Learning in Increments, Teaching by Habits

I am trying to teach my daughter, my niece and my nephew the basics of Bible geography. This includes a surprising amount of basic geography; I guess paper maps are not as much of a thing anymore as they once were. But they are learning to tell a national boundary from a river from a river that is a national boundary; the symbol for a mountain from the symbol for a city; and that, as my niece announced after a solid two classes of confusion about it, “The dark parts are water and the white parts are land!”

The text we’re using moves a little too quickly for young people whose idea of a “map” is voice commands from Siri. The relationship of a flat map to a globe is not, it seems, intuitive; neither is the relationship between an elevation map and a topographical map—although my niece again was the first to sort it out in her head, and tell us “the places where the lines are closer together are steeper.”

On the whole, my students seem frustrated by the fact that they’re struggling. It’s too much new information, and they can’t absorb it as quickly as it’s being presented. I told them not to worry; we’re only in lesson two. We’ll re-use this information as we continue, and as they see it repeatedly, it will begin to stick. Some of it is already sticking, for the usual idiosyncratic reasons. In lesson one, we discussed Mt. Ararat, and my nephew led us on a lively discussion of Noah’s ark, how long it takes wood to rot away, how long it takes to make a single board without modern tools and the likelihood that prepared wood would have been reused, rather than left intact. When we got to lesson two, he remembered exactly where Mt. Ararat is on the map.

I told them, “Next week, you’ll remember more. Learning is incremental.” And then I had to explain what that meant.

Not only is learning incremental, it’s often unintentional. They say “children learn what they live,” but many of the things we learn through living are so deeply internalized that we don’t recognize what we’ve learned—or what we’ve taught. Occasionally, though, the clouds clear and we get an unexpected glimpse.

I hate clutter. I have records going back before my children were born, of participating in “get rid of X things in a year” challenges, and packing my car (or my full-size SUV) with loads outgoing to the thrift store. Before Marie Kondo, before Hoarders, I watched all ten seasons of Niecy Nash cleaning out other people’s homes on Clean House. Children, of course, are born hoarders, and grandparents are irrepressible enablers; add homeschooling and my own collection of books to the mix, and it’s a recipe for uncontrollable accumulations of Stuff.

When my older daughter left for college and I took a job in a new state, I vowed that things would change. I cleaned out my attic, turning twenty-plus years of paper tax returns and documentation into s’mores in my backyard firepit. I gave away every homeschool book I had not already sold, and tossed used workbooks saved from Kindergarten against the possibility of the Education Police (who never asked for them). I hauled off all of the outgrown clothes I’d saved from my older daughter that my younger daughter is never going to wear. I gave away three truckloads of stuff, and sold another three truckloads of furniture and household items. And, in my ultimate display of Decluttering Good Faith and Mastery, I downsized my book collection by more than half.

(Just so you’ll have an idea how many books that was, the young men who showed up in my new home to move me in declared in desperation at the end of the day that I had “way too many books”).

I had, by then, become so accustomed to my children’s resistance to decluttering that I believed them a lost cause. They were, I feared, well on the road from “too many toys for Christmas” to full-fledged hoarders. Sadly, no amount of encouragement, no carrot, no stick that I could identify persuaded them to significantly cull their own stacks of clothes, books, outgrown toys, and ephemera.

Then, something wonderful happened as we were unpacking books onto bookshelves in our new home.

I was finding more books that I could let go of, and setting them aside in boxes to dispose of later.

My younger daughter, the one who still lives at home, came to me and asked, “Can I have a box to put books in that I don’t want anymore?”

The lesson I had given up on conveying…had somehow been learned anyway.

And all I can think is…I must have taught it with my life. With my habits.

Learning is incremental. Learning is habitual. Your children do see your habits. They may not internalize them all—children are, in the end, their own fierce selves—but, there’s a chance in the end that something will stick.

And since you can’t control what that thing might be—what might stick, like Mt. Ararat, versus what might not, like which one of those dark blotches is the Persian Gulf—be intentional about it. Learning not to hang onto stuff is, I think, a good habit to pass on. Some of my other habits, not so much. But I’m working on changing those. I’m trying to form better habits, just a little bit at a time.