It's a blessing...and a curse.

Alzheimer’s Disease is a curse…

…but blessings abound within it.

Mom and Dad with their Drexler grandchildren, 1993

My Dad’s words today: "When I went into Greencroft, there was music.  All residents who could were in the meeting room listening to former Miss PA of about 40 years ago singing songs from the 40's and 50's accompanied by her trombone playing husband and a big band in an electronic box. 

Veva was alert and enjoying the music.  When I sat down next to her, I was greeted with a big smile of acknowledgement.  The music had brought her alert.  And, Mark, when I told her that you phoned me last evening she knew who you were.  I took her for a ride around the building before her lunch of ham loaf and sweet potatoes."

I can see her in my mind

toes tapping

hand conducting

voice humming

a big smile for her dear husband of 61 years.

Yes,

Blessings abound.

Classical Education in Our Home part 4: the method

I won’t share our mistakes

except to say they were many

…and rose mostly from my pride

and trying to jump in with both feet.

But

I did learn something very important from my mistakes:

Children are living, growing, developing people.

Not mini-me,

Not monsters,

And not perfect.

Children learn things in small doses...

…liquid drops melting into their mouths and running down their throats…

...a bright cherry-red drop of Rome, a blueberry drop of Latin, a strawberry drop of prime numbers…

...drops and layers growing into a stalagmite...

A foundation of knowledge.

Knowledge of simple things that the child builds on as experience widens.

Rome wasn’t built in a day,

children don’t learn everything in one year,

or one exposure.

Repetitio Mater Studiorum.

...repetition is the mother of learning...

I learned to bake with phyllo. Lay down the dough, spread the melted butter, another layer of dough, another layer of butter.

Layer upon layer, until you have a single whole.

 

That’s the method when teaching children.

Year after year of layers and the children start making connections between the familiar pieces.

Things make sense.

The foundation is firm.

The early years – basic stuff – the grammar, the mechanics, the what of language, math, science, history.

Spelling, phonics, reading.

Counting, number relationships, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division.

Nature exploration and much time spent outside experiencing sights, smells, textures.

And the who and what of history. The early years are for biographies and historical fiction – learning about people.

The middle years – building on the foundation – the logic, the why…

Grammar, classical languages, logic, more reading.

Numbers play games in algebra.

Science separates into different disciplines.

The why of history: why did these people do what they did? What else was going on?

The later years – getting ready to branch out – the rhetoric, the how…

Learning to take ideas, analyze them, examine them, judge them…how do they relate to each other? How do they affect me and my life?

Critical thinking about science. Does this make sense? How and why?

Knowing what happened in history and why; but how could these things happen, and how can we influence our world for the better?

The method

the discipline

the learning

evolved over time…

...but the joy came in bright flashes

when we made connections

to the learning

to each other

and we know

this moment is forever.

Classical Education in our home part 3: answering the call

God calls.
We listen and respond, right?

How many times does God’s call go unheeded because our first reaction is fear?

What if I can’t?

What if they won’t?

What if I’m wrong?

But where God calls…

…where God calls He equips.

HE equips.

Internet searches are fine – if you know what it is and how to use it. This was 1996. We had a computer, and email. But the internet was in its infancy back then.

But a friend had heard of this school in Pennsylvania

…and one in Idaho…

Classical Education was finding its feet in private schools.

Some say it had never left.

I found Calvert School. I found Greenleaf Press.

We started our second year of homeschooling armed with a desire to educate our children

…differently…

We read. I studied.

God brought Charlotte Mason to my attention.

I studied more, adapted, made do with a small, very small, budget.

Veritas Press. Memoria Press. Sonlight. Susan Wise Bauer and The Well Trained Mind. Tapestry of Grace.

I studied history, Latin, math.

I dove into the Bible.

I learned the things I should have learned in those naive years between 12 and 20.

A plan developed; a method.

My poor children. Guinea Pigs, all.

Classical Education in Our Home part 2: the Call

Part two has been a long time coming! My only excuse is that our family life has been in huge upheaval over the past year...but we are finally re-employed, re-located, re-establishing and ready to start again. If you've read my blog post from December 2009 - we are living out that post once again :)

So, today's question is: what led us to a Classical Education in our home?

Just before we started full time homeschooling - after one year of homeschooling our oldest, a move, another baby, and a few more years of public school - I was a children’s leader in Bible Study Fellowship, which meant a trip to Indianapolis for a retreat. The retreat was wonderful, but the most life-changing event wasn't in the teaching, or the discussion sessions, or in my personal Bible study - it was one little phrase, just two words, that BSF Director Rosemary Jensen used as she shared her personal story: "classical education."

It was one of those experiences that I can only describe as a door opening into a new world. A door I had been searching for without knowing what I had been looking for.

All through my own years in school I had always felt that there was something more than what I was seeing. Elusive bits and pieces floated just beyond the edge of my field of vision – details that would connect the disjointed bits and pieces that I was picking up in my education. I had a niggling feeling that there was a story behind the story, but it was like waking up and only being able to remember the feeling left by a dream without remembering anything else about the dream. I couldn't describe it to anyone, couldn't identify it…I wasn't even convinced it was real.

Until Rosemary Jensen said those two words.

God got my attention that day. Once I turned my face toward Classical Education, I never looked back. THIS is how we were to educate our children.

Classical Education in Our Home, Challenge #1: my own background

When God first called us to educate our children at home, he placed in me a desire for them to have a Classical Christian education. That was a tall order since I really had no idea what it was! So I started doing the research…

What I learned was that Classical Christian education had been around for a long time, and that in my own educational background (13 years in a “progressive” public school system and a BA from a highly respected liberal arts college) I received the vestiges of a Classical education – the leftovers from an earlier era.

During the 1960’s and 70’s (for those of you too young to remember), we were going through a social revolution that sought to throw out anything that was “old”, “classical” or “traditional”. But in any institution, public education included, there is a process to change and a period where the old mixes with the new…and that was the confused educational climate I grew up in. Our teachers had us read the “classics”…because we should, somehow, they thought, be exposed to them…you know? It just seems right, you know? (Yes, the teachers were more confused than we were!) So I read Les Miserables in 8^th grade, in a class taught by a teacher who was more concerned with social justice than literature, and at the same time “studied” American “history” taught by a teacher who impressed us more with her “mod” clothes (remember Mrs. Peel in “The Avengers”?) than with anything she had to say in class. This same trend continued through to my college years, so even though I was given an “excellent” public school education and graduated from a top ranked college, I reached adulthood feeling like I really hadn’t learned anything.

I’ve discovered that the problem with my own education is that I was given bits and pieces in a vacuum. How could I hope to understand Les Miserables without any understanding of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Era? How could I understand the French Revolution without understanding the humanistic philosophies of the time? How could I hope to understand the main theme of redemption in the story without an understanding of the religious and moral underpinnings of that society or my own? And that was just the beginning. I read Moby Dick under the guidance of a professor who refused to look at the Christian symbolism of the book, Dante’s Divine Comedy with only the shallowest of understanding of medieval literature, and Beowulf with just an inkling that there may be a connection between Old English literature and the modern pieces by Tolkein and C.S. Lewis.

The result was an English major who hated reading literature, and a writer who couldn’t write. I wanted something different for our children, and God called us to something different.

The Case for Imagination

Our family seems to be in the minority among Christian homeschoolers. Well, yes, in several ways – but there is one area that stands out most sharply at times: we encourage our children to read fantasies and fairy tales, and to play games that have “magical” elements in them.

We don’t advocate “spiritualism”, or exploration of anything scripture prohibits (we don’t even look at horoscopes and astrology, for instance), and I wouldn’t think of encouraging those who are against exposing their children to fantasy and fairy tales to change their convictions. I only hope to explain our own decision.Before you stop reading (although I know a few of you already have), let me explain why we draw our lines where we have.

First of all, we have carefully chosen this route because of a very important aspect of our faith. God is a Spirit – our triune God has a physical body in one part (our Lord Jesus Christ), but the other two parts of the trinity (God the Father and God the Holy Spirit) are part of the supernatural, spiritual realm.

Before I go on, let me define “supernatural” as being outside of nature, not “demonic”.

This spiritual, supernatural aspect of our faith is almost impossible for our minds, schooled in rational thought and anchored in the material world, to understand. If we only let our minds think on things that are natural and easily explained, then we are limiting our imaginations to what we can experience. Our understanding of God, therefore, is also limited to what our minds can understand – and we end up limiting God.

But by training our minds to think of things beyond what we can see, touch, hear and feel - training our minds to fathom the depths of what the scriptures reveal to us of the spiritual world – we can begin to imagine what God’s word tells us about Himself, His angels, Satan and his demons, and our role in God’s created order in both the natural and supernatural worlds.

Secondly, we have chosen this route for our family because we, as Christians, are in a battle. A very real, very serious battle.

“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Therefore, take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm.” Ephesians 6:12-13 ESV

Our battle is fought in the spiritual realm as well as in the material. We need to have imaginations that can understand this, imaginations that can see beyond our own experiences to a bigger picture. We need to train our minds and imaginations to see the world as God sees it.

To do this, we immerse our family in God’s word, and expand their imaginations through stories that go beyond our own world – both true and fantastic. We cannot fight against that which we cannot imagine existing, so we imagine.

Memories.....

It's been 43 years since I ate my first lobster. That's me on the far left, next to Grandma Tomlonson. My mom and brother are across the table from us. My dad took the picture.

That was my first and most recent trip to Maine. We took a lot of camping vacations when I was growing up. My parents wanted to travel around the country and see as much of it as possible before my brother turned 16. So in 1967 we traveled to New England, in 1968 we went to the Southwest, and in 1969 we went to the Northwest.

I have great memories of those trips - always a new place to sleep, new things to see, new foods to try. I swam in both oceans, fell in love with rocky sea shores, discovered the rain forest on the Olympic Peninsula, attended the rangers' fireside talks at the National Parks. I learned to love the Kansas prairie at dusk, the Rocky Mountains at sunrise, and the wondrous cold of a mountain stream on bare feet.

I remember looking out from our campsite in Rapid City, South Dakota one night and seeing the lights of Wall, SD 60 miles east. I remember the sandy feeling of the warm wood of a boardwalk along the Jersey shore on a July afternoon. I remember the view from the rest stop near Banff, Alberta, as we ate a picnic lunch on my 12th birthday.

Years later my dad added up the total costs of those trips - buying the camper, gas, campground fees, etc., and found that we could have made the same trips staying in motels for the same money.

Sorry Dad, you're wrong. They wouldn't have been the same trips.......