Smrt Lernins

The Tank goes to a Methodist preschool. A half-mile down the road is a Catholic private school. Both schools have carpool at the same time.

Today, it was raining pretty heavily as I dropped the Tank off. The carpool line stretched around the building, as only one car fits under the covered awning at a time. The other teachers working carpool mostly stood around looking disgruntled at the weather and how long it took to get everyone through carpool. The teacher removing the child from the car had to have at least a minimum of dialogue with the parent, of course, and a little chat with the child as the teacher proceeded through the unbuckling process with more cheer than haste.

After dropping off the Tank, I drove past the Catholic school. This carpool line was moving at its normal rate of speed, aided by a half-dozen teachers in, I kid you not, matching rain ponchos and umbrellas. In a perfectly coordinated dance, they managed to remove children from about four cars at a time, shuttling them into the building and keeping the line moving.

There you go, folks. The difference, in a nutshell, between Catholics and Methodists. The difference between Baptists and Methodists is that Methodists make eye contact and wave when they run into each other at the liquor store.

After a string of lame-to-adults, hilarious-to-kids jokes, Captain Science said, “I have thousands of jokes like that!”

I said, “Really? Thousands?”

He looked thoughtful for a moment and answers, “Well, probably not thousands. Tens of hundreds, though.”

You can pick your friends and you can pick your nose, but if you pick your nose and end up with pinkeye, you can’t see your friends at the co-op.

A bird in the hand probably has mites. Put that bird down.

Anything worth doing is going in my homeschool blog.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice and I’m sending you back to public school.

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you’ll be asked which curriculum you used.

A friend in need is a friend who will ask you to loan them your vocabulary test booklet.

Many hands make Mama harried.

If at first you don’t succeed blame it on flaws in the curriculum.

If Mama ain’t happy, you’re probably dawdling.

The early bird gets done with his work in time to go to the park.

There’s many a slip ‘twixt the planning and the implementation.

Two wrongs don’t make a right angle. 90 degrees do.

The road to hell is paved with evolutionist science materials, apparently.

In the land of the blind, the one eyed man has 100% more sight than those blind guys. That’s 1/1 or 1.0. He also has 50% fewer eyes (1/2 or .5) than me.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, but Roman history can be covered in 8 weeks.

Out of sight, into something they probably shouldn’t be.

What homeschool adages do you us?

Did you know you can now follow Smrt Lernins on Twitter? No, I can’t think of a single reason why you would want to, but you could.

I’m a fan of theme-blogging, because it makes it much easier to think up a posting topic if I know the day has a them. With Wordless Wednesday, Secular Thursday, and now “Ask a [Smrt] Homeschooler ” Tuesday, I’m becoming the laziest blogger ever. Stay tuned as I wow you with more boring nonsense!

My non-homeschooling friends and family have a lot of questions about how such and such works. I can’t answer for all homeschoolers or, ok, any other homeschoolers, but I can certainly answer for this particular Smrtly Lerned homeschooler.

Today’s questions come from my friend H. the Harried Homemaker:

“How do you keep your shit together [without having 9 hours of time during the week to not answer questions or tend to someone else's needs]?”

I mainline coffee from 9am-5pm and then drink heavily after the children go to bed. I’ve also convinced myself that I’m two separate people. I switch on Homeschool Smrt Mama during school hours and pretend that Actual Smrt Mama is spending four hours at a day spa getting highlights put in and her unmentionables polished. I also spend a lot of time hiding in the bathroom with a book. Captain Science asked, “Why do you have so many books in the bathroom.” I told him it was for reading while in the bath and neglected to mention that sometimes I sit in there and read while pretending to poop.

How [do you] keep the house straight when you’re never really out – there’s no separation between house and school?

We have a lot of stuff and very little time to sort that stuff. Luckily for me, Officer Daddyman collects plastic bins. We fill a bin and put it somewhere, and if we don’t need to sort through the bin to find anything for about three months, we just bury it in the backyard. Amazingly, this words well for disposing of dead pets, too, though I’d recommend an opaque box for that.

It seems like homeschooling is the ultimate act of submitting to your family. Not in some patriarchal bullshit [way], but being there.”

Ok, this one wasn’t phrased as a question, but it still sounds ask-y to me, so I’ll run with it.

Submitting, no, but subsuming, yes, a bit. It isn’t much of a shock or a paradigm shift, because I’ve also spent the last 4+ years pregnant and/or breastfeeding. I’m used to being there 100% for them. I never got a chance to get out of the habit of just always being RIGHT THERE if someone needed me or of rescheduling what I want to do around what the babies might need. If I’d started this several years down the line, after I’d had the opportunity to adjust back to the non-lactating, non-cosleeping way of life, it might have been harder to adjust to it and felt more oppressive, but I’m already a shambling zombie wearing a living babycoat all day, and you can’t really oppress a zombie. Zombies don’t pine for the fjords.

Do you have a question you’d like to Ask a [Smrt] Homeschooler? If so, email me at smrtmama@smrtlernins.com!

Captain Science, while looking up a word in the dictionary*, said with frustration, “Why do teachers make students memorize things? In the future, we’ll all have personal robots who tell us anything we need to know.”

I said, “Well, then in the future, we’ll all be pretty dumb, won’t we?”

Later he said he wanted a personal robot servant to flap his shirt for him, so that he could cool down. He also said his personal robot servant would fix him a snack. “I have lots of servant robot cooks.” When I told my mother, she said I should tell him he needs to learn a lot about mathematics and get a degree in robotics, so he could build his servant robots.

“I’ll just have my servants build them for me,” was The Captain’s response.

“Your servants?” I asked.

“Yes, when I’m rich and famous, I’ll have lots of servants.”

My mother pointed out that you have to do the work up front if you want all of that, because no one will give it to you (“unless you’re Paris Hilton,” she added). Captain Sciences says that he will invent new words and get rich off of them.

Sounds like a plan. Hope he remembers the little people.

*Please note that he wasn’t being asked to memorize anything here. He was just feeling pissy and this was the topic that popped into his mind, I guess.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned that I teach a creative writing class for a local secular homeschool co-op. I had nine students and am now, sadly, down to seven. We have an interesting age mix, 7-12, despite my specific instructions in the class description that all students be ages 8+. Rules do not apply to homeschoolers, whose children are all so gifted that it practically grants them an extra year.

We just finished our non-fiction unit. The final non-fiction assignment was writing an article for a newpaper or magazine. One quirky child of about nine submitted this little beauty, which I will now shared in his exact words, spelling and grammar included (just a hint, this is best if you read it out loud):

I had my first “these kids are homeschoolers” moment today while teaching my creative writing class at the co-op. Co-op policy for quieting a rowdy room is to clap three times. The students are supposed to respond by clapping three times. I’ve joked with my students that instead of clapping, I’ll just wave my arms wildly until they look at me, because I felt silly clapping at a group of such brilliant writers.

Today, the class was getting a bit rowdy, so I did the triple clap. They all clapped back at me. I triple clapped again. They all clapped back at me. I clapped “shave and a hair cut.”

They clapped “shave and a hair cut” back at me.

Yes, that’s right. They clapped the same thing right back at me. I thought that maybe, just maybe, they’d been on such a roll with the clapping that they didn’t realize what I’d clapped, so I clapped it again. Once again, they responded by clapping it back at me.

These kids didn’t know “shave and a hair cut, two bits!” Ok, two be fair, two of them (of the nine) knew it, but the other seven kids didn’t know that the appropriate response to a clapped “shave and a hair cut” is “two bits.”

I explained what I was doing and what the correct response was. I clapped for example. I sang “bump ba da dum dum…dump dump.” I even sang “shave and a haircut, two bits.”

Once again, I clapped “shave and a haircut.” Once again, they clapped “shave and a haircut” in response. Really, you guys? Really?

I explained that, one day, they’d go to college and they’d be expected to know things like this, or people would look at them like they had something wrong with them. The would not make it as well-adjusted adults without knowing the appropriate response to “shave and a hair cut.” I carefully coached them in the appropriate response. Two bits, people. TWO FREAKING BITS.

One last time, I clapped “shave and a hair cut.”

Well…8 out of 9 of them are going to turn out all right, at least.

Question: What happens when a toddler is left unattended with filched markers (used for The Captain’s timeline) on Labor Day while his brother and mom are working on history?

Answer: Nothing good.

[He's doing a lovely "naughty dance" here as he tries to sneak pretzels into the playroom]

I’m pretty sure my child has full sleeve tattoos in his future. I just hope he waits until he’s 18.