Environment: Physical Surroundings

Christmas gifts remind me of the opportunity I have to influence the physical environment that surrounds my children. As I give and ponder what would be best, I have always felt that whatever I choose can help direct their growth. As Dr. Wernher von Braun said, "All one can really leave one's children is what's inside their heads. Education, in other words, and not earthly possessions, is the ultimate legacy, the only thing that cannot be taken away." I love to give them gifts that will help them learn, not just toys that provide temporary entertainment. Improving the conditions for growth and development will help my children have a rich legacy inside their heads.

Especially for young children and those who homeschool, our most influentual physical environment is the home. I don't think this means a child needs to grow up in a home that looks ready for a Better Homes and Gardens photo shoot. Mine certainly wouldn't meet that test. It also doesn't mean the environment has to be perfect. One thing I love about Suzuki's philosophy is that he encourages us to strive for the best while simultaneously acknowledging that none of us are there. As long as we are continually working to provide a better environment for our children and keep that goal in mind, it is enough. In Nurtured by Love he wrote: "Without stopping, without haste, carefully taking a step at a time forward will surely get you there."

My careful steps begin with building an environment that has an abundance of things that will help my children learn and grow. Yesterday I felt that the choices I made for gifts mostly matched this test. A Christmas afternoon where I can watch one daughter piece together a jigsaw puzzle, another make handmade cards from a book I gave her, my toddler and preschooler cuddle on my lap as I read them a book full of Mary Cassatt's paintings of mothers and children, my son attempt magic tricks with new supplies, and my husband and another son play ping pong together in the garage while a new recording of Handel's Messiah plays on the stereo counts to me as one day where I succeeded in establishing a nurturing environment. Many other days fall far short of this ideal, though, like those when I am frantically trying to prepare for a Shakespeare class I'm teaching so I allow the boys to play Lego Star Wars on the Xbox just to get them out of the way.

Where does a quest to improve the atmosphere in our homes begin? I start and end with books. They are the focal point of my home, with a diverse set of books on nearly every subject for everyone in my family to learn about. On a good day I think the floors, shelves and tables in my home are a blank canvas on which we are daily composing a shifting collage of books. Other days as I look at the mountainous pile on the tables in my living room, I think my family is in danger of being buried under an avalanche of books. For some reason that I have never been able to figure out, the books that are out on the floor or a table entice my children much more than those that are shelved neatly by topic or author's last name. At the beginning of December, we brought the contents of a shelf of Christmas books downstairs and set them on the coffee table. All month the pile has been precariously balanced and the opposite of neat and tidy, but we have all read them, and I don't think we would have otherwise. Maybe for the sake of their education I need to pour a different shelf out onto the table every month.

Early this fall I checked out dozens of children's books about 19th-century history to accompany the book my children are using to study history, Abraham Lincoln's World by Genevieve Foster. She has written several books that take the life of a famous individual, in this case Abraham Lincoln, and she tells the story of the world during his lifetime through a series of vignettes about other famous people and events. When I checked out the books, I optimistically planned on reading them with my children or at least, failing that, assigning them to read them. But a couple of months and a couple of renewals rolled by where I failed to use any but a couple of the books. As I bagged them up to return them to the library on their final due date, I began asking my children if they had read several titles, trying to figure out whether I should check out a bunch of them again later. I was surprised to discover that they had actually read most of the books on their own because they had seen them lying around.

One evening this past month when my son Jack saw Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol lying on the coffee table, he brought it to me and asked me to read it to him. What followed was a week of family gatherings around the fire as I read myself hoarse each evening and we all accompanied Ebeneezer Scrooge on his transformative journey with the Christmas spirits. My husband asked, "So what is the Ghost of Christmas Present supposed to represent? I think the Ghost of Christmas Past represents the Christmas feeling he once had that has now been extinguished, but what about this one?" I didn't have an instant answer, and I found myself pondering the Ghost of Christmas Present in a way I never had before. He now represents to me the abundance of Christmas that is inequitably distributed and the power we each have to give of what we have. I'm grateful to my son Jack and a messy pile of books on the coffee table for my stronger desire to give more this coming year from any abundance in my life: of things, knowledge, and love.

Environment is the Foundation for Learning

An environment with language is vital in helping a child learn to speak. Speech may be a universal human characteristic, but in a few isolated situations where children grew up without hearing the spoken word, they were never able to develop more than a rudimentary speaking ability. Children adopted internationally learn to speak the language of their new home, not their genetic heritage. We pick up the accents, cadences and grammar of our environment. My three-year-old son sometimes repeats an annoying phrase word for word that he heard in a movie, my unpleasant reminder of the power of environment.
Suzuki understood this, and built his method on the foundation of environment. Is genius born or made? When confronted with this question, Suzuki felt confident that it was made. Most people do not share his extreme view or his certainty. We will probably never have the definitive answer, but studying a great composer like Mozart shows that nurture plays a large role. Beginning in Mozart's early childhood, his father, Leopold, surrounded him with music and trained him in both performance and composition. By his mid-twenties, Mozart had already been composing music under his father's tutelage for 20 years. Both his musical environment and his driven father helped shape him into a historic prodigy. Suzuki admired Mozart and the process that aided his achievement.
However, contrary to popular perceptions of the Suzuki Method, Suzuki did not consider the purpose of musical education to be the creation of prodigies. He repeatedly said that his method was first for the love of the child and then for the love of the music. Parents should be constantly striving to create an atmosphere for their children in which they can grow in every important way. Both parents and teachers research and implement ways to provide a better environment for development.
This quest might be overwhelming, but I usually find it empowering. Although I do think genetics plays a role in who we are and that we are the product of more than just our environment, as a parent I may have contributed to my children's genes, but I certainly can't alter them. I would also hate to assume that they are limited by heredity and have no ability to progress. When I am concerned with helping my children improve in a certain area, I can't force them to change or even be their motivation. I do, however, always have the power to improve their environment, and it may make a difference.
How can I create a better environment? Haruko Kataoka, who developed the Suzuki Method for piano, frequently ended lessons she gave piano teachers with the challenge to "research." That is my first step, followed by implementation of new things I have learned and a return to more research. According to The American Heritage Dictionary, environment is "the complex of social and cultural conditions affecting the nature of an individual or community." As I have pondered on this meaning, I have decided to focus on the following aspects that I can influence:

1. Physical surroundings
2. People and relationships
3. Ritual and tradition
4. Schedule and structure

I will focus on each of these in upcoming posts about my perpetual quest for an improved environment for learning. In all of this, I hope not to lose sight of the fact that each of my half-dozen children is an individual. Suzuki worked first for the love of the child, for each unique personality. Part of my research, then, goes beyond books and experts to the hearts of my children as I observe them one by one in daily life and contemplate what they need most.

Nutcracker

Today my children and I are going to Pacific Northwest Ballet's Nutcracker, which we have done every December since 2002. My three-year-old son Luke has been anticipating it for weeks and has spent the morning circling the house yelling how excited he is. The other children have encouraged him by telling him how much they love it. And after spending the first three days of my week cooped up because of my disdain for the unusually cold weather, I am ready for something different.

My family takes frequent field trips as we homeschool. It's important to me for my children to take part in many positive experiences in the world so that throughout their life they will continue to choose substance and virtue over the frivolous and degrading. Besides that, it also keeps us sane. The difficulty of homeschooling is not something I want to downplay. Many days I collapse on my bed, exhausted physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Although I wish it were not so, my behavior and my children's is frequently less than exemplary. Going out as a family helps us to transcend the tedium and effort of our routine. For me, the Nutcracker is a magical moment when life halts and scary dreams become real, but Clara manages to transform the nightmare into something wonderful. When I return home and feebly attempt to reenact the ballet in my living room, holding hands with my young child, I remember that even my nightmare days will one day be my nostalgic dreams.

Every Child Can Learn

Every Japanese child can speak Japanese. Every English child can speak English. Every German child can speak German. As a young man pursuing a career as a violinist, Shinichi Suzuki realized this with amazement, and it shifted the focus of his career and his life. Everyone knows that we all learn to speak, that a Japanese child can speak Japanese even though it can be incredibly challenging for an American adult to learn it, but for most of us it seems ordinary. For Suzuki, it was remarkable. He developed a philosophy based on the fact that all children speak their mother tongue and then applied it to teaching music, continuing to refine his method until his death in 1998 at the age of 99.

Rather than accepting speech as an ordinary matter of course for people, he viewed it as evidence that every child can learn. Every child has talent. They are all born with both the natural mechanisms and the motivation to develop the ability to speak. Suzuki believed that if we can understand the way spoken language develops and use this natural process to teach other things, we can assist all children in achieving their full potential. He played the violin and believed in the value of music, so he devoted himself to developing a way to teach children music by replicating the "mother tongue" method.

In a linguistics course in college I learned that humans seem to be hardwired for language. Speaking is a natural skill that all people acquire, and other skills, like math or playing a musical instrument, are not universal. We may not all have the aptitude for other skills as naturally as we have the ability to speak. However, I think Suzuki was right that if we try to replicate the learning of language in our teaching of other skills and subjects, our success will be far greater than by any other method. We can help all children achieve, not just those who seem "gifted." Suzuki teachers generally accept anyone who is willing to try the method and do not preselect for musical ability. As a result, some of their students may seem to have a lack of talent. A few summers ago I heard a piano teacher, Karen Hagberg, speak about this part of her experience. Throughout her years of teaching there were a few students who she privately believed were hopeless cases, but she continued to teach them anyway. Some of them eventually became career musicians, and she became fully convinced that Suzuki was right. Every child can learn.

When I struggle with teaching my children something new, I remind myself of this. I may need to approach it differently, to find the best way for them to learn it, but eventually, if I keep trying, I can teach them and they will learn. It has helped me persist in homeschooling. I'm grateful that I have had many years to think about Suzuki's philosophy. After two years of traditional piano instruction as a child, I began taking Suzuki piano lessons, which was my introduction to the Suzuki method. A love for music became a central part of my life. Since then, I have studied Suzuki's books and his philosophy, applying them to every area of learning, not just music lessons. I currently have six children, ranging in age from fourteen to fourteen months. The four oldest currently take piano lessons, and I homeschool all of them with Shinichi Suzuki's Mother Tongue Method as one of my greatest influences as I strive to rear children with a "beautiful heart."