we help our children with certain things related to their work. Another shift in perspective for me. As homeschoolers, we also have the luxury of helping a child with whatever skill, concept, word, idea as long as they need it.

#3 Using a pencil is almost as distressing to a reluctant writer as the assignment, itself. A pencil only stays sharp for a few lines at most. Children, boys in particular, prefer the visual contrast of sharp, black lines. Which is why some children suffer from the cramped hand and broken points or they’re up every few minutes sharpening the pencil. The program advocates using ink for everything but the final draft. Have the child write on every other line. They can cross out words or phrases that they want to change and add words on the blank line above. This also aids the mental process of writing because they can see the whole progression. Again, a revolutionary concept, but one I can really relate to.

If you’re as old as I am, on the first day of school, you were issued a No. 2 pencil and a yellow tablet. You know the kind, with that soft paper and the blue lines. I remember the horrible feeling of writing on a fat tablet with a dull pencil.  If the pencil was too sharp, it tore the paper. I did love the feel of a ball point pen on this type of tablet and it was a tablet, not a “notebook”. Erasing was out of the question. It either smudged or tore a big hole in the paper. I couldn’t wait until junior high when I could use spiral notebooks or looseleaf paper and pens! To this day, I love the feel of writing with pen on a clean sheet of paper. I also prefer certain writing tips and inks to others. Writing is a total sensory experience for me and I wonder how much more I would have enjoyed it if I had been encouraged to use pen and cross out mistakes. Come to think of it, writing a draft or several was never part of the process.

Armed with these few principles, I feel empowered to dive into the program and help the kids become more confident and proficient writers. The truth is, none of the kids are reluctant writers, they all have a desire to write and love stories but some of them have not felt confident no matter how much I’ve tried to encourage them.

Who doesn’t love Mach Madness? I’ve loved the excitement of everything leading up to it and the tournament, itself since high school back in the “Phi Slamma Jamma” days. I didn’t start filling out brackets until graduate school and only then discovered how it made you care about ALL the games-not just your favorite teams.

As a mom, I still fill out my bracket. I don’t watch all the games, but I’ll sit down here and there to catch some of it. I love how it unites the family in a shared experience. Even Kate, who has no interest in the X’s and O’s of any sport, makes her picks and likes hearing who wins and loses. I think last year, she almost won the 6 bucks!

The Thursday afternoon that the tournament starts is one of the times that I love that the kids aren’t in school. Tip-off 12:20, pick your seat, grab the snacks. I’ll go to the mat defending this experience as education-though I don’t count it since Thurs. and Fri. are our typical weekends. This is the type of 3-D, real-world, delight-driven learning that grows the brain.  Handwriting, spelling, reading, math (what are the odds of Robert Morris winning the tournament, what’s the score-how many does RMU need to tie it up?) social studies, (wonder how Chief Kicking Stallion Sims got his name), physiology, language arts in its most applied, authentic form, all integrated naturally by the conversations that go along with it and topped off by the more frequent trips to the driveway hoop during time-outs and half times. Mind you, I don’t instigate or hijack any of the above naturally occurring “educational” moments, they happen spontaneously and usually without any input from me. I would never ruin the experience by trying to schoolify the tournament, I’m just saying they’re learning.

Admittedly, I don’t have much wisdom to offer to the chatter and pontificating since I don’t follow basketball all season but I love to listen to the conversations. I’m telling you, neurons are firing and brains are growing because its relevant. Maybe not relevant to the world-at-large, but March Madness is relevant to our world for the next 2 weekends and I’m grateful for the tradition.

I’ve noticed that our culture has very little tolerance for mistakes or failures. The irony is that I think we learn more from our mistakes and failures than our successes. I’m not sure whether my homeschool environment encourages mistakes or whether it “nips them in the bud”. While I think homeschooling has the POTENTIAL for a lot of tolerance of mistakes because it’s a completely safe environment in which to make them. I also know that I, personally never care or worry whether the kids’ work is perfect or even conforms to my vision of right or beautiful. Of course, some subjects leave no room for question and are completely objective. The obvious being math. But even in math, I can give partial credit if they performed the operation correctly but made a simple error of numbers. Sometimes I don’t give partial credit if I feel that they rushed.

For the most part, my children  HATE to make mistakes and I’m not sure why. I would admit that I don’t have tolerance for do-overs when it means wasting lots of time or money. For example, I don’t like to throw food away if a new recipe stinks. That rarely happens because I tend to stick to what I know or can pretty much anticipate how it will turn out. But really, I should let the kids have at it more in the kitchen and not worry so much about their mistakes. School work: I tell them over and over, “that’s what erasers are for”. I’m admitting that this is a failure on our part as parents but I’m not sure how to turn it around.

To be fair, though, I don’t think schools and parents with kids in school have the luxury of tolerating mistakes. I think there’s a fear that their child will be humiliated or labeled for less-than-perfect work.  The notion of helping kids with homework is counter-intuitive in my view, yet it’s common and expected. I thought the purpose of homework is to give the kids more practice on a given concept or allow them to complete work at home that there wasn’t time for in school. The idea that parents should help with and then correct it before the child returns to school cheats kids in 2 respects. First, in an obvious way, the child doesn’t learn how to do his own work. Secondly, a teacher would have no idea that the children in a class are having trouble with a particular concept and likely would move on. Don’t even get me started on projects and contests. I think it’s common that parents help so much that they pretty much do them. My friends of conventionally-schooled kids complain that they HAVE to help or practically do the types of projects that are assigned. There’s no way that the child could complete them on his own. I’m sure I’d be the same. It would be cruel to send Johnny in with a poster that he made by himself next to the fabulous ones created by the other kids’ parents. Maybe that’s not the best example but you get my drift.

I recently had an opportunity to ask an expert in managing people (he was hired to reorganize a certain federal agency after Katrina) how tolerant he was for mistakes in that agency when mistakes literally might cost lives. He agreed that we learn from our own mistakes and he encouraged employees to make them in non-crisis day-to-day work performance. I asked how in the world he encouraged mistakes? He said, he created an environment where it was completely safe to make them and employees knew they could come to him when they made mistakes. His first question was always “Did anybody die?” If the answer was “no” then he’d tell them “We can fix that.”

I think I’ll apply that same standard around here to encourage mistakes AND independence. Hopefully, nobody will get hurt.