Some people felt like it was merely an expression of relief to return to a familiar routine. I’m sure that’s part of it, and is perhaps the actual intent behind some parents’ jubilation over the return to school, though that might be somewhat belied by the sheer exuberance about the children being gone for the day.

Some people felt it was expressive of sometimes we all (even homeschoolers) feel, which is “I’d like ONE FRIGGIN QUIET MINUTE TO MYSELF NOW PLEASE THANK YOU!” Definitely a sentiment with which I can empathize, as I dearly enjoy a brief break from the constant demands of parenting, though I don’t think I’m in any way entitled to a 7-8 hour break, 5 days a week.

Some people felt like it was indicative of an unhealthy mentality about what our “real lives” are or should be and how we must send children away in order to have those “real lives.” I think this is the crux of it and this is far from the only area where this mentality manifests. I also don’t think this is something people are making up in their own heads; there’s serious social pressure to divorce our “real” identities from parenting and to celebrate opportunities to not be beholden to our children’s needs.

When a woman gets pregnant, she’s bombarded with social messages that tell her she is supposed to “want her body back,” and the pressure begins to keep pregnancy as short as possible. When she breastfeeds, she’s not only told she’s supposed to “want her body back,” but to “want her life back,” something that can only be done by weaning the baby, of course, since breastfeeding is clearly not a part of life and “life” seems to be comprised of as many tactics as possible to physically distance yourself from your offspring. Case in point, when her child becomes school age, the woman is supposed to rejoice in sending the child away (to “real” school, of course), so she can finally “have her life back” again.

“Life,” by the way, doesn’t mean the responsible thing you’re living, with a spouse/partner, children, and a job. “Life” actually means that thing you were doing BEFORE kids, BEFORE responsibility, when everything was fun, fun, fun and you were only responsible for yourself. There’s this emphasis on the false notion of “adult life,” which seems to actually be code for “second youth,” a period of late teen/early 20s-like self-indulgence, partying, and forgetting (temporarily, at least) that one even has children. Most of the people I encounter who are longing for this “adult life” aren’t talking about added responsibility or maturity, but time without children in order to act like children. This is adulthood? This is “real” life?

This isn’t a mentality found solely in public school parents. If anything, I think it’s a generational problem. Gen X grew up, with all their extra self esteems and misplaced sense of entitlement (seriously, I’ve read articles written by Gen Xers saying Baby Boomers should retire, because they’re selfishly keeping all the good jobs), and they’ve had a hard time adjusting to the fact that they are no longer the center of the universe or life of the party. I feel perfectly comfortable saying this, since I’m at the tail end of the Gen X generation, and I have seen it in so many of my peers over the years. I think my generation is getting far worse with age, actually, because that self-involvement that was charming in a teen and tolerable in a 20-something has become very tired in a 30-something. Gen X can’t pull its head out of its collective asses long enough to realize that this message of “real” life that they’re buying into so completely isn’t real at all. It’s fabricated by people who are selling something, be it baby formula or school supplies or a mentality about your “real” life.

Why are they so happy their kids are going back to school? They’re told they’re supposed to be.

And they bought it.

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.

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:

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.

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.

These are a few of the traits I think are part and parcel of good writing. A strong writer should:

1. Use and understand symbolism. Use and understand connotation (ie. subtext), which is a subtle form of symbolism.
2. Create and implement figurative language maturely and avoid trite or cliched figures of speech. Don’t be afraid to play with language.
3. Display an understanding of pacing. Avoiding a sense of “and then…” is one mark of a strong writer. Good pacing makes a simple story seem profound. Bad pacing makes a profound story into a movie of the week.
4. Write with a strong narrative voice, even in non-fiction. Narrative voice is one reason why some biographies are so easy to read and others are a chore. If you don’t have a sense of your own voice, how is your reader meant to?
5. Eschew obfuscation. Writing so nobody can understand what the hell you’re talking about doesn’t make you look smart; it makes you look pretentious. If you have a point, make it. If you have a thesis, show it. Circumlocution and superfluousness have their place, but humping your point/thesis is not it.
6. Avoid retelling  the same story unless you can write it better than the original. You can swap out whatever other items you like for hair combs and pocket watch chains, but we all know you’re just rewriting “The Gift of the Magi.” And yes, we’ve also all read that essay on feminist themes in “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” so you’d better find something awfully revelatory to add to that particular line of thought before you invest several hours of your time in it.
7. Ensure that any item or creature that interacts w/ your main characters should be a tool that furthers the plot line, a symbol (see #1) that sheds light in the inner mechanisms of the character, or both. If you aren’t giving us Chekov’s gun or a satisfying red herring, don’t give it to us. Don’t give the readers details they don’t need simply for the sake of including more details.
8. Craft quality sentences, because if you can’t write a good sentence, you can’t write a good paragraph or essay. The devil is in the details.
9. View learning to write as a ongoing process, not a terminal goal post. You never really “learn to write.” It’s not a finite skill set. You can always improve your voice, your style, your finesse.
10. Have the ability to accept and implement edits from an editor (or professor or word-wise friend). All manner of grammatical errors can be overlooked in the arena of professional writing if you have the ability to work well with an editor.

Since I don’t view academic writing as the termination of writing instruction, my goals for teaching writing to my children are much more in line with developing the above traits than in developing fluency in specific formats. MLA, Chicago, and AP style all have their places, but they aren’t the sum of writing. If a writer has good prose, s/he can always apply a format to it. It’s easier to teach a good writer to work within a set of formatting rules than it is to teach someone who knows the formatting rules to write well.

What traits do you think are requisite in a good writer? How do those traits related to your goals in teaching writing?

*Stay on my good side and share your writing goals w/ Patchfire, too, as she started this whole conversation.

ETA: Also consider reading Kurt Vonnegut’s “How to Write with Style”.

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 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.