The
Virtual
Middle School Library is a site that I recently came across while trying to
find help for one of my Freshman Composition students online. While the
site is label as a Middle School virtual library, I believe that all education
is ripe for students at their maturity-level or education-level and down.
Let
me put it to you this way, when I used to manage a Classical Conversations (CC)
community for homeschoolers, if a student from an older class was uncomfortable
with his/her placement, the peers in the class, or the knowledge of the others
at that level, I would encourage the parent and the student to consider
stepping into a younger-aged classroom*. The content was the same at all
Foundations levels of CC—just as it is in a children's Sunday School classroom—it
was just a different approach to conveying that same content. If it would
make the student feel better to be the teacher's assistant, this was fine, but
the goal was to place the child in a room where he or she could feel confident.
When you are confident, you are at ease…
When you are at ease, you learn better…
Studies show that it is
easier for you to not only learn information better, but to retain it longer,
when you are feeling at ease in your educational environment.
An
older child in a room full of 'littles' is a good role model for the ‘littles’,
and it makes them strive to know as much as the older student. What child
have you known who did not want to be looked up to or who did not look up to
older children? On the flip-side, though, I would never suggest moving a
child to a class of older children, even if the child seemed precocious.
If the student is in his/her age-group or lower, this still promotes
enrichment and then you have the added benefit of younger-level comprehension
to assist with repetition, thus producing mastery.
Education
has always seemed to work well when you access your maturity level and lower.
Some may argue that this stops the student from aiming high—stops advancement
into higher levels of maturity. I disagree. We are talking about
education, here. Education is best processed in a state of peace and
calm. Stretching too far beyond your maturity- or comprehension-level
only produces confusion, embarrassment, and stress, which are the opposite
conditions to promote long term knowledge. It is also the quickest way to
stop a child from enjoying education. The ultimate goal of education is
not to get a high-paying job—despite what our culture may be touting these days.
While higher pay is one of the benefits of attaining and education,
certainly, there is more to life than where you work or how much you get paid.
Life is about how you interact with the world, at any income level.
The
goal of education is to produce life-long learners. A life-longer learner
will find life much easier to handle throughout the ups-and-downs. Therefore,
I promoted the Virtual Middle School Library to my college students.
While they might think that they are 'above' using something designed for
middle school students, the fact of the matter is if they are struggling in
some area of language arts (the writing process, editing, comma usage, sentence
structure, research development, formatting sources, etc.), and if they need
help to learn specific lessons to help them advance through their current
course, then where else should you go but back to middle school?
*For those of you who are not
familiar with how the Classical Conversations (CC) curriculum works, let me
provide some guidance here. CC is a
curriculum that is based on the Classical method of education. The Classical method of education focused on
repetition and mastery while moving from knowledge, to understanding, to wisdom. Foundations is what CC calls their knowledge
phase of their curriculum. While many
people—specifically home school parents in their 30s and 40s—often think of ‘content
knowledge’ as simply memorization, it is not.
Memorization has received a bad ‘rap’
in last 30 years, and so many people think that memorizing facts is low-level
thinking and a waste of time. Would you
say that to your doctor? A doctor-friend
of mine told me once that 80% of everything he did in medical school was based
on memorization. He had to memorize body
parts, terms, locations, functions, surgical tools, operation procedures, the
correct steps and combinations for administering medication, and the list goes
on. Your doctor is a walking dictionary
of medical terms he memorized to have the knowledge to be able to properly
guide you through issues with your body.
Don’t tell me that memorization is a waste of time. It is not.
However, memorization without development might be seen as
useless. Learning facts through memorizing
is the first step in being able to move to the next step in education—understanding.
When you were learning to drive,
did your mom or dad simply put you behind the wheel and give you directions to
go? No, you had to learn the key terms,
components, and functions of the parts of the car. From there, your parent could properly school
you on those terms and components so that you could safely drive. The same holds true for the CC
curriculum. While the Foundations level
of the curriculum is about content knowledge, the goal is not simply
memorization. The goal is to grasp the
key terms and phrases of something so that deeper development can be had at
home, and deeper understanding can be had later, when the child is
developmentally ready.
CC has created a curriculum for
students to use in a three-cycle period.
This means that students go through Cycle 1: Ancient Times [let’s say at age 5], they
then move on to Cycle 2: Pre-Reformation to Modern Times [all new content—at age 6], and then they move into
Cycle 3: Columbus to Current Events [again, new content, we are now at age 7] (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Classical conversations Cycle Progression Chart
When the child turns 8, Cycle 1 is back up
for the curriculum focus of the year.
What does this mean to the child?
To the parent homeschool teacher?
It means you can dig deeper now.
It means that the child repeats the same readings and content, but three
years later, the maturity-level, content-knowledge, and understanding of the
world is drastically different. The
child now triggers the original content—which puts him or her at ease—yet the
parent can take that content and go deeper with it, thus promoting long-term
retention of the material. This goes on
at 9 when the Child enters Cycle 2 again, and then at age 10 when Cycle 3 is
back on the table. Each time you move
through the curriculum, the parent is emboldened to seek out new supplements to
enrich the child’s knowledge, and the child is stress-free because the content
is familiar and he/she is simply revisiting the topic and seeking out a deeper
and more comprehensive understanding of that topic.
While I am no longer part of a CC
community, I would recommend home school parents look at it and give it a try
for one year. I think you will be pleasantly
impressed, and there are more CC communities popping up every day, thus making
it possible for you to attend a community day one a week with the other
homeschoolers who actually live near you.
