Charlotte Mason Composition: Preparing for the Precis

How do we prepare for the precis?

In Form III (~7th grade), the first step is summarizing.

If we're following the Charlotte Mason method of teaching composition, we don't need to require our students to summarize until Form III. Prior to Form III, we're allowing our students to become fully immersed in the world of the story. We're not imposing constraints as to how our students can interact with the text.

But in Form III, we begin requiring our students to get critical, to look for the main idea, to decide what is most and more important. This is what students must do to write a summary. But what must we, the teachers, do to facilitate this?

We have to limit. If a student usually writes a 3 page narration, limit the student to fewer than 2 pages for a summary. This is a hypothetical starting place, not a rule. If a student usually writes n pages, limit the student's summary to < n pages. It's as simple as that. Have the student to talk through the summary before they put it on paper, giving them the opportunity to remember relevant information and decide where to put it, or to "delete" less important information. The limitation will force the student to decide what they really want to include.

But this is just the beginning of preparing to write the precis.

In Forms I and II, we're not explicitly teaching things like text structure or genre or author's purpose. That doesn't mean we can't gently teach it, pointing things out as they come up. ("So, do you think Alice in Wonderland is realistic or fantastic?") We can do this, or we can not.

However, in Form III, we are teaching author's craft (narrative elements and literary devices).

Another way of thinking about it is like this:

• In Form I, the student learns how to form letters & practices writing by copying other people's words.
• In Form II, the student adds to what they know about writing by learning how to use the rules of our language (grammar) & practicing those rules in their written narrations.
• In Form III, the student adds to what they know about writing by learning about author's craft & practicing author's craft in their own writing.

Learning and practicing.

The student must know about narrative elements and literary devices before writing a precis, because the precis weaves together a summary of a work and an analysis of the author's craft. This is not to say that a student must learn each and every last literary device before attempting a precis. In the same way that a student learns a grammar rule, and practices that grammar rule in their own writing, adding to their rule list, the student learns an author's tool, and practices using that tool in their own writing, adding to their "tool box." Rules and tools.

And that's how we prepare for the precis.


Your thoughts on this? I'd love to hear them. :)

Charlotte Mason Composition: What's a Precis?

Charlotte Mason's Form III students wrote something called a precis. But what's that?

A precis (pronounced pray-see) is:

an abstract or epitome of the essential facts or statements of a work, retaining the order of the original               - A Handbook to Literature by Harmon & Hollman

The precis is a summary of a whole work, which means that a child needs to know how to summarize before attempting this composition task. (One of the misunderstandings out there is that the whole of Mason's composition pedagogy was just writing narrations, longer and longer narrations. But this isn't true. CM composition tasks, of course, get more complex as a student gets older.)

oral narration --> written narration --> summary --> precis

Again, a precis is written after reading a whole work, while a narration and a summary can be written after reading only part of a book. So, in some ways, it's similar to a book report. (In a lot of ways it's very different, but let's use the idea of a book report because we all know what that is.)

There are several ways to write precis (plural of precis is pronounced pray-seez), and I'm working on some future posts about this.

What about you? Do you have your child write precis?

Charlotte Mason Composition: Writing a Resume

resume: a summary; in French, resumer means "to summarize"

Each week, in Form III (approximately 7th grade), a PNEU student was expected to write a resume (a summary) of something he or she had read in literature, the news, history, or "about an allegorical subject." Composition was once a week for 30 minutes.

I've been thinking about the summary...

When a child narrates, they tell back everything remembered. But when they summarize, they decide on a main idea, and ideas that support that idea. They decide that certain details are irrelevant, and they edit them out.

In public school, we teach children to do this right from the beginning. We want them to tell us what the story is about in one sentence. We don't allow children to go on and on retelling. We want them to get to the point.

In elementary school, I was very good at tests in which I had to read a passage and find the main idea. I was good at these tests because I didn't read the passages. I read the questions' multiple choices, I went back and scanned for key words, and I got right answers. I viewed a test as a game, and the test-makers as my opponent. Fortunately, my first experiences with books were not at school, but at home, in my mother's lap; I learned to love reading, not for main ideas, but for pleasure. This isn't true for a lot of children.

When we school a child to listen/read for a main idea before we train a child to listen/read for story, we do them a huge disservice. We teach them to ignore how the author told the story - word choice, sentence fluency, and voice. But when we train a child to listen/read for story, we are teaching a child to attend to everything. It is all important.

Charlotte Mason had children spend six years narrating (Forms I and II) before they began summarizing. Six years studying - unbeknownst to them - how to be effective writers.

In Form III, composition was once a week for 30 minutes. Only 30 minutes! For a student to be able to write a resume of something they had read in 30 minutes, they needed to know what they were going to write before they came to the table. (Contrast this with a creative writing approach, in which the student comes to the table not knowing what they will write, is given a prompt, freewrites for a bit, develops a piece from the freewrite, workshops the piece, revises and edits, and finally has a finished piece of writing. This approach takes much longer than 30 minutes.)

~

Writing a Resume

A resume should be written from memory. In a CM-style resume, the text was not used, so direct quotes would not have been used; contrast this with Common Core Standards in which 4th graders must correctly use direct quotes and cite sources. Sometimes student writers learn to rely too much on using direct quotes, instead of paraphrasing material. Writing from memory solves this problem, and it also means that plagiarism is not an issue.

The resume should:

• be shorter than the original
• accurately communicate the text's main idea and supporting points (or plot, if the text is a novel or play)
• include the text's most important terms and concepts
• follow the same sequence of ideas that the original author used
• make sense (use complete sentences, use the best words to communicate clearly, etc.) 
• exclude details that will confuse or distract a reader
• exclude analysis, argument, or the reader's response

Your thoughts on this? :)

For my other posts on Charlotte Mason Composition,

check out:

1)Charlotte Mason and Composition

2)Narration: The Cognitive Core of Learning to Write

3)How Long Does It Have To Be?

Charlotte Mason Composition: How Long Does It Have To Be?

As a public school teacher, when I give a writing assignment, I'm always asked "How long does it have to be?" This got me curious about how much Form III students in PNEU schools were writing in one sitting.

I looked at the Form III student writing in Mason's School Education (Volume 3). These were answers to exam questions. (You can read the Form III student writing on Ambleside Online. I think I started on page 289.) I entered five of these answers into a word counter. This gave me the word counts as well as the reading level of each piece.

The word or phrase in bold is the topic of the answer. It's followed by the age of the writer, then the word count. I calculated the length based on 250 words (12 point font) equaling 1 typed page. I also included the reading level of each answer.

• Aristides (age 13) - 423 words (1 2/3 pages) - reading level 9th/10th grade
• Northern Italy (age 12) - 485 words (almost 2 full pages) - reading level college student
• Seed Dispersal (age 13) - 271 words (slightly more than 1 page) - reading level 11th/12th grade
• Tissues of Rhubarb & Potato (age 13) - 147 words for rhubarb, much of the potato paragraph is missing, so I'm going to assume that it was also around 150 words, making this piece around 300 words (1 1/5 pages) - reading level 9th/10th grade
• Waverly (age 12) - 617 words (2 1/2 pages) - reading level college student

One thing I can't quite wrap my head around is that PNEU Form III students only spent 30 minutes per week on composition. ("High schoolers" spent 40 minutes per week on composition.) So, students needed to be comfortable writing 1 and 2 1/2 coherent pages in 30 minutes.

At one point, I was able to write a 2 page paper in half an hour, so I know it's possible. If a student knows about their topic, has thought about what they want to say and how they want to organize it, has had lots of exposure to masterful writing, has a sense of excitement about communicating what they've learned, has studied grammar, and can spell, this is possible.

Your thoughts on this?

Narration: The Cognitive Core of Learning to Write?

Charlotte Mason said that narrating was an art. She believed that the ability to narrate was innate, and that it wasn't the product of instruction. It was not the result of a teacher teaching a student how to tell back a story.

She went further to say that children naturally tell back stories with ease. They have lots to say. They naturally tell stories in order. They include lots of details. They choose their words carefully, without being wordy or redundant.

In Volume 1 (pg. 232), Mason tells the story of a child (Bobbie) who has seen a fight between two dogs, and comes home to tell his parents the story of what he saw. He tells it with "splendid vigour in the true epic vein." But his parents don't perceive their child's storytelling this way. They're dismissive.

[B]ut so ingrained is our contempt for children that we see nothing in this but Bobbie's foolish childish way! Whereas here, if we have eyes to see and grace to build, is the ground-plan of his education.

Narration is the ground-plan.

And now I have to share with you a paper I read titled "A Natural Way to Write" by Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner. Thomas and Turner remind us that writing is modern, whereas drawing another person's attention to something is ancient.

[W]riting is a recent invention... For most of its history, it was a special purpose activity... Literature is considerably older than writing. And even after it was invented, poets such as Homer remained illiterate.

Homer couldn't write, but he sure could tell a story.

Thomas and Turner go on to write:

Much of the world's population is even now illiterate. It is a mistake to treat writing as a common, species-wide behavior like talking or walking... All writing is exotic, but in literate societies it is now taken as "normal."

The authors posit that there is an ancient behavior underlying writing that cognitive scientists call "joint attention."

In joint attention, two - or more - people are paying attention to something. For example, if I point out a beautiful flower to my daughter, and she looks at the flower, we are looking at the flower together. Now, I know she's looking at it, and she knows I'm looking at it, and we both know that we are sharing the experience of looking at this flower. Additionally, we both know that we both know we are sharing this experience. This is joint attention, and joint attention, the authors say, is the "cognitive core of writing."

I don't have any trouble pointing out this beautiful flower because it is directly observable to my daughter. I expect my daughter to be able to perceive the flower once I point it out.

But what if my daughter can't see the flower? What if I saw it earlier, and I want to tell her about it? To do this, I need to blend the unfamiliar with the familiar. I need to anchor the new flower to ideas that already exist to my daughter. For example, the new flower is small, tiny, the size of the tip of her thumb. It's pink. And it's shaped like a strawberry. My daughter's thumb, the color pink, and strawberries, are all familiar to my daughter. If I tell her about the flowers of the Arbutus 'Marina' using the ideas that are familiar to her, she is able to "see" them, even though they are unfamiliar.

Once the process of learning how to write is anchored in its cognitive core, the scene of classic joint attention—rather than a list of surface features—the process becomes straightforward and intelligible. In a series of steps, one can master the actual scene of classic joint attention, then extend it and practice until the new behavior becomes second nature—and then extend it again, until one has become an accomplished prose stylist. This process takes a scene that human beings everywhere are built for...

We are built for this. It's innate.

 

When Bobbie told his parents about the dogs fighting, he wanted them to "see" the scene. He saw something interesting and tried to direct his parents' attention to that thing. Charlotte Mason called this narration. Might a cognitive scientist call it joint attention? Might Thomas and Turner call what Bobbie was doing learning to write?

Charlotte Mason and Composition

I've been thinking about composition pedagogy a lot recently. A couple of months ago, my principal announced that there was some funding available for Common Core instructional materials, and my grade level was able to purchase some teacher packages from Institute for Excellence in Writing (IEW). In preparation for next year, I've been watching IEW training DVDs.

I like IEW. A lot. But it's not the way Charlotte Mason believed composition should be taught. I also like some of the progymnasmata-inspired curricula out there. But, again, it's not the way Charlotte Mason believed composition should be taught.

My favorite Mason quote about composition comes from Home Education (247):

In fact, lessons in 'composition' should follow the model of the famous essay on "Snakes in Ireland" - "There are none."

As a public school teacher, this is completely the opposite of what I'm mandated to "believe." And yet, I agree with Mason.

It's not that Mason thought composition should never be taught. She just didn't think it should be taught until about 10th grade (Form V).

In these Forms some definite teaching in the art of composition is advisable, but not too much, lest the young scholars be saddled with a stilted style which may encumber them for life. (Vol. 6: 194)

Some. But not too much.

The idea of waiting to teach "writing" until a child is in high school is something that, I think, many people are uncomfortable with. It's not the way we learned writing. It's not the way children in public schools are taught writing. If everyone else's child can write a state report by the end of fifth grade, won't my child be "behind" if she can't? Doesn't my child need to be able to write essays for college applications? Won't delaying teaching my child essay-writing until high school cause her detriment? How will she get into college? How will she be successful in college classes?

But I'm so comfortable with this.

In public elementary schools, students go through the writing process. They draft, revise, edit, publish. Why? They don't have a firm grasp of the grammar rules. They don't have a firm grasp of spelling rules; they're still getting weekly spelling lists and taking weekly spelling tests. They haven't been interested keenly* in the subjects they're asked to write about.

*from pg. 193 of Mason's An Essay Towards a Philosophy of Education

I teach 4th grade at a Title I school, which means that the majority of my students come from low-income homes. Last year, most of my students came from homes where English was not their parents' first language. One-third of my students had parents who didn't speak English at all.

I wish I could delay teaching them how to write.

If my students were in a PNEU school, they would be in Form II. In Form II (4th through 6th grade), children wrote narrations, but their narrations weren't revised. They weren't edited. They weren't published. (They weren't celebrated with fruit platters and parent invitations and colorful Post-It notes, the way we public school teachers have been trained to celebrate the writing of children.) The narrations didn't conform to a certain length. (If I had a nickel for every time a child asked me how long a piece of writing needed to be, or if their paragraph needed to have five sentences, I would have quite a few nickels...)

The rules about paragraphing weren't established until 1866. Defoe and Dickens didn't need these rules to be Defoe and Dickens.

It wasn't until later that students wrote in other genres. In Form III (~7th/8th grade), students wrote:

• a good precis (pronounced pray-see, a very specific kind of summary) of a lesson
• a descriptive essay
• narrative poems on striking events
• a resume (meaning a summary, not an employment resume) once a week, about something read in literature, the news, history, or about an allegorical subject (which would be less like writing a summary and more like writing a literary analysis)
• letters (Christmas letters to friends abroad on general news)

And then there is this interesting parenthetical note in Programme 93 for Form III:

(See Meiklejohn, 176-183.)

I'm assuming this refers to Meiklejohn's A New Grammar for the English Tongue.
 
Now, pages 176 to 183 of this edition are about paraphrasing and prosody. So students in about 7th grade - by Term 93 - were reading about how to paraphrase and about some of the meters used in English poetry (it looks like these pages in Meiklejohn cover iambic, trochaic, anapestic, amphibrachic, and dactylic meters).

In Term 94, the programme changes a little. Prior to 94, students were not required to write poetry that would scan. But in 94, students are. The programme doesn't require students to write their poems in a specific meter - YET.

In Form IV (~8th/9th grade), students wrote:

• weekly resumes (as in Form III)
• poems about current events, characters in the term's reading, heroic deeds, historical characters, or on scenes of the season
  
• letters to friends about family events and general news

But here's where it gets interesting. The parenthetical note says:

note metre of poems set for this term

Each term focused on one meter. Students could spend a whole three months exploring iambs. Or a whole three months playing with trochees.

If only!

I love that, with my own daughter, I will have the freedom to focus.

Forms V and VI (10th through 12th grade) appear very similar, except Form VI appears to list more essays.

In Form V:

• a good precis
•  a letter to the editor 
• essays on subjects taken from history, literature, and economics
• ekphrasis/analysis: (write on a picture studied) 
• write on some aspect of nature 
• letters for magazine on nature: for the P.U.S. Magazine...on occurrences in nature
• essays, in the style of Macauley [Thomas Babington Macaulay maybe?] on subjects suggested by the term's work in Early Stuart Literature
• poetry: occasionally, twenty lines of blank verse** or sonnets events that stir general feeling, or on historical or living personages. These must scan, see Abbott & Seeley***, Part III. 

**iambic pentameter
***Part III (pages 91-150) are about metre, disyllabic metre, and trisyllabic metre

In Form VI:

• essays on ethical and economic problems
• essays on events and questions of the day
• essays on any subject that interests you
• poetry: occasionally, twenty lines of blank verse on some deed of heroism or aspect of nature
• letters to the editor
• a good precis
• letters for the P.U.S. Magazine on occurrences in nature
• essays, in the style of Macauley [Thomas Babington Macaulay maybe?] on subjects suggested by the term's work in Early Stuart Literature
• ekphrasis/analysis: write on a picture studied
• write on some aspect of nature
• poetry: occasionally, twenty lines of blank verse or sonnets (events that stir general feeling, or on historical or living personages. These must scan, see Abbott & Seeley, Part III.)

It's interesting to me that, while a student would have studied iambic pentameter, and would have had lots of exposure to Shakespeare prior to 10th grade, he or she wouldn't have been required to try their hand at a full sonnet until Form V.

Most of the above was about poetry, but the essays PNEU students read were sophisticated and dense. James Anthony Froude, Charles Lamb, Sir James Stephen.

I don't know how useful reading essays like these would be nowadays would be (if useful is ever a concern) as the essay has changed. For slightly more modern collections, one could look at books like One Man's Meat by E.B. White and How to Cook a Wolf by M.F.K. Fisher. I read these in grad school.

Thoughts? I'd love to hear them. :)