Vitality of Many Minds, Part II

 

Transition from Elementary to Secondary

High school (Years 9-12) brings a whole new set of challenges.  Most of us will need to make a transcript at the end of high school, sometimes even before then.  We have to decide what courses, credits, and grades we will include.  We have to consider state graduation requirements (if any) and requirements for college or other programs our students will want to pursue.  We have to make time for drivers license preparation, jobs, dual credit, volunteer work, clubs, and whatever else our students take on.  We have to practice our masterly inactivity as we try to superintend without domineering, and we have to perform the delicate dance of gradually turning over control to our students who are preparing for independence.

This is not a utilitarian education, preparing students for careers only; that, Charlotte Mason says, leads to moral rot.   Her aim is an “education [which] should make our boys and girls rich towards God . . . , rich towards society and rich towards themselves.”  (CM V6, BkII, p. 281)  Real literature and real history, real philosophy and theology, feed the minds and souls of students of all ages, and when our students have encountered the same books that others in their circle have encountered, then they have a basis for conversation and community.  

This is the “vitality of many minds” that Charlotte Mason says we should work towards.   We want our students to know authors, artists, composers, thinkers, and doers who have enriched us.  We want to connect our students to a community that also knows these authors, artists, composers, thinkers and doers, so that as they go into the world to do the work that God has given them to do, they have this vitality, this life, shaped by many great minds of the past and present and ready to be shaped by great minds of the future.  The character of our students is our focus.  Charlotte Mason says “that great character comes out of great thoughts, and that great thought must be initiated by great thinkers. . . .”  (Vol 6 p. 278)  We are shaping character by introducing our students to the community of thinkers and doers of the past and present, preparing them to be part of the community of thinkers and doers of the future.

CM advises us to focus at this time on the mind, but to realize that using the mind is not the same as feeding the mind.  We need to feed our children’s minds. She summarizes the field of knowledge to focus on as three areas:  knowledge of God, knowledge of man, and knowledge of the universe.  This knowledge was to be gained directly from the source as much as possible, not from lecturers distilling the learning they themselves had gained.  And the material would be interacted with through narration and CM-style exams, without a teacher coming behind to tell the students what they should have learned.  As Charlotte Mason saw it, our students need to be in contact with the best minds, through the books they read, but they also need “conscious intellectual effort, the act of knowing” done by themselves in order to grow in “capability, character, and conduct.”  (CM V6, Bk II, p. 298)

When we feed our students’ minds appropriately and when we support them in making those intellectual efforts, students satisfy their need for learning, they develop the skill of teaching themselves, they grow in wisdom, and they acquire a common base of knowledge that allows them to have community with others throughout their lives.

As you prepare for high school, be sure to follow the links on the AmblesideOnline high school page.  These cover specific subjects such as science, explaining what you need to consider, and they cover other helpful topics.  Read all the footnotes on the booklist for the year you are planning.  These sometimes have really helpful advice.  Remember that the schedule page for each year, below the links to the charts, has the entire weekly schedule as a list, and that list has lots of information that is not on the charts.  The charts are abbreviated, and if you aren’t sure what something means, look at the full list.  If the chart and the full list do not agree, the full list is probably correct.

The full AmblesideOnline schedules for Years 9-12 definitely fulfill Charlotte Mason’s recommendations.

If you are using Years 7 or 8 as part of high school, you will need to do quite a bit of adjusting.  The books that are assigned certainly are worthy of high school level work, but in my opinion they are not sufficient to cover all the subjects a high school student needs.  Consider jumping ahead to one of the high school years instead of using 7 or 8 as high school.  If you'd rather stay at that level, then look ahead to Years 9 or 10 to get ideas for what you may need to add.  You’ll want to add high school level composition, economics, government, citizenship, maybe some of the science selections, life skills, and possibly some of the spiritual formation books.

All of my students began working during high school, which allowed them to develop good job-place skills while they were still at home.  They also began taking dual credit classes during high school so they could ease into the learning curve of college classes.  I did not assume they would attend college after high school, but I wanted to prepare them just in case, and for some classes I preferred to outsource to a college class anyway.  For instance, Speech worked better as a college class than a homeschool class, and at the end they had three college credit hours plus a high school credit.  We did upper level math as dual credit, and some of my students did some lab sciences that way.  Some of my students did very little dual credit, while others graduated high school with many credit hours complete.  There's no one right way to do this.

I usually decided how to adjust each student’s high school schedule on a subject-by-subject basis.  I like to download the chart from the schedule page for the year we’re working on, so I can really see how the work is spread over each term.  I rearrange the rows on the chart into units, with each unit representing one set of daily assignments in the week.  These sets are roughly divided by subject, and that way I can see how much work I’m assigning each week in each subject area.  Some years, with some students, we can do two daily literature assignments and three science assignments, and so on, but other years we are only doing one daily assignment in each area, and some of those daily assignments are really one weekly assignment spread across several days.  In both cases, we are still getting a wide variety of types of work.  Even if the work is fairly light, it’s meaningful and rich with ideas.

I also involve my student in these decisions at this level more than I did in earlier years.  It’s not unusual for me to lay out books on the table and have the student look through them to choose, or if we haven’t purchased the books I may send my student links to a summary of each book and ask for opinions.  If my student finds the workload onerous or questions the value of a particular book or task, I will have a conversation about that, and I’m open to removing assignments if their reasons seem valid.

For Spiritual Formation, really look at the recommended books and consider what your specific student needs.  By high school I expect to add to the schedule (or substitute in) some of the spiritual formation books that AO lists as optional, just because my older students really appreciated those books and I think my last student will too.  Avoid the temptation to squeeze in every apologetics book or theology book or other works that seem essential.  Our students have their whole lives to keep reading and learning, and cramming in everything now will not improve the outcome.  My goal here is for my student to know how to study the Bible and have a familiarity with theology, as well as to be familiar with some powerful stories of people of God.

When I schedule History, I want to keep at least one history spine.  We often had two spines, one for British or world history and one for American history.  But if I had to cut, we kept at least one spine.  You will find several options for spines on the AmblesideOnline booklists, some shorter than others, and on the AmblesideOnline forum you can find some other options that are even shorter if you need that.  Shorter options can still be very good.  Along with the spine, I schedule at least one biography per term, even if that biography will be spread across multiple terms.  I also try to fit in some of the speeches and documents, even if we’re cutting way back.  Sometimes we do much more than that, but I don’t want to do less.

With Literature, I tried to have at least one long novel.  If we had limited bandwidth, I might stretch one long novel across the entire year.  I also scheduled at least one shorter literature reading each term, plus some of the short stories and essays, and some readings from the literary history books like English Literature for Boys and Girls or Invitation to the Classics.  That’s the minimum I aimed for.  Many times we were able to use the schedule just as it was, but we adjusted when that was too much.

I usually dropped grammar and dictation at some point in high school, depending on what each student still needed.  I did work on composition.  By the time they graduate, our teens should be able to write an essay of a couple of pages, one that has a clear structure and makes sense.  All these years of oral narration followed by years of gradually increasing written narrations have laid a foundation for written composition.  Very little formal writing instruction is really needed.  AO recommends using a writing handbook beginning in Year 7.   You can assign a couple of pages a week from the handbook, once your student is comfortable with written narrations, and then you can also assign your student to revise one written narration each week.  After that's going well, you can assign an essay once a month or so.  Slow and steady works in this area just as well as all the others.  If you need more help with this, you'll find experienced advisors on the AO forum.  Karen Glass also has a new set of composition instruction books available from Simply Charlotte Mason.  I found college Speech class to be an excellent introduction to formal writing or a transition to college level work.  Some of my students already had written essays at home before they took a Speech class and some had not.  

AO does not schedule a complete science course in Years 9-12.  You are expected to add to what is already scheduled.  Some parents choose a textbook course.  Some choose a hybrid program like Sabbath Mood.  Some add their own choice of books, not textbooks.  The AO forum is a great place to see what others have done and to discuss the choices you are considering.  You can even get feedback from AO graduates sometimes, with their perspective on what worked and what didn't.  I generally keep the books that AO schedules for science and add my own choice on to them.  Remember that Signs and Seasons, which is completed during Years 7-9, counts as a full high school credit of science, so you have some wiggle room in those high school years.   Also, if you've been doing Adventures with a Microscope, that work can certainly count towards biology labs.  I usually allowed two or three daily slots for science in at least grades 9 and 10, and all our readings and all our lab work had to fit in those slots.  If they couldn't fit, then we had to cut back.  I felt free to cut out labs that seemed like busywork, too.  I was really nervous about how much science work we did, especially labs, but one of my students was a Biomedical Science major and had to do hardcore biology labs in college, and I discovered through her experience that she was more than adequately prepared for this by our haphazard work at home.

In high school, I scheduled a "life skills" book every school day, so we had four different books each term, read once a week.  (Some books were spread over multiple terms--I didn't try to cram longer books into a single term.)  Every student had books on cooking, auto repair, finances, cleaning, first aid, nutrition, and health.  Did they learn all there is to know about those subjects?  No, but they had an introduction, a foundation. 

 Consider any books that you would like to include that are not on the AO list.  For instance, I have all of my kids read How to Win Friends and Influence People and also Stop Worrying and Start Living, both by Dale Carnegie.  I think I usually fit those into the slot I reserved for life skills books, although maybe sometimes I put them in Citizenship.  Anything that you add needs to fit--you can't just keep adding books without removing something eventually.  Sometimes you have to remove a lot of somethings, and that's ok too as long as you're keeping a broad selection.  I've scheduled some high school years where we cut pretty much nothing from the base schedule, and others where we kept just a tithe from some subjects.  In both cases and everything in between, I made those choices alongside my student, with lots of prayer, and with consideration of that student's needs at that time.

In the high school years, you’re going to adjust the schedule each term the same way you did in previous years, but now you will have some additional factors to consider and you will need to include your student in this process.  My high school students often are deeply enmeshed in college classes by their junior year.  All of them have been working for pay by their sophomore year.  They have sports or other extracurriculars.  How do I give them a Charlotte Mason education with everything else they have going on?  This isn’t a new problem.  Charlotte Mason dealt with these challenges too.  Students in earlier years in Charlotte Mason’s schools may have mostly all done the same work in similar ways, but by the late teens it was different.  Some students had left her schools to go to college.  Some were now working during the day.  Some were still in school, waiting until they were old enough to marry and start their own homes.

In Volume 6, Book II, Chapters 3 and 4, Charlotte Mason talks about Continuation Schools, which were part-time schools designed for teens who were working full-time and unable to attend a traditional school.  Charlotte Mason was planning to have only 8 hours a week available for her continuation school students.  Beyond that, the young people would be working at employment and in the evenings filling their time with technical classes, athletic exercise, and other recreation.  Because of this time constraint, she chose to focus the assigned work on what seemed most important.  CM’s concern was that all minds, even those of adults, hunger for learning.  Her solution was to prepare students to be life-long learners.

When I first tried to plan our high school work realizing my student wasn't going to have time for a full school schedule by her junior year, reading the Continuation School chapters in Volume 6 gave me hope that we could still have a Charlotte Mason education in these last few years.  Your student can have a soul-filling, community-building Charlotte Mason education in just a few hours a week, if that’s what’s available.  You can pare down and customize what you assign, keeping in mind your specific student and that student’s needs.  Just be sure to include knowledge of God, knowledge of man, and knowledge of the universe in each week’s work. 

My state, Texas, doesn't have specific requirements for homeschooled students to graduate from high school.  I issue the diploma based on my standards, and I make the transcript.  The Texas Education Agency does publish online the graduation requirements for public school students, which can be helpful to look over, but those are not requirements that homeschool students in Texas must meet.  You need to become familiar with the requirements of your own state so that you can be prepared to meet them.  Often, your local homeschool support groups will be able to help you.  The AmblesideOnline forum can also be a help with this--post your question, and you should get responses from other parents in your state who can help you navigate the requirements.

If your child might someday be college bound, even if much later, make sure you cover appropriate high school material to prepare for college admissions and work.  That's not as hard as we often think it is.  Here again, local parents can help, or if your student has particular schools in mind you can talk to the admissions office staff at those schools to find out what they are looking for. 

You are going to need to make a transcript for graduation.  AmblesideOnline as written in years 9-12 will give you one credit of history and one credit of English for each year as well as a half credit at least of Economics and a half credit at least of Government.  It will give you a partial credit of science each year, but you’ll have to add to it in all but Year 9.  (Signs and Seasons is a full science credit, remember.)   I’ve given credits based on the life skills books we read.  You can pull together books and other work your student does in AO to support credits in other subjects too.  Any dual credit classes count for high school credit, and I usually give a full high school credit for a semester of college.  The Amblesideonline forum has great helps for preparing transcripts based on AO work. 

Be sure to give appropriate grades on the transcript.  Homeschool parents tend to grade too low.  This puts our students at a disadvantage over students from other educational settings.  I have seen the grades my students earn for dual credit work in college classes as high school students, and I know that my grades are fair.  The AO forum is a good resource for you to talk through grading rubrics with other parents if you need more support with this.

In Volume 6, Charlotte Mason tells us, “The future of England depends largely upon Secondary schools; let the Heads of these lay out a liberal field of study and astonishingly fair things will grow in that garden of mind in which we are invited to sow the seeds of all knowledge.” (p. 277)

Don’t panic when you begin planning these secondary school years.  You are capable of managing these years.  AmblesideOnline gives you a plan for that “liberal field of study” that you can adjust to fit your student and your family.  Our students will finish their home education years with that “vitality of many minds” that Charlotte Mason hoped for.  And they can continue learning throughout the rest of their lives as those “seeds of all knowledge” continue to bear fruit.

Download the handout.

Return to Part I.