“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” Yeats
Today marked our last day as part of our CC Community and the end of my first year as a tutor. I loved our tutor community (including the director) and my class and their parents immensely. While I didn’t really connect very much outside of these two circles, I thought everyone seemed friendly and peaceable. I never once thought the atmosphere was ever gossipy or backbiting and so I can say that our community was a happy place to be and I will miss them.
But I do not think I will miss Classical Conversations. Curriculum-wise. And I write this not to disparage the program or those who participate in it but to help those who are “on the fence” and can’t afford to spend precious school dollars on a program that will not fit with their family and/or educational philosophy. We participated for two years while my son was in the first and second grades. I think I actually learned a great deal from CC—the oh-so-catchy songs that you can’t get out of your head (especially the timeline song, president song and the history songs) but I cannot say the same for my little guy. Maybe it just isn’t his learning style but I learned this year that it also isn’t my teaching style.
I was pretty dedicated to my Charlotte Mason philosophy of education when some very sweet friends told me how a new community was coming to our area and I really should try it. So enthusiastic were they and my esteem for them so high that I thought,” I simply must try it”. It did seem impressive to hear children reciting the incredibly long timeline song and many other bits of memory work. My favorite quote regarding education nagged at me: “Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.” I ignored it and took the plunge.
I have to say my heart was never really in it. We didn’t really practice the memory work all that much. Reciting something daily seven times was just tedious to me and after reading The Core and it sounding to me like Leigh Bortin’s kids do at least some school every day of the week, I began to suspect I was in the wrong place. But we had just moved and we desperately needed community so we stuck it out. I determined in the beginning I would not tutor that first year, and though I was approached mid-year, I declined.
This year, I must say I loved tutoring. My students were charming and their parents sweet and helpful. I enjoyed nearly every minute: new grammar, science, presentation, fine arts (maybe not so much) and the review games. The days and weeks flew. Preparation went from being a bit overwhelming to not much at all. I was completely planning on coming back next year as a tutor.
But then God…
Told me I hadn’t consulted Him. And that He wanted me to go back to what I knew. And He brought to mind things didn’t give me a warm fuzzy. Now, I am a teacher by trade, though I haven’t ever taught in public school, I have taught—not only my own children but many, many children. I say that I have been teaching for about 40 years and my husband would say that is a conservative estimate. (Did I mention I’m in my 40s?). Yes I have been teaching my siblings and friends since just about the time I could talk. I LOVE TEACHING. But CC isn’t teaching—not on community day anyhow. Teaching is done at home.
So I could not talk about things with my students or explain them. In fact, I wasn’t a teacher. I was a tutor. Not for the kids. For the parents. So maybe I tutored wrong this year, but I didn’t have a lot of tricks in my bag. I pretty much did the same thing week after week. Songs, handmotions, and more songs (Ok I pitched the hand motions a little more than half way through). We all love routine right? Especially kids. The science experiments and fine arts involved some teaching, which I felt was slightly inconsistent of CC. So am I teaching or not? Today for example, our last meeting, I had to talk about statistics with 8 and 9 year olds—mean, media,mode. For the record, I just want to say that I struggle with remembering what each of these terms mean so I was dubious about how this would go with second and third graders. I tried my best to make it fun—we used m&ms and brightly colored bar graphs. Some of them at least understood mean since they had completed some averaging tasks in their math curriculum. Others(including mine) just wanted to eat the m&ms! Hmm…wonder how that lesson went over in the four year old class?
And though I told the parents often it was them I was there for, it’s hard to model for the parents if the parents aren’t there! (Note: Parents with more than one child, alternate weeks going to classes and many parents are tutors themselves, oftentimes in their first year in the program.) So though I really was there for the parents, I wasn’t fulfilling my mission –if that makes any sense. And does any parent really need to see me tutor 24 weeks to get the hang of this? It really wasn’t that complicated. So that’s a lot of money to watch me tutor when the kids really aren’t learning anything behind all the facts they are memorizing. That part is supposed to take place at home. If you ask me– that’s the hard part. That’s the part you might need a tutor for. Anyone can teach their kids to memorize facts at home, if they are diligent about it. Especially with CC Connected (which admittedly costs $6.00 a month extra on top of the $ 400.00 it cost to enroll (per child)). Wow. Kind of a pricey endeavor if you have a larger family.
The more I think about it, there just isn’t a lot of consistency with the program. Bortins emphasizes keeping it very simple (“stick in the sand” is an oft-used catchphrase around tutors) yet some of the worksheets, songs, activities are very professional and elaborate. I was attracted to these posters myself and weekly used the professional sounding songs they produced as the backbone of my class. The home-made sounding songs got the thumbs down and eye rolls. Yes I hate to admit that, but they did. Not from the kids. From me. I should have chosen simple songs that everyone was familiar with but the professional stuff was appealing and fun! My point is, why have this subscription service to supplement but yet insist if we “trust the program”, it is enough. I kind of felt like they knew people might do it anyhow the thought was“Might as well make a few extra bucks?”
The proprietary thing is another thing that really didn’t resonate with me. Many people posted you-tube videos with content that was infringing upon CC’s copyright to the material. But to be fair, it is not original material and the posters where submitting their own original handmotions to CC history sentences, creating clever geography ditties etc. My thought is that many people do not live within driving distance to a community and that it could be really helpful to them to have ideas from other people. Certainly the people who cannot join CC for whatever reason should not be penalized. If you don’t belong to a community, you have to pay a much higher price for CC connected. I believe you can no longer buy materials (such as CC foundations guides) if you are on your own. I am no business manager and I realize they need to make a profit, but it just seemed excessive to me. Let’s all help each other. Even Harvard and MIT offer free online classes (noncredit) in order to ignite the flame for education.
But when it comes right down to it the main reason we left was because I could no longer encourage all the rote memorization. I wasn’t willing to experiment any longer with my young son’s educational future. There are many who say CC is a passing fad, that it is neo-classical, not true classical etc. I don’t believe in the stages elaborated on in Dorothy’s Sayers Lost Tools Essay and I’ve been told that she herself has been taken out of context and that she never intended for her essay to suggest designing the stages for learning so integral to most of today’s classical education. But that, my friends, is another essay. Today marks the beginning of my full attention being brought back full circle, to my mentor Charlotte Mason and to teaching my child to connect with the great minds of the past through literature. Pure unabridged literature in all its glory.
And oh yes. Ahem. We will no longer be studying the tin whistle… Neighbors rejoice!
Decidedly Different 