Do you know the star chamber is a torture chamber?

My mother asked me this question when she visited last week.  She's a bit horrified that is what we call our basement classroom.

In August 2009, team Hudgins embarked on a quick frenzy to turn the basement laundry area into a classroom.  A place dedicated to books and supplies and all thing Frazer.  Having homeschooled Dell, I had felt distracted having his books strewn all around the house, and I wanted at least the supplies centralized.

Porter oversaw the drywalling and helped build shelves with William.  Some painted using all the remaining buckets of paint from every previous painting project in the 13 preceding years.  I shopped for supplies which I enjoyed like buying a new lunch box had been back in the 70's.

I came home one day to learn that Frazer and Will had dubbed the classroom the star chamber.  Not being a history buff, no immediate meaning came to mind.  Frazer had been watching Harry Potter's Chamber of Secrets and he was the star student.  I did not question anything other than that link.

So, I thought the star chamber fit.  An aptly named classroom.  I perhaps should have been wary when my older boys were amused, but I had seating to figure out and had to labor over the different ways to teach math.

Frazer and I embarked on our journey prepared for a Lewis and Clark adventure but behaving more like a Martin and Lewis caricature.  As any good explorer does, I was there to document and assess the process and progress.  Thus the blog, thestarchamberexperience.

As the first month progressed I became aware my inability to write about everything.  I started feeling as if Frazer was under a microscope; it was harder and harder to find strength in my observation or him.  A weekend away blew up my ability to document and thus I launched into an erratic but more pleasurable experience of blogging.

As the year wore on, friends in the homeschooling community would wow me with their photos on their blogs.  I piddled with a means of treating the blog less like a future diagram to how to teach a dyslexic to read and more like Travels with Charley.  Like Jill Krementz, I leaned heavier on the photos and less concerned about the overarching message.

In the car Frazer and I listened to Jim Weiss read Susan Wise Bauer's Story of the World CD's.  And as we learned about England, I learned that the star chamber had some dicier connotations as better articulated here:  http://harpers.org/archive/2007/04/horton-nyu-speech.  But torture and secrecy were not the reasons Frazer and I hung in the basement.

However, in the spirit of full disclosure, I have felt as if some of the greatest knowledge I have gained or acquired involved a measure of brain sweat equity.  Epithets abound such as "No pain, no gain" and "Feel the burn."  Does learning occur in blissful ignorance or is it in the grappling of what we know and where we want to go that learning is active?  In that zone, is there is a kind of torture in learning?  And, is it usually a secret to everyone --even the learner?  What will be the trigger when learning goes from organic and blissful to a more deliberate and overtly cognitive process?  When each person hits this zone of proximal development (Vygotsky) varies and is not entirely predictable how long a child or adult will struggle in this zone.  http://www.learnnc.org/lp/pages/5075  I kind of knew that active learning was just that-- it demanded participation from the learner.

In some ways our classroom was a star chamber.  A court room doling out punishments.  For me.  I had loved classroom teaching when I taught.  I loved the exchanges, the kids' ideas, the joy, and even the sardonic.  Best of all, I enjoyed the kids riffing ideas with each other.  So, this homeschooling gig of mano-a-mano has been my proximal zone.  I have looked for scaffolding from friends and their kids and even Frazer.  I knew last fall I was truly learning because I struggled so much.  The tutorial classroom that Frazer was thriving in was personally my learning zone -- my star chamber, my torture.

Torture came in the form of shame for not being facile in this intimate setting.  In listening to myself speak instead of him.  Everything I believed about learning and education was being challenged.  Yet I was determined to fulfill my promise to him which was to teach him in the way he learned best.  I was becoming amazingly aware that old school techniques of direct instruction and listening were his strength.  He mucked through the mire everyday as he worked through his ability to decode language and read.  Who was I to be bummed that we were not some experiential learning oasis?

Frazer struggled gallantly and joyfully if not dutifully through so much of his learning on a daily basis.  He was used to being deliberate and purposeful.  He knew he needed just me.  He knew he was in his zone -- in his chamber -- and learning was occurring.

As usual, his mother knew last.

So, I have learned that Houlder and Dell are better natural students of history.  It has been reinforced yet again that William has a wry sense of humor or genius to dub the room the star chamber.  And now the blog has become a repository of musings, photos, health updates.

These health updates are the current craze of challenges we face.  Daunting, exhausting and persisting Houlder suffers mightily, Frazer goes merrily along and Will and I feel racked.  Our life has become a star chamber.  The arbiters of our family's health have hopefully spent some time in a star chamber, struggling to know what they have not known before, and managing to get out alive with compassion in hand.

So "Yes, mother, I know what the star chamber is."