Unschooling Math and more rabbit trailing

Some more links to math sites:

Living Math!
HT: JoVE at Tricotomania
and while visiting her site I also found these ones:
Homeschool Math Blog
Anti-textbook math page
Also, her post on Teaching and Learning is helpful in reminding me of the bigger picture in what I am trying to do.

Also, while I'm still on math:
MacBeth's Opinion: Math
Unity of Truth: science and math blog for Catholics

Speaking of rabbit trails:

My oldest son recommended Watership Down as good reading to me; I had recommended it to him last year but hadn't actually read it myself. It IS a good book. I finished it yesterday and am now trying to find a victim/listener to read it aloud to. Coincidentally, Melissa at The Lilting House had just blogged about it in All Roads Lead to Rome -- Even for Bunnies

Perhaps inspired by the bunny on the cover of my book, my youngest (age 3) wanted me to read him the ABC Bunny, a wonderful alphabet book I remember from my earliest childhood days. Wanda Gag is one of my favorite picture book authors.

Which brings me somehow to phonics:

Speaking of the alphabet, somehow my two youngest have learned most of the alphabet names and sounds by playing phonics with Vtech gamestyping letters on the computer keyboard, and a Leapfrog game I don't have the time to look for right now. They also like a Montessori book called the Red Letter Alphabet Book. And my 6 year old enjoys Handwriting Without Tears preschool resources. Especially the magnetic board and the workbook, which we pick up sporadically to use.

And now time for silflay -- (Lapine for going out to eat):

Or rather, this will have to stand in for a real blog post because my almost 7 year old seems to be heading for (minor) surgery around the time of his 7th birthday, which seems to be a pattern for him -- I think he has been in the hospital for 3 of his 6 birthdays so far! He is uncomfortable today.

Older children are having swordfights to the score of Pirates of the Caribbean -- count that for PE today -- I'm getting tired just listening to it!

It really is time for lunch, I think! Other details for today: occupational therapist coming to do sacro-cranial therapy with Aidan, church choir (my daughter), possible baseball awards banquet tonight (have to look at my calendar and am not sure if we'll make it considering Aidan's health), Brendan's overview (we finished Gawain and the Green Knight and are now embarked on a reprise of Beowulf), and a family walk. Oh, and we wanted to zip over to our local library.

Aidan is still not better

Today we went for two walks. One with the boys and then later in the afternoon, one with Clare. Aidan was hurting more again today so we are thinking that I will have to call the nurse tomorrow : (. It is a challenge keeping him quiet! He will play, then clutch his stomach and gasp, “The monkeys!” which is sort of hard to explain — he picks up expressions and kind of “loops” them — last week it was “the kitties at the office saying meow!” and this week it’s “the monkeys throwing apples at the zoo and saying, nss, nss!” He says this kind of thing over and over with various permutations — “the monkeys live in the jungle!” etc. He does this especially when he’s in distress of some sort, maybe it helps him deal with the discomfort sensory overload.

He was playing with his car today, pretending he was an Indy500 driver after watching some of it on TV yesterday. He also wanted me to look up images of race cars on Google, which is how he approaches everything he’s interested in. And he carried around: the broken off wheel of the stroller and the ambulance from his Doug and Melissa puzzle. This is another sign of distress for him; latching onto an object for security. Well, no, it’s normal for him to be attached to some object and the stroller wheel has been part of his life for several weeks, but when he’s under stress he does it “more so.”
I read to him several times today and he played his V-tech phonics game. He enjoyed the walks and also I sat outside for a while so he could play in the front yard.
I discussed lots of things with Clare — while I walked Aidan around the living room in his wheelchair. Mostly feminism and distributism. Sean read Brendan’s book and so did Clare. There are four comb-bound volumes around so everyone is on a different section. Clare gave me a copy of her book so far and asked me to mark it for typos and syntactical errors so she can reprint it.
We did our Monday house-cleaning and later on went to the market and bought our weekly candy bars.

Kevin again played Monastery Mystery (or whatever the title of the new board game is) with Liam, Sean and Kieron. I played Liam chess in the evening and he beat me, so I guess my last win was a onetime fluke. Oh, well. So it was a quietish Memorial Day. Lots more people around than usual in our neighborhood. It is a mostly vacation-home division with only a few permanent residents on our street, but today most of the houses were occupied.
Liam and I had a story-writing discussion after our Rosary tonight. He is reading Bulfinch’s Mythology among others in order to try to include some legend-type components in his story. I am reading Watership Down, at his recommendation. We talked about how beginning writers sometimes try to sound profound, and how Flannery O’Connor quoted Mauriac saying, “Purify the source” ie there aren’t really any shortcuts to being a really good writer. We talked about how sometimes writing gives us a chance to bring up a sort of distillation of ourselves that is somehow better and more real than our day to day selves. But today’s journal ain’t going to be one of those occasions. I am in under the tree with Hazel and co and this all seems sort of routine and not worth writing about — but I know if I don’t write it down, I won’t remember it, and this journal is sort of my springboard to remember what went on in a given day.

Math anxiety continues. It IS summer so I’ll try to bear it. But I don’t see how I can unschool math. It just doesn’t seem to happen on its own around here. Everything else we DO get to, in our unconventional way. I joined an unschooling math group at yahoo. We’ll see. I really want to work through this.
On the walk, Sean was asking me what college is like. He is 13 and the question took me aback. He wanted to know what sort of things you do and if he’d be able to do it. I was not prepared with a ready answer. I am not even sure why he asked!

OK, back to Watership Down!!

Blending Classical Education with Unschooling

Faith at Dumb Ox Academy has a very interesting series of blog posts about the book A Thomas Jefferson Education:

• Core and Love of Learning
• 55 Ingredients
• 55 Ingredients continued
• My(Faith's) distillation of TJE routine

Also check out her post on Unschooling Classically with some nice suggestions on creating an informal learning environment. I am enjoying her thoughts!

Also, for further reading, another commentary on ATJE by One Sixteenth--this one is from a secular classical homeschooling perspective.

And here's a review of the book with some links to other comments.

Brendan's High School

Last Friday I finished reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to Brendan. It was nice how it tied into our epic theme of the last three years. It was a spectacularly organized and vividly realized poem and the ending was a revelation to me. Before that I read him Thorstein the Staff-Struck and before that 1 and 2 Maccabees. The year before was the Aeneid and then the Gospels of Luke and John, then Acts and Romans, and before that, the Iliad. Every once in a while I read him a Psalm. This is something we do in the first 15 minutes of his daily “overview”, while he drinks his hot cocoa and eats breakfast.
Will we continue this now that he is officially graduating? I do not know, but we will see! I will miss this tradition when he is moving out into his adult life! My father kept a journal of his medical school years and one entry mentioned visiting his mother during the winter holiday and the two of them carrying on their old tradition of ushering in the New Year by reading poetry. So maybe my days of reading to Brendan will not be over even when he is out in the world.
Last week Brendan also finished reading Modern Times by Paul Johnson. I am trying to decide whether it would be a good move to collect some of the other 20th century books I used with Liam last year. He wants to read more about politics but of course, political books are quickly outdated and there are few that are fairminded.
Also last year he read: Triumph, Marco Polo’s Travels, A Taste of Chaucer, 2 Lives of Charlemagne, and Bulfinch’s Legends of Charlemagne.

I am going to have to find his notebooks to reconstruct what he did during his first and second year.
This is how we did the first couple of years of his high school: After the daily reading, we’d move into Math and then Logic and then alternated Latin and German. This would take about 45 minutes and we would both be fried afterwards. Then I would write down his assignments for the day under categories like: Math, Language, Literature, History, Science, Civics/Worldview, Religion.
I also had a category called Free Reading where I would keep track of what he was reading on his own. And there was a Life Skills/Activity category so I could jot down things he did outside the academic box. For example, when he was Simon of Cyrene in the youth group Living Stations of the Cross. Or when he stacked several cords of firewood for the winter. Oh, and composition was another category. A lot of his composition time was devoted to writing his “book” but sometimes I’d assign him either reading and exercises from a composition textbook, or a written essay on the literature/history we were doing. Sometimes I counted verbal discussions as composition, too.

A fairly informal, flexibly-based classical curriculum and it had quite a lot of good in it — EXCEPT that this is not really the way Brendan learns best. Six or seven separate things every day. The math and languages came over to him like pounding nails into wood with a hammer. …. a headachy, insistent approach. I was working with him because he had little motivation to approach the texts on his own, but my speed of teaching left him feeling slow and bemused.
Brendan profiles as an ISTJ in his temperament. He needs things to be concrete, logical and black and white. You would think he would enjoy the clearcut, wrong or right type subjects but there is an element in him that shows up very clearly in his story, which I’m reading now. He needs to prepare, he needs to have his own motivation, and he needs to dig deep and pursue something with lots of intensity. Tours through concepts he had no reason to want to know and then immediate expectations of feedback — DIDN’T work for him. And he KNOWS when he hasn’t mastered something. He is a perfectionist.
Consequently, though I did a lot of the “right” classical things with him and gave him access to high-quality content, I think I did harm as much as good. I reached him with the literature and history — or he reached me — which came first?? But math and language was largely a failure. Next year, we can be more peers in learning and he can set the pace since he will be a graduate who is figuring out what to do with his own life.

The bigger question: is there some way to have these rich educational experiences without the Procrustes aspect? (you know, the robber who fit everyone in the same bed by stretching some on a rack and chopping bits off of others). I will regret it if I don’t have these memories with Sean and Kieron that I do with Liam, Brendan and Clare. I loved the books and the little projects and plans. I just did not like being the cause of “negative learning” in the kids — you know, where the child learns something you did not intend to teach — that I know better than they do how they learn; that they are stupid in a subject; that X subject was boring drudgery.

I guess I would like to have the richness and beauty and diligence in our lives without the push/pull and the expectations imposed from outside.

Getting Back in the Game

As for the title: well, I decided that “interlude” must mean etymologically ” between the game”, so since my last post was about interludes… OK, you see, and if I’m wrong in my etymology, don’t tell me. It’s after midnight.

After I wrote my last post about learning interludes, I decided I could better discern what was really going on if I got off the computer. So I did, and I went and made lunch for the kids and then we all went outside. I kept my nose out of a book and tried hard to be in the moment, watching and being part of the following:

* Paddy and Aidan engaged in wheel physics — letting the stroller wheel (which is now called “Pwheel!” for some reason unknown to everyone but Aidan, the exclamation point stands for the excited squeak with which he says the name) race with the toy dump truck down the hill in front of our house. THEN they got a baseball and tried similar experiments starting from our neighbor’s steep driveway.

* Clare and Kieron playing a game, then doing a choreographed fight with their “swords”, and then having a discussion that got heated and ended in Clare sitting very thoughtfully on a rock and Kieron mumbling sadly to himself.(sigh– my role was to reflectively listen and to provide a background spectator to keep the discussion from getting too personal or wounding, but I think I started listening just a trifle too late).

* Liam and Sean passing the football back and forth and Sean asking me to critique his side arm something.

* Brendan coming out near the end to hang around with the other older ones and help Aidan chase Pwheel! down the hill.

Kevin walked with Sean, Clare and Aidan to the park hoping that our car would be ready to pick up, but M called to say he wouldn’t have it ready until tomorrow so they had to walk back after playing for a while.

I made spicy fries (TOO spicy) and fish sticks and rolls and grilled cheese sandwiches — how disgusting is that? and baby carrots. Then I made ice cream. I walked Aidan around in his purple stroller for a while.

In the evening, we said a decade of the Rosary and Kevin acted as a sort of DJ showing us video clips from You-Tube. He found this recently and is delighted with it. His range of interest is wide — he found a tribute to Brett Favre (when his father died a couple of years ago), an ad featuring Willy Mays cautioning kids to avoid blast caps back in the 60’s, several classic Marx Brothers clips, some Broadway musicals, a clip of Sinead O’Connor singing a haunting “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina”, and a novelty song perhaps better forgotten called Fish Heads. Altogether, a cultural pot-pourri all in itself.
Note to self: when I notice we are in a slump, it probably means that I am, or rather that I’m just starting to emerge from it enough to notice I am in it. So for future reference — this is what helped me get out of it this time, and I notice I go through the same cycle of collapse to back in action every time Aidan comes out of a hospitalization:

* Get off the computer (or stop lying around, or whatever). Do something practical and sensory-oriented, hands-on. Tidying, laundry or wiping kitchen appliances all work for this and ALWAYS need to be done around here anyway.
* Get involved with what the kids are doing, be attentive, be present.
* Strew. I didn’t even think of doing this until I noticed I was already doing it instinctively. I thought that was a good sign that my unconscious mind or heart is already working on the problem even before I notice it’s a problem. That day, I had already gotten out some toys from the closet, found the pieces of Aidan’s rescue vehicle puzzle because he was showing interest in it, brought out a box of books, and put the baby carrots on the counter and done some baking because I noticed my cooking was getting scattershot again (it does that when I’m not paying attention).

* Keep a log of what is going on and ideas of things to try for the future. Example of the second category: I wrote down that I’d like to ask Brendan to get out his digital camera occasionally and take some pictures. I can see lots of ways to approach this, it would be helpful to me plus I can find out if he is agreeable to the idea or has resistance to it. Either way I am finding out something about him and we have something to talk about together. It sounds coldblooded put this way but it’s just a long way to say that some ideas seem to “ring” with me — they seem to involve MY kids, the opportunities in OUR lives, while other ideas seem more canned and formal and I have to put them through a sort of filter in order to make them personal and alive. Remember, it’s after midnight and I’m not articulating this quite as well as I’d like to.
* Do something different, myself. That seems to help get out of the slump. When I was a child, I noticed that sometimes I had the best, most interesting ideas after I’d been bored for a little while, or sick. That boredom or malaise seemed to give me incentive to try to dig into something new once I got energy back. So now I can think of all sort of things I would like to pull out and try. Calligraphy; some math manipulatives for the little kids; some science experiment books that Kieron might like; some new food to try to cook or buy at the store.

A Garden of Learning, Life, and the Liturgical Year

An incomplete and very informal roundup of some recent Real Learning blog posts (check the sidebar for the blogroll). I wanted to put them all together in one place. A slightly belated celebration of the month of mothers, especially Our Blessed Mother.

Literature and Learning
Leonie talks about Literature Themes in the Homeschool
Melissa on tidal language arts in a writer's home.
Maureen's thoughtful posts on Reading Great Books

Life and Learning
Elizabeth narrates her path down the garden trail with her kids and blogging on the way.
Amy is adding to her Blog of Virtues literature-and liturgy-based ideas on forming virtues. Theresa's blog is a great resource for hands-on, child-friendly unit studies, complete with pics.
Alice's blog is always full of creative ideas, and her Flow'rs of the Fairest is a beautiful celebration of May Altars.

Logistics and Learning
The Bookworm on Keeping it Together using binders.
Great notebooking pics at Rachel's site, too.
Kim on homemade Montessori manipulatives: here, here, and here. I get intimidated by hands-on projects but the pics really help and also, my own preschoolers loved the pictures so much that we spent several minutes just browsing and talking about them.

Love and Learning
Karen discusses rhythms in our lives
LLLMOm on Trust -- listening to your conscience, trusting your motherly intuition and not paying too much attention to the "experts".

Interludes are for Learning, Too?

I should be used to it by now. Every time we have a rush of activity, the next couple of days are sort of sporadic and quiet. After our squirrel adventure on Wednesday, yesterday was a down day. I’m trying to remember if we did ANYTHING. I read a bit of Brendan’s book, I went for a walk with Kevin and Clare and the “babies”, oh, yes, and I talked to a long distance friend for a while. I wrote a couple of emails. I made spaghetti and otherwise did the minimal amount of house and family maintenance. That seems to be about it.

IT does not seem like “enough”. All the usual little things have been going on — Sean is tossing around a football and talking to Brendan, Brendan and Liam had a LOONG literary conversation at midnight, Liam did another cooking experiment (sauteed apples and cinnamon for our homemade icecream, it was GOOD!), Sean asked for football stretching exercises and incidentally read someone’s sports blog and is now telling Brendan about it. Kieron and Clare are continuing their nature expeditions, Aidan is doing wheel experiments and riding around in his stroller/wheelchair, Paddy is learning to do all sorts of sophisticated things on the computer, Clare has been practicing her music. They all are reading intermittently; Brendan just finished the weighty “Modern Times” by Paul Johnson and needs another book. So there are lots of things going on but no One Big Project or interesting community experiences or any of those things that seem to make me feel validated as an unschooling mom.
Yesterday afternoon, Kevin took our one car, our lived in Suburban, to the repair shop. He brought Sean with him so they could do some football passing at the community park. The brakes are pretty much gone and we were just waiting for baseball season to end so we could bring in the car. But I forgot that we had our Homeschool Stations of the Cross today so since that is 20 miles away, we can’t go. I called the leader and we chatted a bit about homeschooling and its benefits. Both of us have kids who are college age or over. She has three, I have one. They are all doing well in different branches of life. So much conventional wisdom “it takes a village of experts to raise a child” has been proven to be at least incomplete. We both noticed that our children have been able to shine in areas that are NOT our own personal specialties. My college age son got his first year’s grades back. He got an A+ in Latin and is also doing well in Math, Laboratory (science) and Philosophy — ironically, subjects where I was not educated to give him a “teacherly” foundation. I gave him the materials for the first two and we pretty much shut our eyes to the second two, unless you count lots of very informal nature study and a few electronic kits and plenty of interesting midnight discussions about “everything in the universe” — that’s the closest we got to Philosophy and maybe that’s enough.

Her kids followed analogical patterns — went to high school after a homeschool K-8 and did AP English and Science and are now getting college degrees.

She uses a more textbooky curriculum than I ever did and they are also more extroverted and so involve themselves in many more extracurricular experiences than we do, but what we both have in common is that we were homeschooling mostly for family closeness and developmental reasons — because we wanted our kids to have time and space to develop their individual natures. We talked about that a bit, too.

She has a younger friend who wants to homeschool but is afraid she doesn’t have the skill or expertise to do a good job. We were thinking that since our kids excelled in areas where we didn’t have skill or expertise, perhaps that is not what it takes. Perhaps it takes time, and space, and freedom and love and family closeness more than a lot of money or professional skill.

Anyway, those are my skimpy thoughts for today. If you looked at my home you would think that I must believe electronic screens are the key to homeschool success since I am typing in front of a computer, DH is working on his (two) computers and the rest of the kids seem to be clustered around one of them playing a gamecube game, at present. Sigh! It’s not like that all the time but I am trying to get comfortable with the concept that the electronic media can be a legitimate aspect of a loving, vibrant family environment!

Endings and Beginnings

What we had on our schedule today: a visit from Aidan’s occupational therapist, Kieron’s baseball picnic in the evening, then Clare’s choir. So I knew I needed to vacuum (for the OT visit) and bake cookies for the picnic. It looked like one of those peaceful, productive, moderately eventful days. NOT.

The OT came early, while I was still finishing the cleaning. It turned out that this was her supervised visit, so I was rather relieved I’d gotten to the corners with the hose attachment but sorry I hadn’t gotten to wetmop the floor and VERY sorry that Frodo was in the mudroom so I had to let the two visitors in through our grungy garage. The session went well, though with a minor crisis when J the OT inadvertently hurt Paddy’s feelings (she was pretending to be angry and he took her seriously).

Just as they were leaving, Clare and Kieron came in to tell me to come look. They led me to the side of the house where we found an infant Douglas squirrel curled up tightly next to our piping. It didn’t look alive but it didn’t exactly look dead either. Then it took a deep heaving breath. Sigh — it was alive. Now what???

We ended up scooping it up (with gloves) and putting it into a box. It is cold at the side of the house so I figured it was hypothermic. We took it to the sunny deck and, double sigh, a few minutes later the poor thing started moving and squeaking a little. It was definitely alive.

Resigned, I ran to Google care of found baby squirrels and found that besides warmth, they needed hydration. So the next step was to go to the store to get some Pedialyte, at considerable expense. I dribbled some into its mouth in little increments.

Then we read further and found that hot water bottles were recommended. By that time it was getting cooller on the deck, so we found a soda bottle and used it as an impromptu heater until we found a regular water bottle. I kept putting in drops of Pedialyte. Clare was reading the printouts from the internet and telling me to pick it up and hold it upright at all costs while feeding it. The little thing reminded me of Paddy when he used to be bottlefed when first home from the NICU — frail, low-tone and hungry, closed eyes.

The printouts also told us that aspiration pneumonia was one of the most common threats because it was hard to feed them slowly enough to keep them from aspirating. I’m afraid that I found how difficult it was. But I didn’t feel I had any choice but to do it the trial and error way, since I knew it couldn’t survive for long without fluid.
We brought it upstairs and put it into the bathtub and blasted the heat in there until it was rather like a sauna. I really was expecting moment by moment to see it breathe its last, but instead it was reviving a bit and starting to squirm around in the box and burrow next to the cloth-covered pop bottle as if it were its mom. POOR thing.

We had read early after finding the creature that the first thing to do was to reunite it with its mother, but that if it was cold and wounded its mother would probably not return to it. We found that Brendan had actually seen the little body hours earlier but thought it was dead and not went closer to investigate, and it had a slightly bloody paw. So it seemed to us that it would be too dangerous to return it to its chilly former location with too little prospect of success. But of course, I second-guessed myself regularly during all this.

Oh, and also we read it was illegal to keep a wild animal, that the first step was to find a wildlife rehab group. So I looked online and found a contact number in Fresno (nearest big town) and left a message on the answering machine.

By now I was completely exhausted. So I lay down and took a 15 minute power nap. Then I only had about an hour and a half to make the cookies…. YIKES. I went into a frantic spin of making two batches of cookies, getting the two, no three “babies” ready, getting dressed myself, looking for directions to the feed store because we had read the best food for the baby squirrel was puppy formula. I was shouting orders and stressing. Everyone was running around looking for shoes, packing the stroller, etc.
We had to zip to get to the feed store (30 miles away) for the formula powder before it closed and then to the picnic. Just as we were leaving the Rehab volunteer called and I couldn’t find the phone to pick up… but Sean got her number. So when we got to the baseball picnic I called her and found she was at a wildlife meeting that night and could meet us there and transfer our baby.

Clare and Sean had decided to name the baby Exeter after the character in Henry V… it was either that or Gilderoy Lockhart from Harry Potter, but they thought the baby was too dignified and courageous to get the latter name. So Exeter it was… Sean was getting attached to the little thing and carried it in the box on his lap in the car.

I took Clare to choir and was planning to ask one of the members to drive her home so we could go to Clovis and hand over the squirrel, but no one showed up for choir. Later on we found out that one of the leaders had called later because 2 members were sick, calling it off for this week.

SO back to the picnic and we had to take off. I didn’t realize until we got into the car that Kieron, Sean and even Kevin were quite disappointed because there was going to be a Dad-son baseball game and we were missing it. Kieron started crying and continued crying for the next 15 miles. Aidan had been crying through the picnic because he wanted to get his purple stroller out and push it around, plus his wound was hurting him. Now he stopped crying and said, “Kieron’s crying!!” Sean complained that he shouldn’t have come; he had only come to play in the baseball game and now he wasn’t even going to get to do that. Clare was complaining that they had cancelled choir without telling her and that she might as well have stayed home too. Throw my PMS in there and I was about to cry too, or get perfectly furious. I really tried to restrain myself. But then of course, I started thinking that I was being TOO mellow and raising spoiled brats. I really OUGHT to yell at them, but then I’ll cry and everyone will be acting completely dysfunctionally. I really can’t win in these situations. So I stared out the window, thinking: I just can’t win. Probably we’ll get to the Wildlife group too late and then I’ll just KNOW I can’t win. SIGH!

Since we were getting frustratingly slowed down by city traffic, Kevin said I should call and tell A, the lady I had talked with earlier, not to leave because we were almost there. So I did and she said she would meet us out in the parking lot. Whew!! When we got there, it was like stepping out of the dark forest into Lothlorien. She was nice and wholesome and matter of fact, and welcomed us in to where the talk was ending so we could look at the animals. She took our little Exeter and reassured us that we had done everything right. She asked us if we wanted to be trained as rescue volunteers, and made eye contact with the kids too and treated them like prospective or even preferable volunteers. In general, the whole scenario was so welcoming. The kids LOVED the owls. Aidan just laughed and laughed when they turned their heads 180 degrees, and when one flapped its wings and somehow turned its head up to the ceiling. He thought they were “kitties” with wings. He was charmed and so were all the kids. We got back into the car talking enthuasiastically about getting the training and rescuing lots of little Exeters and the like, particularly owls.
So as usual, the “worst” never happened. I suppose that the worst never happens because the worst is never as bad as I think it is going to be. Which means I shouldn’t worry about those “worsts”. If we had had to go back home with the little squirrel I probably would have been happy and thanked God we got to keep him. I should just start that way rather than making myself crazy with all the doubts and discouragement in between. Or maybe not, maybe that would be just TOO unnaturally serene. Maybe the process is part of the whole thing.
I do not know what the outcome for little Exeter will be. I know A has more expertise and won’t make the mistakes I would have and WAS making. I was not looking forward to getting up every 3 hours to warm bottles. But I miss the little creature. It gave me a pang to see his empty laundry basket in the bathtub. Kieron has been talking happily about raising owls. Sean says, “Well, the good things were that we got a drink at the store and got to see owls for about 2 seconds, but the bad things were that I didn’t get to play baseball or pass the football with Dad, I had to go to Fresno, and we had to give up Exeter.”
I wonder if we have wildlife rescue work in our future? Has God opened a door for us this way? We’ll see. Again I WISH I had a digital camera though I am afraid if I had a pic of Exeter, it would give me a sharp twinge every time I looked at it. I hope he thrives!

PS On days like this I am so glad this IS our curriculum. To think, this morning I was worried we were stuck in a learning rut! Oh, to think a year ago it would have made me feel guilty that “nothing got done today”!!!

Unschooling Math?

Formal math is my last holdout. Everything else, I can SORT of see how to do in an unschooling format, and I am realizing more and more how the informal learning was the underwater bulk of the learning even though we had some minimal academic structure super-imposed. But math thinking and "numeracy" is still a mystery to me and a fearful one. I found school math easy and enjoyable, and never had a problem with text work in this area. It is difficult for me to see mathematical thinking in real life.

Consequently, we used math workbooks all last year while I deschooled everything else. I decided to use summer as my time to get comfortable with a more real approach to math. We don't usually do much formal math in the summer anyway, so I can use the time to think, and look for math in our day to day life, and observe how my kids learn.

So, some preliminary links:

Unschooling and Math
Developing a Math Non-Curriculum

I think I am going to start some math journaling, too -- not for the kids but for me as I watch the kids. This will give me a way to start thinking about how math is involved in our lives and maybe make a conscious move towards deschooling this last holdout.

And a couple of preliminary thoughts:

My oldest son loves math and excels at it. Yes, he went through a formal though relatively light curriculum. His first couple of years homeschooling, grades 3 -4, we did very little in math at all. In fact, I have forgotten what we used, so it must not have been memorable! Oh, I think we went through some of the Core Knowledge math sections. I remember that the times table was a big issue. He took a long time to learn it and an even longer time to become quick and automatic.

In 5th grade we used Saxon 65 and a storebought 5th grade workbook -- I think it was Spectrum. He never finished either. I was pregnant that year and lost twins. In 6th he did Saxon Algebra 1/2. Again, we did not finish the book. I was pregnant again. Still, I was noticing a change in his attitude. He had begun adolescence and was developing more focus than he had had in the past. He was able to work harder and more diligently than he had in the past. He had always been both conscientious AND a daydreamer, and still is, but was now able to use one trait to benefit the other one, where previously they were sometimes in seeming conflict.

In his 7th grade year we were suddenly relocated to San Francisco when his little brother was born ill. He was ready for Algebra, but I didn't have the time to focus on working through it with him. So I got him Mathematics made Simple from a local bookstore -- a review of basic math and intro to higher level math, hoping he could work through it on his own. He finished about 2/3rds of the book. I recommend it as a survey and consolidation of arithmetic but the introduction to Algebra and Geometry was inadequate for our purposes and we ended up dropping it because it was confusing.

Then, back home, I bought him Saxon Algebra 1. This was the first time he really protested a math text decision. He wanted to learn geometry and disliked the Saxon incremental approach for this subject. I cast around frantically and discovered Jacob's Geometry. It worked just beautifully for him. He could do some of the algebra reviews at the end of each chapter, but not all of them. So I got Jacob's Algebra 1 and he found the first half of the book too easy. I allowed him to test out until he came to a stopping point, which was just after the midterm exam in the book. The rest of it he did entirely. By now he was in 10th grade.

From there we went to Foerster's Algebra 2/Trigonometry. He took 2.5 years to work mostly through this book. At some point I realized he was getting near-perfect scores and yet doing Every. Single.Problem. So I suggested that he do alternate problems when he felt he knew the material well. He started working this way and was able to finish the book before he graduated.

He used Apologia for Chemistry and Physics. He was also teaching himself to program during this time but I have no idea how he taught himself because I know nothing about programming myself. I will have to ask him for the details, but I am mentioning it because I think it probably helped him get comfortable with math thinking. I know that both he and my computer programmer husband like Python.

This year was his freshman year in college. He is doing Euclid for math and getting A's.

So this is one child's experience. The next two children are quite different and the next two after that are different again. The formal aspect of his math experience was quite light, as you see. But I am wondering if this was partly an advantage, not purely a drawback as I had thought in the past. I wonder if there was a natural talent and a cultivated interest in informal math -- through programming, logic puzzles, electronic science kits, and computer and board games -- which allowed him to feel comfortable with math concepts.

He was slow to develop automaticity in math memorization. I think he was in 6th grade before he had all his arithmetic facts down pat. I think if we could do it over again he would have preferred a bit more focused drill of some kind. Workbook drills don't seem quite adequate for this, in my experience with my kids, though they can be partly helpful. You can do them and still not be able to apply them in more complex operations. We have the same problem with handwriting workbooks. I think maybe some mental math problems as in Ray's Arithmetic might have been more helpful. Ruth Beechick has some good practical suggestions. Exploring his interests in an unschool format might have been even more effective.

Quiet in the Sierras

The California Sierras where we live are never predictable as far as weather goes. Last week it was HOT, like going straight into mid-summer. Over the weekend the temperature dropped sharply and we got several inches of rain. This week it has been sunny and bright, but cool and windy — almost perfect spring weather.

We went on a long family walk around our neighborhood. Kevin put Patrick, 3, in the “bunny suit” which is what Aidan used to call the child backpack for some reason. Aidan went in his purple stroller which Kevin told Sean to push, trying to get him in training for the coming football season. The stroller wheelchair probably weighs close to 40 pounds and Aidan weighs a bit over 40 and our neighborhood is all up and down hill, so it was a workout but Sean, 13 and tall as his father, didn’t seem to be bothered. In fact, lots of the time he was jogging while pushing. We probably went 2-3 miles in all — we were gone for 50 minutes. Patrick fell asleep in the bunny suit and I fell asleep after we got back!

Paddy was playing a Land Before Time preschool computer game for a couple of hours yesterday. He got pretty good at matching common shapes and other simple readiness activities. Plus, he is excellent at maneuvering his way through a screen. The other day he downloaded a picture from the internet, put it in the photo editor and made some scribbles on it all by himself.

After dinner I took Aidan outside for a while and Sean came out to chat a bit, mostly about sports. In the evening Liam, Sean and Kieron played an extended game of Monopoly, Paddy fell asleep early and I played with Aidan for a while with his magnetic letters and his bank robot and some pennies.

I didn’t see much of Brendan or Clare yesterday. They were writing things in their rooms, I think. The movie-making activity seems to have subsided. Clare says they need a videotape and some black cloth. We live so far out of town that getting things like that takes logistics and cash because of today’s gas prices. We live 60 miles away from the nearest Walmart and our Suburban eats up fuel to the tune of 15 miles per gallon. Do the math: going shopping comes with a surcharge of almost $25 dollars, shocking as that seems! There’s a local market but just the basics, no fabric or electronic gear beyond the very minimum (Kodak disposable cameras, batteries and the like).

Unschooling question of the day: Does it contradict unschooling principles to require math, or in fact to require anything? Context: Last year when I deschooled, I still assigned math and Latin vocabulary, chores and a bit of reading, and put limits on video game time. A couple of months ago I let the math and Latin go, and experimented with letting go of limits on movie watching and video game time.

The result: all the older kids down to Paddy will play video games and watch movies, but in the context of a lot of other things they do in a day. But Paddy would rather play computer games and the gamecube than anything else. This makes me uncomfortable…

And I am still missing the math and language. Sigh…. I waited until almost summer to drop those two things because I KNEW it would be difficult. All last year I worked through my “deschooling” discomfort by calling the interim a sabbatical. But I knew that letting go of the math and grammar would be even harder, so I figured that waiting until summer — traditionally a lower-key, activity-oriented time — would work in my favor.

Maybe I will start a “math thinking” page and try to see the math in ordinary life, in order to deal with my concerns in this area. I think that because I actually enjoyed rote math in my school days, I have trouble “unschooling” my thinking in this area. My mom would get us math workbooks in the summer for car trips. I LIKED those. But my kids don’t seem to : (. So I need to find a different approach.

Writing Stories in a Family Community

While Liam was still at college, he and and I made plans to work on writing stories this summer. We both have trouble finishing stories that we start writing. Partly it’s because both of us get into “duty” mode where we start feeling there are more important/urgent/serious things to do than write fiction. Partly we are perfectionists and when the story gets long enough to have a few obvious flaws and difficulties, it discourages us. So Liam suggested that we make an accountability pact and agree to get together weekly and share progress and perhaps read bits to each other, thus maintaining a feeling of legitimacy and enthusiasm which hopefully will help carry us through the rough bits. HE got the idea from reading about how the Inklings — the small group of English scholars that included JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis in the circle — would meet in a pub and read their works in progress to each other.

Our first official meeting is the first week of June, which will give us time to put together ideas and plot and start writing. Hopefully. I thought I was completely stuck on ideas and then one night I started thinking and ideas started coming. So maybe I am just a bit rusty.
Today we were discussing how reading Brendan’s story is inspiring to us rather than discouraging. This is the book Brendan started writing when he was about 15. He finished it last fall and has been revising it. I have been printing out sections as he sends them up to me (his computer to mine via Local Area Network). Then I comb-bind them into readable volumes. Everyone looks forward to the new installments, to reading and discussing them.

While we were talking about this, I realized how many writers I have heard about who had a “community” of some kind in their formative years. Very often, it seems, it was a family community. Jane Austen started writing stories for her sister when she was sick, to cheer her up. The Bronte sisters, Charlotte and Emily and Anne, invented a whole imaginary world as children along with their brother Branwell. Many of those childish stories were the starting points of their classic novels. Louisa May Alcott’s father was a writer. CS Lewis and his brother also invented a world, of talking animals, in childhood and then as an adult formed the small community of the Inklings with his brother and a couple of friends. Tolkien, of course, ditto. GK Chesterton, another writer I admire, started a newsletter in his private school years with his brother and a couple of close friends that continued afterwards. He also co-wrote a couple of books with his friend Hilaire Belloc. The list goes on.

From what I’ve seen in our family, it’s natural for a close family who loves reading and has time to play imaginatively in younger years, to grow into a writing community. Brendan and Clare had their own imaginary animal world when younger and Brendan and Liam invented one that loosely overlapped. Brendan and Sean have their fantasy football league. Brendan and Clare and Liam all went through a stage when they issued newspapers from their imaginary worlds, interviewing fictional “men on the street” and editorializing with great vigor. Brendan’s newspaper run was the most comprehensive and also got the most sophisticated as he got into politics and disinformation and experimented satirically with totalitarian propaganda.

Brendan is working on a new book and welcoming feedback on his old one so he can write a third draft. Clare is working on a book, too and also engaged in RPGs at the Tolkien site Barrowdowns. Sean and Kieron both tell me they “can’t write” : (. Both wrote some immature stories in their younger years and Sean wrote a pretty good fictional sports commentary but they are at that age when they see the flaws in their juvenile work and don’t have the motivation to get to the next stage. We’ll see if there’s any way to get them into the writer’s community during this summer.

Rain and Family Time

Yesterday, Sunday, was the first at-home family day for quite a while. And the weather reversed, too. I built a fire in the woodstove for the first time in several weeks, and the rain drummed continuously and soothingly on our metal roof.

Aidan wanted to go outside in the rain with his stroller, but after little sleep the night before I didn’t feel up to that. I brought his stroller upstairs and walked him up and down for quite a while and then he spent quite a while wheeling it around and putting Pikachu in it — he has a stuffed Pikachu pillow that he got several years back and it is more like a friend than a pillow to him.

There is a lot of space upstairs. It runs probably 30 feet of open floor. I could easily do my exercising and push Aidan at the same time. Do you hear my enthusiasm???
How we spent our quiet day: I made waffles for breakfast. I read the book “Flow” by Mihaly C-something. Changed bandages, kept the fire going. Sean saw me doing a temperament test and wanted to do one himself. The first one we tried had a bug and didn’t compute. That rather pleased him. He thought his strange profile had brought down their program. In the second one he tried, he profiled as an ISTP — which rather disgusted him as it labels him a “realist”. He wanted to be some strange mutant temperament that no one had ever had before.
Later on made the dough for pizza and got into a book discussion with Sean. He had read Lord Brockhurst (Brian Jacques) and was outraged by the way the “good” badger treated the evil wildcat at the end of the story (I won’t go into details). We talked about justice/mercy, and the responsibility of good guys to use their power well. Then somehow we ended up talking, with Brendan involved now, about how labelling someone with a negative label (like “vermin”) seems to make it OK to hurt them or treat them badly. Like Hitler and the Jews. I tried to point out that you don’t want to go too far the other way and sympathize with the villains at the expense of what’s really right and wrong.

Then somehow we moved to football. It was one of those discussions.

I made the pizza meanwhile. Pizza takes a long time to make which is why it’s usually reserved for Sunday. In addition to the dough and letting it rise, I make white sauce, simmer BBQd chicken bits, fry bacon, chop pineapples and ham. It’s pretty good though with a few jalapenos as well. The boys mostly prefer pepperoni so we make a couple of those too.

Then Kevin wanted to play a new board game with the kids. I forget the name now but it is a murder mystery which takes place in a monastery. Kevin says it involves lots of logical thinking and it took a long time, too. They played 2 games in a row: Kevin, Liam, Sean, and Kieron.

Clare practiced her piano — a Sense and Sensibility soundtrack song — she is getting quite good at it.

Then Clare REALLY wanted Liam to watch Henry V before we take it back to the library. So they did that. I forget what I did — OH that’s right, I reorganized Aidan’s large bin of medical supplies — all the detritus from the hospital stays and different stages of his life — the feed bags he won’t use anymore, the oxygen tubing and pulse-oximeters that we might still need, lots of bandaging and alcohol swabs, several binkies (Paddy claimed them and made a collection of them beside the bed). It was like an archeological dig. Aidan was interested but a little bit anxious. He kept saying: “I don’t need that! I’m all better!” as he peered into the contents.

After they were asleep I filled out temperament profiles for all the members of the family: Is there a profile for obsessives??? I came out an INFP (almost evenly divided between feeling and thinking), Kevin and Liam were ISTJs (I think they are actually more INTJs-- they’re not at all into leadership or bureacracy or procedures), Brendan was an ISTP like Sean (that seems rather unlikely), Clare was an ISFJ and Kieron was an ISFP. (the description actually sounds more like Clare) The test is HERE. The one Sean ruined with his mutantness was better in the questions asked, I thought. I came up much higher in INtroversion than the others, too. I was 89%, Liam and Brendan were 78%, Clare was only 33% but Kevin and Kieron were 56%. Maybe it’s accurate but it would be a bit surprising.

Interesting Posts Digest 2

The Thinking Mother writes about Unschooling Resources .

In addition to the resources she mentions, a new ezine Connections has been launched.
Here is a good description of how one mother thinks of unschooling: Unschooling Lightly Defined
Unschooling Math Part I and Part II.
Two Hindrances to Unschooling
Some neat quotes.

Great post on TJE

A Quiet Day At Last?

It is almost 2:30 am and I just put a sleeping Paddy in bed, since my back was beginning to ache from holding him in my arms and sitting at the computer. He half-woke and asked sleepily, “Are you Mama?” Yes, my little one, who else would be nursing you in the dead of night in your parents’ bedroom? “Are you Paddy?” I asked him and he murmured “Uh huh,” and was peacefully asleep.

Kieron’s baseball team lost their fourth game which means they are out of the playoffs. I know Kieron is rather relieved, though he has not said so. His middle name is Thomas, like the saint and scholar, and it has always seemed to suit him very well…. he is generally placid, a bit on the portly side, slow-moving. The intense reflex movements of baseball don’t quite suit his style and he was parked in right field for most of the season. He has a judicial turn of mind and if he was motivated he could become one of those strategic, grand-slamming type baseballers but I don’t think he’s very competitive at heart. His preferred activities are making himself meals, reading (widely and generally, science and fairy tales and everything in between), playing on the computer, and joking. His sense of humor is like an undercurrent that bubbles up quickly and regularly to the surface in turns of phrase and laughter. Since he is just 10, he finds that his jokes are often rather looked down at by his teenage siblings, and the younger ones see his sense of humor as an irritation since he often can’t resist teasing them, in a bothersome though not cruel way. It’s been rather lonely for him this year, in some ways, and he looks forward to our homeschool group meetings where there are usually 2 to 4 kids his own age.

Aidan was in a fair amount of pain this afternoon, and I sat with him and watched Pokemon movies with him and put my hand over his stomach; the pressure seemed to soothe him. It was sort of odd spending most of the day with just the two youngest. Sort of like going back 15 years in time. They seemed to get along better when we were all together like that. I will have to remember that for the future. They played a jumping game (off a footrest onto my lap in turns) and even cuddled together for a while, which Aidan usually would not tolerate.

Today is Sunday so we can relax and make pizza for the first time in several weeks. And Liam will not be calling on the phone, because he is HOME!! I think I will make waffles, too… it’s grey and a bit cooller outside today, too, which is a nice change.

Retrospecting

I was reading an old Growing without Schooling magazine and found a letter by Alison McKee. She was talking about how she sometimes compared her son Christopher’s life with all the challenging creative things she read about other kids doing in GWS. Then she went on to describe how she saw her son take up a particular interest (Egyptology in this case) and pursue it not intensively, all at once, but in bits and pieces over a period of time, consolidating knowledge and returning to it at different levels. That observation affirmed for her that he WAS learning and doing.

This was interesting to me for three reasons. One, because now Alison McKee has a book out “Homeschooling our Children, Unschooling OUrselves” which is a retrospective look at her childrens’ growing years now that they are grown into (successful) adulthood. Christopher, the boy whose learning patterns concerned her at times, is now getting a Master’s degree in German Language, I think — something like that. It shows that his seemingly sporadic, off-academic interests — like flyfishing, for instance — were not destructive to his eventual academic success. His natural learning process “worked” by any standard, and her slightly anxious trust was affirmed over time.

Another interesting thing is that it shows how a homeschool mom can sometimes see grass that looks greener on the “other side” and not immediately recognize the flowers in front of her. If we hear stories of intense, focused learning, we may think our child is just being scattered and superficial in his approach to activity. If someone’s child is engaged in meaningful community projects or, say, college classes, we may regret our own kids’ lack of those things and not pay attention to the service the child is doing around his own house or his own self-directed research and reading. OR vice versa. I am writing this out to remind myself to look right at my kids first and foremost, look at MY family and MY husband, not at someone else’s. Other peoples’ stories are wonderful in showing all the variety of ways learning can happen — endless possibilities and variety. But not as a comparison. Our road is different.
The last thing that occured to me when I read the letter was that when we write things out, the details we put in are the ones that the reader sees. So if I talk about the kids’ movie-making it could sound like we are in a constant super-charged hum of creative activity. Or not. Maybe it sounds thin and non-academic. Either way, it’s not the whole picture. It’s a sort of telescoped focus on one aspect of our lives. In the GWS issue, Alison McKee was reading distillations of others’ learning over a time period — not seeing the lulls, the occasional feet propped up in front of the TV or fire. But realistically, those lulls were there, just not written out in explicit terms.
That’s what ALL record-keeping is like. It’s partial, selected, distilled. Sometimes I don’t see the significance of some actions till later. Sometimes learning is traced backwards, like working a maze from the solution to the starting point (a lot easier than doing it the proper way, have you tried it?). So I want to keep my eye on the big picture AND on the little moments as they occur, but it’s only going to be a cross-section, at best a “type representing the whole”, not the whole thing itself. THAT is like the underwater bulk of the iceberg, mostly unapprehended and silent.

Temperaments and the National Education System

In David Keirsey's book Please Understand Me, I found an interesting factoid that is echoed (in bold) in this online source for teachers:

When you combine the practical, realistic, fairly cautious aspect of S (sensation) with the determined, closure-seeking aspect of J (judgment), you have a traditionalist, an SJ temperament. The SJ is driven, above all, by her need to do her duty.

The most common type in education, the SJ comprises 38 percent of the general population and 56 percent of the teaching population (Keirsey and Bates 1978, pp. 39 and 166). All ISFJ, ESFJ, ISTJ, and ESTJ types are SJ traditionalists.

...The SJ is a belonger, a traditionalist, a conservator. He wants to belong to the society in which he works and lives and he wants to earn the right to belong. The SJ enjoys a practical, bureaucratic, well-defined hierarchy with a central leader. Often, he is that leader. But whoever the leader is, that position must be earned and obeyed.

Keirsey's book (I read the first edition) discusses a little bit the implications of the fact that in the professional education world, SJ's are a majority compared to all other types combined. It seems reasonable that practical, status-quo-oriented people who can work diligently and conscientiously for clearcut goals would be attracted to this field. YET you can also see how the sheer impact of their numbers and their temperamental suitability to today's bureaucratic school structure could lead to a sort of self-perpetuating machinery. Especially since a majority of principals and other school leaders are also SJs.

Keirsey notes the potential for mismatch between teaching styles and learning styles. An intellectual or poetic type for example (NT or NF, represented by, say, Bill Gates and the shy novelist of your choice, maybe one of the Bronte sisters) works largely for intrinsic goals, not externally directed ones. They will be surprised and perhaps offended or embarrassed by gold stars, and their learning pace will not tend to be sequential and predictable and cued to bells and grades. If the SJ teacher believes that his or her way is the "one right way" to learn, there is potential for much damage and suppression of potential. Not all SJ teachers, by any means, will be so lacking in perspective, but the institutional/power/majority combination makes it a clear possibility. "Doing one's duty" might become a matter of making practical strategies to allow for the different potential in different students (good and useful) but it also could become a matter of bullying or corralling the student into becoming more like an SJ (wrong and futile).

SJ's are often the students who do well particularly in the elementary years when academic goals are clearcut, according to Keirsey. Again from my online source:

Productivity is the organizational goal: producing good citizens who can function with responsibility in the work-a-day world. Growth of responsibility and utility sums up the SJ's educational goal. Having the students get on with the work and learn the basics is a common classroom goal.

Preferring formal structures in the classroom, the SJ principal, teacher, and student enjoy a learning environment that combines structure, predictability, clear-cut assignments, and fairness.

Which is another aspect of the SJ self-perpetuation in professional education: the students that do well and feel comfortable and recognized in the school system will tend to self-select as tomorrow's teachers and principals and curriculum-writers. They will sometimes also be suspicious of critiques of the system that seem to deny what they see as obvious verities of life, those described in the quote above.

SJ's have many good qualities -- theirs is the Guardian trait. George Washington and Mother Teresa are said to have been two examples. Since they are considered to be the most common type, comprising around 40% of the population (as compared to 5-7% for NTs and 8-10% for NFs) it is obvious our society needs them in plurality. But society needs the NTs and NFs too, needs to encourage them in their very uncommonness and not try to make them into something they are not.

Perhaps one reason for the increasing popularity of homeschooling is a recognition of the value of the innovators, dreamers and artisans in our society, and the corresponding recognition that this individuality is often not sufficiently allowed for in an increasingly centralized, standardized education industry. And perhaps some of the hostile reaction to the homeschooling phenomonen from some representatives of the educational establishment is the stabilizer's reaction to something diverse, grassroots, and largely informal in scope, which by its very existence seems to be a threat to the stable order.

One of the chief jobs the SJ has given himself is to be the stabilizer of his social and educational world. Change, revolution, chaos, and anarchy are the enemies of the SJ traditionalist. He is often very uncomfortable with the new trends in education. The traditionalist temperament balances the lust for change that drives some of the other temperaments. He can be counted on in the educational system to preserve those things that need preserving; he may need some help, however, in deciding what those things are because he will naturally want to keep them all. Ironically, the struggle to keep things as they are is part of this process of selection. The SJ does not win all the battles.

(All the quotes in brown italics are from A Teacher's Guide to Cognitive Type Theory and Learning Style which from the parts available online looks like an intelligent, conscientious attempt to acknowledge diversity within a school framework -- see the Introduction here)

Temperament and Homeschooling Style

Trinity Prep School has a link to an interesting quiz on Mothering Styles which gives a brief quiz on temperament and describes how it affects your mothering style. Maureen's question is interesting: does our temperament play a part in how we do homeschooling -- more specifically, how does temperament play into success in unschooling? And how about birth order? If you have an opinion on this or would like to be part of her unofficial research, go for it!

I am somewhere between an INTP and INFP, but the INTP seems to fit a bit better since I think I consciously work on the "feeling" part for "rational" reasons. Or is it vice versa?? Anyway......

Your type is: intp —The “Love of Learning” Mother

“I keep the encyclopedia in the kitchen so we can look up things together while we eat.”

• Intellectually curious and patient, the INTP mother relishes those times with a child when they are learning something interesting together. Whether they’re at the zoo or computer terminal, she sparks to answering his or her “whys” with in-depth responses or new knowledge.
• The INTP mother is also objective and introspective. She listens to and discusses children’s ideas and questions as she would those of a peer, fostering self-esteem and confidence. Open and non-directive, she allows children the freedom to do for themselves and quietly encourages them to believe they can do it.
• Independence, autonomy, intellectual development, and self-reliance are probably the INTP’s highest priorities for her children. An avid reader, she naturally imparts an appreciation and love of reading as well.
• Drawn to all types of learning, the INTP may also value her mothering experience for all the new insights about life it provides her.

Further Reading: Temperament and Personality Typing -- I have only glanced at this site but it looks extensive and interesting so I'm linking to read later!

Oh, and I'm a firstborn! Does this together with my temperament type explain why I'm drawn to unschooling but struggle with the logistics of it and feel ambivalent about whether it is too good to be true??? I love the ideals of classical education but not the way it tends to go hand in hand with a concrete structure in most of the class-ed books. I much prefer the dialectic, close-focus approach.

Tournament Day

Yesterday Kieron had his first play-off game. His team, the Giants, won. So that meant he had a game at 9 am today, against the top-ranked Cardinals, which meant Kevin had to bring him down the mountain at 7:45. I managed to wake up early enough to make him hash browns, which is a favorite breakfast of his, and he got the leftover bacon in the fridge.

He will probably have at least 3 games today but Kevin and I agreed that I should stay up here with Aidan and Paddy. Aidan is still in a lot of discomfort from his G Tube stoma and being down in the foothill dry heat always wears him out — he overdoes it and becomes fatigued. I am disappointed about missing the games but it does make sense to keep Aidan quiet until his wound — for that’s essentially what it is — heals up a bit more.
So we shuttled Clare to her violin lesson and back and walked outside for a while with Liam, who was talking about perfect shapes. It occurs to me that you are probably thinking movie stars here since this is a 19 year old young man but in fact, he was referring to his Euclid class and geometrical solids. We talked a bit about Pythagoras too. I wish I could transcribe exactly WHAT we were talking about but in fact, I had enough trouble just listening and commenting with some pretense of intelligence. Ha! If you lose half your brain cells with each pregnancy I am functioning at about 1/256th of original capacity now and I never did get to Euclid and Pythagoras until I was already operating at about 1/64th, unfortunately….. but it was fun talking to someone, one of my own progeny even, who thinks about math concepts for the sheer joy and interest of it.

Then we went inside and Liam made quesadillas with ham and onions and pineapple and Tabasco, among other things. They were REALLY good. He is enjoying having a kitchen to use again after college cafeteria. I changed Aidan’s bandage. He likes to tell me, “The G-tube went to college to see Liam!” He thinks that’s really funny : ).

Clare and Sean are down at the games with Kieron and Kevin. Brendan just came upstairs to show me a perfectly stunning cardboard shield. When Kevin installed the dishwasher, there was a big box left and Brendan asked for it. So he’s made a shield in that chevron form, rimmed with duct tape, and with a design on the center made in relief — he glued cardboard shapes on top and then painted the whole thing in silver and gold enamel. I WISH I had a digital camera. He plans to reinforce it with another layer of cardboard, so he says — he referred to the “7-fold shields” we read about in the Iliad a couple of years back.

“He poised his spear as he spoke, and hurled it from him. It struck the sevenfold shield in its outermost layer–the eighth, which was of bronze–and went through six of the layers but in the seventh hide it stayed.”

As for the movie in progress — they filmed their first scene yesterday evening, asking me to keep the little ones in the bedroom in order to avoid ambient noise. They had put grease and dirt on a white cloth to make a pub apron for Kieron, the pub owner, and Sean put his hair down over his eyes and put dirt on his chin to make an impressive facsimile of stubble — I hope he never lets his appearance go like that in real life — scary!

Later on today Clare is to be co-cantor at mass, and if Kieron’s team does not lose today, they will have a game tomorrow morning. But after that, things will slow down to a more quiet, less gas-guzzling pace. IE, less driving! Whew, it has been quite a week!

The Conversation Charism

Atypical Homeschool post on The Value of Expression:

For all of the talking that I’ve done, what I’m really trying to encourage you to do is to provide your children with avenues of expression. Talk to them as though they were another person. Debate and discuss issues with them. Allow them to disagree with you on those issues. Assume that they things they say to you are serious and legitimate and important from their perspective. Your children will benefit from this far more than any instruction/training you will provide them with.

The Bookworm on Family Charisms:

One aspect of blogging I particularly enjoy is the insight into how families develop their own special gifts - what you might call their family charism. This may be a common love of a particular subject, a shared hobby or talent, a special character given to a homeschool by the family's circumstances or location, or a style of homeschooling with which both the family as a whole and the individual children bloom and flourish. Families that develop their own charism play to their strengths. The enthusiasm that shines through in these blogs often inspires me to add a dash of their special ingredient to our own lives -

I have been thinking about these posts and how the simple art of the conversation has developed as a mainstay of the unschooling "curriculum" in our home. Sort of funny, because we are a family of introverts and a large part of our conversation is the silences in between the conversation! One teenage son admits to being drained by conversation and I quite often feel the same way, especially with an at-home husband plus seven children of all ages and intellectual levels and interests. But I don't think this is contradictory -- something doesn't have to be continual in order to be deeply meaningful in one's life.

Conversation is a uniquely powerful way to share understanding. Think of how the talkers have to fit their communication to their audience, to make clear their thoughts so that others can understand it, to listen and attend. Conversations are natural practicums of the art of "dialectic", the give and take of thought.

What do we generally converse about? All sorts of things. Probably amusing things are closest to the top. Often poetry and philosophy and religion and football. These things are what our family has naturally gravitated towards when left in freedom. We are Celtics on both sides -- Irish on my husband's, Scottish on mine as well as a bit of Dutch and Danish. Poetry and pondering are close to the surface, with the laughter and a bit of competitive fire.

I am using the terms Poetry and Philosophy broadly. Some of my boys would tell you they don't even LIKE poetry. Maybe Story would be a better word. But I know they are poets when they write stories or act them out, when they come with eyes flashing to tell me of some unjust act told in the pages of a book or played out on the football field, when they comment on some real life event with all the vividness of an epic, when they get deeply fascinated with the beauty and diversity of some aspect of nature or of a math or physics idea.

These same things give me an insight into their understanding of Philosophy, which is the love of wisdom and is many times, according to thinkers like John Senior and James Taylor (not to mention Albert Einstein) embedded in the tradition of Poetry. All the big poetic questions are related to the philosophical and religious ones: What is our place in the universe? How do we best live? What are the implications of our actions? Why and how do we come to be?

Talking gives us a chance to pull this in without heaviness and with humanity. You must not imagine us standing around discursively all the time, looking for opportunities to expound. The conversations are more like the mortar that binds the building blocks of our lives and relationships. Through our words, we make connections and forge relationships.

House Management Strategies for My Life and Living

I have been noticing that I have two basic strategies for house keeping and maintenance. One is similar to Flylady's or Sidetracked Home Executives --doing a bit every day. Here's the details of the system I worked out for my house (see lists on the sidebar especially). I have it arranged by day, week, month, and season and when I'm following it, it works just fine.

It's only recently I consciously noticed my second "strategy" . I used to call it my "lapsing" but honestly, I am starting to think that it's not necessarily so. If I can do seasonal homeschooling, and the Church can have a liturgical year based on seasons and cycles, why not seasonal housekeeping? Is there a more positive way to think about this? Am I blaming myself for something that is actually a successful coping device in my own life?

When I think about it, my second strategy is most likely to be used when the bulk of the days for some times is taken up with something else -- when we're very involved in challenging outside the home activities, or very involved in a complex in-home project, or I'm sick or pregnant or dealing with a sick child, or grieving. During these times I tend to step over, look away from or otherwise ignore everything beyond the essential sanitation and straightening. I operate on limited energy and when I devote lots of energy to something besides the housekeeping, either the housekeeping will suffer, or I will be drawing energy from my future reserves.

So, this is the first prong of the strategy -- "masterful inactivity" or "benign neglect".

Then when l I get an opportunity and enough energy, the second prong of the strategy is to tackle the entropy wholesale. Rather than a "habit of order", then it's an "act of order" or maybe a "battle for order" when I can really devote some time and energy to the cleaning. This method really does have its advantages. I usually do my most radical, creative cleaning and decluttering and rearranging during these times. It's fun, invigorating and immediately rewarding. It makes me feel like everything is new. Since the benign neglect times usually come along with emotional and physical challenges, the wholesale cleaning that inevitably follows is usually a stress-buster too. Often this is also a time when I renew and revise my "old" system of maintenance.

I used to worry that this disparity between my two primary methods meant that I was lazy or disorganized or inconsistent. Or perhaps, that I was setting a bad example for my kids. I am no longer so worried about this. I notice that our family life has natural rhythms punctuated by births, seasons, developmental spurts, and my husband's rhythm of game design and completion (he works at home designing computer games for a living). So in a way, the uniform "one size fits all" system I have looked for and thought of as ideal is in fact more fixed and arbitrary than our real lives are. In the quiet, orderly times I can keep a quiet, orderly routine but in the "flex" times, the growth times, the routine may not fit as well and may become less of a support and more of a prison or a stretching rack, if I let it. My diversity of strategies can be seen as a prudent acknowledgement of the diverse flow of our lives.

As for the example-setting part: I suppose my kids will grow up someday and enter a world where many jobs and occupations have a strong imposed structure, but I don't want them to necessarily think this is the only way to do it. Whatever they do in life, I want them to realize that the pace will and ought to vary when a loved one is ill, a new one is born, a little one reaches a new milestone or an older one gets involved in a new interest. I want them to be able to stand back from the complex, artificial order of our society and see what's beyond and underneath, and make their choices in light of those more important, more fundamental rhythms and timetables. I don't want them to court burn-out and ill health by trying to "do it all" or feel ambivalent and stressed by not being able to. I want my sons and daughters to understand the idea of order in a creative, principled way, not just as a reflex.

In our home in the California Sierras, we spend autumn collecting and stacking firewood in order to be provided with warmth from our wood stove in the winter, and then we spend spring and summer raking away debris that could spontaneously combust and endanger our house. There is a time to kindle fires, and a time to bank them, as well as a time to stomp them out. It is wisdom to know the difference.

Religious monasteries have a Rule, and we can glean sound principles from those "Regulas", but our domestic "rule" is different. If my children have a religious vocation, they will choose to accept a specifically religious rule, but that is a different thing. For one thing, it is freely chosen by each member of the religious community, with a vow that is made after much conscious, prayerful discernment. It is meant to be different from the married, lay vocation. The outcome is hopefully the same, but the means are different, and this may be one of the main differences.

So perhaps it is OK to have a wider view of consistency in my house management that allows seeming "inconsistency" in the service of my real goals as keeper of the home, that acknowledges the need for regularity AND some variability? I hope so, anyway!

Making Movies

Now that my oldest son Liam is home from college, my older kids (ages 19, 17, 16, 13, and 10) have been intensely engaged in making a movie. They have been looking forward to this for quite a while. At Liam’s campus, the students like to get together and make impromptu films of greater or lesser seriousness (mostly lesser, from what I understand). He had an option of being a ninja in someone’s movie, but declined because of his workload.
My kids have made several family movies in the past, following their Dad’s tradition — he used 8mm films as a teenager, so was working with more limitations than they are, but he managed some pretty cool effects. He did an action adventure involving a body plummeting off a cliff, a spooky thriller with the camera panning over a still scene and eerie background music, and even a claymation. My children have usually gone either for serial adventures in the style of the old black and white “Shadow” serials, or for fantasy quest-type adventures. It looks like this one is shaping into one of the latter sort, but far more planned and organized than their more impromptu past efforts.
On Wednesday they gathered for a planning and brainstorming session, and Clare took notes. Yesterday, while parents and “babies” were in town for medical appointments, they gathered costumes and practiced choregraphy for fighting scenes. There are neatly bagged costumes everywhere in our living room and items of clothing strewn across all the surfaces. Clare was making beards — a white one and a brown one (dipped in coffee). One logistical challenge is that there can only be at most 4 actors in any scene (one person to film). So they need to have flexible acting and costume-changes in order to increase the pool of characters. They wish some of their friends lived closer so they could add to their actor roll!

Today, they were collecting the movie-making equipment and are planning to begin filming, from what I understand. My role is mostly to listen and to help them problem-solve and find materials. Yesterday we worked on the problem of Sean’s eyebrows. If he has a white beard and “hair”, he needs white eyebrows. We have tried flour and chalk, with limited success. But I am proud of my suggestion for dying the beard in coffee, though we won’t know until today if it actually worked.
The learning connections and “integration” possibilities are endless here. Clare has written a script. Sean was painting his sword and wrapping the hilt in leather. Liam, apparently, will load the movie onto his computer so they can splice and edit. They are refining their skills in working as a group with a variety of talents and interests and personalities. So far, no arguments, though I am simmering ideas to help them through if conflicts do end up arising.

Vertical Relevance

In Better Get Used to It, Alfie Kohn writes:

Here’s another option for those who would rather not have to offer a substantive defense of their views: In response to a humane and respectful educational practice, they can say, “Yeah, but what’s going to happen to these kids when they learn that life isn’t like that?” Invoking a dismal future, like invoking human nature, can work both ways – to attack practices one opposes and also to promote practices one prefers. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve heard someone respond to the charge that a certain policy is destructive by declaring that children are going to experience it eventually, so they need to be prepared.

This kind of reasoning is especially popular where curriculum is concerned. Even if a lesson provides little intellectual benefit, students may have to suffer through it anyway because someone decided it will get them ready for what they’re going to face in the next grade. Lilian Katz, a specialist in early childhood education, refers to this as “vertical relevance,” and she contrasts it with the horizontal kind in which students’ learning is meaningful to them at the time because it connects to some other aspect of their lives.

Vertical justifications are not confined to the primary grades, however. Countless middle school math teachers spend their days reviewing facts and algorithms, not because this is the best way to promote understanding or spark interest, but solely because students will be expected to know this stuff when they get to high school. Even good teachers routinely engage in bad instruction lest their kids be unprepared when more bad instruction comes their way.

HT: Throwing Marshmallows
And here in California, this seems to be a large factor in the justification for Universal Preschool. (this link is actually to a site that opposes the idea of UP).

EarlyEducation.org (which is a site advocating UP) puts it this way:

A federally supported universal preschool program would ensure that quality preschool education is available to every child in America. Such a program would promote school readiness by providing all children with the early education necessary to begin school ready to learn. Studies of high-quality early childhood programs demonstrate that they are especially beneficial to children from economically disadvantaged households. In addition, a universal preschool system would help meet the growing demand for child care that stems from the increasing proportion of families that have both parents in the workforce.

See, though positively rather than negatively formulated, the message is similar: learning is defined as being school-ready. The school is not conceived of as being a place to support childrens' learning; rather, the children's early learning is conceived as being a preparation for school.

My personal experience with this is with my special needs child's Early Intervention sessions, where a key part of the curriculum for the 2 year olds was learning how to sit in circles and follow rules to get ready for, yes, preschool. Was there any genuine developmental need for him to learn how to cope with preschool logistics, when he was functioning as an 18 month old? No; rather, it was a frank acknowledgement of "vertical relevance". We are doing X today so that your child will be prepared for Y tomorrow which in turn is simply preparation for Z ( Kindergarten). Kindergarten was once thought of as an optional preparation for academics proper. How far back can this go and is this really serving the need of the child rather than the convenience of the system?

Is there another side to this? Is there a proper kind of vertical relevance? I would say yes, and bring up the Ignatian idea of formation. But this post is already too long, so that aspect of it will have to wait.

Pulling Back Together??

The day went a bit better as it proceeded, but it continued to be a bit bumpy, like our car brakes right now as the pads are wearing low. Aidan continued to be in pain each time he drank and a certain amount of the fluid leaked out onto the bandage and onto his shirt. So I was changing the dressing and clothes about every 3-4 hours. Aidan was almost heroically brave: “It’s better! I’m laughing!” He alternated between resting on the couch watching Pokemon videos, and running around the house with almost his usual energy, and asking to be pushed in his new purple wheelchair/stroller.

The fact that he watched Pokemon for a good part of the day meant that most of the other kids did, too . We also went to the library, to the post office, and to the grocery market to get our weekly treat and some 7Up for Aidan. Aidan’s OT showed up since I wasn’t unable to get hold of her to cancel the visit, but she stayed for only a few minutes to cheer Aidan up, and left him a toy to play with.

After we got home from the library the older kids made plans to plan out the movie they want to make this summer. This was probably the synergistic high point of the day, as they all gathered around the table and discussed weapons, costumes, technical aspects of the filming and so on. I started dozing while they were doing this and suddenly jumped up with horror. Aidan’s IEP with the speech therapist was scheduled at the local school and I was already 15 minutes late! Leaving the little ones at home with the big ones, I started calling her to let her know as I went out the door and drove down the road, but the line was busy. I got stuck behind a slow van so I can’t say I made it down the mountain in record time, but I would have!
I did get there pretty late but it turned out to be another high “synergy” point of the day since LM liked my ideas about pragmatics and prosody and had some great ideas for resources to use — we will get to use Earobics, and Boardmaker for scheduling, and some other things I could never afford. I asked for some input from the learning specialist and the behavioral psychologist and she thought that was a good idea. We were scribbling down all kinds of ideas and agreed it was better for him to work on several things with a lower percentage of consistency, rather than hammer on a couple of things for a higher percentage. For my purposes because of what I know about Aidan, that will work better because he’s always done better with a broad sampling of things with overlap rather than targeted drill that doesn’t interest him much.

After dinner, I played a game of chess with Liam. This is why I think I may be pulling back together: I actually won! First time in about 7 years (he is almost 20). Better than winning, it was an unusual game with lots of options. For the first time, I could see a sort of stylized storyline in the movement choices we made and guess that maybe that’s why it’s enjoyable to math and pattern minded people (which I’m not, very much, at least not in our family demographic cross-section.