Learning Space

Dorian Speed asks:  "How does your schooling space fit into your home?"

For us it's a timely question. After eight years of homeschooling, first in an apartment, then in a couple of small houses, and finally in this much-larger house, which we bought because it seemed a potential goldmine of discretionary space, we finally -- as of two weeks ago -- have an actual, dedicated room for our books and our learning.

I had been sort of vaguely anti-the idea of having a schoolroom, because I'd been not-so-vaguely anti-the idea that homeschooling means the same old school model, translated to your house. To a great degree, I'm still anti-that idea. At the same time . . . well, we have all these books. Our learning, which is to say our life, is arranged around these books. And at last I've come to grips with the reality that, charming though it may be to fill the kitchen cabinets with books, they're not really all that accessible that way. If I can't see them, I won't use them. Ditto the books shelved two-deep in the butler's pantry. Ditto the books which disappear under people's beds.

Strewing, as I've come to realize, doesn't mean books and crap scattered all over your house, where you hope people will stumble on things. When I think of the parts of my own school experience which were good, what comes to mind immediately is the Lower-School library. In those days, the library was a modest thing:  it occupied a balcony in the upstairs hallway, overlooking the big lunchroom below. This was the pre-computer era, when a school library was still a library and not a media center, and smelled of books with plain library-bound covers, yellowed pages, and type you could feel if you ran your fingers over it. To say that I loved this library is an understatement. Mostly school gave me stomachaches, but to go to the library and choose a book was a glorious reprieve from the minefield of the rest of the day. In those years, in that library,  I read everything from Roller Skates to  Cherry Ames to Marguerite Henry horse stories to all the poignant Rumer Godden doll stories, with their requisite lonely and maladjusted little girls:  Fairy Doll, Miss Happiness and Miss Flower. School was an alien place, but the library seemed like home, and it, not the classroom, was where a significant portion of my early education occurred.

So when I realized that our books had outgrown the spaces to which I'd relegated them before, and I began to see that what we really needed was a space for everything together, I didn't think schoolroom so much as I thought library:  a place for books to live, a place to come and find and meet them, a place to read together;  a place where a person could come to graze and find good pasture.

Meanwhile, we had this little room at the back of the house, which we'd been calling the study. It had been home, mostly, to Aelred's books, and in the ordinary way of things, it did double duty as a guest room and a den. As such, it was mostly a pit. The room is really too small for the kind of large, comfortable couches and chairs which make a den a good crashing place, so we didn't sit there much. The kids mostly gravitated there with their toys and projects. We could close the door on on the resultant carnage rather than putting things away, so unless houseguests were coming, the room remained in a perpetual state of unusability.

Which was really too bad, because it's my favorite room in the house, the only room currently which I don't want to repaint. The apple-green walls are pleasant and soothing, summer and winter;  the ventless gas fire is a bit of a monstrosity, but it's cozy on cold mornings. Whenever we cleaned it, it was a nice place to sit and read . . . but it never stayed that way.

Part of my little series of recent epiphanies was the revelation that to be pleasant and usable, this room needed a definite, daily purpose. Meanwhile, there was the question of all these books. Aelred by this time had moved the bulk of his library to his office on campus, and the study shelves looked like a mouthful of missing teeth. Hm, I said to myself. And, Would you mind? I said to Aelred.

So, at the end of a week of exertion both physical and mental, his books had taken up residence on two bookshelves in the kitchen and in a cupboard in the dining room, where he tends to work when he's at home;  and our books were newly at home in the study. A maple drop-leaf table, a legacy from my brother's father-in-law which used to hold our printer, now occupies the middle of the floor, with stools and a chair drawn up to it -- in fact, I'm sitting at this table right now to write this blog post, my coffee at my elbow. When school starts, we'll sit at it to write and do our math together. The down-at-heels futon which our guests sleep on (sorry, guests, we're still not very four-star here) remains a good place to sit and read together. Some friends just passed on to us an old desktop computer, which the younger kids can use for learning DVDs and interactive CD-ROM things;  it and the printer sit on a coffee table and end table which used to float aimlessly about the room as, essentially, clutter instead of useful furniture. The gas fire's oversized mantel holds art supplies, binoculars and a telescope, DVDs and other sundries at one end, while I'm turning the other end into a little altar.

We've had the room set up thus for several weeks now. We read here in the afternoons and at bedtime;  the kids play on the computer or sit at the table to write. Aelred and I have escaped in here with glasses of wine or cups of coffee, because it's quieter, cooler, and more peaceful in here than anywhere else in the house. Best of all, it's stayed tidy because we're all using it to live in, the way we like to live.

But enough blah-blah. Here are some pictures:

A view of the room from the hall door.

I love this window, giving onto the dogwood tree where we can hang bird feeders.

My history shelf. All kneel.

The short-people computer station.

Futon with decorative computer-charger cable, Periodic Table,  and maps.

The Battle of Hastings

Shelves with each child's books for the year, plus resources and supplies.

Good Stuff

Dry-erase crayons. What everyone, everyone, everyone needs.

Owls in the Garden

Last night the teenagers, out to walk the dog in the dark, discovered -- well, all right, not owls on the backyard grass, but an owl, to be visited by which is to be brushed sufficiently by the wingbeats of mystery, don't you think? I didn't see it. They watched it, holding on all the while to a dog who had decided to feel protective and unfriendly, until at last it went away, with the aforementioned wingbeats of mystery. It was huge, the teenagers told me, the size of a toddler, and its wings shadowed the grass as it flew.

I should not share this information with my friend K., who has a small dog and lives in fear that some bird of prey will stoop down someday on her garden and bear Pegotty away into the eternal blue stratosphere. As my dog weighs sixty pounds -- more, probably, since he's taken to climbing into the compost bin to eat the eggshells and coffee grounds -- this is not a worry which keeps me awake at night, and so I am glad to know that an owl visits my yard in the after hours, when no one is abroad but my teenagers and (see dog, above). It's like being visited by . . . well, not an angel, and not a ghost, not something that would walk over your grave, but by the reminder that complex and intelligent lives go on on the periphery of my own, which of course lies on the periphery of theirs. Being visited by an owl, I feel the way Helier did when we read a book about microscopic life in a drop of water. Pages and pages of amoebae and protozoae and euglenae and so on:  he listened stoically enough, but later  he came to me and said, "Imagine. Whole other worlds, all around us."

If the natural world is like this, invested with mystery, all on the plain of the purely material,  then it's hard to see why belief in things like angels, for example, or heaven, is such a stretch. I have a harder time believing that the bus will come on time, or that the rest of the soccer team will show up for practice (today they didn't, but that was because I'd gotten the day wrong), than I do believing that unseen presences walk with us, or that our beloved dead are nearer than we think and knowable to us, as we are knowable to them. Things go on beyond our imagining;  why shouldn't we imagine them, and more?

Meanwhile, like everyone else I'm fed up with summer. After longing for it, after shuffling around my house in layers of clothing and huddling by the open over door in the mornings, for month upon endless month -- geesh, I can't write things like that without breaking a sweat, even with a box fan blowing full in my face. And yet it's not the heat so much as the longing for order that strikes me about this time every year. The fireflies have gone away, and now children running around the yard in the dark strike me not as icons of joy and freedom but as hooligans who need to be jailed for their own good and that of society:  jailed and read to, ten chapters of Swiss Family Robinson every night. Some of their friends went back to school today;  others will go next week;  we are making one last trip of the summer, to take Epiphany to college, then it will be all up for us, too.  There's the winged mystery of the great dark sultry night, and then there's the orderly daylight mystery of what we might do together this year, given enough books and some nice rain outside.

Oh, and this cicada who's been flying into the window behind me for the last two hours? Whenever I'm tempted to feel, for whatever reason, that I've been wasting my life on one small pursuit or another, I do well to contemplate the fact that some creatures wait seventeen years for the privilege of trying to fly through glass before they die.

Rain Steam Bugs

 

 And snow. Because of course that's what I'm thinking about, and not only because it's what's not happening now. The other day, cleaning a closet, Aelred happened upon a set of pictures I took the winter Helier was a baby, when East Anglia was paralyzed, much as the American South is always paralyzed, by a three-inch snowfall:  cars abandoned by the roadsides, buses not running, people exchanging war stories in the checkout line at Sainsbury's while they bought their extra cartons of UHT milk. The day of the actual snowstorm, I had taken Helier across town to see the doctor for some reason or other -- it must have seemed urgent, for me to have trudged out with a baby in a pram while the snow came bucketing down, in the very street pictured above, actually. The next day, after it had stopped, I walked out with the baby again, this time because the beauty of it all seemed kind of urgent, too.

I distinctly recall trying to cross the Seagull Bridge by Trinity Hall, pushing the baby in the stroller, and discovering too late that the bridge was a sheet of ice. We were stuck for a while at the top -- me transfixed by the vision of what would happen if I slipped, fell, and let go of the stroller on the steep downslope of the bridge, Helier either asleep or thinking his inchoate fleece-wrapped thoughts beneath the vinyl weather shield which turned the stroller into a little rolling greenhouse -- until some nice man came along in, I guess, spiked boots or something, and helped us down.

Anyway, here's what I saw on my walk that day. Maybe it'll cool you off. 

Saint Catharine's College

The lane outside our church. I don't think that's the Vicar's bike, but then again, it might have been.

Memento mori in the snow:  the wild garden behind the church.

Punts by the Silver Street Bridge.

Punts with snowman.

Some humble Bible chapel or other, with insignificant human figures.

A view of St. John's, I think.

Not the bridge we got stuck on.

Nor is this one, though possibly it's because I was taking these pictures that I got stuck.

At every turning, something dear to see.

Like this. I'm almost home;  it's right across the Piece, in the middle of that row of gray houses. The wind's behind me, pushing me there.

Not Exactly Your High-Stakes Blogger

Now, if there were high stakes for homeschool planning, beyond the obvious people's-lives-in-my-inept-hands thing, that would be another story.

I've posted booklists here already (and then gone back and thought, "No, that's not what I want to do. Yes, it is. No, it isn't," &c), and have finally set  up a couple of separate planning blogs for the youngers and for Mr. Eighth Grade Wonder. His is more of an interactive deal between us, while the youngers' blog is really just for me to try to keep all my ducks swimming in the right direction. Anyway, if you're interested in our homeschool planning, and who wouldn't be, I've moved most of that to those places to keep from cluttering things up here. Comments are deactivated on both those blogs;  if you want to comment on our plans, feel free to do it here.

Meanwhile, there's also the high-school humanities site.

Not to mention real life, in which children are coming and going and spending the night and packing for college. Re the last, people keep asking me sympathetically how I'm doing, and I think the answer is fine, though the thought of driving back from Texas without her does leave my happiness for her not unmingled with a sort of pit-of-the-stomach regret for the years which have slipped through my hands when I wasn't looking. Then again, though, how would I have held onto them? Could I really have burdened every second of those years with my full and conscious attention? Would I have wanted to? At what point would I have wanted to stop the clock, and how all right would I have been with not living past that point? Like I need more questions to ask myself at three in the morning.

All of that leaves this blog pretty quiet. Oh, well.