Revolutionary War Book Review Bonanza

2^nd Friday so we’re back to history again, and it looks like this month you’re getting a book bonanza – next week I’ll post my review of The Fathers, which leaves me this week to toss out a handful of childrens’ history books we’ve enjoyed over the past month.

Despite our passion for medieval history, a certain mother has determined one must, nonetheless, study other eras. So our official topic for this school year is American History. We started out with reading about various renaissance-era European explorers; whipped out the timeline notebook and determined that Christopher Columbus followed right on the heels of Joan of Arc. I think in the usual method of studying history in American schools, we tend to lose some of that sense of continuity: Chris C. belongs firmly to the course called American History, St. Joan belongs to another course in a different year, called European History or Medieval History or some other thing, and we never quite grasp that the events of the Hundred Years’ War would have been part of the renaissance explorers’ heritage, much the way the legacy World War II is still felt today.

Anyhow, we’ve since slipped into the colonial era, and I’ve got three nice books concerning the Revolutionary War era to share with you this month:

Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride by Stephen Krensky, illustrated by Greg Harlin; the topic is exactly as it says. Harlin’s watercolors elegantly capture the mood of the night’s events – so brilliantly done I’d recommend this book to aspiring artists and photographers. I can’t do them justice, so just go look. The text is clear and effective – you learn the technical details of the ride, and also the real danger, urgency, and excitement – but spare enough that it won’t be overwhelming to a competent but young reader, or to the parent charged with the read-aloud. A map at the start of the book shows the route of the ride (you will need a larger US map of your own to put the location into context), and an epilogue summarizes in three paragraphs the rest of the Revolutionary War and it’s ultimate conclusion.

Can’t recommend this book enough – interesting to adults who never had a chance to learn more about this famous event, and engaging to children who like a little adventure with their history. Frankly, if I had a student of any age who was history-resistant, I’d put this book in front of him, and mine it for all it was worth.

By the Sword: A Young Man Meets the War by Selene Castrovilla, illustrated by Bill Farnsworth, tells the story of Benjamin Tallmadge’s first foray into battle in August 1776. This is a more demanding text than Paul Revere’s Ride, and focuses as much on Tallmadge’s inner life as a new recruit in the colonial army as with the outward adventure of the Battle of Long Island. The intentionally-hazy oil-painted illustrations support the feeling of inward reflection, and of a man looking back on a turning point in his youth.

[Does introspection make good history? At our house,  mothers were unanimously in favor of this exploration of the danger and emotional turmoil of warfare; a certain boy complained that the story ended just as it was getting to the good parts – I suppose he wanted to read the rest of war while he was at it.]

At the end of the book is a detailed timeline of Tallmadge’s life, a list of relevant historic sites to visit around modern-day New York City, a page in which the author explains how she researched her book and how she made certain literary decisions, and then a very detailed bibliography. There is also a brief note from the illustrator about his art research techniques, and from the typographer about the choice of fonts.  Good stuff — really helps the student catch on to the study of history.

I’d say this book is more appropriate for older children – third grade and up.  The level of detail and discussion of historical research could be helpful even for much older students, as this is the same kind of work that would go into better term papers for highschool and beyond — perhaps more effective than a lecture from the instructor, and would be a quick, easy read for the teen who must be plagued with this lesson.  (Okay, let’s be frank: your average college history TA would give anything to get to grade an undergraduate history paper as well-researched as what the author models here.)

Finally I wanted to mention Welcome to Felicity’s World, 1774: Growing Up in Colonial America. Written by Catherine Gourley, though you will be hard-pressed to find the author’s name in this publication, which is part of the “American Girl’s Collection” as something of an accessory to that popular childrens’ historical fiction series. Not a bad book though – there’s a reason the American Girls franchise has done so well. The concept is something like DK’s Eyewitness Series, exploring colonial life and the Revolutionary War through many illustrations, photographs, short captions, moving stories, and sometimes more detailed narrative explanations, all divided into topical sections and subsections. It therefore makes a good browsing book – you can pick it up anywhere and look through just the bits of special interest.

This is most definitely a girl’s book, but subtly so – Mr. Boy has been reading it enthusiastically, and so far does not seem to have noticed the feminine bent. Maybe some month when I’m scrapping for a history topic I’ll walk you through the differences between girl-books and boy-books in more detail, to show you how it’s done; for now I’ll just say that it nicely combines social history with the usual names-‘n-dates type outline of a traditional textbook. Good reliable backbone for an elementary-years history program, and probably fairly easy to get hold of, since it is part of such a well-known brandline.  Felicity lives in Williamsburg, VA, by the way, for those who are looking for a text to coordinate with a field trip.

Lake Woebegone schools?

Picked up a book called Time to Learn by Christopher Gabrielli and Warren Goldstein; 264 pages of cheerleading for extended school hours. Here’s an interesting statistic from their introduction:

More than 60 percent of Americans (as measured by a Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll) give the entire school system grades of C, D, or F. On the other hand, when it comes to their own community schools, or the schools their children attend, the grades improve markedly. Roughly half the respondents give their community schools an A or B, and 70 percent give the school their oldest child attends an A or B. We seem, in other words, to be convinced that the system as a whole is mediocre, while at the very same time we believe that the schools closest to us are just fine. Both cannot be true. We appear to have taken up residence in a town like Garrison Keillor’s fictional Lake Woebegone, but one where all the schools are above average.

Gabrielli and Goldstien conclude that the parents are simply deluded. The *think* their children attend good schools, but in fact they do not. (And if only you do what the authors suggest, that will all be fixed. A topic I might look at next month.) Today I’d like to toss out an alternate theory for these apparently contradictory results.

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When I was in college I lucked into an awesome course. Award-winning professor teaching a class that was highly recommended by the students who had taken it, and which promised to be the kind of thing you would be glad, decades later, that you had studied. I can remember sitting in class thinking to myself, “this is a really good class”. And knowing that if only I could be bothered to pay attention to the lecture and then actually do the homework, I would learn a ton.

Naturally, slack student that I was, I did not do this. I did the bare minimum to skate through the course, and frankly I even misestimated that minimum, and thus did more poorly than even I had hoped. If you used my knowledge coming out of that class as a guage of how good the course was, you would be very sorely mistaken. My conclusion: You cannot judge that quality of the teaching soley by the achievements of the students.

I can fully imagine that many parents who give their children’s schools high marks know this too well. The teacher is wonderful, if only you could convince your child to actually do the homework. There’s a fabulous school library, too bad your kid never wants to check any books out of it. And so forth. You can lead the kids to knowledge, but you can’t make them think.

So that’s one element of my theory: The parents can see that their children attend good schools – they are being asked to rate the school itself, not to rate how much their children actually bother to learn at the place.

The second part of my theory is this: Quality of education varies within schools. Again, this is not a big secret. There can be really good teachers and really lousy teachers working in the same building. If your child is able to get into the better classes, you’ll have a better impression of the quality of the schools. Sometimes this is even very explicit: a certain sub-population of students participate in a special program (honors, magnet school, resource room, bi-lingual classroom, etc) that gets all the best the school has to offer. Parents of the program may not even know that kids outside the special program aren’t getting as much attention or as good of teaching, and will rate the school highly based on their own experiences.

And thirdly, it all depends on what you want. Does your idea of a ‘top notch sports program’ mean that most varsity players will go to college on athletic scholarships? Or does it mean that 90% percent of the students are involved in an intra-mural sport? Asked to rate your own school on a given subject, you might give it a high grade because you know that an excellent specialty program is available for those who qualify; but you might in turn give a poor grade to other schools, because all you see is the statistics on the general student population.

And that leads to a final, a very likely, cause of the disconnect: We don’t actually know what happens at all the other schools. We can see the statistics on student performance, school violence, drop-out rates and so forth. We might see a newspaper article featuring students or alumni of other schools. If these give an ugly picture, we conclude those other schools aren’t doing so well. Our own school, in contrast, we know very well. We can give a more nuanced evaluation, one that distinguishes the efforts of the teachers and the administration from the results of the students, and that balances strengths and weaknesses in giving an overall judgement.

I think that Gabrielli and Goldstein present some good ideas in favor of the extended school day, though I have several reservations about making it a universal practice. But I think the accusation that parents are simply incapable of knowing that whether their children are currently offered a good education is both patronizing, and based on a very narrow interpretation of the statistics they offer.

[Funny contrast: When given objective data on the results of homeschooling students, I think people get too good of an impression. If you compared homeschoolers only to children of parents who were actively interested in education, enjoyed learning, spent significant time with their children, and supervised the children’s educational efforts to ensure homework was done, tests studied for, and classes chosen carefully, I bet the results between public-, private-, and home- schooled children would be very similar. Despite what the statistics might lead you to believe, homeschooling will not turn your child into a genius. Good form of education? Yes. But no alchemy in it.]

Surprising Foreign Language Helps

4th Friday, so it’s an education-related topic. I originally started this article for my homeschooling blog, but never got around to finishing it. I’m putting it here because I think that plenty of non-homeschooling (and non-any-kind-of-schooling) readers may be interested as well. So many reasons to want or need to learn a foreign language.

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In teaching the kids French, and in toying around with assorted languages on my own (I’m purely a hobbyist: I love to study languages, but I am only competent in the two), I’ve stumbled on a handful of little language-learning helps that don’t get much press. I wanted to share them, in the hopes that they could be of use to others.

1. The Joys of Bad Latin Last summer when I first began my long slow effort to learn Latin, I picked up a copy of a Latina Christiana CD at a used book fair. It was a bit surreal, hearing Latin spoken in a light southern accent. I imagine a meticulous homeschooling mother living in the suburbs Charleston, sitting in her tidy living room and calling out vocabulary words. Fitting, of course, for ecclesiastical Latin, the epitome of second languages – it’s supposed to be used by foreigners, why try to hide your inner barbarian?

I agree, of course, that a language program ought to include instruction on the correct (native) pronunciation; but there are times when it is helpful to hear that foreign language spoken by someone with *your* accent. The reason is that your ear identifies the sounds better. If you are having trouble hearing where one word ends and another begins, or telling whether that was an “r” or an “l” in the middle of that word, this method helps. Especially so in cases when reading the language is difficult, such as for young children.

With my kids I usually give them the normal (native) pronunciation of the word first. If they look at me funny and repeat back something horribly off-base, I give them the word again with a solid american accent, so they can clearly differentiate each sound. We go back to the native pronunciation once they have a better idea what they are trying to say.

2. Bad English: More Useful than You Knew Now it is painful to hear a language mangled. Even more importantly, learning good pronunciation and intonation is essential if you want people to actually understand you. So the second helpful technique is the exact opposite of the first: Listen to your own language (probably English, if you are reading this) spoken by someone who has a heavy accent in the foreign language you are trying to learn. [Ahem: you want a real fluent speaker of the language, not your dearly beloved doing a bad stage accent.] This trains your ear to be able to distinguish the sounds of the foreign language, and gives you a feel for the pace and intonation of the language. You can start learning the sound of the foreign language as spoken fluently, long before you are able to understand whole conversations. Bonus: What trains your ear trains your mouth, as well.

A series that does this is the Bonjour Les Amis videos for children. Not a perfect program, and the style of presentation would be frustrating to some types of learners — but its great strength is that the narrator speaks his English in a powerfully-Parisian accent. A good choice for accent-training as a supplement to whatever else you are using. Presumably the Hola Amigos series does the same, but I have not yet checked them out (our local public library carries both).

[Keep in mind that if you are trying to a learn a language spoken by residents of your own town, you can probably find real live people who would like to practice their English with you. Not that spending an hour with a DVD is somehow inferior to spending an hour with a real person . . . ]

3. Partial Immersion Around here a popular source homeschool-inferiority-complex are the outstanding academic programs available at some of our public schools. Several of our elementary schools have started early-years foreign-language-immersion programs. The children spend half their school day learning entirely in the second langauge. (The program begins in kindergarten – good timing, since recall that back in the day children used to only go to kindegarten half a day, anyway. So no real loss of academic time, by my reckoning.)

Immersion is a very effective way — I would say, the most effective way — to gain fluency in a foreign language. (You still need to study grammar if you wish to be literate, same as a native speaker). To that end, sometimes you read that families learning a second language ought to have a “French night” or “Spanish night” when only the new language can be spoken.

It’s a lovely idea, except you end up saying, “Paul, I present my friend Stephanie. Would you like a blue pencil? Where is the train to Lyons?” Fine things to say, but what you really wanted was the French for, “No you may not put ketchup in your sister’s water glass, even if she did tell you it is her favorite drink.” (And even if *you* knew the french, your young bartender would swear he heard you say, “yes, go ahead.”)

A more realistic method for those of us who can’t pull off total-immersion is foreign-language wading. Use the language, and use it all the time, but combine it with your own. As in, “Non, you may not put le ketchup in your soeur‘s water glass, even if she did tell you it was her boisson preferée.” Gradually it will contain more foreign vocabulary and syntax, but even at the beginning you can practice using what little you have learned. My kids have learned 98% of what they know from this approach.* (Though Mr. Boy is about to start a regular grammar book, now that he’s able to work from a textbook on his own.)

–> Another advantage to this method over total-immersion is that everyone can participate, even if there are widely-varying skill levels. People who don’t know how to ask for the train to Lyons can still get in a mention about the blue pencil from time to time. (“Please take my crayon bleu out of your mouth.”) Perfectly acceptable to use a word in the foreign language, pause to translate if your listener doesn’t get it, and then keep moving.

So you don’t think I made up this last approach myself: A program that effectively uses partial-immersion is the 10 Minutes a Day series, which are geared towards preparation for tourist travel. If you need to know how to ask directions and buy lunch, this is your course. Lightweight and compact, too. I have some of the older editions, so I can’t tell you how good the CD’s are – back in the day we just used the children’s-encyclopedia-style pronunciation guides in the text, and that got us close enough.

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So there you have it, three handy techniques that may be helpful in your foreign language learning efforts. Next week we’re back to economics, continuing with the living wage series. Probable topic will be one of those “They can’t really mean that!” bits of the catechism — you know, the ones that make you think the pope must be a communist or something. (Hint: he isn’t.) TBD, though, as my nieces arrive from out of town on Tuesday, and you never know what will happen from there.

*Combined with method #2, my daughter has also learned how to fake the French language, causing her great-grandparents to be inappropriately impressed with her language skills. But I promise grandma, I am teaching her *real* French, too.