Up until that final click, they were interested and, I think, grasping the idea of scale that was the purpose of the exercize for me, but after that final click, they were beyond excited. The possibility of seeing an image of what had, until then, only been a map, of moving between map and image with a click, suddenly made everything real to them. From then on, nothing would do but that we had to follow along the streets on the map to find the houses of their friends, their church, their favourite stores, their parks, everything they could think of, to see it on the map. It was as if the idea of scale became concrete for them all at once, as if they could finally understand that the lines on the paper represented, not only the idea of things, but the actual places that they knew.

It was amazing, one of those moments that makes homeschooling my kids so wonderful.

Now, I am not of the opinion that all children’s poetry needs to be rhymed and metred, not at all.  Just as with any poetry, a regular metre is in no way necessary to good poetry.  The problem is that so much children’s verse, and virtually all of the children’s verse that is published in picture books, clearly attempts to be metred.  It most often takes the form of the ballad stanza (xaxa rhyme scheme with lines alternating between iambic tetrametre and iambic trimetre) or rhyming couplets of iambic pentametre, but whatever the form it takes, it is clearly written with little or no understanding of the metrical principles underlying whatever form has been chosen.  The result is in most cases is a completely unreadable rhythm. Let me give a few examples.

The zipper has two sides.
They both fit in.
Just zzzzzzip all the way–
Right up to your chin.
(Snap! Button! Zip! by Abigail Tabby)

His Drawers were of Rabbit-skins;– so were his Shoes;–
His Stockings were skins,–bit it is not known whose;–
(The Old Man and the Suit by Edward Lear)

Down by the river bank, Crocodile was trying to nap,
when Mungo jumped out of the trees and gave his nose a tap.
“Want to play?” Mungo asked. “I know a good game.”
“Really said Crocodile suspiciously. “What’s its name?”
“Funny faces,” said Mungo. “What do you say?”
“I’m not sure said Crocodile. “I don’t know how to play.”
“Easy,” said Mungo. “All you have to do,
is pull a funny face. Look, I’ll show you.”
And he pulled on one jaw, and pushed on the other.
Then he jammed them both together.
Hey, Croc!” he giggled. That’s a really funny face!”
Help!” choked Crocodile, “How do I get out of this?”
(Lost and Alone by Jillian Harker)

These examples are not the worst of their kind.  I chose them because they were the first that came to hand off my kids’ bookshelf, and I could have given many others, some much worse.  The problem with this kind of verse is not so much technical, though they very often display a serious lack of technical poetic knowledge, and though a little technical knowledge would probably improve them to no end.  The problem is that they have a complete lack of rhythm.  Their authors, for whatever reason, fail to hear the music, the movement, the cadence of the language.  They fail to hear the stresses and accents of the words, fail to hear how they should transition from one to the other in a way that is musical and poetic.  The problem is that they lack all poetic sensibility of any kind and that publishers either fail to recognize this lack or fail to think it important in writing for children.

Of course, not all recent children’s verse fails in this way.  The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson and Alex Scheffler is one example of metrically and rhythmically sound verse, as is Noisy Nora by Rosemary Wells, and most books by Sandra Boynton, and just about anything by Dr. Seuss .  There are also some children’s books that take great care to maintain a strong sense of rhythm without any formal metre at all, like Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown or Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak.  Here are some examples by way of comparison:

Jack was getting sleepy,
Father read with Kate,
Jack needed singing to,
So Nora had to wait.
“I’m leaving!” shouted Nora,
And I’m never coming back!”
And they didn’t hear a sound
But a tralala from Jack.
Father stopped his reading.
Mother stopped her song.
“Mercy!” said her sister,
“Something’s very wrong.”
No Nora in the cellar.
No Nora in the tub.
No Nora in the mailbox
Or hiding in the shrub.
“She’s left us!” moaned her mother
As they sifted through the trash.
“But I’m back again!” said Nora
With a monumental crash.
(Noisy Nora by Rosemary Wells)

We hippos love our belly b’s.
They’re round and cute and funny.
And there’s a place we take them to
When summer days are sunny.
Ah! Look at all the hippos
With a belly button each.
Do you wonder where we are?
It’s Belly Button Beach.
Where tons of hippos stand around
In bathing suits too little
Because they hope you will admire
The buttons on their middle.
(Belly Button Book by Sandra Boynton)

In the great green room
There was a telephone
And a red balloon
And a picture of–
The cow jumping over the moon
And there were three little bears sitting on chairs
And two little kittens
And a pair of mittens
And a little toyhouse
And a young mouse
And a comb and a brush and a bowl full of mush
And a Quiet old Lady who was whispering hush.
(Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown)

The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind
and another
his mother called him “WILD THING!”
and Max said “I’LL EAT YOU UP!”
so he was sent to bed without eating anything.
That very night in Max’s room a forest grew
and grew–
and grew until his ceiling hung with vines
and the walls became the world all around
and an ocean tumbled by with a private boat for Max
And he sailed off through night and day
and in and out of weeks
and almost over a year
to where the wild things are.
(Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak)

These kinds of books, even when they are not formally metred, pay such close attention to the rhythm and the music of their language that the reader never stumbles or labours over a phrase.  The movement of the words draws the reader along and creates a reading experience that is simply not possible when a misplaced syllable or an awkward phrase or a poor rhyme or a jarring metre interrupts the verse.  Unfortunately, these kinds of examples are by far the minority.  In far too many cases children’s verse means only phrases of roughly similar lengths that are arranged awkwardly in order to arrive at forced rhyming words.

As you can likely tell, all of this is more than a little frustrating for me, and I have been enduring it for at least as long as I have been reading books to my kids, but I reached my limit with it this morning.  My two boys and I were walking downtown, picking up my wife’s boots from the repair shop and buying baking supplies from The Flour Barrel, and we decided to stop in at The Bookshelf on the way home.  We do this sometimes, not because we intend to buy anything, since I hardly ever buy new books, but because my kids like to have me read any newly arrived books to them.  Both boys picked three books, and I saw something interesting myself, so we had seven new books to read, which should be a good day any way you look at it.

Unfortunately, five of the seven books were in verse, and all five were so poorly metred that I could hardly read them.  One of them, an ABC’s hockey picture book had to be paraphrased because I could no longer bring myself to read the actual words.  How, I want to know, have we as parents come to accept this trash for our children?  At what point did we stop caring whether the books written for our children were even readable?  How on earth do we expect to encourage our children to read when this is what we put in front of them?  When will we stop sticking random rhymes together and start taking the time and expending the effort to write real poetry for children?

I am so frustrated that I am tempted to try my hand at some children’s verse myself, and I may still be forced to that extremity, but I am first taking the step of removing from our house every children’s book that is not worth reading, whether because of its verse or for any other reason, because I am no longer willing to spend our time reading poorly written books.  Secondly, I am asking you to share with me your favourite children’s books, in verse or otherwise, that meant something to you as a child or as a parent or as teacher or in any other capacity.  There will soon by space on our bookshelves, and I need suggestions to fill them.

For example, learning to write with a pen, where every mistake seems irrevocable, is very different than learning to write with a pencil, where mistakes can always be erased, though perhaps not without some effort and frustration.   It is a different thing again to learn writing on a chalkboard or on a whiteboard (as we do), where erasing is not only possible, not only effortless, but also a structural part of the medium, where it is within the normal function of the medium to become full and to be erased.  It is a still different thing to learn writing on the computer (as we do also), where things cannot only be erased, but can be cut and pasted and copied and formatted and whatever else.

When something can be erased, it allows us to experiment, to try and fail, to account for the repetition and error that is a part of learning.  Learning is process.  It is not an attempt to create a product that is concrete and unalterable, but an attempt to create something that will enable us to go still further, to take a next step, to supersede what we have learned already by incorporating it into something new.  This is why we should be less concerned with whether students can produce finished and polished products like essays and science projects, because these things are only valuable very provisionally, as trials and attempts and ventures and experiments that should merely mark a single point in a long trajectory of learning, a point that is not really more important than any other.

This is why it is important to allow learners to erase, to show them that erasure is not a sign of failure but of growth, or perhaps better, that erasure is a sign of failure being turned into growth.  I want learners, my kids especially, to write as though they are scratching in the dirt with a stick, as though they are etching a wax tablet with a stylus, as though they are counting beads on an abacus, where their errors can immediately become the basis for the next step in their process of learning.  I want then to be able to learn by erasing as much as by creating.

Slow and Careful Reading – It is better to read one book very well than to read many poorly.  Being well-read should never be confused with being much-read.  Many people read much without ever reading at all.  There are fewer people who truly read well.  Though they may perhaps read less, they are the readers who gain from their practice.

Good reading approaches the text slowly, attentively, with an openness to what might be thought through it, with an openness to being interrupted by reflection and by conversation.  There is no substitute for this time and for this attention.  It permits what is not us, what is other than us, to approach us through the text.  The text is not itself of the greatest importance.  It is the site through which we are encountered by what is of the greatest importance, and its value is in how well it provokes us to be so encountered.

Good reading leaves its mark on the text.  It writes in the margins, and it turns the corners of pages, and it notes its favourite passages with bookmarks, even if it does these things only figuratively.  A book that is well read is stained with fingerprints and coffee stains, even if only in metaphor.  It is well used.  It is a tool that has become worn to fit the mind that is reading it.

Thoughtful and Patient Reflection – It is necessary to reflect on reading whenever something calls through the text, whenever the text provokes, but also regularly, as a discipline.  To reflect is to engage in the exercise of thinking as if it were a religious act, as if it was the rule of a monastic order, in order that it might sometimes become a spiritual act, beyond the rule of any order.  It is to order one’s mind so that it might be prepared more fully for what will come to disorder it entirely.

Reflection is always accompanied by a writing that is not a writing, a secret and secretive writing, notes and jottings, incoherences and incomprehensibles, a writing that will never appear as a writing to be read, a writing that remains hidden and unread.  It is a writing that is also a rereading,  a returning to the places in the text that need mastication, rumination, regurgitation.  This writing chews the text like a cow chews its cud, again and again.  It digests the text, gains sustenance from the text, takes the text into itself, makes the text a part of itself.

Reflection is a wondering and a wandering.  It follows the text to other texts and returns them to where they began. It takes its time as it wanders.  It does not run or even walk.  It strolls.  It ambles.  It perambulates.  It wallows in its journey through the text, follows it wherever it leads.  It is not concerned with a destination, at least not now, not yet.  It leaves destinations to the future and reserves for the present a certain forgetfulness of what the future might demand.   Its purpose is to see what might be encountered now on its path through the text, spiritually, emotionally, intellectually, not to create a coherent text of its own.

This activity, this reflection, this meditation, is essential.   It must not be hurried.  It is not brainstorming or some other such technique.  It is an openness to the text, a willingness to give the text time and space, a discipline of doing the text justice.

Learned and Leisurely Conversation – Conversation is not mere group discussion.  It is not mere argument.  It is not mere chatter.  It is a coming together through the text, where the text becomes a site where we catch sight of one another.  There are always too few of these opportunities to converse, always.  They must be treasured when they arise, guarded jealously, so that they are not overwhelmed by the many things that are less important but more pressing.

Conversation involves a careful listening of one another.  It considers what the other has to say.  It considers what it will reply before it replies.  It takes its time, so it is not afraid to pause.  It is willing to say less and have it be meaningful than to say much and to have it be mere chatter. It knows that it is better to give things their proper time.

Conversation is being on the way together, is helping one another along the way.  It turns us in the same direction, puts us shoulder to shoulder.  Though we may turn our eyes to one another, our feet are always on the path together, following the same path together, so that we might draw nearer to what it is we are seeking.  Whatever disagreements we may have between us, conversation always agrees, before all else, to walk the path together.

Conversation is also sitting at the table together, breaking bread together, recognizing what is other to us through the breaking of bread.  It is the invitation to the table and the acceptance of the table.  It is sitting face to face.  It is having more between us than words.  It is also having between us a giving, and a hospitality, and an invitation, and an acceptance.  It allows us to digest each other’s words like bread and wine, to make each other’s words a part of us.

Conversation never ends.  It is always being suspended for a time, but it is never ended, except by death.

Writing -  Only in the context of these disciplines of reading and reflection and conversation, only in the context of these practices, that writing can begin.  Indeed, these disciplines will produce writing, inevitably.  Though this writing may take many forms, it will become a necessity in the one who reads and reflects and converses.  It will become, not a task to be undertaken, not an ideal to be fulfilled, but a hunger to be satisfied, a thirst to be quenched, a lust to be satiated.

This is what there is to be learned.  This is the learning that teaching must let be.  This is the learning that teaching must let be learned.

Unfortunately, it is not always easy to get access to the places we would like to see.  While there have been some people, like Piccioni Brothers Mushroom Farm, who have been very cooperative, most places are closed to the idea of having anyone, especially small children, come and see what they do, and even if they are willing to have us through, like Speed River Bicycle, insurance restrictions and labour laws often prevent them.  The clear message is that having learners in the workplace is a hindrance, a distraction, an annoyance, and a legal liability.  It would be easier for everyone concerned if they would just go back to their classrooms and leave well enough alone.  The shops are closed.

Now, I do actually agree with this assessment.  Having learners, especially young learners, under your feet while you are trying to accomplish something  is very certainly a hindrance and a distraction and an annoyance and a legal liability.  I  agree that it would be easier, far easier, to send learners back to a classroom and let them learn what they can from their teachers.  I even agree that there is almost nothing to be gained and very much to be lost by most workplaces in letting learners through their shops.  I understand all this.

Even so, it always disappoints me when yet another workplace or university department or public works or volunteer organization tells me that its shop is closed to visitors in general and to children in particular.  The benefits of an open shop seem to me so obvious, to the children certainly, but also to our society more broadly, that I can hardly believe one more person is giving up the opportunity to share a passion, a craft, a skill, or a knowledge with a young learner.  It saddens me that we are a society more interested in efficiency and liability than in conviviality, that we are unable to recognize what we are modeling to our children when we shut them away in schools and daycares and after school programs and deny them access to the things going on in their world, that we fail to see how this only produces adults who are still children, unable to think and act for themselves, unable to do anything but follow their bosses and their politicians and their advertisers blindly.

I understand.  It is much easier to keep a closed shop.   But it comes at a cost.

The question of teaching and learning is one that continually preoccupies me, as my longtime readers will know, and I am particularly concerned with how to teach, not literature as such, but learning through literature.  I am interested, to use Heidegger’s language, in how to teach students to learn, in how to provoke them to learning, in how to draw them into learning.  The difficulty is that I must accomplish this within the constraints of institutional education, according to the demands of grades and credits and degrees, demands which remain operative on students generally even if they are alleviated, at least to some extent, in my own class?

In response to these questions, I am toying with several ideas for my fall class, and I am interested in Heidegger’s claim that to teach is to let learn, but that this letting learn is not necessarily a quiet or a passive thing, that it sometimes involve a good deal of noise, a good deal of screaming.  In other words, if Heidegger is interested in what provokes us to thinking, I wonder whether we might take another form of this word and suggest that he is interested also, at least to some degree, in the provocative, insofar as it relates to thinking, and the question for my own teaching becomes about how to provoke learning, how to provoke reading, how to provoke reflection, how to provoke conversation, how to provoke writing, and to do so entirely apart from the entirely artificial and deformative stimuli of grades and credits.  How would a teacher be provocative in this way?  Would it require a certain noisiness at times, as Heidegger suggests?  What would be required for a teacher to provoke in our school stoday?

One of the questions that it raised for me, not for the first time, was about how the principles of unschooling, with which I largely agree, confront the necessity of obtaining accreditation in order to enter certain occupations.  It was this concern that eventually caused Taylor to choose public highschool over unschooling in her teens, and it is this question that faces many homeschooled and unschooled learners at some point.  In order to pursue a certain vocation or occupation, they find themselves forced to achieve some form of accreditation through the kinds of institutions that they have spent most of their lives avoiding.

There are also those situations where parents, whatever their ideals, are simply unable to unschool or homeschool their children.  Single parents, for example, are not likely to be able to stay home with their children, and even two-parent families often feel that they need two incomes to survive, though this is untrue in more cases than people think.  There are also those families in which parents are unable to provide good learning environments at home, whether due to psychological, or emotional, or physical difficulties, or due to a lack of access to learning resources, or due to unsafe communities.

Whatever the reasons, there are many cases where children are placed in formal educational institutions even when they or their parents would prefer them to be learning more naturally and organically in their homes and in their communities, and the question becomes, at least for me, how might we enable these children to make the best of necessity and find room for learning in the gaps of institutionalized education.  Rather than unschooling or homeschooling, how can we help children to practice what we might call counter-schooling?

I do not have a definitive set of answers to this question, and I would welcome the ideas and experiences of others on the subject, but here are a few preliminary principles that I think should characterize this kind of counter-schooling:

1) Most obviously, parents need to model self-directed learning in the home, pursuing their own learning interests, making use of community resources like libraries and friends, keeping learning materials like books and films and whatever else in the home.  Both of my children have black hardbound notebooks for their drawing and writing, not because I told them that they needed to do this, but because they saw me writing my own notes in these kinds of books and because children model themselves after their parents.  I merely had to model this way of learning myself and give them the books when they asked.  They did the rest.

2) Parents need to support the learning interests of their children by connecting them to the full resources of their communities, from peers who have similar interests, to other adults with the knowledge to offer help and apprenticeship, to libraries and books and computers, to trips and excursions, and to whatever else.  This is not a matter of scheduling children with activities that are supposed to be good for them.  Nor is it a matter of granting them whatever whim they happen to have at the moment.  It is a matter of providing them with the resources that they need in order to follow the learning that really interests them.  My eldest son, for example, is intrigued by photography, so we have a camera that he can use, and a place where he can upload them to show his friends.  My youngest, on the other hand, spends hours drumming on things and plunking on the piano, so we have a musician friend come over once a week and play musical games with him.  In neither case have we started them on some sort of program that would confine their desire to learn and to do things within the constraints of classes and grades and levels.  Instead, we try to offer them informal and inexpensive  opportunities to follow their interests.

3) Parents need to help their children counter the demands of school by modifying assignments, reducing homework, and pulling their children out of school whenever possible.  If children are going to be in school, they will need their parents to advocate on their behalf in order to mitigate the influence of the institutional environment.  Children need space and time to discover and pursue the learning that interests them, and they will not have space and time if they are always doing homework and always stuck in a classroom.  Children cannot be failed in Ontario for not doing their homework, so parents can help their children to modify some assignments in alignment with their interests and to discard others entirely.  Ontario also allows for children to attend school part time, at least in theory, and we know several families who take advantage of this provision either by having their kids attend on the half days when a parent is working, or by pulling their kids out of school around a shiftwork schedule.

4) Members of the community need to take their roles as learning models seriously, acting as mentors, allowing children to apprentice with them, and including children in their own learning whenever possible.  I have creative writing sessions at my house, for example, for both homeschooled kids and for kids whose parents take them out of school for the afternoon.  These kids are working on a collection of their short stores that they will publish through on online self-publishing site.  They decided on this project themselves, and they spend their time at my place reading their stories to one another and helping each other improve them.

These are some of the ways that I think we might encourage children to learn counter to the institutions that they are sometimes forced to occupy, but I would be interested in any further suggestions that others might have.

So, though my kids are not yet old enough that I am forced to put them in formal education of some sort, and though my wife and I have not yet decided whether we will actually home school our kids when they come to that age, we are already learning at home, not necessarily in very formalized ways, but intentionally and constantly.

As part of this process, I was looking for a way that my kids could express what they are learning in ways that are not just assignments, in ways that are relevant to them, and so I have decided to make a blog that I am calling Ethan and Marlon’s Field Journal.  Though I am doing most of the typing, my kids are directing all of the content.  It is a place where they can tell their stories, show their pictures, and link to the things that interest them in what we are learning. They are very excited about the idea, and I am just as excited to see them learning at home.

I was very interested in botany and entomology in my early teens.  During the summers that I spent with my father and brothers at the hunting camp on Manitoulin Island, I used to go for long walks, taking specimens of anything that seemed interesting.  I would dissect, pin, arrange, bottle, and collect things.  I would grind them and make infusions out of them and even paint with them as  pigments.  It was amateur science mixed with some strange instinct to herbalism and alchemy, all born out of months spent in the midst of nature without much else by way of distraction.

I was also fascinated by some of the more or less philosophical questions that mathematics raises.  I can remember pondering for hours about what zero was, for example.  If it was not a number, then I wanted to know what it was precisely, and this was my first flirtation with the idea that nothingness is actually necessary to thingness, not just as a placeholder, but in essence.

Unfortunately, as I have recounted to many people over the years, these kinds of interests were soundly beaten out of me by the very people who were supposed to be teaching me about them.  One mathematics teacher, for example, came by my desk one day to ask what exactly I was doing.  I showed her my notebook and explained that I was trying to work out the nature of zero.  She told me to stop fooling around and start doing my homework.  I never did any kind of mathematics again except under compulsion, and I dropped the subject entirely as soon as I was able.

A whole semester of memorizing the parts of a cell, for reasons that were never explained to me in any way, had a similar effect on my interest in biology, and my chemistry teacher the following semester actually told me, only two weeks into the course, that I should drop it because I was most likely to fail it anyway.  I ended up taking Science in Society instead, where we baked bread and wrote poems about scientific principles and mostly did very little of anything.

Since that time, however, I have found any number of books that have appealed to the initial interest that I had in science and mathematics, as rudimentary and uninformed as that interest was.  Oliver Sacks’s Awakenings was the first such book I can remember.  Its story engaged me so thoroughly that it inspired me to read further about dopamine and to learn more about chemistry than I ever did in any class. Its attraction for me was that it situates a particular scientific problem in its narrative context.  The reader is invited to identify with the scientist and with the patients and with the story.  The science becomes meaningful because it is a part of a story, and it was this story and that caused me to go beyond Sack’s book to some of the more technical details of his work.

This is one of the reasons why I encourage my students to read Robert Adams’ The Land and Literature of England if they are interested in the history of English literature.  As opposed to most history textbooks, it employs an interested narrative rather than trying to achieve some kind of disinterested objectivity.  It revels in the anecdotal and the tangential, even when it admits that some of these things are a little suspect historically.  It makes the historical study of literature into a series of tales that could be shared over a few pints, assuming that you are the sort of person who would share literary stories of any kind over a few pints, which I must assuredly am.  I find, invariably, that this narrative of English literature not only entertains and informs the students who bother to read it, but that it also encourages them to go to the historical documents themselves.  The story not only helps them to learn the basics.  It also creates the desire to learn more deeply.

I am writing about all this now because I have just finished another of these books:  Colin Tudge’s The Secret of Trees.  The front cover of my edition proclaims that it is “a love-letter to trees,” but it is more accurately a love story about trees, a story that goes back millions of years and is by no means finished yet.  Tudge does not at all shy away from the technical details of his subject, giving introductions to plant biology, natural history, and botanical classification, among other things, but neither does he dwell on them.  They are simply included as elements of his larger narrative, and this narrative, written as only a lover can write, inspires its readers to love trees too.  More than that, it gave meaning and interest to some of the mere facts of biology that were inflicted on me in highschool.

If some teacher, any teacher, had thought to tell me the story of how mitochondria, and other organelles as well, probably originated as independent simple cells and then invaded other single cells in order to form complex cells, this would have lent a whole lot more meaning to the apparently random shapes that I was labeling in my notes.  If anybody had taken the time to explain how plants use hormones to respond to their environment, I would have had a meaningful point of entry into chemistry.  Yet everyone was so busy trying to transmit information that they failed to make the information meaningful.  Everyone was too busy, too scientific, too objective, and too educated to tell a story.

Yet stories are how we learn, certainly as children, and also, if we are willing to admit it, as adults.  I understand that scientific papers and mathematical proofs serve their purpose, and I am not suggesting that we do without them.  I am only arguing that these things remain mostly meaningless without the context of their stories, and I am also perhaps suggesting that the increasing irrelevance of academia for many people has to do with its inability to remember and recount the stories that give its work meaning. It is these stories that inspire people to learn more, inspire them to love what they learn, and so these stories need to be shared more often.