Published with Permission
\nWritten by Andrew Pudewa
\nwww.TOSMagazine.com<\/p>\n
When one of my daughters was around 12 years old, we faced a significant problem with her motivation and quality of work. Her \u201cschool\u201d days went pretty much like this: She would get up, do everything on her checklist with as little effort as possible (often being \u201cfinished\u201d by 10:00 a.m.), and then spend the rest of the day snacking and annoying everyone else in the house. When confronted about the quality of her work, she would counter, \u201cI did it\u2014what more do you want?\u201d When it was pointed out to her that she was \u201cfinished\u201d in a couple of hours and that perhaps she could have a bit more added to her checklist, an ugly, hormone-enhanced argument would ensue: \u201cI\u2019m already doing everything I have to. More wouldn\u2019t be fair! How come you want to make my life miserable? I\u2019m doing enough, okay? Can you just leave me alone?\u201d<\/p>\n
Sound familiar? If you have a large enough family, you\u2019re likely to have at least one child who develops this attitude at some point, which might be appropriately termed \u201cHate of Learning\u201d stage. The danger, of course, is that Mom and Dad start thinking evil thoughts such as \u201cWe\u2019re failing her . . . maybe we should put her in a good school . . . of course, she wouldn\u2019t necessarily spend any more time studying, but at least she\u2019d be out of our hair for a while . . . maybe we just need to be more strict . . . .\u201d Such were the thoughts my wife and I entertained at that time. Fortunately, I came across a possible strategy that involved neither sending her to school nor using a heavy-handed approach.<\/p>\n
Late one night, driving home from a business trip, I was listening to a talk titled \u201cThe Seven Keys of Great Teaching\u201d given by Oliver DeMille (author of A Thomas Jefferson Education<\/em><\/strong>). I had heard this talk many times before and thought I understood it well\u2014all except one part. Six of the seven keys made perfect sense to me:<\/p>\n \u2022 Classics, not textbooks<\/p>\n \u2022 Mentors, not professors<\/p>\n \u2022 Quality, not conformity<\/p>\n \u2022 Time, not content<\/p>\n \u2022 Inspire, not require<\/p>\n \u2022 Simplicity, not complexity<\/p>\n \u2022 You, not them<\/p>\n I wasn\u2019t necessarily implementing these keys perfectly, but I understood them and with a bit of success had been using these ideas with my children and students. However, the one I found enigmatic was \u201cStructure time, not content.\u201d What does that mean? What would that look like? How would one actually structure time? What about content?<\/p>\n And then it hit me. This was my exact problem with my 12-year-old daughter; I had been structuring her content, not her time! By giving her a checklist of scholastic tasks to accomplish each day, we had focused on the thing<\/em>s<\/em> she got done, not how<\/em> she was using her time. Indeed, if I wanted her to progress from a \u201clove of learning\u201d phase to a \u201cscholar\u201d phase, I had first to get her out of \u201chate of learning\u201d and teach her the value of time. Would it work to shift over from a checklist to a schedule? Couldn\u2019t she procrastinate and manipulate that just as well? What would it look like in her life if we could somehow structure her time and not worry so much about content?<\/p>\n So after prayer and consultation with my wife (who was basically willing to try anything at that point), I sat down with said daughter and explained her new program: She would be responsible for studying four hours each day. Within those four hours, she would be free to study whatever she wanted to study\u2014within certain parameters. I printed for her a time log whereon she would record her activity for each fifteen-minute block of time, starting from when she woke up until she had completed the four hours of cumulative study time. No more checklist; she would have to determine how she would use her time, and she would have to be much more responsible for her own education. However, a bit of content guidance was needed, since a 12-year-old unmotivated child will not become a self-directed, enthusiastic student overnight.<\/p>\n Together, we made a list of people from history who might be interesting to study and put them in chronological order. I created a list of body parts from the encyclopedia. We created a list of somewhat challenging classics to read. Math could be done every day. Her instructions were as follows:<\/p>\n Take the first thing on this list and begin to study it. You are free to study that one thing for as \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 long as you like\u2014five minutes, five hours, five days, or five weeks. You can use the encyclopedia, the Internet, any book in the house, and we\u2019ll try to take you to the library whenever you need to go. When you\u2019ve learned as much as you wish to about that thing, go to the next thing on the list and study that for as long as you like\u2014five minutes, five hours, five days, or five weeks. When you finish the list, we\u2019ll make a new one. Every day you must fax me (I put a fax machine in her room!) \u00a0 \u00a0your time log and two written paragraphs summarizing what you learned during your four hours of study. Within those guidelines, you are free to choose how to use your study time.<\/p>\n And so we began the experiment, which was an earthquake of change in her life. The first thing she realized was that it often took her until 9:00 or 10:00 at night to accomplish four cumulative hours of study.<\/p>\n Her second epiphany was about how she uses her time. A couple weeks into this program, I was out of town and called home to check in with her, and she said to me: \u201cDaddy! I just realized something today!\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat, sweetheart?\u201d I prompted, delighted with her enthusiasm.<\/p>\n \u201cI realized that I spent an hour and a half\u2014just eating snacks!\u201d Now, I\u2019m sure that her mother could have told her that, but for her to realize it herself was priceless.<\/p>\n While she had many other remarkable insights over time, the most important change was a return to excitement about learning. Over the course of the next two years, she exercised her freedom to pursue her interests and eventually engaged in an extensive study of food, searching the Bible for every reference to food she could find, studying the history of food preservation, writing a paper on how refrigeration changed the course of history, eventually leading to a continuing and in-depth study of nutrition, health, and natural healing.<\/p>\n Yes, there were some bumps in the road, some difficult days where goals were not met (but there always are), and certainly moments of doubt, but the end result, I must say, was gratifying: a motivated, self-directed teenage student who had learned how to use her time well. From \u201chate of learning\u201d to \u201clove of learning\u201d to scholar\u2014thanks to the grace of God and one missing ingredient; what more could I ask for?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Andrew Pudewa is the director of the Institute for Excellence in Writing <\/em>and a homeschooling father of seven.\u00a0 Presenting throughout <\/em>North America<\/em>, he addresses issues relating to teaching, writing, thinking, spelling, and music with clarity and insight, practical experience and humor. He and his beautiful, heroic wife, Robin, currently teach their two youngest children at home in northeastern <\/em>Oklahoma<\/em>.<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em>Copyright 2012, used with permission. All rights reserved by author. Originally appeared in the April 2012 issue of The Old Schoolhouse\u00ae Magazine<\/em>, family education magazine. Read the magazine free at www<\/a>.<\/a>TOSMagazine<\/a>.<\/a>com<\/a> or read it on the go and download the free apps at www<\/a>.<\/a>TOSApps<\/a>.<\/a>com<\/a> to read the magazine on your mobile devices.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Published with Permission Written by Andrew Pudewa www.TOSMagazine.com When one of my daughters was around 12 years old, we faced a significant problem with her motivation and quality of work. Her \u201cschool\u201d days went pretty much like this: She would get up, do everything on her checklist with as little effort as possible (often being […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[81,79,47,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-burn-out","category-classroom-help","category-informative","category-organization"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arkansashomeschool.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arkansashomeschool.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arkansashomeschool.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arkansashomeschool.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arkansashomeschool.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1262"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/arkansashomeschool.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1262\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1271,"href":"https:\/\/arkansashomeschool.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1262\/revisions\/1271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arkansashomeschool.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arkansashomeschool.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arkansashomeschool.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}