What Do I Do Monday?

John Holt wrote this book in response to a question he kept getting from teachers: “I understand what you’re saying about changing schools, but what can I do about this in my own classroom? What do I do on Monday?” I’m very happy to let you know that What Do I Do Monday? is now republished by Sentient Publishing. The book garnered good reviews in 1970, such as this from the Washington Post: “Holt … makes literally a thousand suggestions for opening windows to blow air from the outside world into the classroom, making it new and making it human.” But schools were quickly losing interested in such ideas as the sixties faded and John responded to that shift with books about children’s rights, education without compulsory schools, and homeschooling. In Growing Without Schooling John wrote:

Of my own seven books, perhaps the most immediately useful to unschoolers may be What Do I Do Monday? It suggests many specific ways in which children can explore the world (in writing, math, science, etc.), and learn and feel its wholeness and interconnectedness. These were written as classroom projects, but almost all of them could be done by children, or one child, in a family. Even for those who might not want to try any of these projects, the book will show how any interest or activity of a child can be encouraged, and can and will then lead to many other interests and activities.

While rereading this book I was struck by how so many of the ideas John proposes are commonplace in many unschooling/homeschooling/alternative school settings today but rarely in conventional schools. For instance, John quotes a lot from George von Hilsheimer’s book How To Live With Your Special Child in the chapter Troubled Children and Others. John notes, “Von Hilsheimer is a paradoxical man, a mixture of things that many people think can’t be mixed. He is a behaviorist (far more than I am, I think) who is also a humanist. He is a conservative, in the truest and deepest sense of the word, not the nutty way it is used today to describe many people who are in love with cruelty, destruction, and death. He has great faith in people and no illusions about them. But let his words speak for themselves…”

… It is important that teachers be aware that meals with their children are a very important part of the teaching structure. Most bratty kids have only known meals that are unpleasant—chaotic, poorly prepared and served, noisy, the characteristic time for criticism, punishment, and argument. It is important that the adults surrounding the child make the meal relaxed, attractive, and pleasant … that the programs just before and after meals be pleasant, relaxing, and enjoyable. …

… Years of work with disturbing and failing youngsters have convinced us that, far from being unable to cope with abstraction, they are practically incapable of dealing with the world around them and their own internal feelings in a concrete and specific way.

John writes after this quote, “This is a point of great importance, and one of the central ideas in the book. It is also very close to what I mean when I say that people are in trouble if their verbal or symbolic models of reality are badly out of adjustment, out of touch with their nonverbal, non-abstract mental model of reality, the sum of their true hopes, fears, expectations, and feelings.” Here’s John describing children learning abstract concepts in What Do I Do Monday?:

… I have often heard the reply that numbers are abstract and must be taught abstractly. I have heard this used as a criticism of the Cuisenaire rods. People who say this do not understand either numbers or abstractions and abstractness, or the rods. Of course numbers are abstract, but like any and all other abstractions, they are an abstraction of something. People invented them to help them memorize and record certain properties of reality—numbers of animals, boundaries of an annually flooded field, observations of stars, moon, tides, etc. These numbers did not get their properties from people's imaginations, but from the things they were designed to represent. A map of the United States is an abstraction, but it looks the way it does, not because the map maker wanted it that way, but because of the way the United States looks. Of course, map makers can and must make certain choices, just as did the inventors of numbers. They can decide that what they want to show on their maps are contours, or climate, or temperature, or rainfall, or roads, or air routes, or the historical growth of the country. Having decided that, they can decide to color, say, the Louisiana Purchase blue, or red, or yellow—whatever looks nice to them. But once they have decided what they want to map, and how they will represent it, by colors, or lines, or shading, or whatever, reality then dictates what the map will look like. 

So with numbers. The time may come when it is useful to consider numbers and the science of working with them without any reference to what they stand for, just as it might be useful to study the general science of mapping without mapping any one place in particular. But it is illogical, confusing, and absurd to start there with young children. The only way they can become familiar with the idea of maps, symbol systems , abstractions of reality, is to move from known realities to the maps or symbols of them. Indeed, we all work this way. I know how contour maps are made—in that sense understand them; but I cannot do what my brother-in-law, who among other things plans and lays out ski areas, can do. He can look at a contour map and instantly, in his mind's eye, feel the look and shape of the area. The reason he can do this while I can't is that he has walked over dozens of mountains and later looked at and studied and worked on the contour maps of areas where he was walking. No amount of explanations will enable any of us to turn an unfamiliar symbol system into the reality it stands for. We must go the other way first.

I will end by providing one of several pieces John wrote in GWS that references What Do I Do Monday? and some comments from GWS readers who used ideas from it.

John wrote in GWS 15:

Stopwatch 

On the whole, I think the best way for children to get to know numbers is to use numbers, the same way we adults use-them, that is, to measure and compare things, and think about what our measurements tell us. My experience is that if children have tape measures, they are going to want to measure the lengths of things; if they have scales, they will weigh things, and so on. One of the most interesting things to measure and think about is time. In Chap. 15 of What Do I Do Monday? I wrote about a number of things that children might do with a stopwatch. Children who have stopwatches will probably think of others—and when they do, we'd like to hear about them. [PF: Stopwatches are available on many computers and mobile phones today.]

Want to Write Letter-Stories?

Lyn Milum writes (GWS 83):

I recently finished reading John Holt's What Do I Do Monday?, and am inspired to put out an invitation for a Letter-Story project—a round-robin story that homeschoolers could write through the mail. …

Refused the Labels

Later in this article (GWS 26):

… How have the children done since leaving school? Ericka had made up her lost grade by August 1, 1981, and now she is doing Grade 8 work. Paul is reading at 450 words a minute. We've tried your "private papers" method [see "Writing for Ourselves”, What Do I Do Monday? ] and Paul is now a fast thinking/writing person.

More on Free Writing (GWS 22) 

Jackie Beecher (MI) writes: ... 

John Holt mentioned in What Do I Do Monday? a writing exercise in which the student writes for some "period of time without care for spelling or punctuation.” Almost every day, Jess (8) and Leah (10) write for fifteen minutes or so in a Daily Book, which is a real treasure of poems, dreams, drawings, as well as spelling words and other school work. When I first asked them to "free" write, they groaned until I told them it didn't matter what they wrote–it could be the same word over and over if that’s what they wanted. Jess did just that and wrote the word NO, filling a complete page! Then she began playing with the sound and the rhythm of words, and continues to develop this idea. Here are some examples: 

Look how fat the little pig is. 

Look how fat. 

the little pig 

the little pig 

the little pig 

the little pig is. 

yes yes yes 

Oh, no 

don't make him go 

cat dog pig 

bog hog frog 

six one 

me oh my 

I am hot 

I am hot 

Like red hot.

doo da 

doo da 

me oh my 

I am hot red hot 

The Cat 

meyou meyou 

meyou goes the cat 

meyou goes the funny cat 

Oh no here comes a baby 

Oh no here comes one more. 

Oh no here comes one more. 

Yeah for Kitty! 

me you 

me you 

me you 

me you 

me you 

Put it all together and what do 

you get 

me-you 

meyou 

meyou 

... She has also experimented with writing words without spaces between and then circling the various words which are created by the crowding together. Her stories get longer and longer, sometimes running to six pages, though she has totally abandoned, at times, the lines printed on the page. I asked her if she would prefer unlined paper and she replied that wouldn't make any difference ... PS—In response to one parent's query about TV. We got rid of ours the same day we decided to homeschool. It's a great freedom, for we've read to each other and also have all become more creative—drawing, making music, and writing in our "free" time ...