Skip the Pink Marshmallows
Dear Parents,
I heard recently about a mom who drove all over Northern Virginia in search of pink marshmallows for her daughter’s “create your own planet” project. Do you remember these projects from your youth? Dioramas, poster projects, clay models... These are all tasks that require quite a lot of parental support, like driving to the hobby store to pick up craft supplies or searching the entire metro D.C. area for one obscure ingredient for the winning science fair project.
When prospective parents come to tour our school, they come in expecting to run point on these types of take-home projects for their children. They inevitably ask us, “How much homework should we expect?”
I am always a little surprised by this question, probably because our school does not require much in the way of homework, unlike most other traditional schools—including the Christian ones—in our area.
In the younger grades we never use the word “homework,” much less assign it. As students advance, we do ask students to read from a book of their choice each evening or be read to by parents. Students who struggle to learn their math facts during school hours may need some extra practice at home, but there are not reams of worksheets to complete each night. Most math facts, for that matter, can be mastered with a little focused practice on the ride to and from school. Expectations change a bit in the upper grades where students in 6th-8th grades have about an hour of math homework most evenings, sometimes less.
The difference at our school is both in quantity and in kind.
Charlotte Mason summed it up this way: “We are free to give our whole force to these great educational labours, of the inspiration of ideas and the formation of habits.” She pushes us to ask these important questions: what is the informing idea, and what mental habitudes are gained by the week’s work? Everything we assign must meet one or both of these goals. With nightly reading, our students are enriched by the ideas in the book and get practice reading at the same time. Home narrations, assigned weekly in the lower grades, give children an opportunity to retell a story in their own words with “delightful original touches.” (Mason, Charlotte M. A Philosophy of Education, p.28)
Our guiding desire for students at Ambleside is that they work well at school and then go home free to play outside, pursue hobbies and other interests, have dinner with their families, and settle in early with a good book. We do not want them to go home stressing over putting together the perfect costume for dress-up day or running out to the store for more green puffy paint.
There is no intrinsically educational value to these types of busy activities. What is the point? It is likely because this is how schools have “always done it.” Except that it’s not the way it’s always been done. And if we stop to carefully consider, “this is how we’ve always done it” is not the approach we want to take with our precious children’s education, either.
Everything we ask our students to do must further either or both of our great educational principles—the inspiration of ideas and the formation of habits.
Not every school is the same.
Do you know of other parents in need of reprieve from pink marshmallow projects? We’ve got school tours happening every month.
Gratefully,
Krise Nowak, M.Ed.
Head of School