Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Gud riting
From Acquariando’s photostream. Pretty. Not particularly relevant, but this is Random Flickr Blogging Day.
With regard to writing, our homeschooling strategy has been simple: give Jake something worthwhile to read, then have him write one or two essays about what he has read. We’ve hit the wall, however. He’s older and we’re beginning to expect more from him. We want him to produce college-level essays.
Yeah, he’s eleven, and we’ll probably give him ulcers. On the other hand, Karen and I both wonder what we could have accomplished if we had been given the most challenging regimen possible.
There’s “challenging” and there’s “discouraging,” of course, and the art is pushing the “challenging” envelope without falling into the Veil of Angst that is “discouraging.” We’ve bombed out on more than a few projects — the kid won’t read The Great Gatsby, for example, no way, no how. And one of the key elements of our strategy is to keep it interesting (rather than detestable).
With his most recent project (Ethan Frome), we realized our approach has reached its limit of usefulness. Time for a more organized approach to writing. And so this afternoon, I spent a few hours putting together thirty-five assignments which will, I suspect, last him until the end of the school year.
Here’s the general strategy.
1. Draw exercises from two solid books on writing: Watt’s An American Rhetoric, which was my writing bible in high school, and Diana Hacker’s Rules for Writers, a book used in Berkeley’s introductory composition course.
2. To keep things interesting, intersperse these exercises with exemplary paragraphs and essays from a wide range of other authors.
This last point: since I had to draw from books in our personal library, these exercises were idiosyncratic, easily not the “best” essays in the English language, but hopefully good enough to get the job done. Here’s a short list of what I tapped:
The intro to The Wind that Swept Mexico, a remarkable history of the Mexican Revolution
Readings from Mark Twain’s Letters from the Earth, including his essay on James Fenimore Cooper
Walter Cronkite’s preface to Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the Species
A couple of Stephen Jay Gould’s essays in Ever Since Darwin
Chapter 1 of Marvin Harris’s The Sacred Cow and the Abominable Pig
Readings from Alistair Cooke’s America
The intro to P. J. O’Rourke’s Parliament of Whores
. . . and more.
My question: right this instant, are you thinking, “Oh good Lord, they’re not making him read X?” And if so, what is X? Remember, the goal is to give him exposure to exemplary writing. Great stuff. Because that stuff was the best I could do with the books at hand (remember, Karen and I were both chem majors, so our library ain’t exactly an educator’s paradise) but I’m sure we could do better.
Time to make dinner. See ya later!
D.
two books i read this semester in english that i think Jake SHOULD read are Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie and White Teeth by Zadie Smith. they’re great. i loved Ethan Frome too, and Siddhartha by hermann hesse (both books the majority of my classmates hated, incidentally.). i’ve never heard of most of those you listed, though…except for gatsby, which i loathe with the fire of one billion suns. HATEHATEHATE. grrph.
0:-)
As much as I complain about having to read a certain story by Mr. Hemingway about a man, a boat, and a marlin, I do have to say that there is SOMETHING to be said for being made to read something which is not your first choice.
Now, this is a bit deep for an eleven year old, but while I was in prep school (3 years), I know I at least read: Return of the Native, Death in Venice, Wuthering Heights, Othello, Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, Cat’s Cradle, The Color Purple, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, Crime and Punishment, Love in the Time of Cholera, The Sun Also Rises, Dubliners, Nostromo, and The Years, none of which I was just going to pick up on my own. Some of those I liked very much, some I sorta didn’t *enjoy* so much, but I could appreciate their structure or themes. Some I outright hated.
But the idea that at the age of forty that I’m simply going to pick up Return of the Native and plunge in is a bit ridiculous. (And I LOVED Return of the Native.) Most of the literary “Greats” get into our system at some point because an adult encouraged us to read it, or read it with us.
When I’m trying to get Neo into something, I tend to give her a history lesson first, and then give her a set of questions or themes to be thinking about *before* she starts reading, and then we go over those ideas while she’s reading. Yeah, it prejudices her reaction to the work, but it also gets those analytical juices flowing.
I’m reading Scaramouche right now. WHAT a fun read!!
PS. If you haven’t read Song of Solomon, you should. Leave off on all of Oprah’s glorification of the wonder of the story, forget you ever heard her rhapsodize about it. I read it when I was I think in eighth grade, and then again when I was in tenth. (that’s umm, 13 and 15 years old?)
I remember being completely enchanted by that book when I was a teenager.
Oh! Try some Flannery O’Connor! She’s got a wickedly twisted sense of humor. Wise Blood is a favorite.
And then there’s all sorts of short stories too.
I’d tell him to stay away from Threads of Malice but he’s already read that. So. Hmm. How about The Education of Little Tree, Of Mice And Men, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, and Farenheit 451?
Thanks folks, but, um . . . I’m trying to figure out how I gave people the impression I was looking for more fiction suggestions for Jake. (Not that I don’t appreciate the suggestions — I do! And I even have a good number of those.)
I’m looking for nonfiction writing, essays in particular, which exemplify excellence in writing.
But again, thanks for the suggestions. I’ve been meaning to pick up Siddhartha; Scaramouche, I never would have thought of. And Of Mice and Men, I read that when I was Jake’s age. Used to say to my sister all the time, “Can we have ketchup, George?”
Oh, I know you said you don’t need any more fiction suggestions, but I simply MUST add: To Kill a Mockingbird and Lord of the Flies. I’ll look over my essays in the morning and see if I can’t come up with something suitable. I have something tickling at the back of my brain, but can’t quite get ahold of it…
This is cool: he’s read both! Thanks, though.
I’ll echo Thorne here – I read ‘Lord of the Flies’ when I was about 9, and it made a lasting impression.
And I loved ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’. Did Jake like these books when he raed them?
‘Where the Red Fern Grows’, and ‘The red Badge of Courage’ were books I loved too. My daughter loved ‘The Secret of Shabaz’. (Can I plug my own kids’ books here?) LOL
My first reaction was “Oh Good Lord, he seemed like such a sane bloke, who would do that to a child?”
But if he’s enjoying it, all power to your elbow.
Wasn’t a very helpful post… Sorry.
This might not be what you have in mind, but along the same lines The Guardian newspaper recently gave away a set of great speeches of the twentith century. They included –
Winston Churchill – We shall fight on the beaches
John F Kennedy – Ask not what your country can do for you
Nelson Mandela – An ideal for which I am prepared to die
Harold Macmillan – The wind of change
Franklin D Roosevelt – The only thing we have to fear is fear itself
Nikita Khrushchev – The cult of the individual
Emmeline Pankhurst – Freedom or death
Martin Luther King – I have a dream
Charles De Gaulle – The flame of French resistance
Margaret Thatcher – The lady’s not for turning
Jawaharlal Nehru – A tryst with destiny
Virginia Woolf – Shakespeare’s sister
Aneurin Bevan – Weapons for squalid and trivial ends
Earl Spencer – The most hunted person of the modern age
Apart from that – Bill Bryson?
Jake liked both books, Sam. We also bought the DVD for TKAM, and we all enjoyed that.
As for Red Badge — I checked it out of the library not long ago and I could not penetrate it past the first page.
Marianne, who said we were sane? THANK YOU for that list. Speeches are wonderful teaching tools.
Where’s my post? I’m certain I replied a big suggestion for Johnny Tremain. I loved Johnny Tremain and wonder if Jake’s read that yet? I’m not going to pout in all the efforts I did earlier today but there’s even a bunch of homeschool links you could use for homework and discussion of the book.
Marianne – I got that CD too – it was really good! I wonder if we e-mailed the paper if they’d send us one. They must have spares.
I dunno.
I think I got the idea that you were looking for fiction because you said that he wouldn’t read the Great Gatsby no matter how hard you tried.
And I’m not quite sold on the idea that he needs non-fiction in order to write a better paper. Any paper ABOUT a work of fiction, or at least an analytical essay, is going to be in and of itself, a work of non-fiction.
I’m very confused as to what you are trying to “get” from Jake’s essays. Because if you are heading off into the land of speeches, then that’s rhetoric and synthesizing an idea down into an emotionally resonate “sound-bite”. It’s an excellent tool, and one that can show up in essays a lot. But I’m not sure what you want Jake’s essays to look like. Or what you wnat him to base it off of.
But since you’re in it, I’m sure that you have MUCH clearer sense of what is going on than I do.
Johnny Tremain . . . I seem to recall a worn paperback, and on the cover, a young man sporting a mullet 🙂
Suisan, I wouldn’t rely on speeches to the exclusion of all else, just as I wouldn’t give him nothing but literary criticism to read. He’s had (and will continue to have) lots of exposure to good fiction. For the short run, I want him to learn how to write the sorts of essays he’ll be expected to write in college; for the long run, I want him to have the writing skills to accomplish whatever his heart desires in the workplace.
He should read my blog. That will teach him all he needs to know. ;o)