English Sonnets

For our Shakespeare class this fall, I assigned my students to write sonnets. They needed to be English or Shakespearean sonnets, which basically means the following rules had to be met:

1. The poem would consist of 14 lines.
2. Each line would have 10 syllables, consisting of five repetitions of the stress pattern "da DUM." Another word for this is iambic pentameter, the iamb being a poetic foot that has an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, pentameter meaning that each line contains five iambs, resulting in 10 syllables.
3. The sonnet would have three quatrains (four lines) and a couplet (two lines).
4. The rhyme scheme would be a-b-a-b c-d-c-d e-f-e-f g-g.

I completed the assignment as well and found it to be a challenge. Here it is:

My child that now in arms I do enfold,
With wavering steps and laughing eyes you flee,
For steadily you learn and grow more bold,
No more content to stay, be still, with me.
Like jam that glows of jewels in a jar,
The treasured fruit of harvest well-preserved,
I long to keep you always as you are,
My ruby, sapphire, child with love I serve.
The spring of childhood, buds upon a limb,
A promise of more harvests yet to reap,
Will not remain so tiny on the brim
Of growth, but is a fruit I cannot keep.
Yet in my mind I will retain the child,
The gleaming jam of youth from fruit once wild.

My niece wrote the following sonnet:

I hear the anger in my mother's voice.
There's piles of books of work I have not done.
My sisters fuss and make a lot of noise.
The day should not be gloomy, but be fun.
When e'er a day like this is come to pass,
I want to run away and just be free
And have some time to lay upon the grass.
I'll go some place that is only for me.
Beyond the meadow high upon a hill,
A cottage sits and waits only for me.
Upon my horse I ride, oh what a thrill,
What beauty lies within the flow'rs and trees.
Parting my fantasy is such sweet sorrow,
At least I get to come back here tomorrow.

Learning Together

When my mother stays at my house, I sometimes wake up to music while she practices the piano. During her last visit my son Tommy taught her how to add ornaments to Bach's "G Minor Minuet," a piece they both play. As a child Mom spent hours at the piano, eagerly wanting to learn. She never had the opportunity to have piano lessons as a child, though. In the early 1970's while she was living in Bogota, Columbia, a friend introduced her to the Suzuki Method. Suzuki believed that if parents first took lessons and practiced before their children, they would be better prepared to help and motivate their children to play. She began lessons, hoping to learn herself while giving her children the music instruction she had dreamed of as a child. She practiced her way through Suzuki Piano Book One, also practicing with my older brother Jason when he began lessons, until they moved to San Antonio, Texas, where there were no Suzuki Piano teachers.

Mom had five children and little time for practicing on her own after she finally found a new Suzuki teacher years later. We all began to take lessons and she practiced with my younger siblings but no longer took lessons herself.

Having children that play the piano did not completely satisfy my mother. Three years ago, when she began homeschooling my niece, they both began Suzuki piano lessons. I have watched her practice, struggle, and persist. Learning a new skill, never easy, becomes harder as we age, but she has committed to take lessons for ten years. Through her example, I learn a lot.

Too often we give children the impression that learning is childish, merely preparation for life. How can we show them that it is really a continual process that offers joy and fulfillment? By modeling our message.

My mother loves giving advice to parents who are helping their children learn to read. She begins by asking, "What is the most important thing you can do to help your child with reading?"

"Read to them" is the usual answer.

"Wrong!" she triumphantly answers, "You need to read yourself."

For our children to have enthusiasm for learning, they need more than the trappings of an enriching environment. They need to have a zeal for education genuinely exhibited and communicated by their parents. As Margaret McFarland said, "Attitudes aren't taught. They're caught." I want my children to catch a positive attitude about education. Here, as in other things, pretense and hypocrisy will fail. They will only reinforce the notion that learning is like an immunization--children need frequent shots, adults need an occasional booster, and no one likes it.

Learning, studying, and even doing assignments along with children benefits the entire family. Children become motivated and see examples of learning in progress, parents gain empathy and learn to see their children as teachers, and everyone has a shared educational experience.

Shinichi Suzuki said, "creating desire in your child's heart is the parent's duty." He said that we do this through the environment, of which the parent is a vital part. Young children naturally want to do the things they see their parents do. I see this in my 16-month-old daughter, Helena. Nearly every day of her life, she has seen me write in my planner and my journal. Now she wants both my favorite pen and my planner or journal every time I use them. No diversion seems to quench her enthusiasm, so I am constantly deciding whether I want to endure a tantrum or risk getting ink marks everywhere. Right now my desire for quiet is winning more often, so the pages of my journal, planner, and Helena's and my clothes are full of scribbles. I have been instrumental in creating this desire in her heart even though I wish I hadn't. As parents, we can capitalize on this natural motivation to help children catch a love of learning.

It seems obvious that the perfect parent setting the perfect example would create the perfect situation for children to learn. But it's false. I think the greatest example we can set for our children is to be imperfect but continually trying to improve. If they only see us doing things we are already capable of doing well, they may never understand that no one begins as an expert. Often, when I check my children's math, I don't use the answer key but work the problems myself. My kids love it when I make a mistake. I think it takes the pressure off of them to always perform perfectly. When I practice pieces on the piano, my children can see that I play wrong notes or poor rhythms, and sometimes I have to practice a spot repeatedly until it becomes easy, just like they do. In the writing class we have over the phone, my mom has been doing the papers, too. I have see the benefits and now do at least some of the writing assignments I give myself. When we read our papers to each other, I like to point out areas where I think I could improve. My daughters and nieces get ideas of how to improve their writing without feeling like their efforts are being criticized.

Sometimes when I practice piano with one of my children, I wonder why they can't just play the right notes the first time. Later that day, as I feel frustrated at my own inability to get my fingers to play the right chord even though I know which keys should be played, I regain the ability to empathize with them. Learning, while always rewarding, rarely comes easily. For the Shakespeare class I taught this fall, I asked all my students to write an original sonnet, a task I considered straightforward at the time. However, when I decided to compose one myself, I understood the effort required and gained appreciation for Shakespeare's genius when my results seemed rudimentary and awkward compared to his.

I have also learned to see my children as teacher, another commitment in Chick Moorman's The 10 Commitments. This blog entry is the result of a few weeks of effort, and I have relied on my daughter Karina's help to take it from a jumbled mess of words into a somewhat organized progression of thought. When I see myself as a fellow student, I find that the other students can teach me just as much as I can teach them.

More than anything else, though, the process of learning together makes education a shared experience. A few months ago my son Tommy prepared a report on John James Audubon for Grandma's history class. I found books at the library, and we all read them along with him. When I saw a book with selections from Audubon's Birds of America at Costco, I knew it was the perfect present. A few weeks later when we stumbled upon the small Audubon House and Art Gallery in Key West, Florida, our whole family was excited to find out more about our new interest. Because we all learn together, my family is creating a unique culture of education and interests.

When she began playing "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star Variations" on the piano almost 30 years ago, I think my mother wanted to give her children the opportunity to play music, something she also wanted for herself. Even though at this point her slow progress has driven her to the point of quitting several times, I hope she realizes that the music she creates in her mind motivates, teaches, and enriches her children and grandchildren, making our family culture vibrant, and the pieces her fingers haltingly play are masterpieces as a result.

Scrubbing Dishes to Music

Computer-generated music sounds flat compared to music performed by people. While free from error, it lacks the variation and interpretation that is the foundation of artistry. The capacity to make mistakes and the capacity for excellence are linked, in my opinion. Since I am grateful for one, I must also be grateful for the other.

Last night we didn't have dinner as a family. A salesperson came over right at dinner time, disrupting our normal routine. It wasn't until I woke up this morning that I realized we never did dishes last night. Right now my kitchen has dirty dishes from yesterday evening and this morning that I am going to wash as soon as I finish typing. While I feel inadequate and that I have failed on my habit-making resolution, I am glad of the reminder that I am human. My mistakes might be my road to excellence if I persist, stronger in my resolve as a result.

I will listen to music as I scrub, realizing that while life frequently seems far too full of the mundane, we can hear the sublime instead if we are listening.

Daffodils or Dirt?

"To be able to express love is, of course, an ability, and to expand this ability it is necessary to practice continuously," wrote Shinichi Suzuki in Ability Development from Age Zero.

No one has ever expressed love to Mary Lennox. As a result, she dislikes everyone, and her cross, pinched demeanor makes others dislike her as well. Mary is the main character in Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, which my son Jack and I are reading for the literature class I teach at my homeschool co-op. The way the seasonal change from winter to spring reflects Mary's own change from a dour child into a girl with the ability to express love delights me every time I read the book. Up to this point in her life, Mary has acquired the ability to dislike, but as she discovers the gardens and a robin befriends her, she practices the ability to like and then to love. Slowly "she had begun to like the garden just as she had begun to like the robin and Dickon and Martha's mother. She was beginning to like Martha, too. That seemed a good many people to like--when you were not used to liking." Spring can also transform us if we let it.

Living as I do in western Washington, with the long winter nights and overcast days that feel only halfway light, I eagerly search for any sign of spring. It always boosts my spirits. In the book, the gardener Ben Weatherstaff tells Mary, "It's dull in th' winter when it's got nowt to do. In th' flower gardens out there things will be stirrin' down below in th' dark. Th' sun's warmin' 'em. You'll see bits o' green spikes stickin' out o' th' black earth after a bit." These green spikes will be crocuses and daffodils eventually. My children are the crocuses and daffodils in my life. As a mother, I hope that I can nurture my children's emerging spikes of potential by developing my own ability to express love.

All too frequently when I look at them, I tend to only notice the dirt they're growing in. By nature, I am a critic, not a positive person. Some days I dwell on all the things my children do wrong, don't know or can't do well until I feel that failure is the inevitable result of my efforts to rear and educate them. I usually try to keep these negative thoughts to myself, but I know they affect the atmosphere in my home. I want to break this cycle of negativity, and I have noticed that deliberately expressing my love for them and complimenting them on their strengths can change the pattern.

On Sunday, as I was reflecting about this, I decided to select one family member daily until Valentine's Day and write them a love note. In the notes, I'm trying to follow the advice on giving sincere compliments I found in Sheryl Eberly's 365 Manners Kids Should Know:

"Compliments and words of appreciation sound sincere if they start with and acknowledge specific actions: 'I loved the story you wrote. It made me laugh.' Gushing statements that start with you sound more like flattery ('You are so talented' or 'You're the best writer in the class'). People like to hear specific good things about themselves, not sweeping positive statements that they know aren't true all the time."

So I wrote to Tommy that I appreciated his good manners in holding the door open for me when I went into church.

I wrote to Katie that I loved listening to her teach her younger brother Luke how to sing "I'm Trying to Be Like Jesus."

I wrote to Jack that I enjoyed helping him prepare a report on Samuel Morse and the telegraph for his history class with Grandma.

I wrote to Karina that I loved hearing her sing at adjudications on Saturday. Even more, I loved accompanying her on the piano.

And I wrote to my husband Eric that I really value the fact that he probably does more housework than I do.

Focusing on their strengths and expressing my love for them has made a difference. I am noticing the shoots and leaves unfolding in the children who will one day be daffodils. As the foggy gray days of winter become longer and brighter--today I actually saw the sun--I will continue to practice expressing love. After all, Suzuki wrote, "If humans would recognize respect in each other and exchange expressions of love more, the world would be a brighter place."

Mud Pies and Other Messes

"Can I make a Mississippi Mud Pie?" asked Tommy (10), inspired by the recipe in his Christmas gift, The Boys' Book of Greatness. Already in the kitchen chopping celery, carrots, and onion for a Bolognese sauce, I readily granted permission. So he began to cook alongside me, asking for my assistance in finding springform pans, getting chocolate from the garage, and melting the chocolate in the microwave. I multitasked in the absentminded manner I have when I'm both cooking dinner and calculating mentally exactly how much time I have left in my afternoon and which half of the things I originally planned on doing will actually fit in the next two hours.

With the sauce simmering, I started accompanying Karina on the piano as she practiced singing. Her voice inched higher in her warm up exercises and I congratulated myself that I had left enough time to practice with her before we left for ballroom dance. Then I heard a yell.

"Mom! The pan's leaking!"

I ran into the kitchen. Runny chocolate batter seeped from the pan onto the counter, dotted the oven floor, rack, and door, and trailed around the kitchen island in a nearly complete oval. I sighed as I stared at the mess. The destruction of my afternoon plans, my kitchen, and my equanimity must have shown on my face because Tommy asked, "Mom? Are you mad?'

"No. I'm just trying to decide what to do."

I have heard that all springform pans leak. This may be true, but mine has been bent out of shape enough that instead of a drip, it flowed freely.

"I'll move it to a new pan," I said, pouring the batter into a bowl and scraping the remnants of the graham cracker crust, now mixed with chocolate, into a tart pan, "you clean up the floor."

Life is messy. This has been on my mind recently, ever since I read The 10 Commitments: Parenting with Purpose by Chick Moorman. He outlines ten aspects of parenting, suggesting that parents congratulate themselves where they are already successful and improve in the areas where they are less than stellar. I knew I had found one of my weaknesses with the very first one: "I commit to remembering that experience can be messy."

He continues, "I accept that sand, mud, food, paint, cooking, eating, relationships, emotions, and social interactions can be messy. I allow my children to learn from making messes and the cleanup that follows. I recognize that experience can be messy."

"The cleanup that follows"--four words I cannot get out of my head. In my household, the making messes half of the commitment reigns. Crafts, books, food, clothes, papers, and toys get spread everywhere. I have failed to assist my children in developing the good habit of cleaning up after themselves, taking responsibility for the messes they make. They constantly walk away from messes, completely oblivious to the chaos trailing behind.

Establishing good habits, especially neatness and everyone cleaning up after themselves, is my main focus right now. Comparing habit to a train track that enables our life to run smoothly, the educator Charlotte Mason wrote, "it rests with parents and teachers to lay down lines of habit on which the life of the child may run henceforth with little jolting or miscarriage, and may advance in the right direction with the minimum of effort" (Mason, Home Education, 119).

How I would love to have a household where the trains of all our lives can progress steadily along the track of good habits! I suspect that the problem is my inconsistency in demanding cleanup after every mess. Charlotte Mason explained how the failure to be perfectly consistent is the major pitfall mothers have in helping their children develop good habits. She wrote that sometimes a mother thinks a child should be rewarded after forming a habit, so she gives him "a little relaxation" without continuing to enforce it, "and then go on again. But it is not going on; it is beginning again, and beginning in the face of obstacles. The 'little relaxation' she allowed her child meant the forming of another contrary habit, which must be overcome before the child gets back to where he was before" (Mason 121).

My greatest failing may be that I not only grant my children a little relaxation, but myself as well. I need to set the example of cleanliness I want my children to follow, and it will only happen if I make a continual effort. Suzuki said, "You don't have to practice every day--only on the days you eat." Cleaning up needs to be practiced every day until it is as habitual as eating.

In the Suzuki Method, students develop a repertoire as they continue to review old pieces even as new ones are learned. Through repetition, learning continues. I think this relates to everything we learn, so this year, I hope to teach my family and myself at least one new habit each month, and then maintain it the next month as we begin a new one. Even though I'm not sure how far we can take this or how many habits we can develop and keep up, I'll continue trying.

It's embarassing to admit my faults. I almost feel like I should title this entry, "Confessions of a Messy Housewife" because I do struggle with such basic, mundane things. My habits for January have been to wash every dirty dish in the house before going to bed at night and to do all the laundry on Monday and Thursday. My children are learning, too, as Tommy did when he mopped up the chocolate under my supervision while the Mississippi Mud Pie baked in a new, one-piece pan. Now on day 24, I have plugged away at the dishes every night, even when I didn't want to, because of my conviction that even one lapse could make the track of habit I am laying get derailed. However, I will keep in mind if I do miss a day that repairs are always possible, that laying new track may be a step back, but it works.

The Apostrophe and Me

Yesterday morning my daughters Karina (14) and Katie (12) met me on my bed with a pile of grammar and vocabulary books to call my nieces in Texas for grammar class. We selected this "classroom" because the bedrooms are the only rooms in my house separate enough from family life to have the possibility of being temporarily quiet. My sons Tommy (10) and Jack (7) were supposed to be doing math, but I suspected they were actually researching the care and keeping of a pet scorpion, which had been Tommy's obsession ever since he woke up. As we worked our way through first our vocabulary book, 30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary, and then our grammar books, Our Mother Tongue by Nancy Wilson and Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynn Truss, my fifteen-month-old daughter Helena sat on my lap, whining every few minutes for a chance to play with the phone, paper, a pen, a book, or anything else I happened to be using at the moment. Her three-year-old brother Luke kept entering the room to ask, "Can I play Lego Star Wars with Tommy?" After I had said no nearly a dozen times, he started talking about pets. It wasn't until class was over that I discovered I had given the impression that we were buying a "fish that swims in the water" at the pet store right now. I'm not sure how I managed to discuss new vocabulary words, compound sentences, and the multitasking functions of the apostrophe with so many interruptions.

According to Lynn Truss, the "tractable" apostrophe happily complies with the strange assortment of functions we have given her, continually overworked and misunderstood. Today I feel like an apostrophe, a little curlicue that floats above a word, simultaneously being Karina's and Katie's and Tommy's and Jack's and Luke's and Helena's mother. At times like these it seems like the solution is to find a safe, soundproof area where Luke and Helena can play by themselves, ideally with a free nanny, while the rest of us get some real work done.
But then I remember:

• Luke proudly writing letters on the white board on Tuesday at Katie's piano lesson, making me guess what each one was before shouting out "right" or "wrong."
• Helena swaying in an infant dance while Tommy played "The Happy Farmer" at his cello lesson, her eye's meeting mine with a half smile.
• Luke selecting a white goldfish with orange spots and holding it carefully in the car on the way home after I asked myself, "Why not get a fish?" I couldn't come up with any good reasons.
• Helena using the piano keyboard as a ladder that enabled her to grab a pencil and scribble all over the music books while I helped her older brother practice, laughing right into my face every time I pulled her down.

Since I don't have spaces in my life when I am not otherwise occupied, these circles of interaction always occur in the middle of something, bringing me a moment of joy and peace in the midst of the hurry. Several years ago I read a book called Building Healthy Minds by Stanley Greenspan about the development of the intellect in early childhood. I have never forgotten his term, "circles of interaction," for these moments between a caregiver and child when communication flows back and forth, with or without words. He wrote that these circles of interaction are important for brain development.

The Suzuki Method is based on the concept that we are educating our children from the cradle. Grammar, Geometry, History and music practice may feel more rigorous, but the youngest minds in my family are developing the fastest. I believe they may have the most to gain if Eric, Amy, Karina, Katie, Tommy, and Jack all find space in our lives for circles of interaction with them.

Is Sentence Diagramming Necessary?

My mom currently homeschools two of my nieces in Houston who are the same ages as my two oldest daughters. We hold "class" over the phone several times a week, with my mom teaching Spanish and History while I cover English. One day in the middle of diagramming sentences with noun clauses, my niece asked, "When will I ever have to know this in real life?"

Her question caught me off guard. I find grammar and the diagramming of sentences to be a fascinating puzzle, almost fun. A couple of months ago, to my family's annoyance, I spent hours discussing the function of a word in a sentence. Was it part of the verb phrase, a predicate nominative, or an adverb? After discussing all the possibilities and reasons for them with first my daughter Karina and then my husband Eric, they both eventually responded, "Who cares?"

Should I care about grammar? Does anyone really need to know how to diagram sentences? What is the purpose of education anyway and where is the place for complicated grammar?

The diagramming of sentences seems to be a dying art. Neither in my home schooled or my public schooled years as a child did I learn the skill. It was not until I took Grammar in college that I first experienced it. I chose English as a major because of my love for literature and a desire to improve my writing. It wasn't until I took courses in grammar and the history of the English language that I realized that my interest in linguistics possibly surpassed my zeal for literature.

I am well aware that everyone does not share my fascination. Some people find grammar irrelevant and studying it to be either extremely difficult or as dry as I find the history of weaponry. Knowing extensive grammar may actually hurt them if it kills any desire to learn. Sentence diagramming is not necessary.

I do not agree with E. D. Hirsch, who in Cultural Literacy argued that there are certain facts everyone needs to know to be well-educated. For me, education doesn't consist of a list of things students know or do not know, where education ends once the checklist is completed. Instead, it is about how what they are learning develops them as human beings. Shinichi Suzuki put it eloquently in Nurtured by Love when he wrote, "For the sake of our children, let us educate them from the cradle to have a noble mind, a high sense of values, and splendid ability." As I teach, I need to keep in mind this goal.

If, in teaching grammar to my daughters and nieces, I fail to make it relevant, if I fail to make my fascination with the beauty and complexity of our language contagious, if I fail to make the meaning of sentences clear by analyzing them, then there is no purpose in diagramming sentences. It is a worthless enterprise that won't develop good character but may lead to a lifelong grammar aversion.

On the other hand, words do have power and magic. The gospel of John begins with the announcement, "in the beginning was the Word." As I contemplate the purpose of grammar and how it can enrich my niece's life, if I can help her see the miracle in the miniscule building blocks of language, if diagramming helps her understand a sentence better, if she can feel wonder and gratitude that we have the written and spoken word, it will meet the true purpose of education. I will be preparing a noble soul to serve the world in word and then in deed.