Light and Momentary

Hymns of Geese

I wanted to write one more post about our homeschooling year, because the last time I described our day-to-day approach we were using a fairly strict schedule with the morning divided into predictable 15-minute chunks.  This strategy lets you cover the bases, and makes it easier, I think, to work with strong-willed kids.  If my expectations are encapsulated in the day's routine, if I don't even have to state them because everybody knows that at 10:00 we talk about history (M/W) or science (T/Th), then we argue about them less often. 

But maintaining such a schedule in a home with four kids requires significant discipline and sometimes limits learning.  In general, I find that fifteen-minute chunks work well with my kids' attention spans.  Sometimes when my oldest son was younger, we would spend a long stretch of time learning about a particular subject that caught his fancy on a particular day.  And then...he'd be done for the day.  I'd think, What about math? history?

This is a point of disagreement between unschoolers and school-at-homers.  Unschoolers would say that an hour spent delightedly immersed in understanding a new facet of botany or geometry or what have you is far more valuable than an hour spent in parent-directed drill.  I see their point.  I also worry about gaps in my kids' education, and about the tendency, a struggle for most of us since the Fall, to avoid what's difficult even when it's necessary.

So we compromised.  From August until November, and from January until April, we used a schedule pretty faithfully.  During Advent and Easter, we were a lot more flexible.  I wrote about our Advent routine at the time, but I also wanted to write a bit about what we did, and why we did it, during the last part of the school year.

At Easter, Pete started walking well.  Gone were the days when he would sit peaceably in the sling, listening as I read aloud to his brothers.  There were new realms to conquer, Legos to eat, injuries to sustain.  Part of the change in our daily schedule was practical:  homeschooling requires parents to accommodate the needs of younger children, which I have always found most intense during the first half of the second year.

So we spent our mornings around the house, puttering until Pete exhausted himself hunting down hapless dust bunnies and eating them whole.  Around 10:30, when he took his morning nap, we all piled on the couch to read a chapter from an E. Nesbit book.  Her books took us in surprising directions:  why are the days so long in England in July?  We'd pull the laminated world map out from its spot behind a low bookshelf and all kneel around it, tracing latitude lines from London across the Atlantic to Canada.  We talked about magnetic north and true north and why you wouldn't need a coat at Christmastime in Canberra.  Of course we talked about the books themselves, which are wonderful -- rich and engaging and funny, moral but not in the least preachy.

At the beginning of the year I had laid out my goals for the boys, and in the month of May we concentrated on some unfinished items.  They worked together on US geography; my oldest son worked independently on composition, cursive writing (still wobbly), and the 6/7/8 multiplication tables.  (After our conversation on non-Euclidean geometry, my husband pulled The Riemann Hypothesis off the shelf for me.  It's much better than I expected it to be.  One of the early chapters says mathematicians are frequently sloppy at arithmetic, so perhaps Alex's lingering hesitation about whether six sevens is really 42 augurs well for his future as an abstract thinker.  But I feel an obligation to send him to fourth grade with his times tables down pat.)

This approach to homeschooling produces less tangible fruit than the other.  There are no written records of science experiments, but there is a slow accretion of information about the plumage and the habits of the birds at our feeders.  There are few directed writing assignments, but there are homemade cards and signs (my favorite sign ever was the one posted on the bathroom door:  Stop.  Pay toll.  $50 to enter) and letters to the neighborhood puppy.  (Dear Hannah, one said, We are going to bring you some sticks!)

Whenever I think about what I hope to accomplish in these slower-paced days, a Carrie Newcomer song comes to mind.  Hymns of geese fly overhead, she sings, and I think about the heavens telling the glory of God.  ...And spread their wings like their parents did, she goes on, and I think about how I hope to teach my children to make the most of the gifts they have been given, to be eager for fledging and flight.

It is a song about the sacredness of the mundane and it reminds me to make of my ordinary tasks an offering:  to chop the onion and correct the spelling and clean the shower and channel the toddler into a safer path (again) all for the love of God.  "Redemption everywhere I look" -- that's my favorite line, and it sums up my hope for my boys as we wrap up, for now, this homeschooling chapter of our lives.  Let them see the world truly, fallen and redeemed, full of beauty even as it is passing away.

Uh...

My 9yo asked me:  "The next time we homeschool, could we learn about non-Euclidean geometry and negatively curved surfaces and space-time and stuff?"

Beware the Ides of March

It's a surprise holiday here in the Gladly household:  we're abandoning our usual homeschooling schedule to celebrate the Ides of March.  On the agenda (Latin geek note, in honor of the day -- did you know that "agenda" comes from the Latin "agenda est," meaning "it must be done"?):

• a reading of the Marcia Williams version of Julius Caesar
• a re-enactment of the assassination, with a Caesar made of pillows and crowned with laurel leaves (dried bay leaves from my spice stash), because I have sons who love to stab at things with wooden swords
• a discussion of meter (Shakespeare's blank verse (probably using Antony's funeral oration as an example) vs. Latin dactylic hexameter)
• a primer on calendars -- Roman, Hebrew, Islamic -- with discussion of why the moon has phases and why lunar calendars get out of sync with the solar year
• a quick look at the vocative case ("Et tu, Brute?"), which fits in nicely with our recent study of Mass parts for Lent ("...Sanctus Dominus..." was last week's focus; we'll talk about "Benedic, Domine..." as a contrast today).

After lunch we'll run out to get some ingredients for "Roman treats" -- almond-stuffed dates, a favorite snack here.  I'm off to put on my toga.  Valete!

It's a...

...chicken!

One egg hatched, the one that first cracked open while I was writing that last post. The one that started hatching last night is still working on it -- making headway, visibly breathing, chirping frequently but having a tough time with that shell. I am having to sit on my hands to keep from playing Jamie Gladly, Chicken Midwife. Alicia would probably say being a good midwife means sitting on your hands when that's best for your patient.

We are keeping the chicks until Friday, when they will go back to the extension office and from there to area poultry farmers to live long and prosper. (They are egg-laying chickens, not meaty chickens.)

The boys were kicking around name ideas at dinner and one suggestion was Aerosmith. "We could name them all for different bands!" said Alex. "And if any of them don't hatch, they can be the Grateful Dead."

Push! Push!

Three weeks ago we picked up a dozen eggs from the county extension office and put them in an incubator. Every day since then we've turned them and checked the temperature and the water level. It's been the focus of our science lessons -- what's going on in there? What can we see if we candle them?

I pulled out the picture from Marty's sono, almost seven years ago. At the time I was unhappy because it only shows his spine. Now it's a handy illustration of the fact that people are vertebrates too. It's been fun.

But I was starting to get worried -- what if none of the eggs hatched? We were supposed to turn them three times a day, but it only happened twice (and a couple of days only once). Last night my husband was sitting in this spot and he called out, "Something just chirped!"

Sure enough, there was a hole in one of the eggs. I could see wet feathers and a hard little beak working away in there. "Come on, buddy!" I cheered. "You can do it! Come on out of there."

I may, actually, have said some other stuff along the lines of, "What a smart chicky! I'm so proud of you! You're so strong!" Something caused my husband to laugh pretty hard and say, "That's a strong maternal instinct you've got going there."

But still we only have holey eggs (two of them now) and no chicks. I have cranked up the humidity in hopes of softening the shells. I have called the extension office guy for a little handholding. "Don't help the hatching chicks," all the materials say.

So here I sit, listening to little cheeps and taps and wishing for a little teeny chicken vacuum extractor. I picked one of them up (very gently, but still probably not recommended) and felt the movement within. It's pretty amazing. I just wish I could do something.

Latin for Little Kids

Why Latin and German? someone asked me after I posted our homeschooling schedule.  Here's why:

I think American schools do foreign languages badly.  I don't know a ton about second-language learning; I'm not prepared to debate the extent of brain plasticity in adolescents.  But I know of a study that looked at six-month-old babies in Sweden and in the US and found that they pricked up their ears when they heard an unfamiliar vowel.  And I know that in my college German class we could not -- not a one of us -- distinguish the German vowel /ø/ from the English vowel /ʊ/, as in "put."  We simply could not hear what the six-month-old babies could hear:  these two sounds are related but distinct.  I want to provide my kids with an early and pleasant introduction to other sounds and syntactic structures.

I believe we are unusual here in the US, with our contented monoglottony (I can't find a noun form of monoglot so I'm just going to have to make my own).  I would guess (does anybody know?) that most people, for most of human history, have needed to have a handle on at least one other language, even if only for occasional interaction. From Babel onward, people have been forced to communicate with others who don't talk the same way they do.

Now I have not conducted an exhaustive survey of approaches to foreign-language pedagogy in American schools.  I have not conducted any surveys, actually, but my casual observations tell me that most elementary schoolers get little to no language instruction.  Most high schools offer language classes taught by non-native speakers.  And most veterans of those high school programs say, "Yeah, I took [whatever language] in high school, but I don't remember any of it."

I think foreign language instruction is an excellent back-door means of teaching English grammar.  I think it enhances English vocabulary, and challenges students to consider the semantic limitations of their native language ("be" vs. estar/ser, "know" vs. savoir/connaître).  I think it also keeps me humble, keeps me mindful that there's a big wide world out there and I only inhabit a tiny corner of it.  I also happen to love languages (thus my highly impractical comp lit degree), and I hope to share that love with my kids.

Here's what we've done:  I started low-key Latin lessons with my oldest son in kindergarten, because he asked me to.  In first grade I attempted to add Spanish, thinking I'd like to learn more Spanish myself.  The learning-together approach didn't work very well, so last year we switched to German.

Several people have asked me about teaching Latin and I am afraid I don't have a readily reproducible plan.  Latin is the language I learned most thoroughly, and so it's easy for me to make it up as we go along.  We started with two things:  first, subject and verb are squashed together into a single word in Latin; second, a direct object is marked not by its position in a sentence but by the /m/ that appears (usually) at its end. 

I spun it as a secret code.  If I say "Draconem puer edit," does the boy eat the dragon or does the dragon eat the boy?  Just listen for the /m/ and it will tell you, I told him.  He loved it.

He doesn't always love it these days, but I try to keep it fun.  If you are interested in teaching Latin, I hope I can encourage you to do the same.  The Well-Trained Mind authors recommend the study of Latin, but I have some concerns about their approach to the language. They are dismissive in general of a whole-to-parts learning style (breaking down the big picture into smaller pieces), much preferring parts-to-whole instruction (where you start with the small pieces). 

The problem I see, the big, staring problem with that plan, is that most people on the planet learn a language going from whole to parts -- hearing, in infancy, the messy confusing blur that is adult language and sorting out where all the pieces go.  Parts-to-whole language instruction, as discussed above, doesn't seem to be a good strategy for long-term retention.  Pedagogical philosophy aside, there'd be a mutiny at my house if I reduced Latin to vocabulary drills and recitation of is-ea-id.

Instead we nibble at it from both ends.  We learn the prayers of the Church in Latin (whole to parts).  We do some parts-to-whole work, chanting the perfect endings together with cheerleader arm motions.  ("I - ISTI - IT!  IMUS - ISTIS - ERUNT!")  You can't get comfortable with the language, I don't think, unless the basics are automatic.  And we do a lot of English-to-Latin translation, because I found in my own classics courses that translating into the language -- even if it's dead and I will never in my real life need to say, "Amabo te, phoenicem assum cum allio et hippocampum concoctum in vino volo"* -- made it much easier to parse the prose of Pliny or Plato or whomever. 

*I want a phoenix roasted with garlic, please, and a hippocampus boiled in wine.

For the curious:  in kindergarten we just focused on present tense and accusative case.  In first grade, I taught about the imperfect and future tenses along with a few adjectives and personal pronouns. In second grade, we talked about perfect tense, infinitives, and the functions of the remaining cases.  This year I have introduced more written work (I only did oral Latin lessons until he had a firm grasp on English phonics), and he is practicing declining nouns.  Actually, we are doing a bunch of stuff this year and I will tell you more if you want to know.  I am worried this is boring, though.

What Latin doesn't look like:  no stress, no rigid timetable, no pressure to perform.  Rachel commented once about John Stuart Mill's father, who expected him to compose Greek poetry before he was out of diapers.  The last thing I want is for my children to have a nervous breakdown about foreign language study.  (I worry enough about inducing breakdowns in English.)  When we're busy or when things are rough, German gets the axe first and Latin is not far behind.

But there is for me, in learning other languages, a welcome feeling of connection with other people in other places, other times.  It was a rush to read the beginning of the Iliad in Greek (together now: Supergeek! Supergeek! She's supergeeky!); fifteen years later I can still recite the opening lines (sing it again, everybody).

Usually when I write about homeschooling I talk to my oldest son about the post, because I want to make sure that my perception is at least in the same neighborhood as his perception.  I asked him about Latin today.  He said, "It's boring while you're learning it but it's cool once you know it."  And he said, "Amo sushi-m" (an attempt at "I love sushi").  "Amo sushi-m" was not what I expected when I started teaching him Latin.  But it looks like he's internalized the early lessons:  first person singular present indicative, along with accusative singular.  With his own twist thrown in, which is my firstborn in a nutshell.

Epilogue, Backstory, and a Few Things About Homeschooling Philosophy

Epilogue:  we got in the van not long after my sad little post and "You Shook Me All Night Long" was playing on the radio.  I cranked the volume until the dashboard rattled and sang along.  The boys thought this was hilarious and it dissolved the lingering tension between my oldest and me.  ("Did you see that lady on the sidewalk shaking her head at you, Mom?" he asked me as we drove down Main Street.)  We went to the park and swam at the Y and everybody was a lot happier.  On a wall somewhere I should post emergency instructions for defusing homeschooling crises:  1) Find something funny in the situation.  2) Reconnect.  3) Go outside.  4) Do something physical.  5) If you climb on that high horse, it only means you fall farther.  Which means a bigger splat when you hit the steaming pile of high-horse leavings.

Backstory:  I gave my 9yo a geography assignment.  He did it sloppily, with multiple instances of a mistake I had told him to guard against.  I told him he'd need to re-do it.  Drama ensued.

The central struggle in my relationship with my firstborn arises from his strength of will.  He doesn't have an iron will; he has a titanium will.  This is a gift, I know.  It will serve him well.  At the same time, it has caused me a whole lotta anguish in my nine years as a mother.  How far do I respect his autonomy?  How often do I say, "Listen, kid, I'm the mom and you need to obey."

As you might imagine, this is a recurring question for us with homeschooling.  How far down the unschooling path are we going to go? How often do I say, "This is what I expect from you and I want it done cheerfully and well"?

Recently someone asked me for more information about unschooling -- here's a FAQ.  Melissa Wiley has a post here with some good links.  (Updated:  right after I posted this, I saw this great piece with more thoughts on unschooling.)  Unschooling is sometimes called "child-led learning."

I first heard the phrase "child-led" in relation to breastfeeding. If you spend any time with long-term breastfeeders, you will hear stories of child-led weaning, in which the child gradually decides that she is old enough to prefer stories and Waldorf dolls to nursing and so she and her mother trudge off into the golden sunset wearing matching Birkenstocks.  There's a fair amount of overlap between moms who are into child-led weaning and moms who are excited about unschooling. There's also some unfortunate animosity between unschoolers and school-at-homers. 

I was all set to be a child-led-weaning kind of mom and it

emphatically

did not work for me.  My two oldest sons weaned at almost five and at five and a quarter, so anyone who doubts my commitment to breastfeeding clearly owns more Birkenstocks than I do, but they were not the ones leading the way into that particular sunset.  And for a while, when my firstborn was a needy toddler, I felt guilty about taking the lead and saying no.  These days when I talk to mothers feeling restless about long-term nursing I always say, "Nursing is a relationship. It's about both of you.  Yes, you're the adult and you're better able to handle frustration.  But what you want your nursing relationship to look like is very important.  Recognizing your limits is crucial."

The same is true for homeschooling, I think.  In both arenas, my goal is to be child-respectful but not child-led.  My kids have lots of unstructured time for pleasure reading and art projects and Lego construction.  They can check out 75 library books at a time; they can go to town with modeling clay; I will help them track down answers to questions they throw my way.  But we have fairly structured school time and I like it that way.

Two of the reasons I am not an unschooler are practical.  I have four children -- whose lead would I follow?  More importantly, I think that unschooling, done well, requires a high level of mental presence and sustained mental presence is one of the things I find hard about homeschooling.  Our schedule helps me to have clear and reasonable expectations for myself as well as for the boys.

I also have two philosophical objections to unschooling.  What if a child is bad at something?  Hardcore unschoolers seem to say avoidance is fine -- he'll learn when the time is right.  This was the heart of our conflict yesterday:  my oldest hates geography but I expect him to have a certain level of competence with maps.  I will respect his learning preferences, but I won't be governed by them.

The final reason I am not an unschooler crystallized just after I wrote this post: unschooling seems lopsided to me.  I've heard it said that trusting your child is the cornerstone of unschooling.  And yet a critical part of learning is trusting your teachers. 

"We can't homeschool happily unless you trust me as your teacher," I told Alex when he complained splenetically about reading Rilla of Ingleside. "Sometimes I'm going to ask you to do things you think are boring, or crazy, or redundant, but after you finish them you'll say, 'Oh, yeah, I get it now.'  I'm not going to load you down with meaningless work. The work that I do give you -- you need to do it well."

We compromised on Rilla.  I said if he read ten chapters with an open mind and still hated it, he could bail.  He read ten chapters and bailed, relieved.  I guess that's what homeschooling, and mothering, will look like with Alex:  sometimes I lead, and sometimes he leads, and sometimes we hammer it out together, with attendant noise and sparks. 

Teaching my son to steward his will wisely is humbling.  Some days I do it better than others.  Yesterday's lesson:  when rhetoric fails, sometimes AC/DC does the trick.

This is just to say--

--that sometimes homeschooling is really hard.  That sometimes instead of starting at 9:00 with the housework done, we start at 10:15 with mom sporting a corona of frizz and deodorant smudges on a too-tight shirt.  That sometimes I struggle to get through three subjects with my patience intact.

Okay, sometimes I struggle to get through one subject with my patience intact.

This is just to say that sometimes it is A REAL DRAG to be the one in charge of their education and character formation, that sometimes I wish those two things weren't rolled into one so effectively with homeschooling because character formation is hard work.  Maybe there are character molds in a homeschooling catalog somewhere.  Add boiling water and stick in the fridge for a while, like Jello.

Could I hear the complaining from inside the fridge, do you think? 

This is just to say that some days I doubt myself, and that sometimes my firstborn drives me up the wall so efficiently that I expect a herpetologist to knock on my door and ask me to donate my digits to science when I die.  Maybe I feel like I am coming unglued because all my inner adhesive is trickling down to my fingers, allowing me to make like a gecko and climb the walls. 

Maybe there's an industrial application for that somewhere.

This is also to say that sometimes a person sits down with a cup of coffee to write a quick self-pitying post and is interrupted by the howls of her odd-numbered children, who just bit each other's butts and are wailing in pain and outrage and surprise.

Okay, I am back and I have to laugh at that last paragraph.  I also have to ask:  does carrot cake count as a vegetable?  Because it sounds awfully soothing about now.

"A Little Bit Behind"

I did some rearranging of old posts, so that the Homeschooling category now contains most of what I've written here about homeschooling.  Some of the questions that followed my last post on homeschooling have come up before, like what about socialization, and (in that same post) what about subjects I can't teach, and what about unschooling.  (I've been thinking more about unschooling lately, though, and roughing out another post on why it's not a good fit for me.)

Also:  let me be clear that I am no paragon.  As you imagine me going through the morning I described last time, imagine my hair getting wilder and wilder as I run my fingers through it.  Imagine Os glued to my shoulder by means of Pete spit.  Imagine me losing my temper a couple of days a week, and hitting my goals with decreasing frequency as the semester progresses.  All right?  Got it?

Today I wanted to write about how we tackle math.  I left AmyinMotown with the mistaken impression that we just don't do math, and she's probably not alone.  So let me hasten to clarify:  we do math!  We like math.  We just don't use a particular math curriculum, and I don't own any math workbooks, and I would prefer fleas to flashcards.  I am a relaxed math homeschooler. Sort of.

My husband has a PhD in a field that required years and years of math coursework, and his math skills pay our mortgage.  His perspective is skewed, because his professors were forever saying things like, "You all learned topology in junior high school, right?  Vector calculus in preschool?"  We were driving home tonight and he was talking about the boys' math skills.  "They're a little bit behind--" he began, and I immediately began to excoriate myself inwardly.  Because Alex doesn't have his 6/7/8 times tables down perfectly, and Marty is wobbly on his addition, and even though they can both come up with the right answer eventually maybe eventually isn't good enough -- but then I noticed the sly grin on my husband's face as he finished his sentence: "--on differential equations.  They're supposed to learn those in kindergarten, after all."

So maybe we have an anomalous definition of relaxed.

But I like numbers.  They please me.  When my oldest son was four he begged me to play math games with him -- I would tell him a silly story, about when the bedbugs played the roaches in baseball, and he would have to keep score when the roach pitcher hit a surprise triple with the bases loaded.  (Early math skills and the evils of a designated hitter, all in one fun lesson.)

For years I thought I was bad at math, but really I was bored at math.  Halfway through a homework assignment I would start thinking about other things because I GOT THE POINT already; I knew how to multiply two two-digit numbers.  Yes, sustained attention is important, but I know with utter certainty that seven eights is 56.  Any additional drill would be wasted time.  I don't want to waste my children's time.

So here's what we do:  Marty and I just play math games.  For Alex I pick a topic each week.  He works for fifteen minutes on a particular type of problem.  Some weeks it's straight-up arithmetic -- times-table drill or similar.  Other weeks it's something else entirely.  This is how you find the slope of a line.  This is the Pythagorean theorem. This is how you solve two equations in two variables.

I used to worry about this approach.  Was it appropriate to play around with division when he didn't have his addition facts down pat? And then two years ago I read a fascinating article for my professional continuing ed requirement.  Children, the article said, don't learn in pyramid fashion.  You don't have to lay the first row of blocks down like so much granite, and then draaa-aag the second row of blocks up on top.  Learning is more like a spiderweb, in which you make connections all over the place.  You can learn more complex skills at the same time that you're perfecting simpler ones.  (The authors were writing about a different domain, but I think the comparison holds.)

The arithmetic facts are coming along just fine.  My third-grade son can subtract 38 from 64 in his head without batting an eye.  And! Actually! That's a story in itself:  I was trying to encourage him to play with two-digit subtraction in kindergarten and he was reluctant. "You know what 60 minus 30 is," I said. "And you know four minus eight is negative four."  A light bulb went on for both of us.  He knew that 30 and -4 yielded 26.  And I understood, suddenly, why we teach kids to borrow.  For 25 years I had done it by rote, but in that moment I understood what I'd been doing all that time, and that it wasn't the only way to get to the answer.

Recently I was talking to a homeschooling friend who says her boys do ninety minutes of math every day.  I'm didn't say what I thought, which was AAUUUGGGHHH! NOOOOOO!  I'm just not convinced that ninety minutes of math drill is a good idea for an average first-grader. "Drill and kill," Elizabeth Foss calls it. 

My goal as a math teacher is to help them acquire solid skills, sure.  But at the same time I want to impart three other lessons as well:

Math is fun. My husband found a book for Alex called The Number Devil.  He loves it -- he's read it six or eight times.  Who knew you could laugh about prime numbers and the Fibonacci sequence?

Math is interesting.  One day in ninth grade I noticed that squares are separated by consecutive odd numbers.  One night fourteen years later, as I was lying in bed nursing a 9mo Alex to sleep, the explanation dawned on me.*  I love finding patterns and I hope my boys will too.  The order I see in the mathematical world reflects the beauty of creation's order.  It makes me happy.

Math is useful.  If you are saving for a Lego set and there's a 15% sale coming up, how many weeks of allowance is that? 

Math matters.  Math is doable.  That's what I want them to know.

*Some of you will find this obvious and some will find it a snore, but here it is if you're interested:  for consecutive numbers A and B, B² always equals A² + (A+B).  A²+A=AB, and AB+B=B².  So:  consecutive squares are always separated by consecutive odd numbers.  And they say nursing a baby sucks up brain cells.

All Right, Here We Go: Resolved, and Logistics

Sometimes blogging is good for you.

In a few different deleted posts, I tried to figure out why I was so reluctant to blog about homeschooling.  It's my parents, those posts said.  Their opposition to homeschooling really touches a nerve.  My parents disagree with most of my out-of-the-mainstream choices, but it rarely bothers me.  When it comes to homeschooling, their disapproval really gets under my skin.

They disapprove for three reasons:   (a) they think I am consigning my children to a life of freakdom since homeschooled kids are weird (both Mom and Dad), (b) they have heard that homeschooled children are so used to doing their own thing that they can't function in the workplace (mostly Dad, and one of these days I need to tell him, "You know, increasing their tolerance for soul-sucking boredom is not on my list of educational goals for my children, and I'm not ashamed of it"), and (c) they think a mother can't be an effective teacher for her own children (mostly Mom, based in part on trying to learn piano from her own mother). 

But I think they also disapprove because there is some old tension between us on the subject of education.  My own school experience was frequently miserable, and they seemed to expect that I would just suck it up.  I suspect that their unwavering insistence that my kids should learn to get by in public school arises from their previous unwavering insistence that I should learn to get by in public school.

Somewhere I read that you're never really grown up until you let go of your need for your parents' approval, and in this series of drafted and deleted posts I have been feeling like a flunkout from emotional maturity kindergarten.  I don't know why, exactly, I get so sad about their attitude.  Maybe because I try so hard to do it well and they remain convinced, in a "don't confuse me with the facts" way, that homeschooling is always a bad idea.

For a while I was thinking, "I should have one of those low-key Harriet Lerner kinds of conversations with my parents.  What was it like for them when the boy in junior high set my hair on fire?  What was junior high like when they were kids?"  But something inside me would seize up at the prospect and say, "Ha! As if! Maybe in ten years, if Alex is cruising through Harvard and I am vindicated at last!"

But do you know:  around the fourth deleted post I began to feel a little calmer.  I began to think that maybe I could actually have a conversation with them that didn't leave me tied up in knots.  And even if I don't have that conversation with them, I am at least feeling more peaceful myself. 

I knew, before, that I couldn't handle any trollery on this topic.  You want to tell me I'm a nut for giving birth at home or tandem-nursing?  Feel free.  You want to tell me I'm a nut for homeschooling my children?  Watch Jamie curl up into a ball and doubt herself one more time.   This is why I've written so little about something that takes up so much of my life -- I was staying out of the kitchen for fear of the heat.  While I'm in a better spot these days, I'm still feeling a little tentative about this post.  (If you want to tell me about any areas in which your parents can push your buttons effortlessly, it would help me to feel less alone here in remedial emotional maturity kindergarten.)

Moving on:   I am resolved to post semi-regularly about homeschooling.  Why don't we use a math curriculum?  How do you teach Latin to a kid in kindergarten and make him think it's funny?  Where is the baby during all of this?  (Hint:  not under the haystack, also not fast asleep.)

Here's a bit of the logistical side of things, with more to follow.  I don't use a packaged curriculum.  I like parts of the book The Well-Trained Mind and I use their approach to history and literature.  The authors divide history into four chronological periods; using their plan you complete three four-year cycles, looking more deeply into the material with each one.  We started with the ancients in the fall of 2002; we just arrived in the 20th century last month

Each week or two I sit down with my materials and my spreadsheet software, making a plan for the next week or two.  (I have used less structured approaches in the past, but this is my first year with two students and I have to say I was really unhappy with our foray into unschooling last year.  Ergo, more structure.  So far it's working a lot better for all of us.)

Someone left me a comment which I can't find at the moment (sorry, Someone!), about wanting to homeschool but having a husband who disagrees.  My husband disagreed for a long time and now he is 100% behind homeschooling, so there's hope.  Unity is critical, I think -- I simply could not do it if he weren't on board.  I need help with the kids during my planning time; I need to be able to vent about a bad day without worrying that he will say, "Obviously, they should be in school."

I think it was Rachel who asked about what happens with the little kids while the three of us are working on school.  They are usually right in the middle of things with us.  One of the distinctive things about homeschooling is its organicity.  This is our life -- we learn together, we eat together, we fold laundry together, we read together, we fish Legos out of the baby's mouth together, we learn some more things together. 

Sometimes it's a bad thing:  if somebody wakes up on the wrong side of the bed, you'll be dealing with it all day long.  But often it's a really good thing.  One night I was tucking in my oldest son and he asked me a question about the imperative mood in Latin.  I answered his question and BING! I saw the line jump from dot A to dot B.  He understood, suddenly.  Or on Immaculate Conception -- we read Rev. 12 right before we went to noon Mass at the Newman Center.  At the end of Mass we turned around and I said, "Look, boys, look! The woman clothed with the sun!"  I hadn't remembered the enormous image of Our Lady of Guadalupe painted over the chapel doors.

So what do we do with the little guys?  We flow, mostly.  We've set up our schedule, about which more below, to accommodate a 3yo who needs attention.  I do a lot of reading aloud with a baby on my hip.  Sometimes we take a ten-minute break to get a fussy Pete down for a nap.  Sometimes I smack my forehead in frustration when he wakes up fifteen minutes later.  But in between we learn a lot, not only about WWI and German pronouns, but about doing unto the least of these, and about being patient with each other.

It works best for me to have a schedule, and it works best for me to plan on 15-minute lessons.  I'm running out of minutes, so I'm just going to type in our Monday-Thursday schedule here:

9:00 writing for Alex, reading for Marty
9:15 Latin/German (each one gets two days per week)
9:30 history/science (ditto)
9:45 Alex learns more about our history or science topic on his own, using library or internet resources, and I read a picture book to the middle boys
10:00 Bible
10:15 art/music

At 10:30 we take a 30-minute break.

11:00 memory work
11:15 math

That's it for the morning.  After lunch I read aloud to everybody.  Twice a week we work on geography; twice a week Alex is supposed to work on a writing assignment.

I could make this a huge post because there's lots more to say, but I'll stop here for tonight because my bed is calling loudly.  Questions?  Comments?  I'll try to get back to you soon.

Day in the Life

Two of my more experienced homeschooling friends were talking recently about taking a more relaxed approach to school during Advent, and I decided to do the same.  Actually, I had already been doing the same; I just decided not to feel guilty about it.  I tried to think of one thing I ever learned in school in the two weeks before Christmas break and came up empty.  So, then:  here we slump relaxedly.

Yesterday morning we got a late start.  I aim to start at nine, and I also aim to get all the floors clean on Monday mornings before school, and only one of those things was going to happen yesterday.  I chose clean floors and we started at ten.

We sat down together, with the Christmas card boxes and my address book and the US map puzzle on the table, and while I finished addressing envelopes the boys made an alphabetical list of the US states.  We did a little imaginary road tripping when they needed a nudge -- where would you end up if you went west from Iowa and north from Kansas?  After the list-making and envelope-addressing were complete, Marty went through the stack and announced where each one was going while Alex kept a hash-mark tally of states and countries.

Here you can plug in your own data to create a graph, and that's what we did next.  They entered their results and had some fun with funky colors and fonts, and then they emailed the finished Christmas Card Destinations pie graph to Dad at work.

We are on track to finish the first half of The Story of the World (vol. 4) before we break for Christmas; yesterday's reading was about World War I.  On impulse I googled the Christmas Truce (I wasn't sure if I had the right WW).  In one version of the story, the German and British troops alternated Christmas carols until the Brits began singing "O Come, All Ye Faithful."  The Germans joined in, singing "Adeste Fideles."  Coincidentally, last week's Latin lesson was "Adeste Fideles," with its handy assortment of plural imperatives.  Be there! Come! See!  I didn't really expect it to stick, but my oldest left the table singing the Latin words yesterday.

Usually I try to get to the library in advance to get books to pad out the information in SOTW.  I hadn't done that this week, but I remembered that Rilla of Ingleside is all about the impact of WWI on the Blythe family and their neighbors.  I pulled it off the shelf for Alex, who said, "You want me to read this?  Maybe real school wouldn't be that bad."  It is #8 in the series, which offends his systematic soul, and it has a really girly cover.  He objects vehemently to reading it.  He would complain less if I assigned him some Hegel, I think.  I've agreed that he can bail if he gives it a fair trial and hates it.  One chapter in, he gave it a negative 10,000 on a 1-10 scale.  Two chapters later, it earned a positive 3.  We'll see.

After a little break we read the Tomie de Paola book on Our Lady of Guadalupe and prayed the beginning of the rosary together.  The boys sat down afterward to draw the Virgin of Guadalupe and got in a fight about art supplies.  "No!" said the oldest.  "You can't use my oil pastels.  You'll blunt them!"  I tried to mediate calmly, quelling the urge to turn away and beat my head against something hard.  Slowly and painfully it emerged that the 6yo only wanted to draw a border with the oil pastels.  Of his own volition, the 8yo said, "I'm sorry, Marty, I was kind of a jerk about that.  Do you need any others besides purple and red?"  I scooped up my jaw, which was somewhat the worse for its sudden smack against the floor, and we moved on.

We are finishing out the year with Revelation, a choice that worried me because there are many chunks of it that make me say, "Huh.  I don't know what that means.  Let's ask the Holy Spirit to help us with that one."  I had hopes of finishing David Currie's book on eschatology before we started but it is sitting under the end table, helpless against marauding dust bunnies.  In spite of my incomplete exegesis, the boys are eating it up.  More! they say when I finish a chapter.  Can't we read one more?

(You're not getting the wrong idea, are you?  You're not envisioning them sitting reverently and hanging on my every word, are you?  You have to imagine them squirming and poking each other and asking deliberately goofy questions -- and then asking for another chapter.  They love the war stuff, and the improbable beasts.)

We folded laundry all together while we listened to this CD, the first seasonal music I've played.  (Christmas is weeks away, see -- at least six weeks from now.  I wouldn't want to get tired of the CDs we have.)  I wanted to hear this hymn but I had forgotten how much I enjoy the whole disc.  We decided to play outside instead of going to the Y, and I started a pot roast for dinner.  While I was searing the meat and preheating the oven the smoke alarm went off (forgot to wrap the Springform pan in foil when I made the cake for Elwood's birthday). 

How does that thing work? my oldest son wanted to know.  I sent him here, and while he was on the computer I pulled Clown of God off the shelf to read to the middle boys.  I love that book -- love the idea that any gift can be given gladly to God.  Yesterday I even got through it without crying.  Alex came to ask if he could read further on that same site, to find out about how laptops work.

Then there was cabbage-slicing and potato-mashing, and table-setting for the boys.  After dinner there was dishwashing, and the big boys sat down to confer on their assignment:  how was the Narnia movie different from the book?  I was busy elsewhere and discovered later that they had only come up with one thing, **SPOILER ALERT** which was that the movie White Witch wore Aslan's mane in battle.  (In the moment I thought this was a cool touch.  Now it bugs me.  I can't remember -- where does Lewis write about the scent of Aslan's mane?  (Reminds me of the "aroma of Christ" passage from 2Cor.)  Wouldn't that drive the WW crazy?  Or maybe it was like the apple in the sixth book, which she ate even though she knew she'd pay for it forever.  One thing I know:  anyone who can change overnight from crazy cool dreadlocks to perfectly sleek has magical powers for sure.  I loved her hair.) 

Hm. I was going to write about today as well, because today was even more fun.  But this is long and possibly boring, and my kitchen is still trashed from our project this morning and there are many many library books arranged artfully on the living room floor.  And Pete fell asleep and would probably prefer horizontal in bed to slumped in the sling with his head leaning on my left wrist.  Maybe tomorrow I'll write about today.  LMK if you have strong opinions about boring vs. not-boring.  G'night.

Too Many Fish in the Sea

Our little homeschooling group was planning to make a banner.  The parish school kids were walking in solemn procession to mark the Year of the Eucharist and we were going to join them.  I was worried about this, since my Joe doesn't do solemn and I pretty much hate felt banners.  But I was game.

 

***

The moms meet to plan the banner.  "I know!" I say.  "A pelican! With chicks!"

Blank stares all around, as if I had said, "I know! Yogi Bear! With cubs!"

I explain.  And then I imagine pelican chicks, not the most attractive representatives of their genus to begin with, rendered in felt.  By small children.  Perhaps Yogi Bear was a better idea.  Is he a Eucharistic symbol?

Plan B: a beach scene.  A pelican on the beach, unobtrusively symbolizing the Eucharist with no creepy-looking naked chicks nearby.  Four figures in silhouette (Jesus, Peter, James, John).  Each kid makes a fish and glues it onto the water.  The moms glue an onion bag atop the fish for a net.  Matthew 4:19 will go somewhere in puffy paint.  This can work, we say.

I go home and tell the boys.  The oldest says, "I'm not making any dumb fish.  Unless I can make a giant squid.  How about that?"

I think for a minute.  Is this creativity?  Is this a reasonable reaction to an activity I would have hated as a kid?  Or is this pain-in-the-butt-ness that ought to be squelched?  I am torn.  My husband is not.

"You can't make a squid if you're supposed to make a fish," he says with finality.  "That's not even the right phylum."

"Okay, then," says Alex. "How about an alien sea fungus?"

Elwood rolls his eyes.  "That's not even the right kingdom!"

We talk taxonomy for a few minutes.  Where do sharks and bony fish diverge -- class? order?  Alex allows as to how he might be willing to make a sawfish.  It can only be three inches long, I warn him, imagining him painstakingly cutting out each tiny projection until he crumples the whole thing in frustration.  This is a dumb idea, he says again.

The next day we go to the craft store to buy puffy paint.  He wants to know why, if rocks and trees can praise the Lord, giant squid are excluded.  "Giant squid can praise the Lord, honey," I said, thinking to myself that this is a sentence I never expected to utter.  "We're making fin fish, though."  We talk about the ICHTHYS acronym, and about being made in the image of God.  I consider a Divine Cephalopod.  Hmph, says my firstborn.

At home he tries again.  If God made squid, he declared them good, right?  They were considered clean, right?  (This is what you get when you read your kid Leviticus in kindergarten.)  No! I say, running for the computer.  I don't think so.  Sure enough, fish have to have fins and scales to be kosher.

"But!" he says, his face lighting up, "That doesn't matter to us because of the New Covenant!  Of course I can be a giant squid!"

We end up missing the banner-making get-together because no one else wants to share the mucus.  The solemn procession proceeds sans Gladly-fish because our car is in the shop and I don't want to walk all the way in the cold with a sick baby.  But Alex isn't done thinking about giant squid. 

Tonight at dinner he says, "I bet the fishermen in the Sea of Galilee caught squid in their nets, didn't they?  Fisherman is technically a dimunitive term."

I don't know what "dimunitive" is supposed to mean but he says it with such earnestness that I have to nod my head thoughtfully in response.  I think he's heading for law school.  I may be heading for a facility with padded walls.  At least I'll be laughing most of the way there.

Interview

Tell us what it's like to be homeschooled in this family. What? This is an interview? Yep. If this is an interview, then it's kind of like regular school.  However, there are a lot of big differences.  For one, the teacher pays a lot more attention to you.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing? It's a mixed blessing.

What's good about being homeschooled? What are your three favorite things about our school? I can actually voice some of what we learn -- I mean, like, decide some of what we learn.  For instance, if I were to say I'd like to learn a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, then maybe we'd learn one.

The teacher makes the problems interesting -- like, as in math stories where Mom tells a story and you have to put in the subtraction, addition, division, and multiplication answers to make a very funny story.

And number three:  in recess you can play with Legos.

What's bad about being homeschooled? Well, the problems are usually a bit harder compared to the ones that kids in public school do.  (How do you know?  Sometimes I find some spare homework when I visit my friends' houses.  It looks easy.)  Also, there aren't any other kids you can hide behind if you don't think you can solve a problem.  (What do I do if you can't solve a problem? You usually help me so it turns out going a lot longer and sometimes if I answer them very quickly then I get to get ahead on schedule so I have a longer recess to play with Legos and build awesome new creations like The Dragonfly.) 

What's one more bad thing?  I have to do three of these?  Here's the third bad thing:  there isn't any playground equipment in our backyard.  In normal school at recess you get to go on a playground.

Do you think we fight more than we would if you went to a conventional school? [note from Jamie:  this is a worry of mine, that homeschooling causes conflict between us.]  Well, probably yes, but only because we spend more time together.

Would you rather be doing easier work?  Some people might say I ask a lot of you. Depends on the quantity of easier work.  I mean, I'd prefer a bit of hard work to a lot of easy work.  It sounds like I'd be doing a lot of easy work in regular school.

How do you feel about being with your brothers full-time?  Do you wish you spent more time with kids your own age? or kids who weren't family? It's a mixed blessing, because with smaller kids then they'll play almost anything with you.  They think of you as the figure who does know everything.  However, sometimes my mind goes RED ALERT RED ALERT BROTHERS GETTING CRAZILY HECTIC SHUTDOWN SHUTDOWN

What would you say to a mom who is thinking about homeschooling? Here my second son, who declined to answer my other questions, chimed in.  He and my oldest said the same thing: Good choice!

Why We Homeschool

Rachel said:

This is a hot button, I know, so please forgive any crude phrasings on a delicate issue. As a foreigner living in the States, I'm suprised and slightly puzzled by the idea of home schooling. I've had it explained to me as a fundamentalist way of avoiding any contact with the government/state; I suspect you would explain it very differently, and would really like to hear your reasons and experiences. Any chance?

Thanks for asking, Rachel.  I would indeed explain it differently.  We homeschool because we believe it's the best choice for our kids right now, academically, socially, and spiritually.

Academically, homeschooling affords me the freedom to help my kids acquire a rich and thorough understanding of the world around them.  In some areas I am more rigorous than a classroom teacher would be; in others I'm more relaxed. 

As an example:  I'm a believer in memorization, even though it's out of vogue among most educators.  I think it's easier to be a good writer if your head is filled with examples of good writing.  My two oldest sons just learned "The Charge of the Light Brigade"; starting tomorrow we'll tackle "The Raven."

On the other hand, I haaaaaaated doing endless worksheets in school.  Is it necessary to do 30 problems to hammer home a straightforward math concept?  I say categorically: no.  Ditto for grammar exercises, the memory of which causes my eyes to glaze over so fast you'd think I had a nictitating membrane.  (When Jamie [thinked/thought] about her elementary schools' approach to language arts instruction, she [lay/laid] down on the floor and said, "[Shoot/Bludgeon] me now.")

With homeschooling, you can go at your kids' pace.  Do they need some extra help?  No problem -- your tiny class size means you can handle it.  Are they ready to move faster?  Off you go.

Rachel also asked, "How do you deal with a teaching subject that isn't your strong suit?"  When it comes to drawing, I have the ability of an abalone.  I am approaching it from a few different angles.  I have a book called Drawing with Children, which I am slowly working through alongside the kids.  I have a talented friend who teaches my boys art twice a month.  I have also enrolled my oldest son in park district art classes.  I expect this approach will work for as long as we homeschool:  I can learn more myself, or I can find someone else to teach my kids, or I can do both at the same time.

The most common question about homeschooling is "What about socialization?"  I homeschool in part because of the socialization issue:  school socialization can be negative as well as positive.  You can bet than in a house with four boys, each child will get ample practice in the arts of appropriate negotiation and respectful disagreement.  In a classroom, there can be a lot of under-the-radar cruelty and nonsense.  In my home, the bar is set pretty high:  the key question about behavior toward others is not "Is it disruptive?" but "Is it loving?"  (There are days, of course, when not a one of us clears that bar.  But we keep trying.)

I do try to provide my kids with opportunities to learn the social skills they'd develop in a classroom:  working in groups with other kids, solving problems without adult intervention, taking instruction from other adults whose style differs from mine, waiting for turns in conversation or, just occasionally, at the water fountain.  One advantage of homeschooling is that time wasted standing in lines is kept to a minimum.  I certainly hope my kids don't grow up to work in jobs where they have to ask permission and wait in line to use the bathroom.  In small doses, though, it's worth practicing.

Our faith is a major reason why we homeschool.  We reject without reservation the bunker mentality that says "Keep your kids home because the schools are full of evil."  (I do think it's easier to safeguard a healthy innocence when you homeschool, but I'm not teaching my kids at home because I'm afraid of the schools here.)  Our family hopes to become a "city on a hill"; homeschooling allows us time and space for construction projects. 

My foremost goal for each of my children is a transforming relationship with the living God.  I want my children to live their faith:  to know its tenets well, to keep asking hard questions, to grow day by day in the discipline of yieldedness.  I want them to look at their lives through the lens of the greatest commandments:  how can I love God today? how can I love my neighbor?

I am all stirred up at this moment, carried away with my efforts to get across the vision I have for my boys.  How I hope they will grow into men who will inhabit this world gracefully and leave it a wiser, richer place.  The reality right now:  an 8yo who grouses almost every day about the work before him, a 5yo still learning that I expect him to ask permission before he dashes away from the table to run around in lopsided circles, a 3yo who interrupts my explanation of the Bernoulli effect to say, "Will you be Obi-Wan Kenobi now?", and a baby who has been known to spit up on a writing assignment as a I lean over it to correct its punctuation.  But the vision remains regardless.

Over and over in the schools I attended we asked, "Why are we learning this stuff?"  I hope my homeschooled sons can say that we learn because there's joy in learning.  I hope they also know that learning is good stewardship:  we train our eyes to see the beauty and mystery of the world around us, our ears to hear God's call.  We train our minds to reason and remember; we train our hearts to say gladly, "Here I am, Lord; I come to do your will."

--

Some of you homeschool; some of you (like Tracy) used to homeschool; many of you don't and perhaps wouldn't.  Please join in the conversation -- why do you do what you do?  If you homeschool, I'd rather hear about homeschooling plusses than about school minuses (though I will acknowledge that No Child Left Behind is a factor in my decision to homeschool).  Rachel, let me know if this answers your questions.  Some days I may feel a little crazy, but I think our decision to homeschool is pretty sane.

Caution: May Induce Diabetic Coma in Vulnerable Readers

I had the best day.  I had such a good day that I am hesitant to blog about it because misery loves company but who wants to read about happy? 

But here goes anyway.  This was our first day of school.  I was utterly, totally, could-not-be-more-thoroughly burned out on homeschooling last spring, and it was surprising to feel my enthusiasm building again over the summer, like a resilient petunia recovering after an 8yo boy lands squarely on top of it. 

I didn't know what it would be like teaching two, since this is Marty's kindergarten year.  I didn't know how much of our trouble last year was because of me and how much was because of my firstborn and how much was because we are so cut from the same cloth that sometimes sparks fly when we're together.  That is a terrible mixed metaphor but I am leaving it alone in the interest of speed.  If ever sparks flew while I was sewing with two pieces cut from the same cloth, I would speed back to the fabric store, you betcha.  With kids, though, you do the best you can with the fabric you're handed. 

Did I say recently, or was it in a post that I ended up deleting unfinished, that I had decided to be much more structured this year?  Inspired by Mother's Rule of Life, I made up a schedule that has the two older boys working hard for most of the morning.  At the same time, I am giving my older son more independent assignments this year.  Three times today, I said, "You need to have this finished by the end of August.  You set the pace.  I'll check back in with you and see how it's going."

It could be a terrible idea.  He seems to like it, though, here on day 1.

I find a lot to like in The Well-Trained Mind, although it's a little too workbooky for me, and I am using Story of the World as our primary history text this year.  We're starting with Queen Victoria and the British Empire, so I'm augmenting history lessons with stories from that era:  "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" today (a big hit), and A Little Princess is in the library basket as well.

Marty warms up slowly to new things and I was not expecting him to be enthusiastic about school.  I was wrong.  "This is the funnest school I ever went to!" he said.  "This is great!"

We walked to the park in the afternoon, and just as we arrived Joe announced, "I need to use the bathroom."  (New development -- he's out of diapers as of a couple of weeks ago although ARGH I forgot to send him to the bathroom before bed.)  Another mother was walking up with her two kids at just the same time and I said, "There's not a bathroom nearby, is there?"  (I said this knowing there wasn't, and wondering if Joe would be willing to pee in the bushes, and observing to myself that I really shouldn't have drunk a liter bottle of water before going to a park with no bathroom...)

And she said -- I still can't believe this -- "No, but my house is up the alley.  I can't walk with you because I'm short on time but you can go and I'll watch the baby.  It's open."

!!!

I took the two younger ones and she stayed with the two older ones after I told them what was going on.  (And in hindsight I'm surprised I did that -- I guess she and I just felt comfortable with each other off the bat.)  We came back, much relieved, and she and I chatted for a while.  On the walk home two friends, driving by in opposite directions, called out greetings as they passed us.  It made me feel so settled here.

They had requested pizza for dinner, so when we walked in the door I set to work on the dough.  "You can make pizza?" they said. "Could we have this every week?"  It is exceedingly rare for me to get an enthusiastic response at the dinner table, so you can bet I said yes.  I went into the kitchen to serve the older two a third helping and Marty said, "Mom rocks."

After dinner we went out for ice cream; we prayed Evening Prayer when we came home.  During the intercessions we were giving thanks for people in our lives and Marty said, "Thank you, God, for Mom."

And you know, I am hesitating to post those two quotes because TOOT-TA-TOOT behold me blowing my own horn, or at least telling you about someone blowing my horn most euphoniously, but oh well.  Motherhood is not a job in which people pour gratitude on your head.  (Vomit on it, yes.  But "Thank you, Mom, for cleaning my vomit out of your hair without complaining" is not a sentence springing from my children's lips).  On most days the number of body fluids I am wearing by lunchtime is higher than the number of enthusiastic comments I hear in a week about life with me as the mom.  So hey -- I'll blog about it today.

Pete is restless and my husband just came home, so I am going to publish without further editing.  Hope you had a lovely day too.

Not With a Bang--

--but not with a whimper either, we ended our school year on Friday.  I am relieved.  And I am a little more optimistic about homeschooling next year than I was last month.

I love the idea of homeschooling, but as with all things the reality has warts and prickles absent from the abstract notion.  I've written before about how homeschooling means I have to keep pulling my perfectionist self up short, saying, "Get a grip, Jamie; it's only second grade."  I tend to aim too high in most things I do.  Periodically I make myself little schedules for the day, schedules in which 9am will find me having dispatched the laundry, the Liturgy of the Hours, and the problem of water quality in the developing world as well, leaving ample time in the afternoon to knock out the works of Trollope and whip up a nice little galantine of turkey for dinner.

This is one of my struggles as a mother because of course I want my children to live lives in which they aim high.  Also, I want my children to live lives in which they are shielded from bitter disappointments and feelings of inadequacy.  Maybe they could also live lives in which they solve the puzzle of the Marburg virus and write a Pulitzer prize-winning book about it.  Maybe I should stop drinking real coffee on an empty stomach, you think?

Anyway, if I looked back on the goals I set for our school year in August I would have to laugh.  Instead of berating myself for what we didn't get done, or the various shortcomings of our three years of homeschooling, let me tell you about something that's gone well.

As I was becoming Catholic thirteen years ago I was surprised (I'll be candid: in my 21yo omniscience I was self-righteously appalled) at the unfamiliarity with the Bible I saw in the RCIA team.  They would say things like, "Somewhere in the Bible it says, 'He who sings prays twice,'" and I would shudder pompously.  I hope I've shed the smugness, but the underlying love for the Bible remains and is something I want to share with my children.

So when my son was in kindergarten he learned the books of the Bible.  I wanted him to feel at home with their names, to know from age five that Habakkuk was one of the minor prophets and Colossians was one of Paul's letters.  That fall I read him Genesis and Exodus (with the tabernacle design scheme slightly abridged); that spring we read the gospel of John and the first half of Acts.

When I told him that January that we were moving to the New Testament he was indignant.  "I want to read Leviticus!  We should go in order!" he insisted.  "Honey, Leviticus is really boring," I said.  He was so adamant, though, that I sat down with him and read the beginning of Leviticus.  At the end of the first chapter he said, "That was great! Can we read another?"  In one sitting we read nine -- count them, nine -- chapters of Leviticus.  We read another nine chapters in shorter spurts before his enthusiasm waned.

The following fall we finished Acts and read Mark's gospel along with a handful of epistles; in the spring I had planned to read Numbers and Deuteronomy.  "Not so fast!" said Alex.  "We didn't finish Leviticus."  So we finished Leviticus, and then read Numbers and Deuteronomy.  Some days I can't decide whether he's headed for jail or for a career as a canon lawyer, but he is one tenacious kid.

The second grade plan:  Joshua/Judges/Ruth (with no Lyle Lovett accompaniment) in the fall, and Matthew and Revelation in the spring.  The complications of our spring meant we were still wrapping up Matthew last week, but it was a very pleasant wrapping up.

At the beginning of Alex's kindergarten year I read about Simchat Torah, the Jewish celebration that always follows the reading of the last chapter of the Torah.  I love the idea:  one year older in the Lord, one more journey through his Word.  And so I borrowed it.  Every time we finish a book of the Bible, we have a little procession through the house, singing "Thy Word, O Lord, is a lamp to my feet and a light unto my path" to a catchy little tune that lends itself, apparently, to enthusiastic high-kicking.  (No injuries yet, I am happy to report.)

On Friday we finished our school year with the Great Commission.  Marty said, "Is that the end?  Too bad it's over."  Alex said, "Can we have our parade now?  Can I be the one to hold the Bible?"  (Lest we sound too Hallmark-y to be believed, let me hasten to tell you that Marty was unhappily declaring me "the baddest mother in the world" not very much later.  Oh, and as I was finishing this entry, my husband came in to say that the first thing the older boys did with the jumprope he just bought them was tie the 3yo to a tree.  No Hallmarkiness here, folks.)  We high-kicked our way around the house and then went to the zoo with friends.  It was a delightful end to a rough year.

A new Catholic homeschooling group is forming here and I'm intrigued to see what it will be like.  That's my sine qua non for homeschooling next year:  I have to find homeschooling support here or I just can't do it.  So we'll see what happens; for now I'm feeling peaceful about not knowing which way to go.  "Behold, I am with you always" -- however we decide.

Friday night Alex said, "Mom, I think we should make a schedule for our summer days."  We are so much alike, my firstborn and I, which both motivates me to homeschool him and drives me slowly toward insanity on some days of homeschooling him.  So we will sit our schedule-happy selves down tomorrow, I think, and plan:  lazy hours of reading in our new hammock, trips down the bike trail to a leafy park nearby.  Knowing the two of us, I predict that more ambitious items will surface too.  Watch out, evildoers of the world, because now that Alex and I are done with school we're going to have some time on our hands.

Schooling: Not Anti-Un-

Jane encouraged me not to be hard on unschoolers, which was not my intent.  I was thinking about two things in that last post and neither was that unschooling is a bad idea in itself.  First: the conference I attended last fall involved a couple of people who struck me as rather extreme, and who occasionally slid into smugness in their extremism.  For instance:  one session I attended was led by a woman whose children never had a bedtime.  She let them listen to their bodies and sleep when they needed to sleep.  Who needs bedtime when you can trust your children?  I do, that's who.  I need bedtime in a big way, and I refuse to see it as a moral failing.  Different people need different levels of structure, and I need that "." at the end of my day with the kids.  I'm not a bedtime tyrant, but I am less effective (and a whole lot less pleasant) as a mother if I don't get a quiet hour with all the kids down for the night. 

Two:  I'm not sure I could be a good unschooling mother.  I think if I didn't have specific goals for the morning, too often 12:30pm would find me slouched guiltily at the computer, with coffee spilled on my pajamas and my children clamoring for lunch and attention.  A crucial part of the "listen to your child and he will tell you what he needs" philosophy is the "listen to your child" bit, as distinct from the "blog until interrupted by bloodshed" approach which I fear would be the dispiriting default around here. What works for us (mostly, although I certainly admit it hasn't worked as well this year as it did the preceding two) is to have focused time after breakfast when we work on school.  I guess it's tied to my first thought:  I need a certain amount of structure in my days. Any unschoolers out there to comment?

My husband picked up a copy of Alfie Kohn's What Does It Mean To Be Well Educated? at some point (he doesn't always tell me when he buys books, see, because I have this irksome habit of asking which of the overflowing shelves he's planning to put them on) and I've been reading it today.  It's interesting stuff, all about the state of public schools in this country and the effects of standardized testing. (Alfie Kohn is an interesting guy -- I have mentioned his Punished by Rewards a couple of times here.)  He mentions homeschooling only in passing, but of course I am thinking about what we'll do next year as I'm reading.  Worth picking up if you see it in the library.

Speaking of libraries, my usually non-confrontational 5yo is going through a tough-guy stage.  He launched himself into the storytime room at the library today with a ninja kick combo.  And a loud ninja yell -- it would probably have been better received had we not arrived five minutes late and interrupted "Itsy-Bitsy Spider."  Oops.  Next week on time.

All That Ends Well

My oldest son is crying on his bed right now.  I told him he was welcome to come down as soon as he was prepared to finish an assignment.  "You're never going to see me again then," he announced dramatically, his tear-stained face pink and angry.

When he was five, homeschooling was the clear choice for kindergarten.  He was ahead of the curve academically and a little behind it socially.  I knew that putting him in an environment that left him simultaneously stressed and bored was a recipe for disaster.  Whatever choices we made in the future, I didn't want him to think of school as "that place where I get in trouble every day."

Our family has been through enough transitions recently that homeschooling has continued to be a good choice, albeit a difficult one.  We had a really nice kindergarten year and a rockier first grade year.  Second grade has wrung me out.

I have posted very little about homeschooling, and I'm not sure why.  Maybe because it is a minefield for a perfectionist like me, and I dread the thought of criticism.  Maybe because it's been so rough this year.  We've had some good days, but we've had too many conflicts like this one.

Right before Christmas, the NY Times published an essay in response to those studies about how bad American kids are at math.  The writer said, "Who needs math when those nice Asians will do it for us?  I can't help my high school kid with her math homework and I don't care."  I put down the paper and said to my husband, "If you couldn't solve two equations in two variables, would you admit it in the New York Times?  I could teach Alex how to do that in a week." 

The next morning, I said, "Hey, let's pretend we're planning your birthday party.  If you get six trays of sushi and four cartons of ice cream, it costs $44.  If you get five trays of sushi and eight cartons of ice cream, it costs $60.  How much does each one cost?"  That was Monday.  By Thursday, he could write down the equations when I gave him a problem.  He needed a little guidance to isolate one of the variables, but then it was easy for him to find x, plug it in, and figure out y.  He thought it was fun.  I did too.

(This is another reason I have seldom posted about homeschooling:  my oldest son is a sharp cookie and I don't want to sound boastful.)

But too often it goes sour unexpectedly.  This morning we were reading Story of the World on the porch swing, surrounded by daffodils and birdsong.  I was thinking we should have a little Paul Revere party on April 18.  It was all very pleasant.  But when I said, "Okay, time to write down some of the things you want to remember from this chapter" -- kablooey.

I am tired of kablooeys.

Last fall I went to an unschooling workshop.  It was thought-provoking and enjoyable but it confirmed my feeling that unschooling is not for me.  The featured speaker talked about her son learning to use commas at age 18 -- an anecdote which she told with satisfaction but which horrified me.  In my view, if my son cannot use commas at age 18 I will have let him down badly.

But I am also not a workbook-y kind of homeschooler.  We don't do spelling drills, or Latin vocabulary drills, and our three years of math lessons have all been "let's sit down with a pencil and a piece of paper and see where it takes us this week" kinds of things.  (If there are any other laid-back math types out there, my husband bought a book called The Number Devil which Alex has read over and over again -- he loves it.)

In between paragraphs I went upstairs to confirm that yes, I am really an evil ogre who eats small children with horseradish and apricot jam I was serious about writing down some things to remember.  I fixed a quick lunch for the boy who said earnestly, "Part of the problem is that I'm hungry."  I stayed beside him while he wrote down six things that caught his fancy in the chapter we read.  Now he is happily writing the story of an alien civilization in side-by-side English and alien pictographs.  All's well that ends well for him.  For me -- I'm not so sure.

Committed and Crunchy

Before I became a homeschooler myself, I thought homeschoolers were probably pretty homogenous.  I was wrong.  People homeschool for a multiplicity of reasons and they use a huge variety of approaches.  What took me by surprise was the hostility that sometimes surfaces about their differences.

I got interested in homeschooling early on, but my husband was skeptical.  One night he said to me, "It's 11:30 and you're still washing the dishes.  How are you going to add school to the mix?"  When our oldest turned four, I began a little preschool-at-home routine to see if I could keep all the balls in the air.  We got a book called Five in a Row and gave it a whirl.  We both loved it.  And the dishes were clean to boot.

A couple of weeks into our experiment I was talking to an acquaintance who was homeschooling her older daughter.  "This is going so well," I said.  "We're both having so much fun with it!"  She turned a delicate shade of scornful and sniffed, "We don't do much sitting-down-at-the-table workbook kind of stuff."

Pssssssst went the air from my happy little balloon.  Welcome to homeschooling, Jamie.

By that time I had a vague idea that homeschoolers fell into different camps.  I knew there was a crunchy contingent, and I knew there was a committed Christian contingent with various denominational subgroups.  I told M, "I was born to homeschool, because I'm a crunchy committed Catholic."  But I didn't know how hard it would be to find a place to pitch my own tent.

The unschoolers reject the rigidity of the school-at-homers.  The school-at-homers are certain that the unschooled kids will never learn algebra, and how can you get through life without algebra?  In my experience, homeschooling support groups tend to lean one way or the other, and it's tough to be in the middle.

When I go to my local unschooling group meetings I feel kind of quaint, with my crucifix and my Latin lessons.  (But they are fun Latin lessons!  Really -- we go to the Fantastic Zoo together. Draconem videmus!)  At the Catholic support group meetings I feel conspicuously granola with my Birkenstocks and the almond butter-oat squares I brought for snacks.  (But they are good almond butter-oat squares!)  Mostly I feel like I did as a new mom at La Leche League meetings:  I do not belong here.

In this area as in so many others, I am puzzled by how easy it is for people to polarize themselves and point fingers at each other's perceived errors.  All of us who homeschool are stepping out of the mainstream to do what we think is best for our children.  All of us are doing something that requires a substantial investment of time and emotional energy.  We mostly agree that we live in a rich and lustrous world -- one in which we have too little time to drill for and take endless multiple-choice tests while staying under the class bully's radar.

Wouldn't you think we could focus on what we have in common?

I had been toying with the idea of trying to get a local Catholic group going since the one I occasionally visit, weird snacks in hand, is too far away.  I don't know if it will happen now, but I wanted to send an email to the parishes nearest us and ask them to include a bulletin announcement.  I had thought it might say something like "Homeschooling families:  if you'd like to get together occasionally for daily mass or field trips or visits to the park, call Jamie."

It's not the announcement I'd really like to see, though.  What I want to say is more like this:  Let's skip the unspoken competitions about whose family is more devout and who says a longer grace over lunch.  Let's not assume that faithful Catholics are required to fit a particular mold.  Instead let's take our motto from Augustine:  "In essentials, unity; in all else, liberty."  Let's remember that we are grinding the lenses through which our children will view the world, and let's strive together to give them the clearest vision we can.

I can't seem to fit that in 35 words or less, though.