Renewing the Minds of Damaged Learners

One of my flock graduated just before Christmas, and it has caused me to reflect on what those early days were like, and how far she has come. When she began homeschooling with me she was what I would call a “damaged learner”. A damaged learner, in my opinion, is a student who has shut down and turned away from any interest in learning. I’ll be real frank with you and say that I was a damaged learner before I was rehabilitated by homeschooling my children, and inadvertently myself, using Charlotte Mason’s methods. This new graduate is not the only damaged learner I have taught. There have been four of them, not counting myself.

Seeing the beauty in the world through this kind of education was difficult for my damaged learners at first. In fact, they found it abrasive, maybe even offensive. Classical music grated on their nerves and traditional hymns left them flat. Narrating was weird, and Plutarch was even weirder!

Charlotte Mason talks a lot about us spreading the bounty of the feast before the child, but I can only describe the condition of the damaged learner as one who has only ever eaten sugar and processed food. Vegetables do not taste good to them. The texture is not even pleasant. In this scenario, my first response would be to cease all sugar and tell them that when they are hungry, they will eat! But alas, that was not an option. Not only were these not my own kids, but not all of them were living in my own home, so I couldn’t control their environment. The adjustment had to be made slowly. I had to coax them along, entice them to join me in tasting a bit of the feast, a little at a time. Furthermore, it’s one thing to need calories of some kind to survive, but a person can certainly survive without beauty, without the feast Charlotte Mason suggests. A paltry existence it would be, no doubt, but my point is that we cannot starve them out.

That said, most of my damaged learners left public school with no hope. They were failing, or more honestly, the system was failing them. However, there was a huge blessing in that, because we knew what didn’t work, and therefore we could wholeheartedly embrace Mason’s methods.

Folk songs were an easy start. One of my kids happens to have the nickname Lizzie, and I will never forget us learning the folk song “Go Get the Ax”, which includes the line, “Go get the ax, there’s a fly in Lizzie’s ear.” Oh how they giggled! Lizzie wasn’t impressed at first, but she warmed up.

Picture study was easy enough too. I remember the first piece of art they encountered in public that we had previously studied. It was Night Watch by Rembrandt. There is such a sense of confidence and pride that shines in a child’s eyes when they come upon a picture that has been made their friend. I don’t think my kids had any idea that they had made that friend until they walked into a children’s museum and saw it there. It was just a little reproduction, but recognition dawned on their faces, and it was a beautiful thing.

Hymn was a little trickier. For a long time I would seek out a modern version of the current hymn, which was more comfortable to them. Eventually we undertook to learn our hymns in traditional form. There was much groaning and difficulty. Frankly, we did not sound good for weeks, but amazingly, by the end of the month we had the thing down, and wonder of wonders, we sounded pretty good. It was sort of like creating something ourself. That may sound odd, but the broken, maybe even ugly thing we started with had been practiced and honed into something lovely.

Handicrafts were…well, ok, they loved handicrafts from the beginning.

Reading living books for subjects like history, science, geography, was a relief to them, but narrating on these things was like asking an old dog to do a new trick! I remember my own initial attempts to narrate. It was a similar experience to learning to write left-handed in the fourth grade, because I’d broken my right hand. I’m thankful that I knew how hard it was to learn when you didn’t start out that way, because it helped me to take it slow and teach them the art of attending and narrating. Sometimes line by line.

One huge blessing with regard to living books is that they don’t have to be at a high reading level to be worthy. Even to this day my kids read books that range from a fifth or sixth grade level up to graduate level. Of course, I needed to read aloud any that were beyond their reading level, but that was fine, because I found that the skill of listening and narrating was as important as the skill of reading to themselves and then narrating.

Interestingly, I also found that they preferred to do written narrations over oral narration. It’s so odd, because we know that all areas of language arts have an order of attainment the same as a baby learns to roll, pull up, crawl, and then walk. But I’ve heard that those babies that skip crawling and go straight to walking have the potential for learning difficulties later. Frequently their parents have to get down on the ground with them, and teach them to crawl for the sake of their brain development. I think somehow this relates to a lot of what Mason suggest we do, and in what order. So, I constantly asked for oral narrations over written narrations despite their preferences.

They had never heard any Shakespeare, so we started with Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare by Edith Nesbit and then moved onto Tales from Shakespeare by Charles Lamb before listening to an actual Shakespeare play. I remember having a big white board where we tried to keep track of all the characters and their various names and love triangles! And a few years later two of them participated in an actual production of The Taming of the Shrew!

Plutarch took much longer, but I’m happy to say that before they each graduated, they were able to understand, narrate and converse about several of Plutarch’s lives.

One thing that had to be kept in mind was their level in all things. Forget what they should be doing in grades 6, 7 and 8. What they needed to be doing was just above what they could do. What I mean is that they needed to be challenged, but they couldn’t skip whole steps in the process for the sake of being on grade level. For instance, all of them started math at about a fifth grade level, and I worked with them daily through all parts of their math work. None of them have turned out to be math wizards, but they have the basics down very well. In fact, my recent graduate was asked to be a math tutor at her new technical school!

It was also important that I be very deliberate about alternating subjects as is done in the lower forms. In fact, maybe I should mention that I started them, all of them middle schoolers, in what would be the equivalent to AO’s level 4. It was plenty hard enough for them, and the fact is that attaining some specific standard was never my goal with these children. Just consistently moving forward was. Building confidence in their ability to learn was. Hopefully fostering a lifelong love of learning was.

In the end though, all education is self education, and the Holy Spirit is the teacher. Therefore, our identity cannot be wrapped up in their success or their failure, in their motivation to learn or their lack thereof. We must be committed to doing our part in the process, and step by step their knowledge base builds, and the number of things they know about increases. But just as you can share the gospel with someone, and they can still reject Jesus. You can share the blessing of learning, and the student has the choice to refuse. I wish I could say that all of my damaged learners have gone on to embrace the feast, to continue their education, to fill their souls with the beautiful things, but not all of them have. I console myself by remembering that those who haven’t embraced this lifestyle are at least far, far better off than they would have been.