Smrt Lernins

Tank is dressing as Spider-Man for Halloween. On the drive home from Stevi B’s tonight (where we went to offset the sorrow of Captain Science spending the night with Memomma, but not Tank), Tank began to expound upon the various types of Spider-Mans. Along with “old” Spider-Man (regular o’ red suit guy) and “black suit Spider-Man” (symbiote suit), there’s apparently quite a long list of alternative Spider-Mans.

Types of Spider-Mans
as dictated to Smrt Mama  by the Tank while riding in the car

• No-Hands Spider-Man. He has no hands and shoots webs from his arms.
• No-Head and No-Hands Spider-Man. His stomach is his head. His belly-button is his one eye.
• No-Tummy Spider-Man. His arms and legs and feet come right out of his head.
• Mind Brain Spider-Man. He’s a scientist of brains. If you need to find out about brains, you call him. He has a car with a map on it to help you find where the brains are.
• Muscles Spider-Man. He shoots webs from his muscles. My costume is Muscles Spider-Man.
• Wheels Spider-Man. Instead of feet, he has wheels. He shoots webs from his wheels.
• Top Spider-Man. He makes lots of statues. The statues shoot webs. “Top” is his nickname.
• Upside Down Spider-Man. His feet are his hands. His hands are his feet. He uses a tornado to walk instead of his legs. He shoots webs from his tornado.
• Robot Spider-Man. This side [left] of his body is Legos and this side [right] is robot. He shoots webs from his fingers. That’s what he is.
• Night Spider-Man. I don’t know about Night Spider-Man. He…He…I don’t know what he’s about.
• Giant Spider-Man. I forgot about one Spider-Man that I love, Giant Spider-Man. He’s a giant Spider-man. He can crush bad guys because he’s giant. It’s kind of hard for him to see, because he accidentally crushes buildings.
• Big Hand Spider-Man. He can crush bad guys with his big hands. He can punch them and stuff and throw them out of the world.
• Super Spider-Man. He can fly and he has a special rope that can swing on trees and go to the other part of the world. It might be the Dark World. The Dark World is so easy, I’ve found. That’s the world I’m on.

There you have it, folks. In case you were wondering about Spider-Mans, you now know all the different kinds.

Wellllll…so we kind of had a slacker week, relatively speaking, at McLernins Institute of Advanced Lernins. Since coming home from Disney, we’d been making major progress, but between my weekend activities (a HUGE event I helped run) and the awful chest cold that’s been dragging me down this week, I just couldn’t be super motivated to continue at our prior pace. We took it nice and easy this week, but I think that was a nice break for everyone.

A few highlights from our week:

Captain Science is finally making progress in math again. He finished pgs 101-104 in Life of Fred: Beginning Algebra/pg 49, Lesson 32 in Fred’s Home Companion. He did the cities of Advance, El Campo, and Gadsden. He attended a Math Olympiad meeting and worked on problems there in preparation for the upcoming tournament. He also watched the lesson from Khan Academy on the distributive property, worked problems sets from that, and did additional problems with Officer Daddyman. As much as I hate to admit it, I think we’re encountering a little of that “not developmentally read for Algebra” thing you hear about on the WTM forums. He has all the skills necessary to do the work. He can work through it each time if reminded of the need to use the distributive property. There’s something conceptual he’s struggling with. I think we may have cracked it this week, but only Monday’s lesson will tell.

In language arts, Captain Science only spent two days working in Essay Voyage, and covered the Correct Sentence and Punctuation lessons in Chapter 3 (Unity). He read a section in World of Poetry, but didn’t write any poems this week. He read the first 30 sections of Beowulf. I don’t remember if I assigned any Caesar’s English II or not. My head is spacey.

He did some more reading on the middle ages in History: The Definitive Visual Guide. This week, he read about Medieval Europe, the Black Plague, and about William the Conqueror/Battle of Hastings (1066!). We’re doing an overview of medieval history and he is then choosing the topics he’d like to study in depth. I have so many resources that I thought it would be fun for him to just go crazy-go-nuts amongst my books.

Science-wise, Captain Science completed the last of the stuff on rocks and soil and moved on to the water cycle. He did the rock mastery test, along with a review of parts of the lesson, then completed the water cycle unit, the application, and the worksheet packet. I need to snag An Inconvenient Truth from Patchfire so that he can read that. He’s doing supplemental reading from Science: TDVG as well.

Tank did some letter matching this week, worked on Halloween pictures, and played some games.

Babypie discovered My Little Ponies.

Oh, and we also watched The Black Stallion together. That’s enough, right? We did enough?

Of all aspects of learning/education, the one I value most, without question, is reading.

Reading is the skill I most want my children to learn and to learn to love. I want them to start reading early, read often, and continue reading throughout their lives. I model reading, we read aloud, we buy books often (they’re one of my few shameless impulse buys), we pack their rooms with books. Captain Science could read at 2, could read well independently by 4, and continues to read well above his suggested age level. Tank really wants to read, but isn’t there yet. He has word recognition for a short list of words, but I can see him being ready to actually read by age 5. I’m doing as much as I can to encourage this, because I see so much value in reading at a young age.

I’ve seen a lot of arguments against early reading. I’ve read claims that children aren’t really ready for reading until 8 or later, or that boys usually don’t (or can’t) learn to read until age 7, or that reading before then is actually bad for children. I’ve heard parents talk about gently (or sometimes less-than-gently) steering their children away from reading because they (the parent) didn’t feel the children were ready. The Waldorf method of education actively discourages reading until at least 2nd grade (of course, they also don’t let kids use black crayons, so perhaps let’s not use that as the rudder to guide our discussion). I’ve heard the inevitable, “Well, whether they learn to read early or late, it all evens out by [whatever date they happen to choose from whatever study that confirms their biases].”

Academically speaking, that might be true. Perhaps a student’s reading ability at third, fifth, seventh, or whatever grade is roughly the same whether s/he learned to read at 4 or at 8…on a purely quantifiable level that measures only the reading ability and nothing else. Standardize testing is excellent at quantifiably measuring a single skill out of context. On the level of the heart, the soul, and the creativity, however, I will not accept that early reading doesn’t offer a great and irreplaceable benefit.

A child who learns to read well by 5 has three more years to devour books than the child who learns to read at 8. that’s three more years of beautiful fictions enriching the mind and sparking creativity and curiosity, three more years of absorbing knowledge and storing it away, three extra years of being able to choose a book over a more passive form of entertainment. That’s not nothing. In fact, that’s a pretty damn huge something that early reading offers over late reading.

Now, I love reading to my children. I think it’s a wonderful, educational thing. Read-alouds and audiobooks won’t cut it as an alternative to those additional years of active reading, however. Listening, while more actively imaginative than watching TV and beneficial in its own right, is still much more passive than actually reading. No need to imagine tone or voice. No need to puzzle out unfamiliar words. It’s much less of an exercise for your mind and your imagination. Losing yourself in a book is an experience that has no substitutes. Why on earth would I intentionally keep that from my children?

I think this is an area where Christian homeschoolers seem to, in general, have the right of it much more so than many subsets of secular homeschoolers. Between the unschoolers (“Oh, it’s ok that my 12 year old struggles with reading! She’ll catch up when it’s important to her!”) and the Waldorf-method homeschoolers, we’ve got a nice little chunk of our smallish population that doesn’t place that much emphasis on reading. I don’t know if it’s because the ability to read the Bible is, you know, kind of important to Christianity or because they are more likely to adhere to a more classical form of education, but Christian homeschoolers seems to be much more encouraging of this early reading. Not all of them, of course, but just in a general observation.

I’ll continue to work with my children to help them unlock their reading skills as early as they are able. I’ll encourage them to read often and read well (both in ability and in literature choices). I can no more imagine discouraging reading until age 8 than I could imagine discouraging mobility in a baby, simply because someone else has decided that 5 months is too early to crawl or 9 months is too early to walk. If the seeds of ability are there, don’t smother them. Water them. Will it make a difference in long-term ability? Maybe. Maybe not. Will it make a difference in the richness of their childhoods? Absolutely.

Reading a particularly disgusting thread on the WTM forums at the moment, entitled “What would happen if….70% of women, who hold full-time jobs, left the work force? Just for fun-what do you think would happen?”

In a stunning display of everything wrong, sexist, and just offensive on that forum (and in homeschooling AND in that “traditional” Christian mindset), one user replies, “More men would be gainfully employed and therefore better able to *properly* provide and care for their families,” and multiple users comment with the “I agree” icon.

Yes, let’s say that again. Let’s say it in big bold letters. “More men would be gainfully employed and therefore better able to *properly* provide and care for their families.”

Women leaving the workforce would be a GOOD thing, because then men could have jobs and be providers. It’s WOMEN keeping men from having enough jobs. It’s WOMEN who keep men from being “proper” providers. THOSE TERRIBLE WOMEN! I might just go puke a little right now. But sure, why not? I’m sure this plan would work out beautifully for everyone as long as you:

• Forget all the single parents families. They deserves to be wageless. Only MEN should provide for their families. If you don’t have a man, that’s your fault. You probably ran him off or you should have turned a blind eye to lying/cheating/abuse or you’re a slut for getting pregnant without a man.
• Forget the lesbian families. They’re going to hell anyway. If only they’d repent and get a MAN to provide for them.
• Forget the families where the mother’s education and training are higher, and she can get the better job. Education is wasted on women, anyway. Men should get all those jobs.
• Forget the families that need two incomes to stay afloat. Men can take a second or third job now that they’re available. That’s what a real provider does, and God knows, a woman can’t be a real provider.
• Forget the families where the man has been injured on/off the job, has developed a chronic illness, or  has some other health concern that limits or precludes his ability to work. Pshaw. I guess those guys oughta just suck it up. Shake it off, boy, it’s just a truck.
• Forget the families where the mom is simply happier at work and dad is happier at home. Women who aren’t happy at home have something wrong with them. Men who don’t provide for their families have something wrong with them, too.
• Forget the families where the man is just plain worthless and won’t work.
• Forget the families where the parents have little education, few job skills, and already work several minimum wage jobs to get by. What, dad can suddenly add an extra 12 hours to his day to pick up a fourth or fifth minimum wage job, to make up for the one that mom doesn’t have?
• Forget the families where one or both parents are incarcerated. All those kids being cared for by mom only, by grandma, by aunties? Well, it’s not like we really want the children of criminals to grow up in anything less than abject poverty, right? Keeping those kids in as low an income as possible will definitely make sure they grow up to not follow in their parents footsteps!

Thank goodness there are a few people with a lick of sense on that board. Best response so far was from Rivka:

The GDP would plummet. The US would drop many immigration barriers in a desperate attempt to prop up the economy and fill huge gaps in the workforce. Tax revenues plunge at the same time that there is a massive increase in the need for public assistance. Female-headed families become hungry and homeless in droves, and unfortunately there are very few social workers or professionally-run charities to assist them because the women who dominate those professions have all gone home.

Your husband will almost certainly get a big raise, but he’ll also almost certainly be pressured to put in 80-hour weeks as his company tries to function with so many fewer workers. Don’t expect to see him much. Don’t expect his increased wage to improve your family’s standard of living, either – in such a dramatic labor shortage, wages for jobs like supermarket checker and gas station attendant will have to go through the roof if those positions are to be filled, and so the prices of basic goods and services will skyrocket. Lots of US jobs will simply move overseas where there is plenty of cheap labor.

Hospitals are plunged into chaos with virtually no nurses; all elective procedures and routine care will need to be canceled while nursing training programs are hastily set up to train some of the new male immigrants in nursing. The death rate for hospital patients soars. Because things like mammograms, Pap smears, and colonoscopies are halted due to the need to prioritize on emergency medical services, the cancer rate climbs. If you have a relative in the hospital, be prepared to go and stay with that person yourself 24/7 to provide personal care, prepare and serve meals, administer meds according to the doctor’s instructions, etc. If you need to go into the hospital and don’t have someone able to sit with you, I hope you survive. There are no more midwives. Your options: unassisted childbirth at home or a virtually unattended (no L&D nurses) hospital birth in a criminally understaffed facility. Maternal and neonatal death rates soar.

At first it seems that elementary schools will have to close, but then they triple or quadruple class sizes so that male middle school and high school teachers can be spread out to cover all the grades. Parent volunteers fill in as best they can. Special needs students suffer the most; the vast majority of OTs, speech therapists, etc. are women, and those aren’t jobs that can be taken over by volunteers.

By the time everything shakes out and we return to some degree of economic stability, 30% of American workers are permanent residents or new citizens born in a foreign country. The huge influx of immigrants is hard to assimilate; they’re so critically needed that they must be welcomed, but U.S. culture returns to the atmosphere of New York City in 1900. Language barriers and lack of experience continue to depress the economy. There are nurses in the hospitals again, but they only speak rudimentary English and most of them are brand new. So the death rate doesn’t exactly go back down again.

And, by the way: women who wanted to work and/or needed to work will not universally find joy in being a stay-at-home wife and mother. Especially not given the increased economic stress caused by soaring prices and the increased workload caused by the scarcity of service workers.

“Just for fun?” It would be a social and economic nightmare. An utter nightmare.

Oh thank goodness! A better answer than “emulate the Proverbs 31 woman” or “sell crafts on Etsy.”

I’m a SAHM (mostly, I do on and off freelance writing/editing work) by choice, because Daddyman and I both felt it was important to have a parent at home, and it made more sense for that parent to be the one who could actually nurse the babies. The idea of all women being FORCED to stay at home is just absolutely terrifying. Seriously, WTMers, y’all are messed up sometimes. Maybe I need to start spending moretime on Secular Homeschool.

Have you ever had one of those days where you covered one subject and feel like you should get a gold star sticker for accomplishing even that much? Yeah, it was one of those days.

I suppose that after so many great post-Disney weeks, we were due a bad Monday, especially since my weekend was swamped with the BOLD Red Tent event that Patchfire and I (along our three dear friends, Mel, Mandi, and Sarah) ran on Sunday. The boys stayed over at Nana’s house and she didn’t bring them home until 11, with my blessings, I might add.

I coaxed Captain Science through one chapter of math, which involved two hours on one problem, partially because he seems to have decided he just can’t master the distributive property. Once I started asking him questions, he was all, “Ooooooh, I didn’t realize you meant to do that!” *headdesk* Whatever, kid. Just finish your math.

After that, I put on The Black Stallion and called it our “comparative media” class. We paused the movie multiple times to discuss what was happening, how it compared to the book, etc. Captain Science said, “I like seeing the look in the movie compared to the look in my imagination.” He’s going to write an essay about it tomorrow.

Because I’m a MOM (mean ol’ mom) and because I think he can handle it, I gave him (one of my many copies of) Beowulf to read. Not a young reader version or a simplified version. Just my unabridged modern English translated text from college. Why? Because I can and because I think he can handle it. Plus, how do I pass up the version that begins with “Lo!”

Tank’s day consisted of computer games, tormenting the dog, and falling off the kitchen counter while sneaking candy. I’m a winner of a mom right there. He did, however, finally tell a joke that made sense and that he actually got: Why did the chicken cross the playground? To get to the other SLIDE.

Babypie asked me for a “bite of water.” Ok, then!

This week started out with lofty plans, but was derailed in a couple of areas. For starters, Captain Science is consistently having difficulties w/ a certain type of algebra problem set-up, so we tanked our math plans for the week and Office Daddyman has been making math Mad Libs w/ Captain Science this week, in order to work on that type of problem. We also went to the Roy Barnes rally on Wednesday, which made that day pretty much academically useless after the rally was over.

Here is what our week should have looked like:

Monday

• Life of Fred pg 95-100, Your Turn to Play – review w/ Daddyman
• PLATO Science – Rock Cycle mastery test
• Essay Voyage pg 40-43
• Caesar’s English pg 39-41, completed work on pg 40, note cards
• History: DVG pg 158-159
• Finish at least 4 Pantheon Cards

Tuesday

• Life of Fred pg 101-104
• Fred’s Home Companion pg 49, Lesson 32
• PLATO Science – Weathering, Soil, and Erosion lesson and application
• Essay Voyage pg 44-47, choose from options 1, 2, 3, 4, or 6.
• World of Poetry, read pg 40-45
• History: DVG pg 160-163
• Finish remaining Pantheon Cards

Wednesday

• Life of Fred pg 105, Advance and El Campo
• PLATO Science – worksheet packet
• Essay Voyage pg 49-51
• Caesar’s English pg 42-45, Classic Words Challenge and Caesar’s Usage
• History: DVG pg 164-167

Thursday

• PLATO Science – practice tests
• Soccer
• Math Olympiad

Friday

• Life of Fred pg 106, Gadsden and Hampton
• PLATO Science – Weathering, Soil, and Erosion mastery test
• Essay Voyage pg 52-53, Correct Word Assignment
• World of Poetry read pg 46-51
• History: DVG pg 168-171

Here is what our week actually looked like:

Monday

• Life of Fred pg 95-100, Your Turn to Play – review w/ Daddyman
• PLATO Science – Rock Cycle mastery test
• Essay Voyage pg 40-43
• Caesar’s English pg 39-41, completed work on pg 40, note cards
• History: DVG pg 158-159
• Finish at least 4 Pantheon Cards

Tuesday

• Math Libs word problems w/Daddyman
• Fred’s Home Companion pg 49, Lesson 32
• PLATO Science – Weathering, Soil, and Erosion lesson and application
• Essay Voyage pg 44-47, choose from options 1, 2, 3, 4, or 6.
• World of Poetry, read pg 40-45
• History: DVG pg 160-163
• Finish remaining Pantheon Cards

Wednesday

• Math Libs word problems w/ Daddyman
• Barnes Rally

Thursday

• PLATO Science – worksheet packet
• Soccer
• Spend a half hour chasing our escaped beagle and missing Math Olympiad

Friday

• PLATO Science – practice tests on Weathering
• Essay Voyage pg 49-53, Correct Word Assignment
• History: DVG pg 164-171
• Caesar’s English pg 42-45, Classic Words Challenge and Caesar’s Usage
• Math Libs word problems w/ Daddyman

We still got a lot done and we’re mostly caught up, excepting math and World of Poetry, but it wasn’t the week I’d envisioned.

Patchfire’s Eclectic Girl and my Captain Science get involved in politics.

I obviously have my beef with religion. My experiences with organized religions haven’t been positive. I’m not talking about my experience with faith or belief, but with the structures that surround them, the hard and fast rules these structures try to impose upon that belief and upon people…not just the people who wish to belong to those structured religions, but to all people. I resent having someone else’s interpretation of faith pressed upon me and my children.

That’s awfully common in homeschooling circles. I know you know it. Statements of faith for co-ops. Unreasonable expectations of behavior at activities. Scathing looks when you drive up in you minivan covered in liberal bumper stickers. You know, hypothetically speaking. It’s hard, as a secular homeschooler and a non-religious, particularly non-Christian, person, to not develop an overwhelmingly negative view of Christianity, Christians, and religion in general.

Sometimes, though, they get it right. Lately, I’ve been seeing many examples of that. When we went to Pride, I saw easily a dozen congregations marching in the parade, but only one small group protesting. The other day, someone linked me to a beautiful article in Esquire, written last year by Christian minister Shane Clairborne. Though this article was addressed to non-believers, but his letter was as much to Christians who think they are better than those non-believers. I was moved — this, this surely must be what draws people to Christianity. The God I believe in is love. Not a God who expressed love selectively. Not a God who can love. But capital-L LOVE itself. I couldn’t believe in any other sort of God– not a vindictive God, or a God who makes mistakes and punishes you for them, not a God who wants certain people elevated above others, not a meddling God playing with us like chess players– but one that is, purely, Love. Minister Clairborne seems to get that.

And then I saw this: Pastor Jim Swilley talking openly to his congregation about being gay, honestly addressing concerns, and dispelling myths. He doesn’t have to break from his faith to do it. He doesn’t have to turn his back on a Christian interpretation of God. That gives me a lot of hope for Christianity. Yes, on the fringes, people are moving more and more to the extreme, but I think a compassionate, intelligent middle must be growing. I have to hope so.

On this Secular Thursday, I’m sending out my thanks and my potential-heathen-but-hey-deal-with-it blessings to Pastor Swilley, Minister Clairborne, and all the congregations I saw in the Atlanta Pride parade. You make the world a lot easier for the rest of us to live in.

Today, I’m wearing purple to raise awareness of anti-gay bullying. I’m not wearing purple for my kids, though. Gay or straight, my children are growing up in a home where they know that they and the people they love will be accepted. They know their parents will not tolerate–or perpetuate–homophobic bullying.

It’s your kids I’m wearing purple for today. You, over there…the one who believes that being gay is a choice, that being gay is a sin, that being gay is going to send your child or someone else’s to hell. You, in whose home a gay child will grow up being too afraid to share who he* really is, who will hide his true self out of fear of losing your love, who will hurt or kill himself because he doesn’t believe it will ever get better.

Your child is the one I’m wearing purple for today.

If you suspect, or know, your child is gay, here’s a few simple things you can do:

Don’t try to beat the gay out of him.
Don’t try to pray the gay out of him.
Don’t send him away to be reprogrammed.
Don’t try to have him committed.
Don’t ignore bullying at school because “boys will be boys.”
Don’t ignore bullying because it will “toughen him up.”
Don’t bully him.
Don’t mock him.
Don’t ridicule him.
Don’t try to “make a man out of him.”
Don’t tell him he’s a sinner.
Don’t tell him he’s going to hell.
Don’t tell him his love is less than yours.
Don’t tell him his love is wrong.
Don’t tell him he is wrong.
Don’t tell him he is unloved.
Don’t tell him he is unworthy of being loved.
LOVE HIM.

If you can’t do the things on that list, if you cannot love your child and treat him like a human being of equal worth, with equal rights, perfectly created by God to be exactly who he is, then for God’s sake and your child’s, send him to me. I’ll open my doors to him, because I’d rather have him safe and cared-for here than abused and bullied to the point of hurting himself there. Or…or…won’t you try letting go of your hate and your fear and your ignorance, embracing your LGBTQ child, telling him how much you love him, that he is cherished in your home, that you will keep him safe and will never, ever, ever perpetuate bigotry, hate, or homophobia.

Can’t you do that? Can’t you wear purple in your own heart for YOUR child and the children of others?

*I say “he” in this post because the tragic bullying-related teen suicides in the media lately have all been among seemingly-cisgendered males who either self-identified as gay or were labeled gay by others, but for those of you with lesbian daughters, for those of you with transgendered children, for those of you with bisexual or genderqueer children, please apply the same rules.

We’ve had a slack past few weeks with homeschooling where Tank is concerned. I’ve been doing progressively less and less with him during the day, academically speaking, and there’s really no good excuse for it other than dealing with all three kids is kind of exhausting. However, I had these three kids, so I need to find ways to make it work.

This morning, Tank and I actually sat down and spent about two hours doing school work together. We tried to do some work with his telling time cards and his foam clock, but the concept of telling time beyond the hour is still a bit over his head. We did move the short hand around the clock and say the times out loud. He also identified the time on a few of the cards that were just hours, no minutes. I might cull the hour-only cards from the rest of the stack and work on those.

We also pulled out the Phonics I flash cards (we have two sets, Phonics I and Phonics II) and went through the letters and their sounds. I was worried that Tank didn’t know all his letters, but it turns out he actually does know them all, with just a slight mix up with Y (he can differentiate it from V side-by-side, but thinks it looks like V otherwise). He could identify all the letters in order and out of order, with the exception of G when shown it out of order, which I think threw him mainly due to the picture of a goat, which he thought was a sheep. He’s also showing some progress with his fricatives! He was able to make a clear S sound for the first time today. Came out of the clear blue! He says he’s been using my iPhone phonics app to practice the sounds the letters make.

We also did a little building w/ the unit blocks. He made a castle with two guns. I made our house, complete with all our porches. After that, we had a snack, and now he’s watching some Mickey Mouse on the Disney website.

Christmas lists, apparently.

Tank, perhaps as a stall tactic to avoid going to sleep, just rattled off his Christmas list. He would like the following:

• A magnifying glass
• Dinosaurs. [Big dinosaurs or small dinosaurs?] Both. Big dinosaurs and small dinosaurs. Dinosaurs from movies and maybe people from movies, too, you know, like Wow Wow Wubzie. And the dinosaurs.
• The games [from Gamewright, our favorite game company, Feed the Kitty and Bzz Out]
• Pretend bombs
• Doodle Track
• No, instead of Doodle Track, a book about how dinosaurs lived and a book about how trees grow

Quite a list, no?