[00:00:00] Andrew Pudewa: The blue light that is making the screen so vibrant and colorful and attractive to us is the same spectrum that the sun emits at its zenith in the middle of the day. The problem is that blue light comes to you, and your body says, “Oh, it’s middle of the day, wake up, be active.”

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[00:00:26] Gretchen Roe: Good afternoon, everyone. This is Gretchen Roe for The Demme Learning Show, and it is my very, very special privilege to welcome Andrew Pudewa today to have this conversation about cultivating attentiveness and contemplation. Man, in this fast-paced society in which we live, both of those words are hard to even sometimes wrap our minds around because there’s so much that comes at us. Andrew, how about I let you introduce yourself?

[00:00:52] Andrew: Yes, thanks so much. It’s great to be with you again, Gretchen. We see each other like chips passing in the daylight, but it’s nice to have a chance to just focus and talk, and discuss. Yes, for me, most important, I am a dad of seven grown children. We homeschooled almost all of them for almost all the time. The three youngest, four youngest, all the way through. I have a small business called the Institute for Excellence in Writing.

We provide curriculum for the cultivation of the arts of language, listening, speaking, reading, and writing. We’re probably best known for our English composition video courses used in classical conversations, as well as our Fix It! Grammar. The most important thing about me is I have 18 grandchildren, plus one on the way due in November, and it’s the best thing about being a human being that I can see is grandchildren. I’m happy.

[00:01:52] Gretchen: I have to say, Andrew, every time you talk about your grandchildren, you have a smile on your face that’s just beatific. I know how much you enjoy them. How many of them are there with you in the Midwest?

[00:02:03] Andrew: Yes. One daughter has five, and they are very close by. My son just had his first, and he’s about, I think, nine months old now. Super chunky kid. He weighs as much as a two-year-old. He is massively strong. He got my son’s weightlifter genetics, and they are actually in the same subdivision where we are, right around the corner. Then my daughter, my youngest, she has two: a five-year-old and a one-year-old. The great thing about that is that when we get together, the cousins are starting to develop relationships. Then I have three in Michigan, six in Pennsylvania, and one in California. I don’t get to see them as often, but whenever I get time with any of them, it’s very, very wonderful.

[00:02:53] Gretchen: Absolutely. Now you are also a dad. Before we get into this conversation, you’re also a dad who just had another child graduate from college. Does it get old?

[00:03:04] Andrew: Actually, this child graduated from medical school. She’s actually quite old, much older. She finished college. She taught for a while. She did a couple of other jobs. Then she worked to– I don’t know. She just did a bunch of stuff. Then she finally settled. I definitely want to go into medicine. Then she started on that. I think medical school is the worst form of torture devised since the crucifixion.

I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemies. She survived. We went out there, and now she’s starting a residency at Los Angeles General Hospital. She must be an adrenaline junkie because she’s going into emergency medicine for a residency. Anyway, we’ll see how that goes. It has been very interesting to watch that whole process. Yes, hopefully, I won’t have to go to any more graduations for a while.

[00:04:04] Gretchen: [laughs] When she graduates, whatever path she takes, I’m sure it will be successful because she’s you’re child. That will make a difference.

[00:04:12] Andrew: We will hope so.

[00:04:14] Gretchen: Tell us about the evolution of this talk. You and I talked back in March. You said this was a new talk that you were creating. It sounded fascinating to me. I can’t wait. This is going to be awesome. I don’t even know what questions to ask you. Tell me where we’re going to go with this today.

[00:04:34] Andrew: Yes. It’s very often a conversation goes something like this. I have a fill-in-the-blank year-old, boy or girl, fill-in-the-blank, who just has a really hard time concentrating on fill-in-the-blank, usually schoolwork of some sort. Because the conversation with me, it’s usually about writing or some reading. Most parents want to have some magic thing. They want a magic pill. They want a technique. They want some pedagogy that’s going to fix this.

Now suddenly they have a kid who just loves to concentrate and do reading and writing, and math all day. That, of course, is a very unrealistic fantasy. It’s not even unrealistic expectation. It’s fantastical. I started thinking a lot about– you hear this more and more and more in the modern world. You and I have been around in homeschooling and education long enough to remember 20, maybe even close to 30 years ago. Things have just changed so radically.

I started to think, I believe, I know, I have some experience with certain aspects of how to cultivate attentiveness, how to cultivate contemplation. In a rather reckless manner, I just made up the title, threw it out, and said, “Oh, in six months, I’ll figure out what I’m going to say.” Now I know what I’m going to say, because I’ve done it a few times. What I like to do is start with some physiological fundamentals. You don’t get physiological fundamentals in place. Everything else is going to be hard.

Then we then I said, “Let’s look at some environmental things that are either contributing to or detracting from better attentiveness and concentration and contemplation. Then let’s look at some physical disciplines that contribute to this and then some things that we can work on, both with younger children and older children that will solidify all that into what we–” The end hope is better academic engagement. You can’t really start with the symptom and solve it. You have to look at the core problems, not just the symptoms.

[00:07:22] Gretchen: Now you sing the song of my soul, because that’s where I come from with every talk that I do is let’s get to the root of the issues, and then we can figure out the path forward.

[00:07:34] Andrew: Which is why you and I have been so like-minded and had so much camaraderie over the many years we’ve known each other. How long have we known each other, Gretchen?

[00:07:43] Gretchen: Gosh, maybe 15 years now.

[00:07:46] Andrew: Yes, I think at least.

[00:07:47] Gretchen: Yes. It’s been a while. You keep getting younger, though. That’s not really fair.

[00:07:53] Andrew: Oh, you can still join the looks way too young to actually be a grandmother club.

[00:07:59] Gretchen: Thank you. [crosstalk Today I’ll take that.

[00:07:59] Andrew: join that club because I look like a grandpa. I’m trying to hold out for the looks way too young to actually be a great-grandparent club.

[00:08:08] Gretchen: Okay, someday.

[00:08:09] Andrew: In years, if I can hold out 10 years, maybe.

[00:08:13] Gretchen: I love the fact that you take your health and your mental health and your emotional health so seriously. It comes through in everything that you say and you do. Those of us who are joining us who are not particularly familiar with your brand of experience, I think you’re in for a rare treat today. Tell us, where do we start?

[00:08:35] Andrew: Yes, let’s start with that, because I did have this health revolution in my world. It started around COVID because I didn’t go anywhere for six months, and I had all this extra time to cook for myself. Nutrition got me into wellness. Wellness got me into longevity and exercise. There’s a really interesting podcast called Wellness Mama, Katie Wells. She’s a homeschool mom in Florida, but she’s got a huge following. I heard her on a podcast and I really, really liked what she said. I wanted her to get on my podcast.

I asked her, I said, “Katie, of all that about health and wellness and parenting and raising kids and caring for them in a holistic manner, what would you say is the most important thing to make teaching and learning easier, better at home?” She did not say what I thought she was going to say. She said morning light. I knew a little bit about the power of this, but since then, I’ve explored it much more in depth. She said that getting outside in the morning,even if it’s cloudy, it gives you this influx of light that sets your circadian rhythm for the rest of your 24-hour cycle.

It activates vitamin D production in a way that nothing else will. Vitamin D is actually not a vitamin. It’s a hormone, and it’s a hormone that’s necessary for the production of all sorts of other hormones. It also sets this cortisol release. When you go outside, you get this bright light, and it activates this cortisol release, which is what you want in the morning. You want your cortisol to go up and then sustain and gradually go down, and then decline toward the end of the day when the sun goes down.

The cortisol is what creates that energy, that engagement, when you’re interested in something and you have the energy to fully engage with it. A lot of people, “Oh, cortisol is the stress hormone.” Okay, but that’s when it’s at the wrong time in the wrong way. Cortisol is absolutely necessary, and some people suffer from chronic low cortisol. What do they do? Then they use artificial means like caffeine, sugar, other stimulants to get that same level of engagement.

She said, “Kick your kids outdoors as soon as you can, as soon as they get up in light. Even if it’s cloudy or cold, bundle them up, but get them outside. If it’s nice and warm, get them outside with as few pieces of clothing as possible, which they are particularly happy to do, most of the time barefoot if you can. They can ground a little bit, on the grass or the dirt, even the concrete. If you will, get them out outdoors for about 20 minutes. When they come back in, you will notice a huge improvement.”

I’ve tried this on myself, actually. As soon as I wake up, I try to get outside and do some morning prayers and drink some morning drink. I don’t do coffee first thing in the morning. I actually drink a few other things. Electrolytes would be the first thing. I noticed that I’m just happier in the day, and I just feel more focused, and it’s not always the case, but I think it’s one of the factors that can make a huge difference for kids. Whereas you think about most of us, especially if you live somewhere where it’s dark and cold half the year, you don’t want to go outside.

You don’t think of going outside. You get up, you eat some food, you do whatever, and then start school. Because when you’re homeschooling, you’ve got to start school. Because if you don’t start school, you’ll never do any of it. I think that we might all do much better if we end our kids, if we kicked all of us outside and ran around and got some sun or drink the coffee, or whatever you want to do, or even make the breakfast and take it outside and eat outside.

That would be the number one thing that I think it’s cheap. It’s easy. Some people do live in apartments, it’s a little bit harder, but hopefully there’s some common areas someplace where you can just get out. Remember, you don’t have to be in direct sunlight. Even on a cloudy day, the quality of the light that you get from the sun is way better than the quality of light you get from any inside room in terms of brightness.

[00:13:43] Gretchen: I didn’t realize until you said this, but I have practiced the discipline of going for a walk every morning for years. When I don’t get my walk, I have an attitude [laughs], and it’s not a conscious attitude. It changes how I feel about the day. I don’t care if it’s cold, I don’t care if it’s warm, I’ve been known to go for a walk in the rain. Now, I have three dogs when I’m at home who always accompany me, and they really don’t like the rain, but they get to go anyway. A little bit of that is, a parent can take a note from that and rain or shine. Ethan does this with his kids every day, rain or shine. I think it makes a difference.

[00:14:28] Andrew: Now, on the other end of the light thing, I’ll just mention briefly, you want that lowered cortisol, you want low light at night because then it eases you into sleep better. Now, some kids sleep really well. Other kids have a hard time getting to sleep. Same thing with adults. What I noticed is if I will start turning off lights in my house around sunset and keep very minimal lighting indoors, I am much readier to sleep when I want to. I didn’t always understand this. You’d have all the lights on because you’re doing stuff.

The other thing, of course, we all know is screens. It’s hard. It’s a hard, hard discipline. If you can somehow just stop looking at screens at least an hour before when you want to sleep, preferably too, you will get better sleep. You’ll have more REM sleep. You’ll have more deep sleep. I didn’t quite understand why, but then people start talking about blue light. Blue light. Screens and blue light. Then you wear your blue light-blocking glasses or whatever. Kids generally don’t have blue light blocking glasses and they’ll watch videos or whatever.

Here’s the problem, and I didn’t understand it until recently. The blue light that is making the screen so vibrant and colorful, and attractive to us, is the same spectrum that the sun emits at its zenith in the middle of the day. When the sun rises, it’s filtered through the atmosphere. You get more red and infrared and near red. Then, as it gets at its zenith, it’s the least amount of atmosphere. You’re getting the most amount of full-spectrum light, blue light included. Then at sunset, it’s being filtered again.

Now, the problem is that blue light comes to you, and your body says, “Oh, it’s middle of the day. Wake up, be active.” Here’s a really interesting thing. Every cell of our body has photoreceptors. It’s not just our eyes or skin. It’s like our whole body detects the presence of light frequencies, which is why when you watch a screen, particularly a strong, powerful one or a little one up really close, your body is saying, “Hey, it’s time to wake up. It’s time to be active.”

[00:16:58] Gretchen: It makes sense.

[00:16:59] Andrew: Of course, you’re tired. You’ve expended your energy. You’re ready. Those two things, light in the morning, cortisol up, cut the lights at night, and get some, maybe some amber or some non-whitish light. Just the hour before everyone goes to bed, try and do that. I think that helps a lot. If your kids sleep well, they learn better. If you sleep well, you teach better. [laughs]

[00:17:28] Gretchen: I was going to say that you’re messing with my jam there because my book reading time is before I go to bed.

[00:17:34] Andrew: You can probably read a book with a lesser light or even an amber light. That’s way better than reading whatever you would on a screen. Paper is much, much better for the eyes and winding down. I read at night, and that’s the way I get away from the screens. When with the kids, I always read to them at night. The second thing that would be connected here with fundamentals would just be when you eat various foods and what types of foods.

One of the problems that we all live in is called the SAD, which stands for standard American diet. We have all been brainwashed for years that what we should eat in the morning is cereal, and maybe put some fruit or even some sweetness on the cereal. That, things like waffles and pancakes and pop tarts, if you want to go extreme. These are all pretty high-carb foods. What happens is when we do that, and especially if we accent those grain-based carbs with sugar-based carbs is it does because a big spike in blood sugar.

The problem is then the blood sugar goes down. Now we lack [?] sustain that level of engagement that we had for a short period of time. What do we do? We have to drink some coffee or get more sugar. We got to get more food in the body. A lot of people are on this blood sugar up and down, up and down all day long. Whereas if we will prioritize protein in the morning and eat things like some eggs or some sausages or even into less carby things and more protein, even like avocados, cheeses, things like that, then what happens is we have an increase in blood sugar, but it sustains much longer through the day.

I have noticed that with the grandchildren, if I fix them some eggs and sausage with a little bit of cheese and some avocado for breakfast, they just have a better morning. In fact, I think their whole day is better. If I succumb to their demand for cereal with fruit, the cycle is shorter. I think we would do well to consider that and, of course, try to eliminate any of the artificial stuff because those artificial flavors and colors, we know the research is unequivocal. Those things are not good for the brain function or the metabolism. I’d consider those fundamental light and food.

[00:20:24] Gretchen: It’s interesting that you’d say that. When you and I saw each other in March, I had the joy and privilege, if you want to call it that, of coming home with COVID from that convention.

[00:20:34] Andrew: Oh my, this year?

[00:20:36] Gretchen: This year, yes. It was a very mild case of COVID, but at the outset, I discovered I didn’t like the taste of coffee anymore. I’ve consumed coffee since I was finishing my last year of college at the age of 28. I didn’t develop a fondness for it until then, but it seemed to be an essential bodily fluid in that last year of academics. Cutting out the caffeine, I’m amazed at the return of my energy and my– I don’t have as many– I wasn’t a big coffee drinker; I was one cup a day in the morning, and cutting that out, I have more sustained energy. I don’t have swings during the day, and I do start my day with protein, but I also don’t do that until about 10 in the morning.

[00:21:35] Andrew: Yes. That would be me, too. Children are a little different. They have much higher metabolism, so they generally do need food when they wake up. Some people, unfortunately, will add sugars and flavors to their coffee to make that spike thing much worse. Those are the two things I think just fundamentally will improve attentiveness and concentration.

[00:22:01] Gretchen: It’s interesting that you should say that, Andrew, because what we’re looking for is the key to a lock, but there’s more than one combination to unlock that.

[00:22:12] Andrew: It’s almost like a Houdini suit. There’s a whole bunch of locks and you need to get several of them undone to see the results you want. Moving on, then I would look at environment, and this intersects a little bit with light, but in a different way. That is the difference between being inside and being outside in terms of engaging the senses.

We have five senses. They’re all interconnected in our brain. When we engage senses, we store various interchangeable information, like food. There’s the visual sense of it.

You see what it is. Then there’s the gustatory and olfactory sense of it. There’s even a tactile sense because it feels different in your mouth or your fingers or whatever. When we are outside, we are gaining a much greater level of sensory stimulation because the temperature varies more greatly. The things that we see and hear are more varied and complex. A good way to think about this would be to consider, let’s say you’re outside in a park or maybe in a foresty area or maybe at the beach or even the desert.

Everything you see is different. Even one tree, you could look at one tree, and what you would notice is that all the leaves, although they have the same structure. A poplar leaf is a poplar leaf, and it isn’t anything but a poplar leaf because it has the structure of a poplar leaf. Every one of the billions or trillions or gazillions of poplar leaves that have ever existed are different. The nature of natural creation is infinite complexity with perfect order with perfect structure. That’s the way God created the universe was structure and order and infinite complexity and variety.

When you are in nature, you are absorbing both the structure of natural creation through your senses as well as the variety, and then the multi-sensory stimulation aspect of that. Whereas when you’re in a room, inside, you don’t have that same thing. The temperature is more controlled. The conditions are much more controlled. You’re sitting on couches or chairs or floors rather than bumpy logs or rocks or walking on gravel. You are seeing things that are more manmade, and so they’re repetitive and don’t have that same level of variety.

Now, what we like to do is we like to bring nature into our environment. We like to create more variety. You’ve got a plant right behind you there. I don’t because every time I put a plant in this room, it dies. My home, where my wife is in charge, there’s just plants all over the place. We put beautiful pictures that try to imitate nature to some degree because we love the complexity. Now, when a child spends time outside, they’re actually stimulating the senses in a much more profound and dynamic way than when they’re inside.

That stimulation of the senses promotes a contemplation of the world around them. If you look at younger children, sometimes even older children, they love to collect things. I’m sure you’ve noticed this. They will collect up and then they’ll organize their collection in some way. They’re contemplating what’s the relationship between all these things that are very similar but different. When I was a child, I spent a lot of time on a boat over at Catalina Island off the coast of Los Angeles, and I would dive down and collect sand dollars.

These are dead sea creatures that make a white circle. I had just the most amazing sand dollar collection from the tiniest little one that I could find and see to the biggest one I could find. I kept them all organized, and I would pull them out a. Then I’d go get another one and figure out where that would go. Then I’d get a slightly more perfect one and get rid of a chipped one. I worked on this for years, this sand dollar collection. That was a natural inclination for me at 9, 10, 11, 12 years old.

I watched a seven-year-old granddaughter the other day dive down, grab handfuls of gravel, put them on the edge, sort them, pull out the pretty ones, throw the rest back in, go get more gravel, sort them, pull out the pretty ones, throw the rest back in. She did this for an hour. She was just finding the prettiest of the rocks that made up the gravel in the bottom of this pool. I just watched, and I thought, “This is so engaging for her. What is it?”

It’s that natural tendency that we have, that actually it’s a skill that we want to have when we think about an analysis and comparison, and some of those higher-order thinking skills that we might call critical thinking to some degree. What are we having to do is attend and compare and divide, and categorize. I had a daughter who went to a classical liberal arts college, Thomas Aquinas College. Maybe some of our listeners know this school. It’s a very different school in many ways.

One of the things I found so interesting, all of the freshmen, the whole school, they do the same course of study. All the freshmen had to take a course called natural philosophy. One of the things they made them all do at the beginning of the school year, and these are 19-year-olds, right, 18 and 19-year-olds, is go out and collect insects and then organize these insects in any way they wanted to so they could organize them by size or they could do a little research or they could organize them by color. They had to organize.

That was a project that they all had to do was pin these collected up dead insects and then explain how they chose to organize them. I thought, that’s really odd. If you were a teacher at blah, blah, blah, you, and you had your 19-year-olds go collect insects 12-year-olds want to do. They understood. That’s creating an attentiveness to detail that nature naturally and intrinsically provides for children. I think all of our children need a lot more time outside.

[00:29:12] Gretchen: It’s funny that you should say that about the insects, because my husband majored in biology, minored in entomology. My friends in our homeschooling years would come over to the house and say, “You need to get so-and-so out of the freezer. I’m not opening your freezer,” because they had no idea what was going to fall out because all of my kids were completely fascinated by all sorts of bugs and insects. They were all in states of baggies and stuff like that in our freezer for years and years.

Now it’s just bees and jars when we’re trying to determine. We had a virus go through our bee yard this spring, and so we were trying to determine its origins. Half a dozen jars up on the counter with different bees in various states of development, trying to figure out the origin of the virus.I can see that as– it doesn’t occur to me as a discipline, but it is a discipline because it’s a fascination. Does one get the other or the other way around?

[00:30:14] Andrew: Probably-

[00:30:16] Gretchen: A little bit of both.

[00:30:16] Andrew: -cultivating both. Now we might also say that inside is where people are most likely to be using screens. If children are using screens, they’re most likely doing some schoolwork, and I’m not opposed; we sell video curriculum, you do too. One thing to note about a screen is that it eliminates three of the five senses, because you’re only seeing and hearing, and it also eliminates dimensional sense. It’s a limited form of seeing and hearing, which is antithetical to the full development of the senses. I think there’s a very good reason, just from that perspective, to want to limit the amount of time that children are using screens, and that limit should be stricter the younger they are.

[00:31:11] Gretchen: I just finished reading Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation about a month ago. My goodness, if that doesn’t wake you up, I don’t know what would.

[00:31:20] Andrew: Phenomenally important book. Unfortunately, even in the homeschool world, there’s more and more being pushed through crean, screen-based; learn to write screen-based; learn math, screen-based; learn phonics, screen-based; science class. Like I said, I’m not fully opposed to that. For young children, that’s going to be highly– It’s highly hyper-stimulating to the visual sense, especially if it’s got cartoony stuff that would qualify as edutainment. Of course, we know, I think you’ve dug into some of this as well, all of the research shows you learn to read better, you learn to write better, and you learn math better if you do it on paper.

[00:32:15] Gretchen: Yes. There’s another thing related to screens, and something that I have been exploring for several years, and that is the younger you put a child on a screen, the more overdeveloped their central detail vision becomes, and the less developed their peripheral vision is, and you need both to be able to read successfully, and this is why we’re seeing an increase in kids who have reading challenges.

[00:32:38] Andrew: Absolutely. I think technology is hugely connected with all the things, whether it’s the ADD, whether it’s the– Even attention deficit issues that are interfering with concentration, probably even some visual issues bordering on the dyslexic, because what is dyslexic mean except not reading good. That’s why, I think, you want to keep young children, and you can define that however you wish, but I look at up through 10, 11, 12, you just want to keep them as minimal amount of time looking at screens as possible and then regulate it very well and spend more time doing real things with your hands, with your whole body.

[00:33:28] Gretchen: Real things with another human. Because what I often say to parents is computers are a tool. They’re not a teacher.

[00:33:36] Andrew: Yes. Of course, now we’ve got this whole in the schools, which seems profoundly dangerous to me, this belief that somehow AI through screens is going to teach children to read and do math better than the humans have been doing. I don’t know if the humans in schools haven’t been doing all that great, and I don’t blame the humans, I blame the institutions. I think that the danger here is really profound. Fortunately, there is a reaction against it. People are saying, “Yes, maybe what we need to do is cultivate distinctly human activities.”

[00:34:16] Gretchen: You said something that reminded me of something I read 20 years ago. Now I’m going to have to find this attribution again. The difference between being inside in a classroom and being outside in a classroom. There was an article that I read talking about how– I don’t remember how it defined it, but it talked about, for instance, you hang a beautiful painting on the wall because you love it. Then you become blind to that painting because it’s always in the same place and you don’t see it with new eyes until somebody comes in and says, “Oh, well, that’s a beautiful painting.” Then you see it again for a period of time, but in nature, it’s never the same.

[00:35:00] Andrew: It’s always changing. I had a little story that I tell in my talk on nature deficit disorder, I think, is really, really telling here. I’m going to share this. I think a lot of people will relate. I was in my home office working away, working away, and I needed to go somewhere. I was going to go take a shower, get dressed, and then go somewhere. I walked through the living room, and we had these big windows that went almost to the floor, and you could see into the backyard, and there are a lot of trees and grass, and all that.

My 10-year-old daughter was sitting in front of this window, just looking out the window into the backyard. I walked through the room, this is about 10:30 in the morning, and my thought was it’s 10:30 in the morning, and she is doing nothing. If you are homeschooling and you have a 10-year-old who is doing nothing at 10:30 in the morning well that’s a problem it needs to be fixed. I made a mental note to find her mother, “Where is my wife? Where are the other kids? Why is this happening?” Anyway, I go in, take a shower, I get dressed, I come out, maybe I don’t know 10-15 minutes later, she’s still sitting there, staring out the window, doing nothing.

I think I’ll find out. I came over and I said, “Hey. What’s she doing?” in my nicest dad voice. She looked up at me and said, “Things are just connecting up in my brain.” I remember at that moment thinking, “Who am I to interfere with things connecting up in her brain?” I’ve heard many stories of parents say their kids look all spaced out. What’s happening is they’re thinking through things. In fact, one of my daughters told me recently that her– I think he’s 7 now, 7 maybe 8, he was lying on the couch for a long time. Then he finally stood up and went over to tell his mother, a sphere is the same big high as it is wide. If lying on the couch-

[00:37:30] Gretchen: That’s a very connected thinking.

[00:37:32] Andrew: -thinking about three-dimensional, geometric figures and shapes, isn’t that infinitely better than staring at a book and some formulas or something? I think a lot of people have, they understand that children need the environment that nature provides for contemplation. We’re just so worried that somehow that’s going to take too much time away from all the stuff we really need to do so we can get through the math book or the writing program by the end of the year. Part of it, I think, is just relax a little bit and breathe, and let kids be kids. Guess what, they will grow cognitively, and I think they’re developing some of those skills and aptitudes, and attentiveness and engagement, that when they are older is going to transfer for in. Now, can we move on because I got another category here? I think it’s very important.

[00:38:33] Gretchen: Sure.

[00:38:35] Andrew: That is the nature of repetition. You got grandkids, so you’ve probably noticed this. A lot of our listeners have children. Young children are very happy to let you read them the same book again and again and again. I think when my kids were young, I didn’t really think about this so much, but one of the great things about grandchildren is you can observe them with a modicum of wisdom and experience in a way you couldn’t when it was the first role. Also, when they get irritating, you can just send them back to their mother, so there’s no stress involved in grandchildren.

I noticed this, you can read a story and then they’ll bring you another book or something, and you read that. Then they’ll pick up this book and say, “Read this,” and “I just read that to you 10 minutes ago.” “I know, read it again.” “You just heard it.” “Yes, but read it again,” and then you read it again. What’s going on here? I’ve been so curious and I’ve finally, I think, identified some really important things. First of all, from a language development point of view, when they first hear the book, they don’t know what it is.

They are getting words, the words are being translated into images in their mind, but they don’t understand every word or every idiom or everything. They have a fuzzy image, but that is helped by the illustrations in the book. They see an illustration in the book, and they will compare the illustration with what they think is going on. If it matches, then they know, “Okay, my mental imagery is in the ballpark of right.”

If it’s different, then they’ll try to figure out, “Okay, is that happening after this or before this, or do I need to change part of what I’m imagining?” They don’t do this consciously, of course, entirely subconsciously. The illustrations help them check and improve their comprehension of the language. Every time you read through that book, they understand it a little bit better. Then the next time, a little bit more. That word that was fuzzy now has clearer meaning, and that idiom is now firmly there. Their actual understanding of what they’re hearing improves with repetition.

That’s one thing that’s happening. Now, why is that so valuable? Because they enjoy understanding things. In fact, a kid’s whole goal in life is to understand everything, to grow up and know everything like you do. That’s one reason they appreciate it. Now, the other funny thing is they know what’s going to happen. They’ve heard the book maybe several times. They know the end. One of my favorite examples is The Story of Ping. Do you know The Story of Ping?

[00:41:40] Gretchen: Yes.

[00:41:41] Andrew: Every parent has read this a thousand times. It’s a real classic. They know that Ping is going to find his way back just in time to get in line and be the last one in the boat and get his little spank on the back and suffer that, and it’s okay. He’s going to get back with all of his aunts and uncles and cousins and infinite number of relatives on the boat. They know it’s going to happen. When it does happen, there’s a fulfillment of expectation. That fulfillment of expectation creates both the attentiveness to it and the little spark of joy when you know what’s going to happen happens.

We see this in adults who watch superhero movies. You go to a superhero movie. The plot is extraordinarily predictable. A romantic comedy. You know what’s going to happen in the end. When it does happen, there’s that little spark of happiness, that joy. Yes, what was supposed to happen happened. We’re all experiencing this. Now, carry this into older kids. You get a little bit older, and then your attitude starts to shift. Like, “I know that book. I read that book. Now I want a different book.” A good book you could read again and again and again.

I know kids who’ve read through all the Narnia books and then just went through all the Narnia books again, maybe two, three, four times, or Lord of the Rings. I know kids who just live in Narnia or Middle Earth for a year or two years. You try to make them read other stuff, and they’ll do it to be obedient and make you happy, but they want to go back. They want to go back. Why? That same phenomenon is happening. The better understanding and the little spark of joy. I had this experience with Anna Karenina. I’d never read it. I read it a few years ago. I think it’s the best novel I’ve ever read. I think it is–

[00:43:46] Gretchen: I love that book.

[00:43:47] Andrew: I think it’s the best to me. Some people don’t like it, because her story is depressing, but the real book isn’t about her. It’s about Levin and Kitty and how he seeks the good life and wins her heart and all that. What’s interesting, when I finished the book, my instant desire was to go back and start it again. I wanted to go back and I read the first few chapters and I loved it so much because now I knew the basic everything. Now I could attend to the details.

[00:44:19] Gretchen: Details, yes.

[00:44:21] Andrew: Then I could think, knowing things about the characters, I could look into those characters and appreciate them more. I think that we undervalue repetition in every way. We undervalue it in math fact mastery. We undervalue it in our grammar and composition. We way undervalue it in literature. We way undervalue it in so many ways. We see this in music. When you get kids to listen to a beautiful piece of music and then you play that same piece of music for them two or three times a day for a week, and they get a repetition of 15, 20 times, now they start to memorize it. They start to own it. They hear it in a different way than the first few times that they heard it or owned it. Then there’s greater attentiveness because of the expectation, and there’s greater joy in the fulfillment of expectation.

[00:45:24] Gretchen: When you were talking about why a little child wants to read a book multiple times, the other thing that’s happening for them neurologically is we are laying down myelinization pathways, and they are developing in their brain. As children emerge as readers, we get so excited as parents. We’re like, “Oh, read this, read this, read this.” That being able to read until you read fluently and with inflection and with consistency, we lack the knowledge to understand how important that really is. I just love the fact that you’re saying this because it really makes a huge difference. I’m always so surprised when I say this to parents in front of a conference room or at a talk, and they look at me like, “Really? I just thought my two-year-old was trying to drive me nuts by reading Peppa Pig a thousand times.”

[00:46:23] Andrew: I do think, too, that there’s a certain comfortability that kids need before we add complexity. This is what we call at IEW, we call it the EZ+1 method. Here’s your little checklist, and you do that until it’s easy. Then, and only then, do you add in the next complexity. Then you do that until that’s easy, et cetera. So many people, especially new to homeschooling, they’re in this idea that, “Okay, there’s an nth grade book and an nth grade curriculum, and we have to get through this nth grade thing in nine months or else we’re going to be behind and that’s really bad. Then we take three months and forget everything. Then we have the next nth grade thing, and we have to go through this at this speed.”

I am always saying, no, any textbook is only as good as you are, because you have to be in charge of that thing. Don’t let it dictate the schedule to you. You control it. I’ve talked with Steve Demme a lot about this idea. This is why I love the Math-U-See approach, like no numbers, no nth grade. It’s Greek letters, and nobody even knows which one comes after the other one. There’s this nice idea that you camp out where you need to until there’s that mastery. Then you add in complexity, mastery, add in complexity, and then you have success.

Andrew Kern said to me once, he said, “Nobody hates math. It’s not possible to hate math because math is intrinsically beautiful. If you hate it, what you hate is not being able to do it.” That’s what you hate.

[00:48:12] Gretchen: [laughs] I really love that. That is really true.

[00:48:15] Andrew: You can steal it, but give credit to Andrew Kern because that’s where I heard it. I think so often we’re afraid to camp out and let the repetition build the mastery because somebody put in our brain that because we have an 11-year-old who has to get through a 6th-grade book by the end of the year, that we don’t have the time to do that. There’s a saying in Latin, multum non multa. Much, not more. More is less, we would say in English. Beware the man of one book, because– that’s an ancient proverb, too. If you know one book really well, you’ve extracted more wisdom from that one book than you would if you had just read a bunch of books and forgot almost all of it.

That idea of being willing to go deeper, and that’s where you get the engagement too, is at that point of proximal challenge. If you have a kid who just doesn’t want to do something, it’s usually because they’re overwhelmed with the complexity. Then you got to go back to, “Well, where’s the level of proximal challenge for this child?” Where’s that point where they can do almost all of it, and there’s that one little thing that is challenging them, then that’s engaging. If there’s too many things they don’t understand or can’t do, and that’s the same thing with writing. Nobody would hate writing. What you hate is being overwhelmed by the complexity of the process. That’s what we’re–

[00:49:57] Gretchen: Absolutely. For years– I think the very first time I heard you speak, I heard you say that. For years, I have had this idea that kids don’t like to write because we make them park their fannies in a chair and we ask them to do so much at one time. If I could find an equivalency for you as an adult, you wouldn’t like it either.

[00:50:24] Andrew: You would leave. You would just walk out of the room and not suffer that. I know we’re coming into the end, but I would like to mention one more thing, if you don’t mind.

[00:50:35] Gretchen: Oh, no. This is wonderful. I’m having more fun than anybody else here, so this is just amazing.

[00:50:42] Andrew: Again, this isn’t– People want a magic pedagogy or a magic pill, but this is something I’ve really been noticing and thinking a lot about, and that is– I think this came to me in a stronger way when I noticed the correlation between physical well-being and mental and intellectual. I won’t say mental because people think mental health, blah, blah, intellectual well-being, and that is the relationship between control. If you can control your body better, you will see an immediate improvement in your control of your mind.

This is why I believe that there are a few things that parents can do with children that will have a huge crossover benefit to them intellectually and cognitively, and probably even emotionally, and that would be disciplines that encourage self-control physically. Top of the list, absolute top of the list, for me, is playing a musical instrument because when you think about what your brain and your heart and your brain all have to do together to learn a piece on the piano and play it or learn a piece on the– or even playing a recorder.

It doesn’t have to be a complicated instrument, but you have rhythmic control. You have pitch control. You have distraction control. You have holding your body in one place doing something, control. You have fine motor control. You have the absolute best possible opportunity to discipline your body for the purpose of producing beauty. I think that if you had a young child, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, maybe even 10 years old, the single most important thing you could possibly do way beyond learning to read and write and do math would be playing a musical instrument because that’s going to do things for your body and your heart and your brain that nothing else will do as a foundation.

I view the fact that I got to start playing the violin at 5 years old and grow up and play violin for 10 years of my childhood as the single most formative thing in my entire life. That would be top of the list. Then, number two, and I’ll just shoot this out and you can comment, is martial arts. Martial arts, what do you have to do if you want to go Taekwondo, Karate, Aikido, even things like archery or riflery, you have to exercise extraordinary control over your body, your eyes, your head, your fingers, all the muscles to hold your body in that position.

I started doing Karate middle school, so probably 12 years old. It was a life changer for me because I had to sit there and totally control my body. I remember my teacher, he was tough. If you even yawned during the demonstration part of the class, 20 knuckle pushups on a hardwood floor. I was highly motivated to sit still, to not yawn, to lock on. Then when I would get up to practice, you’re just using your brain to control your body in these very precise ways. We can say, by extension, dance, like formal dance, or gymnastics. These are all better. Dance, gymnastics, martial arts is the best in my view. These are way better than team sports.

One reason, because you are doing exactly the same motion in exactly the same way again and again and again. You mentioned earlier, you’re getting this myelinization of the neural connections, but the self-control that this promotes. I have a granddaughter who’s extremely good at archery. She took second place in the bullseye competition in her age group for the whole state of Pennsylvania. I asked her mom, I said, “How’s this, is this been good for her in other ways?” She said, “Oh, it’s been phenomenal because it’s given her focus.” She has learned to focus, and she was a very easily distractible, probably still is by neurology, by genetics, or nature. This control that archery creates is hugely cross-applicable to everything else in life.

[00:55:40] Gretchen: You taught me something here that has never occurred to me. My second oldest child is– he’ll be 36 in October. He was that child who, from the age of five, said, “I want to learn to play the piano.” He was also extremely ADD, no H there, but it was like trying to educate Mr. Magoo because he was always lost in a book, and he wasn’t– Trying to get him to attend to the here and now was very interesting. I’ll just leave it like that. He also had an extraordinary desire to learn to play the piano. By the age of 17 had participated in enough competitions to earn his master musician’s piano certification.

I’m recognizing in what you’re saying today, educating him would have been far more difficult if he hadn’t had the discipline of music to bring alongside his academics. He’s brilliant. He would have been distracted far more had he not had that discipline of music.

[00:56:50] Andrew: Yes. I’ll throw in one more comment. I was at a Searcy conference, and there was a Q&A after, and they’re talking about purity. Which is a super, super hard thing in today’s world. Harder probably than ever before in history. The speaker, Heidi, she said the best curriculum for purity is playing the piano. Then unpack that a little bit. When you think about it, music has its physical control component. It has its daily discipline control component, and it has an emotional nourishing effect. When you’re doing music, I don’t think piano is magical more than cello or something else. When you engage in music with other people, you are having an emotional relationship that’s deeply satisfying.

When kids get to sing or play with other people, it meets a need, an emotional need that I don’t think other things can meet very easily. I don’t think team sports does it. I don’t think– I suppose maybe something like robotics or speech and debate. That’s still mechanical and intellectual in many ways, whereas making music, harmonizing, literally harmonizing with other people meets a deep need. I’m still thinking about her comment, like in what other ways could that be unpacked? Just one last thought for anybody–

[00:58:37] Gretchen: I hate the fact that you’re saying that’s one last thought, because this hour has flown by. When you told me you were developing this talk, I thought, “This is going to be really interesting.” This did not go any way in the direction I anticipated it would, but it was profound. I think you have given parents some insight into seeing the world through the eyes of their children and recognizing that the things that have been valued generationally maybe are somehow being lost in our ever-increasing zeal for technology.

[00:59:17] Andrew: Yes. There’s other directions we could go. One would be responsibilities and chores as being the number one predictor of success in adulthood, and why that’s key. We could talk about certain techniques for things like math and reading. I think with the foundation we’ve got, that’s a good place for people to begin. Maybe it’s a conversation we continue someday in the future.

[00:59:45] Gretchen: That would be lovely. I’m also mindful of the conversation I had a couple three weeks ago with Lenore Skenazy of LetGrow.org, and she was talking about in our cultural zeal to protect our children, we are creating an environment where they are more anxious instead of allowing them to explore and engage in risky play and have a degree of independence. That conversation was fantastic as well. I think, if I remember correctly, you asked me to share that conversation with you after I had it, so I will email that to you, and I’ll definitely include that in the show notes for our participants.

[01:00:28] Andrew: I don’t know if it’s Jonathan Haidt who said it, but I’ve heard a few different people echo, today’s world, we way overprotect our children when they’re outdoors, and we way underprotect them on screens.

[01:00:44] Gretchen: That is, Jonathan did indeed say that, and boy, we need to write that down. [crosstalk]

[01:00:50] Andrew: No matter how good we’re trying to be, we need to keep that in mind, because that’s the mentality that we’re all pretty much a victim to right now.

[01:00:58] Gretchen: It is. Thank you so much, my friend, for this hour. I have enjoyed it most thoroughly, and I will look forward to seeing you again soon. To our audience, thank you so much for trusting us to come into your living rooms this afternoon. We appreciate you more than you know, and we’ll look forward to your joining us again soon. Take care, everyone. Have a wonderful afternoon.

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