Reading and Running
or Getting Good at Being "Bad"
I was a runner for a very long time. I don’t currently run, as my children will be quick to inform you. But, running shaped me in a way very few others things ever will and I still see life through that lens. A few weeks ago the CPQ ladies and I had a conversation in which I laid out my thoughts as a runner and how they apply to teaching. I was encouraged to write them out as blog posts so I thought I would give it a try.
In junior high, I joined the polar bear club at my school. This fun after school program was a precursor to the high school cross country team and was sponsored by the high school coach who was a junior high science teacher. He knew that if you could make running fun for kids at an early age, they would be more likely to join the team when they graduated up into the next level. And so we bundled up into our sweatpants and ear warmers, jogging the couple square blocks around our school three days a week in the winter of 8th grade. I was new in town and these club kids became some of my first friends. I had never run two miles. I wasn’t skilled or striving for greatness. I was curious. I loved running. We laughed and joked and slowly increased our stamina and agility as athletes as we consistently practiced day over day, week over week.
Sounds about like pretty much every kid wanting to learn something new doesn’t it? They aren’t skilled and they aren’t, usually, striving for a college scholarship or an award. They are curious. They love {enter thing they love here}.
But, ah, insert parental involvement...We see interest and we think success so we want to push for more. We see mistakes and we think failure. We think “What if my kid is bad at this? This is wasting their time. We need to pivot and find something they’re good at. Bad at baseball? Let’s try soccer. Bad at reading? Let’s give easier books a try. Bad at math, let’s switch curriculums…again…” Now, I’m not saying there isn’t a very good reason for making changes at different times in a child’s life. Sometimes a pivot is exactly what needs to happen. But what if that pivot is happening because we, as the parent, are making the decision out of fear of failure. If we are pivoting because we are afraid to allow or watch our children be “bad” at something they enjoy, is it really a necessary or best option. Could it be they just need more time to learn and improve and go through the process? I believe, in the Charlotte Mason world, this principle is that of the need for self-knowledge. In reading, narration is the key to self-knowledge, but in activities, practice is the key to self-knowledge. The more you practice, the more your body and mind know what they are doing and begin to internalize that knowledge.
My girls do Irish dance. My oldest daughter got a free flyer and my mom took her to her first class when she was four. She was not naturally good at dancing. She had a wonderful time and a wonderful teacher who welcomed her in and loved her every week for years as she labored to learn dances that others memorized in only a few weeks. I wanted her to quit. I wanted to save her embarrassment. I wanted to save us the expense and the time. I wanted her to be the best. But, my mom convinced me that she should stay—that she was in a consistent, kind place, and I listened. So, instead of quitting, she was nurtured and loved as she learned at her own pace. She was “bad” for a very long time. I fought it. I pitched small fits about her needing to find something else. I stressed about the fact that I couldn’t help her and I didn’t understand the dance world and I wasn’t good at being a dance mom. Note how much of that was about me. I wanted to be comfortable in my leadership and I wanted my daughter to meet expectations. But, just as in book-learning, the parent need not be the expert. I should have known, of course, that this wasn’t about me. For her, it wasn’t the success she sought, it was the education. Her heart was drawn to the dancing itself. Her joy was in her own learning. When I asked her if I could share this story she said, “Sure, but I didn’t know I was bad. We just had fun. Mr. Maguire was there and he was fun. Ricky (her brother) was there and we had fun together.” She loved dancing. She still does. Only now, after over a decade of regular practice, she is competitive and progressing into the upper levels. Seeing her succeed over time was a life lesson in seeing “bad” as a very good place to not stop. I had to reframe my mind to understand and embrace starting at a place of growth and then staying through the hard work of getting to the end goal of being proficient. I needed to learn to allow her curiosity and enjoyment in learning new skills be enough because the first key to getting good at being “bad” is approaching things from a place of curiosity rather than perfection.
Charlotte Mason understood this and she was a master of teaching and encouraging it as a principal lesson. She said that “the desire for knowledge (curiosity) is the chief agent in education: but this desire may be made powerless like an unused limb by encouraging other desires to intervene, such as the desire for place (emulation), for prizes (avarice), for power (ambition), for praise (vanity).” She was so wise.
There is a second key to getting good at being “bad” and that is to enter learning with an assumption that your child is capable and that prior knowledge, skill, or current competence have nothing to do with that capability. “{The child} really is capable of much more than he gets credit for…” says our friend, Miss Mason.
When my son was in the Fifth grade, AmblesideOnline assigned Charles Dickens’, Oliver Twist. I remember thinking there was no way my son would do this book. He would hate it. It would be too difficult. But in my heart, I really wanted this level of learning for him. He was only reading at a 4th grade level at the time. For all intensive purposes, he was “bad” at reading, which of course we never verbalize in quite that way. But we had completed all of our studies to that point with AO, together, and I decided to trust the process and give him the book despite my doubts. I wanted to challenge him. His struggle with reading is on-going but I worked very hard in the early years to not let his reading level affect his education level. In our house, we consider audio books the same as on-paper books but we do our very best to include visual and audio together whenever we can. So, I bought the audio version with Whispersync so he could both look at the words and hear it read to him and to my surprise, he loved Oliver Twist. Not only that, he grew to really love Dickens as an author. The following year he read Great Expectations and was able to go see it in play form at the playhouse down the street from us. It was an incredible learning experience for him as a student and for me as a teacher. This son of mine who would prefer to just read Calvin and Hobbes or Garfield and who will push back against almost anything in written paragraph form, has a deep understanding and appreciation for one of Britain’s great Victorian novelists.
If I had acted pre-emptively out of fear that he would not succeed based on his current level of skill or an assumption that he wasn’t capable because Charles Dickens was hard, we both would have missed out on a wonderful time of growth.
In just the same way as I learned to run out of curiosity but got better out of practice, so my children’s education is built out of intelligent curiosity and improves with the self-building qualities derived from regular narration and grand conversation, or practice. They are very capable and in time, gain great knowledge. I have learned not to let my fear or their failure, or their level of expertise, keep me from putting them in the way of the best learning I can offer.
The goal isn’t instant success or postable public triumph. The goal is simply to allow a quiet growing place where the desire for knowledge thrives.
Cara Williams, 2023