Smrt Lernins

I think we’ve finally found our pace for the year. Watch, I’ll say that and next week will end up completely bunk.

Captain Science finally got started with Grammar Voyage and is making fast work of it. He took the pretest for the book and made 100%. If I had any doubts about Michael Clay Thompson’s ability to teach materials in a way designed for retention, those doubts are put to rest. He read pages 3-45 in Grammar Voyage this week. He also took the pretest for World of Poetry, and got 7 of the 15 correct — not bad, as I’m pretty sure some of those terms weren’t in Building Poems. He also started reading The Black Stallion and watched the 1970s movie version of The Secret Garden for a little comparative media experience.

In history, he read pages 22-57 in Eyewitness: Ancient China and wrote a beautiful piece on the ancient Chinese irrigation device. He wrote a first draft on Tuesday and rewrote it on Wednesday. He’s showing good progress with essay writing, which makes me very hopeful about a good beginning with Essay Voyage in a few weeks. We’re wrapping up China next week and beginning ancient South and Central America.

Captain Science finished lessons 8-11 in Life of Fred: Beginning Algebra, including the cities of San Francisco, Gainesville, Palmer, and Racine, and a “Your Turn to Play.” He is doing great with negative numbers and beginning multiplying with variables. At his Math Olympiad meeting, he worked on probability. Captain Science likes to play the odds of situations, so that’s right up his alley.

In PLATO science, Captain S completed the Plate Tectonics packet, the pretests, and the mastery test. He did a second pass of the application of that unit, as well, because he missed a few important questions on his pretest. He did very well on the mastery test and, today, started working on mapping. He finished the main video, but didn’t get through the application, so we might log in and do that in the morning.

Finally, he completed another unit of KidCoder computer programming. He’s running into his first real challenges, however, so he and Officer Daddyman are going to sit down this weekend and go back over the lesson to make sure he’s got all the right foundations to continue.

Tank also had a busy week. He worked on the numbers 6-10, including tracing and writing the numbers, counting objects, and matching items to numbers. He also continued working on his letters, doing a second pass with A a and starting B b. He did workbook pages on circles and rectangles, did some tracing and cutting work, and together, he and Officer Daddyman made a robot using various shapes Tank drew and then cut out. They will be pasting them onto a colored background, so I’ll get a picture then.

Babypie mostly worked on screeching, which she’s mastering, and on slapping the dog, which we’re trying to stop.

It’s not Wordless Wednesday, but I wanted to share two photographs my friend Trin took at her son Mat’s 2nd birthday party.

This shot of Captain Science is just beautiful. He looks all posed and pensive. Really, he was covering water jets with his hands.

I also love the ridiculousness that is Babypie’s bikini with matching hat. Please do your best to ignore me squinting in the background.

She didn’t get any pics of Tank, because he moves TOO FAST. Here’s one of the few I snagged:

The Institute for Democratic Education in America (IDEA) posted a great article today, “The Teacher as Soldier,” addressing statements by public figures about recruiting an “army of teachers” and questioning what war, exactly, these teachers are fighting. The author presents the troubling paradigm of, “Generals and leaders – Administration and the government; Privates/Soldiers – teachers; Civilians/those to be “aided” – students ([...]the group that needs to be fought for – to have things done for them because we don’t see them fit to achieve for themselves) [...] = The War for Education.”

Teachers as low ranked soldiers in a battle (against whom?) to educate passive, helpless student learners; administrators and politicians as detached leaders of a battle in which they aren’t even getting their hands dirty. Not a pretty picture. Not a picture the author enjoys. Is it really that far from the truth, though?

I think public education has become a combat scenario, to some extent, but it’s not a war for education. I’m not sure it’s a war for anything. It’s a skirmish between players with little vested interest, like politicians with children in private school. It’s a battle between Republican tax cuts and the systems that are now so underfunded that they can’t let staff into the building until the day school starts, leaving schedules unfinished, classrooms not set up, curriculum not set in stone. It’s a conflict between the few teachers who are genuinely invested in the success of their students and the administrative status quo that is focused solely on test scores. In this scenario, students are not the citizens being helped, but the friendly fire casualties of a large system floundering and firing randomly, hoping to hit a target they can’t even agree upon.

This is a pretty bleak picture of public education. It’s not an accurate portrayal of every teacher, school, administration, or system. There’s no denying that there’s a strong element of this in public education as a whole, however. Our own experiences in public education certainly point to that. No one was fighting on Captain Science’s behalf but us, and it was a fight we were well aware we shouldn’t have to fight: a fight for him to not be bullied by a teacher who felt threatened by gifted students, a fight for him to spend his days doing something other than worksheets, a fight to have any expression of creativity not squashed out of hand.

Parents have to fight with teachers and administrators to have their children’s most basic educational needs met, and while we’re doing that fighting, more and more funds are diverted away from the children who need them most. It’s obvious who the administration values — not the gifted students and not the special needs students. For the parents of those children, public education can be a constant battle.

The author of the IDEA piece writes, “Learning is not a war, it is an adventure. While it can be used as a tool to equip oneself with the awareness necessary to achieve justice, learning overall is discovery and an intriguing challenge.”

She’s right. Learning is not a war. Education, however, is most certainly a battlefield.

Today’s question is from an anonymous commenter on Formspring. S/he asks, “How do you find time for your relationship with your husband when you’re so busy with your kids? In a world where divorce is common, how do you keep that spark there? What do you talk about in the evenings? Do you ever find homeschooling consumes you entirely?”

What? What’s that you say? I can’t hear you, as homeschooling has eaten my head. *crunch crunch*

In all honesty, homeschooling does sometimes consume me entirely. It takes up most of my morning and afternoon. Planning takes up a portion of my evenings. Homeschooling certainly takes up a large percentage of my thoughts. I spent a neat little chunk of time writing about homeschooling.

Homeschooling hasn’t been the biggest stumbling block in our marriage this past year+, though. The thing that has really been draining is parenting in general. I have spent the last five straight years pregnant, breastfeeding, or a combination of the two. We have three children, ranging in age from 17 months to almost ten, plus a beagle. Someone always wants something from me. I’m tired and drained, physically, mentally, and emotionally, much of the time. I’m tired of people touching me. I have stints of a lot of anxiety, both generalized and specific. I can’t use the bathroom without a pottience or someone banging on the door, hollering through the door, sniffing and scratching at the door, crying “Mama! Mama! Mama!” outside the door, or getting into a fight downstairs. We’ve had one or more small people sleeping in our bed with us for the last four years. Mix that up with Officer Daddyman’s work (very late nights) and the homeschooling in the morning, and sometimes it does feel like the whole world, or at least the portion of it occupied by our children, is trying to come between us.

Keeping the spark is hard. A lot of the time, I couldn’t care less about the spark. I’m starved for a few minutes of intelligent adult conversation far more than I’m starved for romance. I sometimes trend towards not making enough effort, because I’m just too lacking in energy to care. Even in the less sparkful times, however, I always find Daddyman interesting. I like talking to him. I’m interested in what he has to say, whether it’s stories from work or explanations of a game system he’s working on. I like how he seems interested in all the probably-boring stuff I did during my day. I stay up almost every night until he gets home, even if that means forgoing a couple extra hours of sleep that I probably need. We spend a little time talking, maybe watch an episode of whatever show we’re watching on Netflix (right now it’s Studio 60 on Sunset Strip), maybe eat a little snack. Sometimes we have Quality Adult Time™ together. Sometimes we just have time together.

We have periods when we spend a lot of time together, periods where we drift too often to our separate computers, but mostly, I like Daddyman more than I like just about anybody else, and he seems to like me pretty well, and I think that’s what keeps us going. I like parenting with him, having general life stuff with him, having conversation (however trivial) with him. We actively work on getting it together and keeping it together. We’re honest with each other and we try to lay it all out there so nothing is hiding, building up resentment. Every once in a while, we have great big fights and great big make-ups, and that’s always nice, too, in the long run. It’s a work in progress, but I think any good marriage is. I want to keep working to find ways to make it better. I want to keep working to find ways to not just keep the spark, but to want to keep the spark. I see us making a lot of improvement in that area. I think it will keep getting easier.

Ultimately, I don’t think homeschooling is any more (and probably less) of problem in our marriage than any thing else. It’s a common interest and a shared project, and it means we’ll nearly always have something to talk about.

Just look at that MCT hotness!

Captain Science is motoring through some stuff!

This week, he completed the second unit of his PLATO Earth Science, watching the main video, doing the application activity, finishing the 7-page packet, taking the practice tests (and getting 100% on them), and then passing the unit test w/ a 90% (27 out of 30 correct). He started the third unit today and completed the video and the application activity.

Math is coming along nicely. Captain Science completed lessons 4-7 of Life of Fred: Beginning Algebra/Fred’s Home Companion, including the first set of cities (which this book has instead of the bridges in the previous books). He got all the problems in Adin and Elberfield correct! He’s also enjoying the Math Olympiad meetings, though he hasn’t completed the homework for next week’s meeting yet.

This week in history, he read about the first emperor of ancient China and about civil service careers in ancient China. He wrote his first history summary of the year, choosing to write about the civil service exams, their importance, and the risks of cheating. A valuable lesson, if there there was one. He wrote a first draft and a final draft.

In computer programming, he started his first actual piece of programming, a very simple application that pops up the text “hello, world!” He also reviewed the previous chapter and did a short test on those chapters.

I think he has finally finished The Secret Garden. He’s dragging it out, possibly because I also gave him It’s Perfectly Normal his week, a book on human development/puberty/sex ed. He’s alternating between the two and, as long as I don’t bring up puberty, seems perfectly comfortable learning about it. If I so much as say “hair under your arms,” he gets mad at me and says, “Can we change the subject?”

Tank also had a good week. He’s working on tracing, which is as much an exercise for his patience as for his hand. He worked on tracing shapes, identifying and writing the numbers 1-5, tracing big A and little a, and identifying words that start w/ an “a” sound. He finished a few pages in his workbooks on matching and comparing, as well. We’re hoping his friend Dimhibbins* will be joining us soon, perhaps as early as next week, for some additional pre-K fun!

Babypie’s big thing this week has been working out a nice balance of smacking and biting with Badge the beagle. She slaps him, he gently bites her, I intervene and fuss at both of them, they both look chastened, and as soon as I walk away, she’s smacking him and he’s nipping her. Honestly, since neither one is crying about it, I suspect this might be how they play. Puppy pals, maybe?

Today, we wrapped up our day with a “surprise” field trip to Fernbank to meet up with some friends and go back through the gecko and Sensing Nature exhibits more carefully, now that most of the public schools are back in session. Much less crowded! We blew some great bubbles, played with the sound exhibit (where I was faux-chided by my friend’s husband for saying “the magic of science,” because he says that’s the very thing I rant about on my blog), and looked at a backlit gecko’s internal organs through its translucent belly. All three of my kid came home with small plastic geckos (which only cost $.93 a piece before my 10% membership discount).

Anyway, that’s our week in review. Our Michael Clay Thompson stuff came today, so we can jump right back into that come Monday!

I received a pingback on the Secular Thursday page this morning from the blogger of Quarks and Quirks. After reading through the article that linked back to the secthurs page, I am strongly recommending it to all of you. Take some time to read through “Why We’re Not Secular Homeschoolers” and give it careful thought. It presents a differing set of opinions and attitudes to those that have lead many of us to write our Secular Thursday posts.

I think she misses the mark on a few points (for instance, I don’t believe it’s anger, but a search for “tribal” camaraderie in an overall non-Secular homeschool world, that drives most of us to participate in Secular Thursday), but she took the time to address this issue with great care and has invited polite discussion on it. I do think she hit the nail rather squarely on the head by pointing out that “secular” seems to translate too often to “atheist” or “anti-religious,” rather than “not overtly or specifically religious” (the definition she uses in her post and the one that I follow), leaving those of us that believe in something, but who don’t make that something the focus of our academic exploration, out in the cold.

I hope you’ll take her up on her invitation to participate in a conversation on secular homeschooling. Share why you’re a secular homeschooler (or why you aren’t), why you participate in Secular Thursday (or why you don’t), how you address issues of religion, secularity, etc. (or how you don’t).

ETA: I really wanted this to be the dialogue she requested, but apparently she’s only interested in a conversation with those whose opinions match her own, sadly. I see several great comments from you guys, but no responses.

My friend Heather’s oldest daughter is about to do something absolutely ridiculous: start first grade. I’m pretty sure she’s not allowed to be old enough to do that. In the spirit of preparing for this next stage in academic development, she IM’d me with this cute little message:

So, things homeschoolers never worry about:
1) Will the new teacher like my child?
2) Will my daughter make friends?
3) What if she doesn’t have any of her friends from last year in her new class?
4) Why am I sharpening so many damned pencils?

Oh, sweetie! Have I lead you to believe that the life of a homeschooler is a really so carefree? What a travesty! True, I don’t have to worry about teachers liking my child, but other than that? I have worries! I’m not worry free!

I worry about, on any given day:

1. Will my child be able to maintain his friendships with his public school friends?
2. Will my child have ample opportunities to socialize w/ homeschooling friends?
3. Will we cover all the subjects we need to cover?
4. Will getting in to college be too hard?
5. Does he hate homeschooling?
6. Does he hate me?
7. Would we all be happier if he were still enrolled in public school?
8. How on earth will I cover everything we need to cover?
9. Am I a failure for not having started Latin yet?
10. How about a modern foreign language?
11. Do my kids dress funny?
12. Are my kids well-adjusted?
13. Will my kids manage to actually pass those standardized tests?
14. If they don’t, what does that say about them?
15. If they don’t, what does that say about me?
16. Will I ever get a chance to sleep in again?
17. Do people think I’m doing this because I’m obsessed with Jesus?
18. What would Jesus think about this whole homeshooling business?
19. Am I way more boring than I used to be?
20. Why am I sharpening so many damn pencils?

See, Heather? We worry, too. We probably worry more, because the buck stops here. If our kids are all screwed up, we have no one else to blame but ourselves…and everyone KNOWS it!

Enjoy your babygirl’s first grade year and don’t feel too envious of us homeschoolers. We have it pretty good, but we don’t have it worry-free.

This has been a great week for working on projects and getting things done.

Our Life of Fred: Beginning Algebra and Home Companion books finally arrived. Captain Science completed lessons 1-3 in Home Companion. He also had his first Math Olympiad team meeting last night. I’m not exactly sure what he worked on or how well he did, but he enjoyed it, and enjoying math is a goal that all parents should want their parents to achieve! We’ll go weekly on Thursday, 6:30-7:30, which makes Thursdays a busy day for us!

Captain Science is still working on his Pantheon Project, writing the blurbs for the cards. We’re waiting on our next MCT curriculum to get here, so this is a good opportunity for him to focus on a little writing. He’s completed the work on the Greek pantheon cards and will go ahead and do the Roman pantheon next. Speaking of Rome, he also finished all the flash cards for Cesar’s English I, which we should have been doing this whole time, I realize now. It really cements the words in his memory. We’ll continue with the flash cards for the remainder of the book and with Cesar’s English II.

Computer programming began this week, too. It was mainly vocabulary and history of computers, but a nice foundation on which to build. We’ll be setting aside a two hour block every Thursday for Captain S to work on it. The final project of this semester is to program a game of Pong!

We’re finished the first unit in our PLATO Earth Science course. Captain Science passed the skill mastery test with 96%. He started the second unit today. We’re working on science four days a week, M/T/W/F.

Captain Science has almost finished reading The Secret Garden. It’s a nice change of pace from Where the Red Fern Grows, what with no dogs dying. He was excited to recognize one of the sentences from the first chapter, which has been used in Cesar’s English I as an example sentence! So far, not a peep of argument about the assigned reading, though. I think we’ll start The Black Stallion next week.

Tank got two new giant workbooks from Nana, who picked them up at Costco. He happily worked on them Monday through Wednesday, then declared yesterday that he was too tired to work on anything but drawing (which he did, quietly, in his room) and flat out refused to do anything but watch Go, Diego, Go with our brand new DOG!!!!! this morning. Last week, Tank and I discussed that if he were going to school at his old preschool, he’d only be going four days a week anyway, so anything he does on Fridays schoolwork-wise is lagniappe, anyway. On Monday, I think we’re going to do some more time-telling work, since he’s enjoying that and has grasped the concept of the small hand telling the hour.

Do public schools kill creativity?

Yes, I think they do. I watched Captain Science’s ability to think outside the box be slowly crushed during the course of his 3rd grade year, until he was afraid to think creatively (at least within the context of education) out of concern of chastisement by a disapproving authority figure. I saw the traits that made him unique treated as character flaws or manifestations of a disorder. I even went along with it at first, worried that I had simply been misinterpreting aberrant behavior as creativity.

Our story isn’t that unusual. It should be unusual. It should be completely off the wall, but it isn’t.

A friend recently shared some examples of class rules sent home by her daughter’s third grade teacher. The packet contained fifty rules that the children must follow. Not simple, two or three word rules, either, but fifty rules that meticulously spell out the exact behavior students were to exhibit under nearly every imaginable circumstance. Some examples:

Rule #3 of 50 — If someone in the class wins a game or does something well, we will congratulate that person. Claps should be at least three seconds in length with the full part of both hands meeting in a manner that will give the appropriate clap volume.

Rule #17 of 50 — We should be consistently be able to turn from one book to another, complete with all homework and necessary materials, as quickly as possible. The opportune amount of time to spend in transition should be less than ten seconds, and we will work toward a goal of seven seconds.

Rule #23 of 50 — Quickly learn the names of other teachers in the school and greet them by saying things like, “Good morning, Mrs. Graham,” or “Good afternoon, Ms. Ortiz. That is a very pretty dress.” Note: If you are in line with the rest of the class, you are not allowed to speak to the teachers at that time because the no talking rule is in effect.

Imagine your eight-year-old children receiving a list of fifty such rules. Do you see a lot of room for expressions of individuality within those rules? Would your child come out of that classroom more creative or less? Is this classroom, and the others like it, helping mold a generation of independent and abstract thinkers?

Sir Ken Robinson thinks public schools are killing, rather than nurturing, creativity, and speaks eloquently about it: