Episode 286: Finding Balance in Our Teaching
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Welcome to A Delightful Education, the podcast that spreads the feast of the Charlotte Mason Method. I'm Emily Kaiser, and I'm here with Liz Cattrall and Nicole Williams. This season, we are focusing on finding balance in every aspect of our application of the Charlotte Mason Method, aiming to find balance in our whole lives because her method covers all of our life, right? Today, we're going to take a look at our Charlotte Mason teaching itself.

And take a look at various areas where we can easily fall out of balance. This might get a little long because there's a lot of these areas that we can fall out of balance. Sometimes we fall out of balance on opposite sides together.

in the same day. But we will try to keep this episode in balance. So the first area I thought we could start talking, because it's kind of foundational to our teaching, is how we develop our Charlotte Mason knowledge. I think one extreme is that we have to only learn from Charlotte Mason's words herself. You may get this impression because of how we talk about her on our podcast. We could have done this to you. But

I think the problem with this is if this is our only, our tunnel vision on Charlotte Mason's own words and what she did, we forget that we're not 19th century British citizens, right? Things have to change. And she would want that. She would not want us to be slavish adherents to every single word she says of how the method gets applied for her and her students because we have a different context, right? Right.

Don't hear us say that we don't think it's important to reach out on Mason for yourself. We absolutely do. And please don't have the impression, maybe you do from our podcast, that that's all we do. We don't. We also chat amongst each other. We bounce things off. But more importantly, we're looking at the children in front of us, right? Which is what her words tell us to do.

On the other side of that, though, is when we don't read Charlotte Mason and we learn everything from our friends or our favorite podcast. This one's hitting a little too close. Or, you know, blogs that we like. People who've read her, but it's like one step removed from reading her. Right. Or social media groups, you know, that proclaim her.

all kinds of crazy things that she would never agree with. Yeah. So you, I feel like sometimes this is more reactionary because you're like, okay, we have this problem or I don't know how to do this thing. And you throw it out there or you do a search and then somebody gives you the response. Or you take a homeschool style test, um,

because you're starting school next month with your first child and it says you're a Charlemaisian and you have one month to figure out a life, right? This whole method. It can be really tempting to take a shortcut like that. Right. Especially when she has six volumes, you know, and when somebody tells you, like, this was my first child,

reaction to this comment. Here is a Charlotte Mason curriculum, but you cannot apply it properly unless you read the volumes. And I am sitting in front of all these children and there are six volumes written in, you know, kind of a older style that I'm not comfortable with because I

I may be diving into this. I mean, this is where I was. I was diving into this kind of an education, but I had no background in reading anything like that. Right. I was totally ill-equipped. And so we see why you may go this side of things. But it does have dangers because.

As with all of us, we are filtering what we read through our particular experience with our particular children. And we are making those adjustments and tweaks that we need to based on a living method because we are working with living born persons. But that might not work in your home. Or I've developed practices. So one common one I hear all of the time is morning basket, which is how some

you know, longtime practitioners of Charlotte Mason's method have made it work in their very large families to have certain lessons that they do all together and they call it morning basket or morning time, things like that. Charlotte Mason never, ever once talks about morning time and we get questions all the time from new teachers

to Charlotte Mason educators and moms who are saying, what is with this morning time? How do I do it? And they're actually putting on something that doesn't make sense in their home or doesn't work with their children that Charlotte Mason never talked about. So that's just an example. I think of another one is poetry tea time.

Charlotte Mason was British. She talks about having tea because that is what they call their evening meal. This is what the children ate instead of staying up really, really late and having supper with the adults who were in dinner attire. That's not a concept that you find in Charlotte Mason. You don't have to couple poetry with tea. So if your kids don't like drinking tea or you have all boys who would just

throw up their hands at drinking out of China teacups. Please, you know, rest assured that you don't have to do that to be a faithful Charlemagne adherent. But it even goes into the subjects too. Yeah. How do you do math? How do you do dictation? Absolutely. So there really is a balance that has to be found here because

Like you said, you can't read the volumes in a vacuum and you also can't rely entirely on other people. You're going to have to find a way to do both. And I think the primary thing is that you've got to start reading the volumes, even if it's just a little bit every day or multiple times a week.

You will get more comfortable with it. And please don't be fooled by the subtitle of home education that says for children up to nine years old and you have students who are older. I see this all the time, too. That is foundational information for all of her method for every student, even if they're older than nine. Right. And it's a little easier to enter their curriculum.

Because she takes time to explain things much more thoroughly. Things that take, you know, I've said before, the nature study portion takes 54 pages for her to walk through in the first one. If you're new to Charlotte Mason, you need that foundation. She takes one page to cover that.

in her 60th education. So you need that. Go ahead and start at the beginning and just start getting comfortable with her. Over the years, you're going to add to this and you're going to know more. And just from my own personal experience, even before the internet was, you know, our common source of information, um,

For many years, I tried to do Charlotte Mason based on what other people told me. And when I started reading her volumes, that's when things got clear for me. And what I really encourage you to do is if a lot, even if a lot of people are saying the same thing, it doesn't mean that it is wrong.

compatible with her ideas. And so just even reading like Nicole is saying a small bit and just keep doing it, you will start to understand her way of thinking and her perspective. And you'll know when people's advice is off. It's kind of like that old thing about counterfeit money, right? You study the real thing and you're going to recognize errors. Yeah, exactly. So as we try, strive to keep balance and

We need to follow Charlotte Mason's own advice that she must have discussed with one of her teachers who gave us this phrase, but to mix the method with our brains. And I think that's... It does. But what she's saying is like we can't just take this philosophy at face value without using our own common sense and our mother's intuition. You know, she starts her first volume talking about how the mother is...

absolutely equipped by the creator to be the first agent of education in their children's life.

While we do try to present accurately what Charlotte Mason did so that you can, we do this so that you can mix it with your brains, with your particular children. And that is why we also share interviews with moms and dads and teachers from all over because they're applying the philosophy differently. So it's really both. And if you're getting too skewed in one direction, you're going to want to come back to the center.

So the second way, I think, and this one is so challenging. This is maybe like where the rubber meets the road or like the greatest pain points in our school morning as we're trying to give this wide education to all of our children is managing multiple students. Yeah, it can be a real temptation to keep everybody. This is where we started school.

Everybody in their own even grade level, their own year, as it's sometimes called. Track. Right. And then like everybody has to be separate, you know, but then you mom are like bouncing back and forth and that's really hard. And the school day gets a lot longer because you are only one person. And if you're having to do...

Everybody's separate work. That is probably more than the time that you have in a day to do that really well. And I think it also just leads us to burn out as moms, right? Right. So we're not using our brains very well. One of the other ways is it doesn't promote family culture. A lot of times when you're keeping everybody separate, they might be studying different time periods in history and everybody is just despair.

Disconnected. Right. The kids can't go play and recreate, you know, whatever that they're learning about in history. Yeah. And I think also another subtle thing that we're doing because we do believe the way we do school is educating them, not just their intellect, but really also their moral character is it can lead to selfish students who think,

I've got all of mom's attention for what I need or I'm just doing my own thing and I don't have to make considerations for my younger or slower to read brother or sister. You know, we just get, oh, I'm just going to do my list and check it off and I'll do that instead of the more natural way of having to be considerate of other people who are living in the same house as us.

On the other hand, we can combine our children so much that we're shortchanging some of them. We might be giving a, you know, doing some book together with four or five different children that is way too advanced for our first grader or way too juvenile for our eighth grader. Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

It really disadvantages children at both ends because our first grader is really not capable of narrating our 10th graders work. Somebody's missing out when we over combine. Yeah. And really like that, probably everybody is when you're shooting for the middle, you're maybe not giving each one what they were doing. The beauty I think of Charlotte Mason's method is she gives strenuous work that

that is age appropriate at every developmental age and giving them enough like, okay, this seems really simple, but it's actually really challenging for our first child to learn or, you know, our youngest child to learn to narrate and, and giving them the time and space to do that even in their lessons, but also not underestimating their intellectual capacity and then really keeping that up so that the older they get, they are taking more ownership of their work and are being given fit.

very meaty, meaty text to deal with because they have been brought up along this. And so when we shoot for the middle, when we try to keep everyone in group lessons, we really are failing to meet any of our children where they are. Right.

So we really need to shoot for a different middle, which is where there are certain things that we combine based on where students should be combined. There are places, there are things that across forms, you know, within a single form or across two forms. Yeah, Charlmason has the note at the end of every single program for form one and two. You know, we have form 1A and 1B and form 2A and 2B. And she says we're in homeschool rooms where there are children in both levels of the form.

them to do the work of one or the other. We are still supposed to challenge the older students to do more than the younger ones, even when they're combined. But another area that we like to combine is in history, between Form 2 and 3. Because even in the Charlotte Mason schools, they had the same books for the most part in those two

like all their separate history streams. So that makes total sense to assign the same books. They can be maybe reading biographies at different levels or the older ones might be doing longer written narrations or something like that. Maybe we have more oral narration thrown in for the younger students, but we're giving them the same material. Mm-hmm.

So there's a place we can do that, but then there are times when we cannot. They need to work in their own form level. Yep, and Charlotte Mason schools had the same time period for the entire school for history, and they were going through those history rotations online.

all together. And so some things that need to be tied to the time period, like art and music and the humanities, literature, those things are natural. So we can be reading a poet to all of our students or we're all enjoying the poetry of Anne Bradstreet or somebody because it fits into our time period and it's not out of balance with one child who's studying the 1900s and another student who's back in the Middle Ages and that sort of thing. Yeah. And

Yeah. And they can all enjoy the same picture, even if they are at different levels and things like that. Absolutely.

I do also think that that is a benefit to looking at how Charlotte and why we still use the word forms and stop talking about individual grades because within a form, there is very much shared work. Yep. I always fall back on the food analogies and, you know, obviously. So did Charlotte Mason. At a meal, you know, we fix one meal for everyone, but the one-year-old in the high tier, um,

is probably most comfortable with applesauce. And you're not going to give that to all the big teenage boys as their only meal. You know, we have to have a balance of things so that kids can take and do what they can do on their own. And this really leads naturally into our next point, which is how much independence versus dependence a student has. When you have a child working remotely,

if everybody's working together, I'm thinking you are literally like just feeding them their education because you're like mom in the center of all these children. And usually when we hear about this, it's mom reading aloud everything, right? Right, right. And that is not allowing a child to do the work of their education. So we have two sides that we fall on this also. And one is pushing independence too early or too much before a child is ready. Maybe we have

multiple kids and we just need this one to be independent. And maybe that's because we're trying to keep them two separate from what they need to be doing. That could be a natural outflow of that. Mm-hmm.

And on the other side, we have, and I think this is far more the temptation of moms who are over combining, is to really not give our students opportunity to grow in independence, which should happen by degrees. It's not overnight that they're able to take that independence. And if we are continuing to read aloud all of their books, Charlotte Mason actually says very specifically, that is not what we are to do. She said, as soon as the child can read at all.

He should read for himself and to himself. This doesn't mean silently in your head. So if you have students who are sharing the same book, they can read aloud to one another or they're working on that skill, which it is a skill. It takes time and practice. But mom, I think a lot of us, when we see the curriculum, oh, everybody's using the same book. The natural default is,

I read it aloud to everyone, but we're actually hindering them in their ability to grow in reading aloud. Right. We don't realize that it's not just about them getting the material that's in the book. Yes, absolutely. It's about them learning to use the book and practicing that skill. And as Charlotte Mason said, making them at home in the world of books.

Right. And they are the learner. So they need to learn how to do their own lessons and not rely on mom to be doing their lessons for them. Yeah. Even if we pass the book around a little, you know. And one of the greatest things that I noticed was that my kids were very well equipped to listen to each other read, even if...

the you know brother wasn't as good of a reader or you know sister stumbled over it didn't matter they still got the material but we think well we're the best reader in the bunch here so we'll just read more efficient yeah or we don't want to miss out i think that's a huge part of it yes yeah

So in my home, what this has looked like, so now I have upper form 2A. So his last year of form 2, so hard to believe, student this year. And how he does most of his book reading independently, because I have four students in lessons. So it started out with once he became a

reader at all, I would have him buddy read with me out loud, you know, and that determines the books we should be using. They should be able to be reading from the books that we're using for their lessons. The next year, his younger brother joined us and he would sometimes read like a paragraph and then I would read the rest of it or we'd alternate depending on how difficult the reading was. And then the next year he had one

one or two books that he read on his own because I was working with younger brother and then he would tell his narrations to me and then last year he was reading almost all of his books by himself because his younger brother was working with his other you know younger sister and

And so he had different books. He was doing them independently because I had three students and he was writing his narrations for those. And then this year, younger brother is joining him in some of his books and they are reading to one another. So it's a gradual thing. Please don't see like they have to read the entire thing. We're helping them gain balance. And I think that's the middle way is reading.

We are always on guard and watchful to see, am I holding them back? How much independence can they take? And that varies from child to child, right? This is us mixing the method with our brains. We have to look at the child in front of us and help them make slow and steady progress and independence. We don't want to get to the end of their education when they're 18 and say, well, now you can take over everything. Yeah. Yeah.

It doesn't go really well. Well, it reminds me of what you're always saying about chores, too. Like, who is the youngest child who could do this thing? Yes. Always, even a child who can't read yet, there is something he can do independently in the morning. Yeah. This is why we say keep those handicraft lessons in the morning, even when you have a bunch of students, because you need your Form 1 kid to do something that doesn't require your attention. I teach the skill at a different time, usually in the afternoons.

and or during term break and then they continue working on it and or maybe I schedule one session a week that I can be more on you know helping them and they continue on working on that same thing even for those 20 minutes because I do need to work with my other students yeah I hope people can see

as you described that process, I hope people can see that this is the work we do to free ourselves up so that we can work with the next younger child. If we don't ever get that older child prepared and moving forward. And you know what, even if they have a learning challenge, because talk about what you had to do. Yeah, like for for my son with severe dyslexia, it

It became even a factor that this independence was necessary for his character, for his feeling of pulling away that he needed to do. So-

If we couldn't find an audio book for him to read when he needed to read independently, I would get up in the morning and read it and record it into my phone for him to read later. Because they need to have that independence from you. They cannot just one day, like you said, just be like, and go. Yeah. How unkind. I mean, thank goodness we're not like birds that just kick them out of the nest.

At one time in a conference talk, I remember used the analogy that we would think it was ridiculous if a mom had a child who had no physical handicap, but was still carrying him around on her hip when he was 16 years old. It was quite the picture, but you get the idea. Right. Yep.

So along with this, I think it's very natural to ask, you know, how and when do we modify for individual kids? If we're looking at each child, are there pitfalls that we can avoid in that area as well? Like the cookie cutter approach? Mm-hmm. Just...

expecting every child to cope with everything the same way the last child did. Yeah, or I think this happens when we're stuck with a specific curriculum that says this is the work of a second grader, you know, or in not realizing like my child doesn't remember anything about math that they learned in their first year. They're definitely not ready for a second year, things like that. Right, right. And I think this is very detrimental to

Because it leads us to compare, right? Because if we have multiple students who are going through that. Your brother can do this book just fine. Exactly. And just what a burden that is on our children. And it does come through, Mom, because we get a little frustrated. Like, why aren't you picking this up or whatever? Or maybe the other end. Maybe the first one was slow and the second one is shocking us because they can get all of it done and we're left going, what else do you need? But yeah, I think that that can be really insidious sometimes.

I see many times at the end of the school year, mom saying, well, we're going to continue math through the summer because this one's behind. And really, if you're always challenging them, if you are appropriately challenging them,

You'll be moving forward at their pace. You're working at that child's pace. So when break time comes, the break time should come. Yes. Yeah. Charlotte Mason was adamant about that. This process is exactly what the public school does. Right. And I think all of us who are home educating or choosing an alternative, which is what you're doing. Absolutely. If you're listening to this podcast and giving your children the Charlotte Mason education, you're

We're doing, we're revolting against that. So let's not fall back into those practices where they're just passing. I mean, we've talked about so many people whose kids were just getting passed along. And this happened to your youngest son, Liz. Oh, yeah. You know, definitely hadn't learned all of the math and just got, was just pushed through so they could move on. So they could graduate. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

And then on the other extreme, there is the family who allow the child to choose always their pace and they just let them go lickety split through things. Or follow completely their interest. My child wants to be a paleontologist. So either according to their, you know, quick aptitude or.

Or just because they're interested in science. So we're going to let them do 10th grade science when they're, you know, 11 and 12.

Yeah. And choosing other areas of study. And letting go while they don't they don't like to read novels. So they're not going to do that. I think this we see this a lot in specialization. Like we get things like they want to be such and such. And they're eight years old. Like I I wanted to be a lot of different things when I was eight that I'm not at all remotely interested in now. I thank God I grew up and didn't pursue those things. Yeah.

But that really limits. And I think, you know, this is where we find balance is when we stick to Charlotte Mason's broad, wide feast of education. We're exposing our children to all different kinds of things. And then we're also looking at each individual student. She always had a note on her programs, especially in math and grammar, but basically what we would call language arts or English language arts, that there must be no gaps. And so we were forced to not keep pushing our kid through if they were not.

or understanding previous material.

I think sometimes this comes from kind of the opposite of what you were just mentioning with this. You know, this is the public school way of doing things, pushing your behind, catch up. This is a grade level. The opposite, I think, is when we take our kids out of school or we decide we're going to homeschool and not to school. We think we have flexibility. We can follow whatever our interests are. There is a time and a place for that, actually. Yeah, Sean Mason talks about it during the term breaks. Yeah. So.

There is a place for that, but there is also a place for us to remember this broad feast is going to give our kids a wide knowledge

knowledge about so many things. And kids who are in college, not even the younger kids, but kids who are in college, statistically, 50% of them change their major. So if we're going to take them from a young age and just start pursuing a path or maybe doing a more of an unschooling approach and just read what you're interested in, we're not giving them that broad foundation that is going to help them with whatever they become.

I always think of that one professor that was interviewed in the Read Aloud Revival episode. We've linked it before. I'll try and dig that out again. But her parents made her go to a liberal arts high school. And she was definitely science-minded and, you know, is a scientist. She's a mathematician now. She did change her major. Yeah, she did change her major. But she got to college and she was just crazy.

feeling totally inadequate because all of her classmates had gone to like stem focused or did all these ap classes and all the stuff and she's like and i had to read so many books and write so many papers in high school and do you know by the end of the semester people were coming to her for help with papers because she was getting the top grades in the class she said that that ap class helped them with two weeks of the class and then after that it was about who

could learn. Yes, and that is what the wide feast does. And it also does meet each kid where they are because Charlotte Mason herself said we don't know what they're going to pick and choose. We have to be content that they're not even getting our comprehension, like our answers. And that's why we don't give comprehension questions because we aren't looking for them to take specific information away. We want them to build relationships with ideas. I just this morning

when I was out on my walk, heard someone say, oh, we have great students in college these days. They just don't know how to read, write, and think. Oh, let it not be so of our children. One other niche area is how much do we do outside the home lessons or outside teachers versus just teaching everything ourselves. Yeah. So we could think that

We need to give our children all the opportunities. This is a major, major pitfall for most American parents homeschooling or not these days, which doesn't allow them time and space to grow and develop and to have thoughts as we were just talking about. Because one thing we've got to remember with this is that

Whenever they're going to do a lesson outside of the home, there's very few opportunities where that's going to be a Charlotte Mason lesson. And even if it is, like it's got to take the rest of your stuff off your schedule. Like when you add something extra in...

It's going to have to pull off something else. And we really need to weigh those. We can also lose touch with our children's learning if they're being taught all kinds of things by all different teachers and we're not taking as active a role as we are. And we can be just training them to always be pursuing more and more and more and more. You know, we were building in that craving for learning.

I got to do more. I got to do better. And we don't even realize that we're trying to give them good opportunities, but yeah. And there's things that like Charlotte Mason wanted them to have music lessons. We may not be equipped to do the art lessons like they should do. We may not be equipped to do math and literature lessons. And we want to take care to take advantage of some of the classes that are available to us. So, and we can feel like in order to pursue a good Charlotte Mason curriculum, we,

we need all of that. Right. Right. Yeah. And on the other extreme, we could never do anything. You know, you could hear us say, don't overload your time. You need your afternoons and evenings free and not have any involvement in anything. And we're not just lacking the, you know, expertise of other people. We're lacking the social and emotional engagement of our children with other people besides their family. And that would be detrimental as well. I mean,

We don't ascribe to the fear that homeschooling will make your kids socially awkward all of the time, but it can happen. And even just getting to know people who do things a little bit differently opens their eyes, gives them empathy and compassion and broadens their horizon for other people. And they're learning how to deal with other people. Yes.

young people do need social interactions besides our very own family's way of doing everything. And they need to learn to be accountable and responsible to other people. So that is definitely a consideration there. So the middle way balance is just wisdom, right? Like to do, take advantage of classes that

are taught by people that we don't have the capacity to teach. Sometimes, though, this can happen with YouTube, right? Like we talked about this with handicrafts. Go to YouTube and learn a handicraft. You don't have to enroll your kid in all the handicraft lessons, you know, so every afternoon they're at art class or whatever. They don't have to be on a heavy schedule of being in a specific choir to learn soulful.

But that's what I do. Soul fall lessons were terrible. But your kids aren't in organized sports. But they aren't in organized sports. Yep. So it's a trade-off. So finding that balance for your family. And really, I found this was not something that was a one and done. This was something we had to reevaluate every year and decide, are we doing too much? Is it too little? What do we need to participate in? Here's our options. Which one should we choose? Which ones can we use?

you know, that must we say no to because it's just too much. Right. And to recognize that you're not robbing your children of potential opportunities if you do not have them in all of the sports, right? What is it like?

Less than a percent go on to or like maybe less than 5% go on to pursue sports in college and less than 1% actually do that for a living. So that is a very different statistical percentage than the number of children who are spending their lives at the ballet studio or the gymnastics gym or on the field.

Okay, so this last one is maybe the most important that we're going to talk about today, and that's our expectations of ourselves as teachers. And this is where I think we tend to not fall off on one side or the other, but we fall off on both sides constantly alternating between them. Which is why we get sometimes feeling pretty dizzy. Yeah, and mom guilt is a real thing. Rollercoaster teaching here. Yeah, I think...

One thing we can fall off on either side is we pre-read everything or pre-read nothing because we feel like we don't have time. And truly, it has to be in the middle, right? We can't pre-read everything, but we should pre-read some stuff, particularly Plutarch. And I prioritize the books that my sons are reading on their own without me at all. And that helps me stay up.

You know, I don't miss out like, you know, just because I'm not reading it aloud. Yeah. Or there's that mix of over planning down to every single second and procrastinating.

part that goes with that is not starting anything because you don't have every single little teeny thing figured out or on the other side you could never plan and everything is haphazard helter-skelter and you're not getting anywhere you're just spinning your wheels yeah and I think Charlotte Mason had the middle way for that she had expectations of us as teachers that we would look over the work of the next day know what we were going to be teaching and

But she wanted us to be fresh and to not stay up late doing that preparation. Yeah, yeah. We've also in a in a later episode mentioned my tendency to be a little bit perfectionist and then do nothing like like I just throw myself into something and then I burn out and then I'm just

done. So I think that's what the these this is why I say all of these points we tend to go from one extreme to another. I read too much last summer. I'm going to read nothing this summer. You know, I plan everything. We're always re-acting. Never planning anything. On extremes. And we want our pendulums to fall back in the middle. Right. Right. And that that idea of perfectionism versus realism and trying to find that middle ground there in ourselves, in our kids, in

That's hard too because I mean I think Charlotte Mason is an idealist and I think we Charlotte Mason adherents are idealists too but that doesn't mean we're out of touch with reality right. It's kind of the blend of both is we have high ideals because we are going this way but we also have very common sense down to earth expectations of how our students are going to encounter the material and know the bad days are going to be almost all of the time you know.

Going to be the norm far more than the exception. So Charlotte Mason, I think, would say to strive for progress, not perfection. Right. And we need to keep on keeping on and just diligently doing our part. And then we rely on the Holy Spirit to supply the life for our students. In conclusion, I think it kind of...

it comes down to the balance in our teaching is really the balance of the atmosphere, the discipline, and the life, the P-U-S motto. Education is an atmosphere, discipline, and life. Charlotte Mason, in her third volume, has a chapter called A Master Thought, and she talks about how if we take a part for the whole and a part of a part for the whole,

for the whole. We are in danger of skewing. It's like a three-legged stool. It can't stand if one of those legs is missing or even shorter than the others. Or if one leg is really, really long, we're going to be falling off that stool. And so our teaching has to rely on a balance of

the atmosphere in our home. We can't be frantic and running all of the time. We can't be so beating ourselves up because we're not doing enough or, you know, we have perfectionistic tendencies. We need to have discipline. We need to have the discipline of the habits of good life, as Charlotte Mason said, and training our children to have those good habits. But it also means we need to have good habits ourselves. And that's the hard part, right? Yeah.

And then life, we need to have an abundant supply of living ideas in our teaching. And those living ideas do seep into us and rejuvenate us and give us the stamina to continue. So I think it can boil down to also continuing to read Charlotte Mason. What is that quote you're always saying, Mom? This is where we started today. Yeah.

You said, or you always refer to this quote about in every school where the teaching was found to be. Well, subpar, that's not the word they use, but below what was expected or where narrations were failing. It was always found that the teacher had not been reading volumes one through three. Mm-hmm. Rereading and reading and rereading. And we want to draw your attention to our season-long sponsor, Living Book Press, which

because they have done an excellent job of reprinting and making Charlotte Mason's original volumes accessible in print or in the wonderful audio format. If you can't find time to sit down and read Charlotte Mason's tomes, volumes, we call them that for a reason, I think, because they're so meaty and they have so much to offer. You might want to take advantage of their audio collection. So...

Those are excellently done. You can choose between paperback or hardcover in the print edition and those lovely audio recordings. Please visit livingbookpress.com slash delectable to receive 10% off your order. Thank you for joining us today on the podcast. We hope our discussion serves to equip and encourage you as we seek to explain the Charlotte Mason Method.

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