Semi-Highlights

I don’t quite have the energy for a Sierra Highlight this week, so I’m just going to log down a few things that are going on.

General State of Things:

We all are in various stages of a cold. Sean and Kieron came down with it while we were travelling (and Sean was here). Then I got it. Now Brendan, Paddy and Aidan. Kevin and Clare don’t seem to have it yet.

Weather:

Cooling down, and supposed to cool down still more. I love fall.

This Afternoon:

Sean got to come home early — this is parent/teacher conference week so the bus delivered him at 4 instead of 6. It was SO nice to reconnect with him. He took his shower, did his homework, and talked. …. a lot. We ate dinner. Four seems so much earlier than six, somehow.

His knee is still bothering him. The doctor says it’s OK and he can play past it. So that’s good, but it still hurts.

Formal Academics:

Going pretty well. Kieron is quite into most of the things we are doing. The Morning Time reading and conversation made a big difference. Next on my list, more time outdoors. I know I keep saying that. The problem I think is that by the time the morning is over, I’m tired; and by the time I’ve rested, it’s time to start the “second shift”of evening. I am trying to figure out why I don’t have enough energy for 16 hours. How did I do this when I had an infant and a child on oxygen, or 3 babies under four years old? I’m not THAT old.

Dreams:

I dreamed about constructing parallel and perpendicular lines from an equation, and I dreamed we had brought home a kitty from our friends the Bryans’ house. Strange.

Nine Years Ago:

Aidan was just stepping down from the PICU to the pediatric ward at the San Francisco hospital where he had his transplant. He was on oxygen, G-tube fed with a continuous drip, and on 14 meds which he would reflux at the least opportunity. He was massively immunesuppressed with a huge incision from the transplant. His nurse cried when she was assigned to him. He was SO not ready to be on the floor. And she had already had to call security on a violent teenage patient that day.

Grateful For:

Lots of things.

Reading:

Self-help manuals. They’re my form of escape : ).

Photo:

This is a really nice guy. He’s a star running back in our area, a senior, who is being recruited by D1 universities. He read Aidan’s story on a local football board and sent him a football and a league champion hoodie, with a nice note telling Aidan how much he admired his courage. That is classy.

Something Cute that Aidan Said:

We were at our friends' house in Northerrn California. They have several hens and a couple of roosters. The roosters were crowing early one morning and Aidan tilted his head to one side and said, “That chicken is SINGING.”

The Hidden Life of Introverts

I am really zipping through these old papers — well, not really, because every time I write one up I spend about 20 minutes on it. Which makes for about 5 minutes per page. Not zipping, then. Considering that I have a box full of papers, I am probably not making much progress at all. I don’t even want to do the math. But blogging them is helping them stick in my mind — I suppose it’s a form of narration. So in that way, it’s all good.

Several years ago we were talking about introverted temperaments at Real Learning, and Lissa sent this link to a post by her husband. He, in turn, was drawing from an Atlantic article by Jonathan Rauch called: Caring for Your Introvert (the habits and needs of a little-understood group). From what I read on the Atlantic web site, the short piece received and still receives more traffic than anything else posted there.

Also, in an RL discussion Cindy, an old friend who has two introverted sons, mentioned this book: The Introvert Advantage. Reading the article and the book helped me quite a bit in understanding things that had puzzled me in the past about myself, my kids, and the world around us. According to most sources, introverts are “a minority in the regular population but a majority in the gifted population.” The reason for this, apparently, is that introverts mentally process a different way than extroverts do. They are often slower in the give-and-take of an “extrovert” scene like the local neighborhood BBQ, but process in more depth and since they are energized by solitude and going into depth on a subject or skill, they develop abilities that carry over into intellectual areas. Of course, quick social ability and ability to get along in crowd situations is a good thing, and is probably an important aspect of “emotional intelligence”, but the point is that introversion does have some redeeming qualities as well.

Also, introversion is not the same thing as shyness. Some introverts are shy, but so are some extroverts. I would imagine that there is more reason for an introvert to develop social anxiety, because often society prefers the out-going, “people person” type of personality to the quieter, more reserved type. (I have read that it is otherwise in Japan, where quiet reserve is valued more than it is here in central California, but I don’t know if it’s true. It always reminds me, though, of my oldest son’s good friends in his grade school years — they were Asian, brothers about a year apart in age, and their mother heartily approved of my son as a playmate for them because he was so quiet and respectful and thoughtful : )). So, there are plenty of confident introverts who are comfortable in their own skins, and there are extroverts who are socially insecure, perhaps because they have been criticized for their natural style of interaction.

A surprising number of actors and actresses are introverted by temperament, and this isn’t as odd as it seems. My daughter, for instance, as a moderate introvert, is much more comfortable doing things like cantoring and lectoring at church than much of her more extroverted peer group. It seems that this kind of setting, where an introvert is allowed to challenge herself in a semi-controlled environment, can lead to success which builds confidence in other areas.

It’s much more commonly realized that many writers are introverted types. One way that this is noticeable is in their choice of main characters. A large proportion of literary characters especially in juvenile books have some obvious up-front “issue”, like overweight or a limp or poor eyesight, and also some inner strength or talent or vocation that ends up saving the day in some respect. This, I would imagine, reflects how many introverts see themselves, and it’s probably no accident that many introverts (certainly I was one) receive a lot of emotional nourishment from books.

I suppose the internet can be a solace to the introverted person, too. A solace can become a burrow to escape into and balancing that out is important. I think I burrowed into books a bit too much as a child, and I have to fight my tendency to burrow into my computer now.

I blogged about introversion and unschooling a few times in the past:

• Introverts and Their Learning Behavior
• Can Unschoolers Exhort?

(I thought there were more, but they are not coming up).

Not directly related, but I like this post at Studeo about how “the world” sees things one way but that is not always the truest way to see them.

(Brendan having some time and space)

Witnesses

Another one from the files: Childhood Trauma by Alice Miller, a Polish born psychologist born in 1923. She makes the case that horrific murderers and tyrants were practically always abused children. I am not sure why I printed this out several years back, but it is certainly disturbing reading, and fits in with several books I have read recently about attachment and the deprivation of attachment. Children who are abused and severely neglected don’t always become horrific criminals, by any means. But people don’t generally become human monsters unless they have undergone monstrous treatment in their early years. The children who are “saved” and grow up to be conscientious folk trying not to repeat the violent cycle have generally had what Miller calls a “helping witness” in their background, someone who did not support the mistreatment even if he or she was not powerful enough to stop the abuse. That seems to be a lifeline for the child’s soul and spirit, enabling him to disassociate the mistreatment from his own identity and move away from it.

when I tried to expose the social consequences of child maltreatment, I first encountered strong resistance. Repeatedly I was told, “I, too, was a battered child, but that didn’t make me a criminal.” When I asked these people for details about their childhood, I was always told of a person who made the difference, a sibling, a teacher, a neighbor, just somebody who liked or even loved them but, at least in most cases, was unable to protect them. Yet through his presence this person gave the child a notion of trust and love.

I call these persons “helping witnesses.” Dostoyevsky, for instance, had a brutal father, but a loving mother. She wasn’t strong enough to protect him from his father, but she gave him a powerful conception of love, without which his novels would have been unthinkable. Many have also been lucky enough to find “enlightened” and courageous witnesses, people who helped them to recognize the injustices they suffered, the significance the hurtful treatment had for them, and its influences on their whole life.

Later on in life, a person can be helped by what Dr Miller terms an “enlightened witness”, someone who can help one sort through one’s childhood and provide insight and opportunity for reflection. For this reason, she thinks prison interventions are important. Of course, the person has to WANT to be helped, to be willing to do the hard work to revisit and work through his past, and this is where free will comes in.

One thing that fascinated me in the article was the influence of the psychologist Daniel Gottlieb Schreber.

At that time I quoted in For Your Own Good at length the pedagogical advice given to parents in Germany a century ago, and detailed what I believed to be a connection between the systematic cruelty of these methods and the systematic cruelty of Hitler’s executioners forty years later. The numerous and widely-read tracts by Dr. Daniel Gottlieb Schreber, the inventor of the Schrebergärten (the German word for “small allotments”), are of major interest here. Some of his books ran to as many as forty editions around the year 1860, and their central concern was to instruct parents in the systematic upbringing of infants from the very first day of life. Many people - motivated by what they thought to be the best of intentions complied with the advice given them by Schreber and other authors about how best to raise their children. Today we would call it a systematic instruction in child persecution and maltreatment. One of Schreber’s convictions was that when babies cry they should be made to desist by the use of spanking, assuring his readers that “such a procedure is only necessary once, or at the most twice, and then one is master of the child for all time. From then on, one look, one single gesture will suffice”. Above all, these books counseled that the newborn child should be forced from the very first day to obey and to refrain from crying.

Miller’s question was why so many German citizens went along with Hitler’s crazy ideas. When she started researched Schreber and his influence on German parenting of the time, she theorized that the parenting techniques he espoused were carried out by the German people and that their children developed a certain hardness of heart that prevented them from compassion and intervention as their neighbors were carted off to concentration camps. In contrast, she found that the Germans who did interfere and try to help the persecuted Jews and others were generally brought up in a kindlier way, disciplined by exhortation and example and affection rather than by detachment and physical discipline.

Schreber believed that cuddling and physical affection made a child weak, so he discouraged these things. Now there is physical neurological evidence, brought out in the book Becoming Attached by Robert Karen and by books like The Developing Mind by Daniel Siegel, that emotional deprivation and physical abuse actually change the structure of the brain and prevent normal development in some areas that are responsible for certain types of higher thinking. As Miller writes:

Contrary to common opinion prevalent as recently as fifteen years ago, the human brain at birth is far from being fully developed. It is use-dependent, needing loving stimulation for the child from her first day on. The abilities a person’s brain can develop depend on experiences in the first three years of life.

Studies on abandoned and severely maltreated Romanian children, as an example, revealed striking lesions in certain areas of the brain. The repeated traumatization has led to an increased release of stress hormones which have attacked the sensitive tissue of the brain and destroyed the new, already built-up neurons. The areas of their brains responsible for the “management” of their emotions are twenty to thirty percent smaller than in other children of the same age. Obviously, all children (not only Romanian) who suffer such abandonment and maltreatment will be damaged in this way. The neurobiological research makes it easier for us to understand the way Nazis like Eichmann, Himmler, Hess and others functioned.

Alice Miller advocates passing laws to make corporal punishment illegal. What she observes as a psychologist is that children who were physically mistreated will sometimes grow up to deny and justify their own abuse “it did me good” and thus be way more likely to pass on the behavior to another generation. So I suppose she thinks legislation will break the cycle. That goes too far for me, for several reasons. I am editing this a bit because I realized that if I go into that at all, it raises a whole bunch of questions that aren’t directly connected with the point of this post. Let it suffice to say that I don’t agree with everything she says.

I think she is perceptive though about the tendency to “commit” to something unhealthy in your own past and repeat the cycle. You see a parallel to this sometimes in some of the more emotional “anti-unschooling” reactions — “How will a kid ever read Shakespeare if he is not forced to study it in school?” “How can you grow up OK if you haven’t had to deal with the schoolyard bully?” “I wouldn’t do hard things if someone didn’t force me to, so why should my kids?” My family’s been able to debunk these personally. The idea here is that if one doesn’t examine one’s life a bit, one can end up reflexively following patterns set in childhood even if they aren’t really true or the best for the situation.

Incidentally, Hitler was beaten often in childhood, and Miller theorizes that because his father was the illegitimate child of a Jewish man, that Alois Hitler (Adolf’s father) passed on an intense self-hatred and shame literally physically to his own son. Of Daniel Schreber’s two sons, one commited suicide and one became spectacularly mentally ill and wrote a book about his illness. Really interesting! Miller has collected a lot of case studies about childhood abuse in famous historical figures, and it’s interesting to see the same story played out in so many ways in different time periods, with variations for individual personalities.

Therapy, and Unschooling

Another one from North Carolina Unschoolers — From School to Unschool (pdf) — about one family’s transition from school, to “school at home”, to unschooling.

Also, Children and Deficits (pdf)

This one brings up something I’ve thought about many times. … about “when” and “if” special therapy is required in specific cases. Our mainstream seems to encourage bringing children in to be evaluated and treated for any little difference. I suppose this is good in many ways. If the disability is quite significant, intervention is probably called for. However, I think it is also important to realize that there is a Law of Unintended Consequences. Every intervention has a ripple effect. That is not to say that people should never intervene, but that one should carefully think through what one wants from the intervention, and not just blindly hope that the diagnosis, therapy, whatever will be a panacea, a cure. It usually is not that. It does sometimes provide tools. And it can provide a network, which can be important. But it will bring costs too — perhaps financial, perhaps in time and energy, perhaps in the child’s view of self.

As with planning a medical procedure, it is important to be prepared beforehand with some background information on your child and his or her perceived problems, to list questions and concerns to ask about, to set goals (and get the child’s help in doing this, particularly if he or she is older than 10). Finding a good fit is important — a poor relationship with a therapist is likely to become a problem with the intervention. Plus, it is important to look for the kind of treatment you can believe in and follow through with at least in part! And I would add from my own trial and error experience that you should formulate some sort of “back out” plan if the intervention seems to be doing more harm than good. Usually the “expert” has more experience and knowledge in the particular area being addressed, which is a good reason to seek evaluation and treatment, but the parent has way more knowledge of the “whole picture” of the child, and that is extremely important as well.

Boys and Girls and Learning at School

A few years ago I got quite interested in the way boys are floundering in school compared to girls. Here’s a short article at PBS — Boys in School which summarizes some of the recent findings. Another recent article The Trouble with Boys says

In elementary-school classrooms—where teachers increasingly put an emphasis on language and a premium on sitting quietly and speaking in turn—the mismatch between boys and school can become painfully obvious. “Girl behavior becomes the gold standard,” says “Raising Cain” coauthor Thompson. “Boys are treated like defective girls.”

Since I have six boys it was an interesting question to me around the time my oldest ones reached their teenage years. I am going through my old print-outs and found these two pdfs:

• Boys in Schools — What’s Happening?
• Perceptions of Adolescent Males

There is an Australian government clearing-house of more similar studies and articles over here.

Basically, according to present studies in the US quoted in the first article:

• Boys are 30 percent more likely than girls to flunk or drop out of school;
• When it comes to grades and homework, girls outperform boys in elementary, secondary, high school, college, and even graduate school;
• Boys are four to five times more likely than girls to be diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD);
• Women outnumber men in higher education with 56 percent of bachelor’s degrees and 55 percent of graduate degrees going to women.

• Boys make up two-thirds of the students in special education and are five times more likely to be classified as hyperactive.

Earlier and earlier formal academics have their problematic aspects in the developmental process of boys, too. Here’s one blog post at Why Boys Fail that discusses this.

Preschool has changed a lot in the last couple of years — for the most part, it has become much more academic– and little boys, well, they’re about the same as they’ve always been. And lots of parents are keying into the fact that this is a problem…..It turns out, the expulsion rate for preschoolers is three times higher than it is for K-12th graders. And preschool boys are expelled at 4.5 times the rate of their female classmates.

Some little boys do just fine in preschool. But too many are learning a damaging lesson — that school is not for them.

My guess is that any educational practice that has a tendency to squelch boys will also do harm to girls. For one thing, boys and girls don’t temperamentally divide by gender. There are some low-key, verbal boys and some very kinesthetic sensory-seeking girls and those lively girls would probably fall through the gaps in a similar way to the lively boys, though they might not show up on the statistics so much as a group. Plus, an education that rewards and emphasizes one’s strengths in an artificial way wouldn’t necessarily do a service even to the compliant, verbal-linguistic girls and boys. They might easily come to think that the talents rewarded in the grade school academic world are actually the talents that will help them succeed in life, but that is not always necessarily so. I’ve certainly met lots of women who did well in school because they were cooperative and verbally talented with early fine motor skills, who found that this did not add up to “real” education or coping ability for them in the long run.

• Here are some blog posts on brain-based gender differences.
• And a few more at the great Eide Neurolearning Blog.

Anyway, in my ongoing efforts to have less paper floating around the house, I’m going to try to start linking to the articles and papers that I have thought valuable enough to print out and keep for one or more years, so that hopefully I can feel OK about adding the paper to the woodstove this winter : ). So I’ve started a new category — “In the Files” for things I want to virtually organize so I can toss the extra paper. I hope it will be interesting to readers, of course, or I wouldn’t bother to put them on the blog.

I’m off for a week or so — a few of the family is going up north for a family reunion, while the rest of us stay home because of outside commitments that prevent travel right now. Bye for now!

More on School Science

Laura asked about my last school post:

Not that you have to be an expert or anything, but you do have at least one child in college, so perhaps you could answer something for me: How much has what Cohen said about not having to take the typical high school survey courses been superseded by the growing influence of SAT subject tests (or SAT IIs) on college admissions, especially for private colleges? Our little “neighborhood” school, Columbia, requires five for homeschoolers. (Not that we’d be able to get in or pay for it, necessarily, but at least it’s close by and they have a core curriculum.) I know none of this is not quite applicable to Sean’s situation (ouch!), but I for one would love to sidestep this intimidating and onerous way of teaching science, and just have fun doing and learning.

I do have one child in college and two others who are in the process of applying, but my experience isn’t exactly representative. My kids have tended to gravitate towards Catholic liberal arts colleges that use a “Great Books” curriculum and don’t generally seem to require subject SATs. Now is this a limitation we have inadvertently imposed by our style of homeschooling? More proximately, have I done Sean a disservice by not prepping him from way back for a “high school” style curriculum? I have reflected upon this, and decided that it is irrelevant, for two reasons:

#1 — I think that an informal, “living” science background such as Laura described is more effective in preparing a person to think like a scientist. I researched this a lot when I first started homeschooling. Arthur Robinson, for example, who is a science professor who has devised a homeschooling curriculum, said that kids brought up on a conventional “school” science curriculum tend to have to unlearn a lot when they reach higher levels. (Science Taken Seriously is one article on his site, and there are a few others on the sidebar). He writes:

If Isaac Newton could not do mechanics without calculus, how can a teenage student do so? The answer is, of course, that he cannot. He can only pretend to do mechanics with the help of texts that contain artificial problems. If he ever has an opportunity to learn physics properly, he will then have to unlearn the incorrect procedures. This is debilitating and wasteful of his time.

Robinson thus goes on to say that the bulk of science in the earlier years (up to college) should be outside the formal academic curriculum, and consist of research, reading, observation and investigation of the natural world. In fact, I’ve hardly seen someone trained in science who thinks that the way science is currently taught is the best way. For what it’s worth, there is this Textbook League which is a bit polemical but has interesting reviews of standard high school and middle school science textbooks. Here are some articles about errors and myths taught in school, too.

So now to the second point, FWIW — I have not had personal experience here.

#2 –I think that preparation for subject SATs, should one have to have them for college admissions, can be taught in considerably less than 4 years of high school. One would have to study for them anyway, I imagine, so I would probably have the child simply study a bit during the course of the year, and then prepare more intensively during the days before he or she actually takes the test.

A sample question from the Biology subject test:

16. Which of the following most accurately
reveals common ancestry among many
different species of organisms?
(A) The amino acid sequence of their
cytochrome C
(B) Their ability to synthesize hemoglobin
(C) The percentage of their body weight that
is fat
(D) The percentage of their body surface that
is used in gas exchange
(E) The mechanism of their mode of
locomotion

This is the kind of thing that people don’t tend to remember unless they are studying for an exam, or happen to be in a field that uses this kind of information regularly, or are interested in it for some hobby-type reason. I probably knew this once but have lost it in the mists of time since high school biology. It’s not the kind of thing a child retains just because he or she is exposed to a science textbook instead of “living” science. It’s not formative to a young person in the way investigative and cultural science is. For students in secondary school, I would have to call this “derived” knowledge — accepted on faith because someone told them it was true. Which is fine, but not really an educative force per se.

So I will probably continue to do some version of what my older children did — divide 2-3 years of textbook science into 4-5 years, for familiarity with standard high school science concepts, and spend the rest of the time reading classic science books like those on MacBeth’s Opinion, and investigating scientific concepts empirically like Theresa’s children do. I generally teach information-crunching skills to older high school age children so they CAN efficiently assimilate information for exams if they have to someday. But that’s not science — it’s something else — useful perhaps in today’s world, but not exactly what learning is about.

I am off now to locomote to the Post Office. I hope this helps a bit — a science post from a literature major!

Almost cut my hair....

Then I did….I cut my own hair! I was sick of it and yesterday decided that I had a daughter who could help me salvage it if I really messed it up.

But it’s OK… at least, if there’s a bad part in the back, I am happily unaware of it ;-).

a dad on unschooling

I loved this An Unauthorised Guide for Unschooling Mums dealing with (still developing) Unschooling Dads

So funny and seems quite perceptive!

My own husband has always been pretty fine about alternative methods — in fact, in this house I’m more the “inside the box” type than he is, and when I’m the divergent one he’s usually OK with it — but I thought the article rang true in general, in explaining why one’s well-meaning neighbor or relative or associate might criticize one’s parenting and education choices with the best of intentions. My neighbors and relatives don’t generally do that, but one does run across it once in a while, and in my experience it has usually been in a caring context — more bewilderment than contempt.

HT: Leonie who linked to it on the Unschooling Catholics list.

Sierra Highlights #5

My occasional Daybook.

Adventures in Recent Past and Future:

Sean’s football, which is like a marvellous saga in itself.

An upcoming trip north for a family reunion. Only some of us can go; Sean and Kevin have to stay here, so Sean can go to school and practice, and Brendan may hang out here too in order to keep Kevin company.

We got 5 cords of firewood dumped last week, and my washing machine got repaired.

Where Everyone Is:

Well, I shouldn’t do these on weekends because the answer is obvious. Clare’s watching a movie in my room; the teenagers are watching football; Kevin is catching up on things in his office; the younger boys are playing board games. Oh, I think Kieron is reading now.

Liam is probably having brunch after Mass at college, and then going to the nursing home with his Legion of Mary group.

Recent Music:

Van Morrison, something classical I didn’t recognize (Clare), and Clancy Brothers.

Recent Books Seen Around the House:

Through the Looking Glass/Alice in Wonderland combined set (Kieron); Old Thunder (bio of Belloc by J Pearce) (Clare); Punished by Rewards, Reading Rescue 1-2-3 (me), Namath, Bleak House, (Brendan); Last Man Down, Old Man of the Sea (Sean)

Weather:

Heated up again, but then cooled way down again.

Thoughts:

Many, but confused.

What I’m Working On:

Plato’s Meno (for the study group), also reading aloud to Brendan.

Wrapping up the first term of the year.

What I am Happy About:

That the firewood came and I have my washing machine back.

That it is nine years this October 1st since Aidan’s transplant and the child we almost lost is with us every day, even though he often tries to take over my lap top. Worth it.

What I’m Not So Happy About:

Too much screen time. Isn’t that a familiar complaint?

Also, Paddy has had an attitude recently. Be your age, Paddy — oh, that’s right, you ARE five years old.

Spiritual Focus:

Persistence with the Rosary — I’ve been exercycling while praying and at least, I stay awake.

Recent Kitchen Events:

Northern beans with jalapenos and onions and garlic, for Aidan.

Chocolate applesauce bread with chocolate glaze.

Lemon bread with sugar crust….. I was so thrifty and used the extra sour cream in the recipe, and no one noticed (a good thing).

Formal Academics:

Up to Day 22 and turning the corner on Week 6. I changed my mind. Kieron is not sluggish. He just would prefer to do things his own way. Now that we are having a Morning Time of reading, he is much happier about including some seatwork.

Informal Learning:

Aidan and Paddy both reading more words in their environment.

Culture:

Hmm.

Movies:

We watched The Outsiders. It is by Francis Ford Coppola. It was a bit over the top.

Wives and Daughters with Clare, and a couple of episodes of Bleak House.

Wearing:

Light blue Alaska hoodie, jeans, clogs. I lost a bit more weight and am back to my smaller size jeans.

Creating:

Still stuck on forms. I am learning a lot about my cool Microsoft Word 2007.

Grateful for:

My family’s geekiness. Sure, I get uncomfortable sometimes wondering how everyone will fare in life, but they are so cute and endearing and different.

Some things I want to do this week:

Prepare for upcoming journey.

A Picture Thought:

well, video anyway; plays from the game this Friday. Sean is the kick returner in the first play and also plays QB; he returned it 96 yards for a TD. He is in white, #14.

Grass Stains

Do you care about grass stains? I do, right now; I never particularly did before. But if you do, this site has lots of tips for getting them out.

The reason that I care is that Sean’s “away” jersey is mostly white, and he sure can pick up a grass stain. Since the jersey belongs to the school, it’s a high priority to return it in nice condition. I suppose that is what’s called an extrinsic motivation. When it’s our own clothes, I can be OK with a few green shadows here and there, especially in play clothes. And I usually — well, NEVER — buy white nylon play clothes that are supposed to be washed only in cold water without bleach.

So it’s hand-scrubbing in the sink, though I may try vinegar in a safe spot, next time.

Sean’s team won… a hard fought battle against one of the best teams in the division. You know, I didn’t realize it at the time, but last week’s game was the first time I’ve EVER been to a high school football game. Ever, as in my whole life. I wonder if that’s unusual, at least for an American? I did not realize that there was a whole school sub-culture devoted to football enthusiasm.

Last week, I felt like a huge UFO had slowly descended to rest on the familiar high school football field that the children have played and ran on so many times. Brilliant lights flickered on at dusk, people ran around with maroon and gold body paint, and there was much shouting in a language I did not entirely understand, and much signaling, running and jumping by small men in black and white stripes, and young ladies wearing Star-Trek like mini-skirts. A different world.

who my husband would be in 1400

Kevin saw this on my blog so he did one too. This is his.

Your result for The Who Would You Be in 1400 AD Test…

The Lord

You scored 24% Cardinal, 54% Monk, 35% Lady, and 65% Knight!

a few bits from Sean's football game

Just in case Matthew or Heather or someone wants to see!
Sean's team is the one with maroon and gold, and Sean is the QB, of course. His number is 14. At the beginning he makes a nice kickback return. He plays defense too.

His scrimmage is linked over here.

Couldn't Resist ;-)

Your result for The Who Would You Be in 1400 AD Test…

The Monk

You scored 5% Cardinal, 79% Monk, 50% Lady, and 35% Knight!

HT: Drew at Running River Latin School.

Science the School Way

This evening was devoted to helping Sean study for an Earth Science chapter exam — he didn’t do too great on the first one so I wanted to demonstrate the process of studying a textbook — something he doesn’t know much about. He is having the easiest time in Language Arts, the class I was most worried about, and having more trouble with science, because of the memorization required. By chance, while I was pondering his problem during this day, I was sorting through old papers and found this very good article by Cafi Cohen:

Older Kids — Learning and Doing Science

Classroom science instructors and textbook publishers - purveyors of traditional science instruction - focus on the first definition, the “body of facts” and “systematic knowledge” and “general laws.” The result? Students taking biology read the text, complete worksheets, bumble through “experiments” (which, sadly, have but One Right Answer), and take exams to demonstrate that they can differentiate porifera from coelenterates. Classroom science, despite the efforts of some outstanding teachers, rewards memorization and regurgitation. Answers are prized; questions are discouraged. We all know the drill. And we all know that traditional instruction is more likely to discourage rather than encourage interest in science

I suspect Sean would agree. He didn’t look too thrilled with science as he reassembled his backpack in preparation for tomorrow. I can see some benefits to learning to master a body of knowledge by sheer memorization. But it isn’t how we’ve done it up till now. However, now is the time for him to learn how to cope with this method of assimilation, because he will need it in order to do decently in the course. We sat down with him and showed him how to use the end of chapter summary and the teacher’s Reading Guide to quiz himself. Then both Kevin and I tried to explain our understanding of basic chemistry (which this chapter covered). Then we did a sort of interactive summary. Kevin told him he should quickly scan through the notes the next day before the class to refresh his memory. Sean dragged himself off to bed with a headache. Anyway, we shall have to have a more regular study plan.

There are more science in the homeschool articles at HEM.

This blog seems to be a lot about school, not homeschool, recently. But that’s because of the inevitable compare and contrast transition going on.

Firsts and Pasts

Thanks to those of you who reassured me about being a good mom. I don’t really suppose I’m the worst mom in the world, but I do know that I have some limitations and sometimes they seem to be magnified out of proportion when they are in contrast to some need in my family. Yes, like my need for 8 hours of sleep in order to act like a human, Lissla, coming up against the baby days when the baby seemed to need to wake me up every hour or two! Challenges are different now, juggling special needs and college/career choices and everything in between, but I still have some shortfalls in sleep sometimes.

Sean had his first “real” scrimmage yesterday, therefore his first “real” experience as starting quarterback. I wasn’t there; it was at a high school 120 miles away from here (such is the program for a country varsity division where his team competes against other rural teams). Kevin filmed a bit of it though, so we got to watch it when they got home at 10 pm. His team basically scored at will, and the total was something like 35 to 7, with the opponent’s only TD scored against S’s team’s 2nd string. It probably won’t be so easy with every game, but certainly a nice start to the season, particularly as Sean’s school has generally had a losing record for the past few years. Sean looked good out there; he said he was nervous all day but it didn’t much show on the field.

Paddy read the first couple of lines of a hymn at mass this evening, one he had never seen before. So I guess he is managing to emerge into literacy with only the littlest boosts from me. This is kind of nice. I always thought it was neat that some kids learned to read basically on their own and I really wanted to try to do it that way for Paddy and Aidan. I have been breaking the deal with Aidan. I suppose I got flustered by the school IEP last year. But maybe I’ll try and back off a bit, since now it looks like Paddy is on the downhill slope and I don’t see why Aidan shouldn’t do the same thing even with his disabilities, when he is ready. The thing is, Paddy doesn’t really LIKE to read all that much on his own, and I can’t blame him. He is only five. A lot of his learning input needs to come from ear, eye and touch, not from symbols, at this point. He’s been having fun with the story games we play, where we write stories together and sometimes act them out. So I think I will keep to the informal approach, and the theme of “opening up the world” for them, not putting their noses to the grindstone.

Sean thinks he is getting an A in Spanish. We all know so little about how high school grading works. I never paid any attention to my grades throughout school, at least not until college. He knows he needs to keep a basic GPA in order to meet his college goals, but he is still learning HOW that works in a public education building. At any rate, he is certainly putting his hours in, at home as well as at the building.

Picture of Hatcher Pass, near Wasilla in Alaska, taken last year about this time, when Brendan and I were there. Gotta love those clouds. I miss them and the mountains the most (I grew up mostly in Alaska). California skies are mostly like turquoise ceramic bowls, except when as now there’s a forest fire and you get a tinge of yellow greyness at the edges. We do have mountains here, but they are not spectacularly white and huge all year around like they are there.

Sierra Highlights #4

My occasional Daybook.
Adventures in Recent Past and Future:
We got the new van — umm, 98 Nissan Quest with 111 thousand miles on it. Then it went into the shop (under warranty) for a speedometer problem. Anyway, we’re officially a two car family with one car in the shop! Luxury!
Where Everyone Is:
Aidan fell asleep when I did, this afternoon, and is still asleep. I found handwriting sheets and phonogram cards scattered around me so apparently he was trying to teach himself literacy while I was off the job. Paddy and Kieron are playing some elaborate game involving lots of digging through toy chests. I declared a computer moratorium because everyone had too much screen time while Sean was home for Labor Day Weekend. Clare is apparently studying in her room, or something — I can hear music drifting from there.
Liam called today — he had a cancelled class, so some extra time, and was hiking up the side of the little bowl of hills his campus is on.

Recent Music:
Les Miserables.

Recent Books Seen Around the House:
Winter’s Magic (Kieron); War and Peace (Clare); Plato’s Meno, Cradles of Eminence (me), I Will Love you Forever (Aidan); Billy and Blaze, Three Fox Fables (Paddy).
Weather:
Cooled down dramatically… from 107 to the 80’s down in town, so here we need a bit of a fire in the mornings.
Thoughts:
What is virtue? (see reading above). How do you manage it?
What I’m Working On:
The yard — Kevin is chainsawing and the boys are dragging trees, and I’m trying to rake and pile.
Studying Plato — doing an online study group with some classical friends, which is looking like so much fun. I feel like a grown-up, being in a book study group with a chat room interaction format.
What I am Happy About:
The cooler air.
Aidan is reading just a trifle better. Just a trifle. Also, his recent labs were great. I never get tired of that.
That the screens are off, except mine (blushing).
What I’m Not So Happy About:
In general, battling the blues. Missing Liam and Sean. Feeling like a not-good-enough mom.
Spiritual Focus:
Sacramentality of everyday life.
Recent Kitchen Events:
Enchiladas with shredded beef from the crockpot, and red beans and cheddar.
Homemade donuts with sugar, yesterday — unhealthy but very nice with a woodstove fire and cool autumn air.
Formal Academics:
On Day 8…. and week 3… so a slow start. I think Kieron’s entering the dreaded twelves at last. He’s decidedly more sluggish academically than he was a year ago.
Informal Learning:
Aidan’s been on a roll — with role playing, and trying to write, and constructing words with the letter box, and baking a simile of everything I make, with Playdough.
Culture:
Kevin is taking Brendan and Clare to a Paddy Keenan concert in town –the “Jimi Hendrix of the Aeolian pipes”.
I played the piano, um, keyboard the other day!
Movies:
?? can’t remember what’s been on, besides preseason college football. I think they’ve been watching more Perry Mason episodes.
Wearing:

Jeans and a dark blue knit shirt. I should give up this category, since it basically never changes, except for the color of the shirt.
Creating:
I seem to be weak on this point. My favorite thing to create right now is forms — it’s like an addiction. Not very enduring though.
Grateful for:
The Psalms. No matter how horrible I feel, King David has been there and told about it already.
(I don’t have a direct reason to feel bad, but that’s probably the worst kind; I always feel there is something I SHOULD feel bad about, and then I can think of all kinds of things).
Some things I want to do this week:
Keep up my household rotation (so far so good); finish something I am writing.
A Picture Thought:

(I went into the archives — this is Paddy, two years ago tomorrow — he is wearing an old life jacket which he apparently thinks is a mail-coat, and trying to sheath his sword). He was three.

Life in Pictures 2

Whenever Aidan’s really into something, he brings his Pikachu pillow over to share the experience:

And then there’s Aidan and Daddy — another beautiful friendship:

This one amused me — that the 15 year old, the 5 year old and the 12 year old all seem to have the same reaction to whatever game Sean was playing:

Sierra Highlights #3

My occasional Daybook.

Adventures in Recent Past and Future:

We took Liam back to college on Sunday.
We may get a new van. New indeed! It has 111K on it, but is in good shape and comes with a warranty.
Hey, how many rural families of nine do you know that have gotten by for 10 years with one vehicle. It can present its challenges! We will be happy to have a second mode of transportation if only for those moments when our one car is in the shop.

Where Everyone Is:

Aidan is asleep. Sean, having finished his homework, is going to sleep. Kieron and Paddy are watching Kevin play Free Bird on Guitar Hero. Clare and Brendan don’t seem to be around.

Recent Music:

Elton John and John Denver (these are the football kid’s picks when he comes home from school at 6 pm)
Mozart’s Requiem.

Recent Books Seen Around the House:

We Went with Magellan, The Enchanted Castle (Kieron); Founding of Christendom (Clare); The Guillotine and the Cross ( Brendan); Cloud of Witnesses by Dorothy Sayers (Sean); The Cloister Walk (me), War and Peace (Liam — he has to read it during the first week of class, for Seminar). Car magazines (Aidan); Arnold Lobel books (Paddy).

Weather:

Hot, but normal hot.

Thoughts:

Too many transitions. Mom overload… ducklings scattering all over the place. Oh, the days when I had a brood of under-tens! it went fast.

What I’m Working On:

Trying to seamlessly integrate various aspects of my life and keep my focus. Yeah, right!

What I am Happy About:

Arrival of fall in this beautiful, beautiful national forest.
A stocked pantry and freezer.
Our dog has successfully lost almost all his extra weight and seems to have regained a new lease on life — he is going on 12 but acts like he’s about 8 or 9 now.

What I’m Not So Happy About:

My lack of follow-through in several “important but not urgent” areas.

Spiritual Focus:

Finished Spiritual Exercises. Turning attention to saying the Rosary well and consistently.

Recent Kitchen Events:

I made nice modified Toll House cookie bars. I use a Toll House recipe but double it, sub a cup of peanut butter for one of the cups of butter, and I use oat flour in place of two of the cups of regular flour. I make oat flour from oats by grinding it in the coffee grinder and it’s not bad.

Formal Academics:

Starting homeschooling in a lowkey way.

Informal Learning:

Some good pretend-play with Aidan and Paddy.

Culture:

Played classical guitar duets with Liam before he left.

Movies:

Perry Mason episodes; Witness for the Prosecution

Wearing:

Black knit pants and a pink thermal shirt. … pajamas, basically!

Creating:

Some order in the schoolroom arrangements.

Grateful for:

The sense of humor this family has, and the way we basically get along.

Some things I want to do this week:

I finished cleaning the garage; I want to get a therapy routine started for Aidan.

A Picture Thought:

Paddy getting sand out of his boots

Expotition to the South and West

I told Kieron about the 100 Species Challenge and he liked the idea of it. I have been wanting to take the children on more regular nature walks so I thought this might be a good focus. Paddy was excited about “hunting for animals” so yesterday was our first venture. I hesitate to put the banner on the blog because I hate to commit to things until I have a sense whether I will actually follow through ;-).

I took lots of pictures yesterday, but they turned out over-exposed. But I liked this early sign of autumn:

and Paddy the Hero heading down through our meadow towards the bus stop. We are fortunate because even though we only have 2 acres, we are bounded by the community trail, so there is something like a long narrow preserve below our house which will not be developed by builders.

Nice how little boys make everything an adventure. I was pondering regretfully as we walked how one of those cheerful, energetic mothers could further the childrens’ sense of enjoyment in the “expotition” and help make a wonderful memory, and how I’m not like that. Yep, I do sound like Eeyore ;-). I think I am probably more of a cross between Pooh and Owl — scary thought. However, then I got rid of the Eeyore voice by reflecting upon how as a mother I can learn from my kids too, and I’m pretty Pooh-like in being able to respond to the call of adventure, even if I’m not usually the initiator.

Sing Ho! for the life of a Bear!
Sing Ho! for the life of a Bear!

a cool cloak of bracing air

“This was one of those perfect …days in late summer where the spirit of autumn takes a first stealing flight, like a spy,…. and, with feigned sympathy for those who droop with August heat, puts her cool cloak of bracing air about leaf and flower and human shoulders.”Sarah Orne Jewett

So yes, it was cool today; I actually had to get a fire going because we were all shivering. And only last week it was 107 degrees down in the valley, and humid. Brendan, who notices these things, noticed that the barometer was almost flooding its receptacle, so once again its prophetic talent is affirmed.

The coolness was good for Sean’s sake, since this was the first week practicing in full gear, and he said he scored a touchdown in practice.

It also has made it easy for me to bake — pizza, oatmeal bread, peanut butter muffins and ginger cookies in the last few days.

Sean was up late last night working on his first language arts paper. He was supposed to take one of the life events on his “Life Map” that he had done the previous week, and write a five-paragraph passage about it using lots of sensory details. He didn’t get home till six, and by the time he finished dinner it was after seven. Then he watched a movie with his family (”Meet the Robinsons”). Then he sat down to work. Then he kept sitting there, agonizing, for about the next hour. He had decided to write about a memorable football game from his Pop Warner season, so he went and got the local newspaper article to refresh his memory about the scores and plays. But the “sensory description” part boggled his imagination, and he couldn’t make himself start.

Finally, Kevin managed to sort of half-joke him into the first sentence. I had already given him the standard advice “just start writing and fix later”, etc. Kevin started reading Sean old bios from his high school reunion booklet and making up life events for Sean based on them “I got my PhD at Wisconsin and then taught for ten years….” and Sean started laughing and some of his stress diminished. Pretty soon he was typing away. At these times I am glad the kid has two parents. In our family, it seems, laughter is the way out of a lot of difficulties.

The final product didn’t have many sensory details, but was a nice clear well-paced little account in football-speak. He noticed the jargon on the second draft and rephrased it to make it more audience-friendly, of his own volition. It had a couple of spelling errors — I am trying to be a mom not a teacher, so I stayed way on the sidelines and didn’t point them out– interesting balance. I expect he’ll get marked down by the rubric chart because he didn’t quite comply with the requirements but I don’t know by how much. I figured these first weeks were going to be a learning time in several ways — they always are with new teachers and new expectations and a new level of school but of course, he has to transition in more ways than that.

In general though, this schooling experience seems to be confirming that a relaxed, unschooly approach can work just fine and save So. Much. Time. I don’t think he ever worked at assigned academics for more than 2 hours a day in his whole homeschool career, but this work he is bringing home is well within his zone. Obviously, personal narratives for composition are going to be on the challenging side of the zone, particularly since we don’t do those much in the homeschool, but it wasn’t like it was beyond his ability.

I remember once talking to a Dad who was unschooling his son. He said that when he was a kid at a rigorous Catholic school, he got to go for a month trip to Ireland with a few people in his class. A monk tutored them for something like 3 hours a week while they were on the trip — when the group got back to the US and resumed normal academics, they were *ahead* of their class.

The days are starting to fall into our new routine — I love these changing times of year. Really, I hate realizing that changes are going to happen, but when the new things do start falling into place, it’s invigorating.