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Tuesday, March 27, 2007

and it breaks my heart

This is our Fix-A-Sentence from yesterday (the Before version; I was going to photograph it After too -- in fact that was pretty much the whole idea of getting out my camera in the first place -- but the kids erased it before I could. Rest assured that this little paragraph was properly punctuated, capitalized, etc., when it was done).

This is a really fun way for the kids to practice their grammar. And of course since I write them, I can propagandize any way I want. Yay homeschooling!

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

oh joy

This evening after history class, as I was gathering my things and preparing to head to the pizza place with Debi and another friend of ours for breadsticks and diet Cokes (well, Anita wouldn't touch diet Coke with a ten-foot pole, but you get the idea, on with the story, Rachel), T and the kids walked into the room. It was a nice surprise; they had finished with Boy Scouts and thought it would be fun to see Mommy at school. (Mommy going to school is a hugely amusing idea to the kids, actually, or to C at least.) I introduced them to the instructor as we were on our way back out the door, and he did what every homeschooling mom loooooves so very much. He started essentially quizzing my kids, starting with C. Asked what she learns in school, she said, "Math, and reading and science, and we used to do history." [ask me if I wanted to find a convenient hole in the floor and crawl in at this point -- we used to do history every day but we backed off and now only do it, on a full, formal, sit-down basis, every now and then. Still, we have less formal discussion on the topic all the time, and I guarantee my kids are learning stuff about history that they would never in a million years be learning in public school in the fifth and second grades, respectively. I bet HIS junior high students -- remember, the instructor's day job is at a middle school -- couldn't do nearly as cute an impression of the difference in fighting methods between the Europeans and the Indians as C does, either.] Then he asked if she was doing double-digit multiplication in math. She is seven. She is in the second grade. She hadn't a clue what he was talking about but she hesitantly nodded; I had to correct her. He asked if we plan to homeschool through high school, we said yes, with some community college classes thrown in; he said 'good luck with that' in a 'you lowly uncredentialed idiots, you'll need it' tone, and we thanked him and left.

All in all, really not that disastrous, right? So why is it that my stomach is still clenched up and I am still apostrophizing him from time to time with "just let me walk up to some of HIS students on the street and ask THEM to tell me what they know and we'll see how quick THEY are on the draw" and similar comments? Why do I feel like I need to prove myself to someone like him? Jenn would tell me I care too much what people think. (Thank you, Jenn, you're entirely right, I do.) I need to turn off the nameless dread and let it go. I'm doing a fine job and my kids are bright and intelligent and respectful and loving and they're even at or above grade level in all their subjects except that their handwriting is rather atrocious, and how many times do you ask a public-schooled kid what he learned in school that day and get the answer "Nothing", and does that mean the school is worthless and he in fact learned nothing, of course it doesn't, sigh.

Still and all, to make myself feel better, we'll have a rousing discussion about the Revolutionary War tomorrow. We'll have a great time. And Mr. "Good luck with that" can stick it in his ear.

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

this turned out to mostly be about school

I'm staying up late tonight, hoping to make it until T gets up at three (yes, THREE. Thank you, boss-man.) to go to work, so that I can make him coffee and oatmeal (and maybe some bacon just for the wake-up scent value) for breakfast.

There were two parenthetical statements in that sentence. I do try to avoid that, usually. I'm too tired to mess with it now. As soon as I get done here -- I actually logged on to post Librivox updates, and got sidetracked -- I'm getting off the computer and doing some reading, where I know I can't a) damage anything or b) embarrass myself, no matter how tired I get.

Grammatical embarrassment just reminded me of my kids' favorite part of school this year: Fix-A-Sentence. In high school we did a thing called Daily Oral Language (not sure if this was a local teacher's invention or not; maybe everybody does this in high school; I don't know) where there would be a sentence, rife with errors, on the chalkboard, and we as a class would have a discussion wherein we repaired it and made it all proper and satisfying and correct. I think we had to write it down too but it's been a lot of years and plus it's 1:30 AM and I just don't remember. I should call Mr. Keller and ask him, right now, don't you think? I'm sure he wouldn't mind. Anyway. I have started doing this with my kids, and calling it Fix-A-Sentence or Sentence Doctors instead of DOL which is kind of a boring title, and besides, oral language involves a whole lot more than eliminating phrases like "very unique" (although I am certainly all for that), putting commas where they belong, and knowing where to put the hyphen in the phrase "fortieth-birthday party" (am obviously in favor of those, too. Oh, how I loved DOL).

Dang. Shut UP Rachel.

Anyway. The kids love this. They LOVE it. They would do it all day long if I let them. Especially if it got them out of doing math. Really, though, math is going well for them too. LT has some challenging stuff going on right now, but he's handling it. We're handling it, I should say, since I'm the one with the headache at the end of each lesson. History is actually turning out to be fun -- we're doing the history of the United States and right now we're just getting to Columbus' voyages. I didn't get a history book in time so I'm using a college US History book as a source text and coming up with my own curriculum for the two of them, which works fine for them and is a great refresher for me too. And we're doing science stuff and reading The Incredible Journey and the book of John and we're really having fun. Not that the kids (*cough*LT*cough*) would ever admit that.

Tuesday, September 05, 2006

dream analysis 101 followed by a wacko introspective about housework

What does it mean if I have had a week of very memorable dreams, all involving either a) world-scale disasters such as nuclear war and comet collisions, b) massive failures in various attempts at important tasks due to my blistering inadequacy at, say, walking, or c) both?

Oh yes. It means today's the first day of school.

********************************

update:

School went fine. Everyone was quite cooperative and so it took less time than I thought it might and actual learning took place. Oh, that's nice, Rachel, you might be saying. Then why is it that your hair is standing on end and your chest feels tight and you want to run far away into the hills? Ah. Well. That'd be because of room-cleaning time.

We give ourselves a bit of a problem in this area, I admit. Well, really, we (T and I) give me a bit of a problem, since I'm the one who has to deal with it on a daily basis and he is not. On the one hand, we can't just bring ourselves to be the bohemian, tie-dyed, parents-are-pals kind of parents who tell their kids, "I don't care how messy it is, just keep the door closed," for several reasons: First, we have to traverse their rooms to get to the laundry room and to the clothesline, and LT has to get through C's room to get to his. Second, how do those parents deal with it when it's time to go somewhere and the child can't find a single thing he or she needs, from socks on up? Third, well, we're just not that bohemian, I guess. We're school-at-home types too. Oh. That kind of parents. Yeah.

On the other hand, though, I refuse -- I patently refuse -- to clean their rooms, especially C's, or even to help her clean it, because it makes me absolutely bananas, even more bananas than I am at this present moment and that's pretty darn bananas to tell the truth, to do the work of cleaning with or for her only to have the room be an utter disaster area again within 48 hours. I am Not A Good Mommy when this happens.

So this leaves us requiring the kids to clean their own rooms. LT is not so bad at this nowadays. He's finally figured out that it's a job he has to do and the quicker he gets going and gets it done, the sooner it'll be behind him. C, on the other hand, will cheerily spend all day -- literally all day -- in her room, supposedly cleaning it and then weeping remorsefully every time she gets scolded and/or punished for not doing so. This makes me absolutely insane. Do you ever feel like having your head explode would be so, so nice, not because you want to die -- that would, indeed, be an unfortunate side effect -- but because the release of pressure would feel so, so good? You don't? Do you... have kids? Oh. Must be just me then. Because I feel this way every time it's time for C to clean her room.

And we've tried so many things. We've tried rewarding her for keeping it clean. We've tried racing her to get it clean (against, say, me folding all my clean laundry) and whoever wins gets a prize. We've tried keeping it lighthearted. We've tried spanking. We've tried taking away privileges (there have been times where she was on computer restriction for three or four weeks at a time, all as the result of one particularly nasty bedroom-cleaning incident). We've tried taking away cherished possessions for various lengths of time. I yell. I explain. I rave. The only things that have ever worked are:

1) T or I stand in her room and tell her what to pick up, continually reminding her to move along and not dawdle, until her room is finally clean. (see above re: wreck in 48 hours and I Am Not A Good Mommy, etc)

or

2) She has to clean it every day before she can do anything fun at all whatsoever. Even reading.

Number Two actually lasted for maybe a month last spring. The difficulty with it is that things intervene -- school, a necessary trip somewhere, whatever -- and before you know it three days' worth of mess have piled up and you're back to square one.

Complicating this whole thing is the simple fact that I am not a good example. Sometimes, in fact, I feel like a complete hypocrite, going ballistic at her for stalling and dawdling when my bedroom looks like a clothing tornado went through it and I have four baskets heaped up with clean unfolded laundry sitting in the living room. I rationalize by saying that I'm trying to teach her good habits so that she won't end up like me. Except maybe I should spend the same effort teaching myself good habits, so that I can stop ending up like me. Hmm.

Monday, August 29, 2005

The First Day

Debi asked in a comment on my last post (this is my third post today. Yes, this is the same person who didn't post for, what, a week? Shut up) how our first day of school had gone. I feel kind of dishonest calling this our first day of school, because like most homeschoolers (and many families in general) our days all involve learning, some more purposeful than others -- but it is only during the school year that we have "sit-down school" as I call it, where we, well, sit down, and do regular subjects one after the other like people at regular school do. Anyway.

The first day has gone really well so far. We read our two chapters of Exodus, made animal classification collages:

... had a good talk about who came to California when and who was here first (tomorrow we'll go to the library after school and get some good books about this subject, and start studying California Indians before we move on to exploration and missions and all that fun stuff), had our book discussion, played geography games, and did all the usual journal writing/printing practice/math worksheets kind of thing. We had a half-hour of free reading (my favorite time, even though the rest has been fun) and a half-hour of playing catch, wherein both kids made progress. I am definitely not a stellar example of What To Do Right When Throwing And Catching, but somebody's got to do it. If they can just learn the basics, practice will help a lot. I hope. If not, I'll enlist someone (like the neighbor boy who, at 11, is adept and coordinated at every physical thing I've ever seen him do) to help. The kids have been really cooperative. The day took from about nine-thirty till three-fifteen, including break and lunch; the collage project took up a lot of time.

Today was a pleasure, in other words, and I'll cherish the memory of it when I'm having a tear-out-my-hair-and-run-for-the-hills day. Or I'll try to remember it, anyway, as something other than an impossible fantasy.

School poem

This is the result of our Crazy Lib for today. (Mad Libs are a huge part of the reason that I ever learned parts of speech; what better tradition to carry on in my own personal private school?)

Without further ado:

The Garbage Gatherer
by Alfred Noyes
(with a little help from the students of Liberty Christian Academy)

The clock was a torrent of pain among the thin trees,
The fork was a squeaky tank tossed upon stinky seas.
The book was a ribbon of moonlight over the pink moor,
And the garbage gatherer came flipping,
Flipping, flipping,
The garbage gatherer came flipping, up to the heavy inn-door.

He'd a French cocked-hat on his skull, a ton of paper at his chin,
A steak of the claret velvet, and breeches of windy doe-skin.
They fitted with never a wrinkle. His bombs were up to the thigh!
And he ran with a jewelled twinkle,
His pistol butts a-twinkle,
His rapier hilts a-twinkle, under the slippery sky.

And over the stairs he clattered and melted in the silly inn-yard.
And he cuddled with his horse on the shutters, but all was locked and barred.
He whistled a tune to the boy, and who should be falling there
But the landlord's black-eyed warrior,
Herbert, the landlord's warrior,
Pushing a dark purple toy into [his] long lavender hair.

-- Corrupted excerpt from "The Highwayman," by Alfred Noyes.

the start of school (and Henry)

We start school this morning. We were going to start after Labor Day, but of all things, the kids bugged me to start earlier. Today was the soonest I could really feel ready. Here's hoping that this level of enthusiasm lasts, eh? If I were going to set up a betting pool about it, I'd put $5 on... Thursday. Thursday is when the enthusiasm will wane and the griping begin. But hey, I am darn sure going to enjoy this while it lasts. Here's what our day looks like (schooldays get longer and longer as they get older):

1. Prayer and Flag Salute (the latter is largely a concession to T, who is a school-at-home homeschooler if ever I saw one, but honestly I'm that way in the beginning of the school year too)
   
2. Read two chapters of Exodus, taking turns (this will happen every day until we finish the book, and is preparation for the 40-week-long study of Exodus on which we're about to embark in our chapter summary study)
   
3. copy work (printing/cursive practice. The text they're copying today is Philippians 2:14 -- "Do everything without complaining or arguing." This has been our first-day-of-school verse for three years now. After Awana starts on Thursday, they'll each have one of their Awana verses to copy each day.)
   
4. History (discuss early California)
   
5. Geography games on the computer
   
6. ---------BREAK-----------
   
7. Math
   
8. Science -- collages of animal groups cut from magazines (mammals, insects, birds, fish, etc), with discussions of characteristics
   
9. Read Chapter 1 of The Indian in the Cupboard; discuss, and look up vocabulary words
   
10. Crazy Libs (parts of speech)
    
11. ---------LUNCH------------
    
12. 1/2 hour free reading
    
13. P.E. -- play catch, then ride bikes. (ordinarily we haven't done PE in the past, figuring that outside play was enough. However, our kids are a little behind on things like throwing and catching, etc., and so we decided that a little structured practice on large motor skills each day would probably be a good thing.)

So that's our day. By spring it'll look more like:

Read a lot. Do a page or two of math. Talk about whatever. Maybe do a little writing.

I've come to realize that this is OK. Our kids are at or above grade level in everything (except the aforementioned PE), so something about this entropic system must be working OK.

P.S. Our cat Henry disappeared over the weekend. In the grand scheme of things, especially this weekend (plenty happening on both a grand and a small scale), that's a small thing, but we're sad about it. He was the friendliest cat I've ever met. We've decided that we'll keep Mary but we won't get any more cats while we live here -- apparently (since this is the second of our pets to disappear this year) we live in a bad spot for them. Ironically, we had just started letting our now-flea-free cats be mostly indoors again when Henry went out at 2 AM and never came back.

Tuesday, August 16, 2005

The Socialization Issue

Thicket Dweller has an excellent post today about socialization and home-schooled kids. (For those of you recently landed on this planet, "the S word" is bandied about with regularity as evidence that homeschoolers are depriving their children of a normal upbringing. Or something.).

You know, the issue for me isn't "can you tell the homeschoolers apart from the public-schooled kids?" Because you can, in most instances. The question is, do we WANT our kids to blend in perfectly with public-schooled kids -- and for me, the answer to that is a resounding no. I like that my kids know more about 19th-century English usage than they do modern slang; I like that their facial expressions and body language speak of openness and interest, rather than sullen eye-rolling "whatEVER" when they're around their parents and other adults. I like that they can speak respectfully and intelligently to people of any age. I could go on. My answer to the socialization question is not, "oh, my kids get plenty of that." It's, "why would I want my children to turn into clones of every other child in their generation?" Homeschooled children mix with people, yes, but they don't do it on a playground filled with several hundred people their own age (and two adults to keep them from drawing blood). How much like the real world is that scenario?

And this is all aside from the point that school shouldn't be about socialization. But our culture has embraced school as this universal bonding element that all people go through on their way to adulthood, and so a childhood without it is somehow lacking, and where will kids make friends and how will they learn to tough it out in life without bullies stealing their lunch money and calling them names and AAUUGGHHH HOW CAN HOMESCHOOLERS THINK THEY CAN DO IT WITHOUT US? is what it comes down to, basically.

Monday, May 09, 2005

mother's day etc.

Well, I'm going to join the ranks of Christian women bloggers who are explaining why they're not blogging as often anymore. My reasons aren't as cool as theirs -- especially Molly; I mean, who can top having a baby as a reason to stay away from the computer? But I do have a little list of reasons. I have a crochet project I'm working on really hard; I am trying to get through Mansfield Park; we're getting to the end of the school year and I'm getting that "you slacker, your children are going to hate you when they're adults because you basically took off the entire months of March and April from any kind of regular sit-down school every year and that meant that they reached the age of 18 barely able to multiply single-digit numbers and now they live in the ghetto and scrounge in trash cans for a living THANKS A WHOLE LOT MOM" kind of panic. I KNOW it's not true, I mean, heck, if I stopped right now they could probably get jobs with, I dunno, the postal service or something. And most importantly, they're growing and blossoming and reading and writing (sometimes even legibly, but don't count on it) and being creative and they're very bright and everything. It's just this kind of opposite-of-spring-fever thing I get every year, don't mind me.

Also, it has been raining again, so I haven't been taking a whole lot of pictures to post, or going for walks. And the biggest reason is that I have a tendency to spend way too much time sitting here in front of this machine, and I need to work on curtailing that to a conscionable level. Don't expect me to disappear (especially because my resolve on this sort of thing is notoriously weak), but don't expect a post every day either, I guess. Which, hey, who's been expecting that lately anyway.

quick Mother's Day summation: I spent the day at home, except for a brief excursion to the library's used book sale, because LT woke up in the wee small hours on Sunday, throwing up. It ended up being a one-off, but we couldn't know that in time to go to church or the family gathering afterward. Plus I was up at 3 a.m., washing sheets and blankets and cuddling my nine-year-old (!!), and that is not conducive to getting up bright and early. It ended up being a pretty nice day, all things considered. We didn't play a family board game like I wanted to (the boys' round of the Star Wars trading card game thing or whatever it's called took longer than they thought it would), but I didn't have to wash dishes or cook, and I DID have ice cream and cookies. Definitely a day for the positive column. :)

Monday, May 02, 2005

out of practice II

Well, here's how you get me to shut up, I guess. Just get me my own domain and I completely run out of things to say for days on end.

Real life started again today. No sitting in the recliner crocheting for hours. No waking up in the morning and stretching lazily and going back to sleep with my leg stretched over T's. No, T went back to work, and the kids and I had a regular day filled with school and errands and housework and all that. I even cooked dinner, which I hadn't done since April 12th, which has to be some kind of record, right? Laundry, messes, getting the soap out of C's eyes in the bath, getting down the breakfast cereal, shopping for things we're out of -- all these things are once more my responsibility. I wouldn't mind, in fact it would be nice to be getting back into our routine, if it weren't for the fact that we had become accustomed to the luxury of having T home all the time and now he's not, and we just plain MISSED him today. It was almost as bad as the day he had to go back to work after two and a half months off for a broken ankle in the winter of 2002/2003. I'm inclined to make a joke about that being pitiful, but I really don't think it's pitiful, if I didn't like having him around I wouldn't have married him, right?

Also, I have to seriously start watching what I eat again. I gained FIVE POUNDS in the past three weeks, not only because I was sitting around not getting much exercise, but also because I ate like a trencherman the whole time. I think I felt like I had to make up for the three days of either liquid diet or no food at all. And people kept bringing us these fantastic meals, and the meals were so HEARTY and the quantities were so large, and T wanted to make me happy so he would bring me heaping bowls of ice cream with brownies, and anytime I was hungry I would just snack. So if you ever should NEED to gain five pounds in three weeks, (I will try hard not to hate your skinny self and) there's the method right there for you.

Good things about today:

• School. The kids were cooperative and we all really enjoyed ourselves. LT gets to basically skip the chapters in his math book that deal with the multiplication tables, since he learned those last year, so now he's doing geometry and measurement, which C is learning along with him as well as doing two-digit addition. They both have books they're really into right now -- LT is tearing it up in his Hardy Boys series (well, tearing it up for a nine-year-old, at least), and C has one of those old-fashioned school reading textbooks, maybe from the 40's, which she borrowed from my parents yesterday, and she's halfway through it. Every time I hear her read out loud she surprises me with how FAST she's getting better and better at it.
  
• The library. I hadn't been there in weeks. I didn't find any books I wanted (when I'm reading Austen, nothing else has any appeal) but I found a few movies. And it was good to just BE there.
  
• LT discussing Austen adaptations with the librarian.
  
• The rebate from the purchase of The Nikon finally arrived, just in time to pay (pause to push down the wave of white-hot self-loathing trying to overtake me) the fine from my traffic ticket.
  
• I went back to the community chorus and I really enjoyed myself.

Oh, man, I am just SO un-funny tonight. You know the scene in The Phantom Tollbooth when Milo winds up in the Doldrums? And the doldrums kind of slink around and talk slower and slower until Milo is lulled into a state of exhausted apathy? I am that tired.

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