Alana, age 11, working through William James's "On Habit"

This is a good example of how I lead children to work through difficult texts. The habit of working through difficult texts trains them to read challenging texts on their own and develops their mind. A few key steps following our first reading of it together:
1. I begin with a check in on how difficult she perceives it to be. The key Socratic mindset is "Do I know what I know and what I don't know, and thus what I need to know?" (aka a form of metacognition). After years of working with me, she tends to have relatively accurate personal assessments (and much of this is established through trust - she trusts that she can be honest with me about her self assessments).
2. We then begin working through it sentence by sentence. I generally have her assess what makes sense for her and what does not, though I have expectations about what is likely to be more difficult and less.
3. We pause and explore various ideas along the way to get her thinking about relevant issues, such as "What is the difference between an instinct and a habit?" and "Do animals have habits?"
4. She noted that the "education" piece did not initially make sense - I suspected it was because her anchored interpretation was that "education" meant formal schooling. After discussing "training" pets, it became obvious to her as we went more slowly that here "education" could mean something more like training.
5. She doesn't have a strong sense of the meaning of "acts of reason." Rather than explain to her or linger over it, I choose to let her interpretation be rough for the time being. I make a mental note that this is a concept to add to her mental furniture at a later point. I'm trying to keep these short, and we are already pushing towards 20 minutes.
6. I knew "objective manifestations of mind" would be difficult so I help her a bit with this one. Rather than "teach" her didactically, I see my role as helping her to identify elements within her own experience that will make sense of the concept here. We also pause to enjoy the mystery of perceiving each other's minds, which we cannot see directly.
7. Still concerned about the time, I did want to give a very early example of how I think about figuring out antecedents to the pronoun "its." Again, the idea is not to provide a rigorous "lesson," but rather share with her how I as a reader think about these sorts of things.
Thus while the gist of the interaction is getting her to make sense of the text on her own, I step in and help her in with a sense of camaraderie as we work to figure it out together.
8. I check to see at the end if she found it too difficult or not. In my experience in working with children doing this kind of textual analysis (one on one or in the classroom with groups), is that once one has established adequate norms of dialogue and trust that mutual respect is constant, they do enjoy it.
In terms of measurements, I've seen significant gains in SAT verbal scores from doing this regularly in class. Most students don't read at all. If they do read, it is exclusively narrative reading. If they read more analytic texts, they are typically reading grade level prose. But students who learn to read conceptually complex texts like this on a regular basis from middle school onward, typically score well on the SAT verbal. Thus this is SAT verbal practice as warm, engaging conversation.
More importantly, it is an apprenticeship in the world of ideas, in learning how to think, and in learning how to read difficult material thoughtfully at a high level.
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“If I were living anywhere near one of your schools, that’s where I would send my kids, because that is the closest approximation to what I did with Laura, and maybe a much better environment, because there are other kids around. The way that you do education is pretty much the way I did education with Laura, except that you are a pro.”
- Homeschooling father of Laura Deming, matriculated at MIT at 14, left MIT to accept a Thiel Fellowship at 16, and who by 20 was a leading anti-aging VC.
Socratic educator Michael Strong, author of The Habit of Thought, models how to engage your child in a conversation about ideas so that they develop curiosity and the habit of thought.