Fall Happenings

We finally got a new roof and had our rotten siding, soffit, and fascia replaced. We also replaced all of the siding on the back of the house. There was pretty much no siding around the side of our chimney where water was pouring on it. We need to replace more siding, but that will have to wait. I am very excited about the work we did do though and I have planted some more flowers, herbs, added mulch, etc. We threw away accumulated junk and I dug up grass near the fence line and planted a butterfly garden. We straightened the pergola which was about to fall over.

I finished reading Fahrenheit 451 to Naia and Mirek and we watched the HBO movie. The book inspired some good discussions. Lela and I finished Ways to Grow Love and she really liked it. We are now reading The Storm by Cynthia Rylant. We are still working on our Story of Stuff and Critical Thinking units. Naia, Mirek, and I are reading the graphic novel version of The Iliad and reading about ancient Greek and Roman history. Mirek and Naia both enjoy mythology, Percy Jackson, etc. Mirek is currently reading Vinland Saga which has a lot of Norse mythology. We also had a brief discussion on Thomas Paine's Age of Reason and Christian mythology. I am sad to be handing Mirek off soon and this is likely the last couple of months we will have together before he moves to online school. 

Lela finished AAR Level 2 and her reading is really taking off. It is so interesting for me to see. She is nine. This is considered a very late reader by many. At my work, we have kids in 2nd and 3rd grade come in not able to read. These are seven and eight year olds. My co workers cannot believe it. They think their parents are negligent, the schools have failed them, etc. I think these kids are young and are not ready. Or they simply need one on one instruction and a lot of repetition. The only horrible thing that could happen to your child because she learned to read at 8 or 9 and not 5 or 6, is internalizing the labels adults have put on her of slow or stupid or behind. And obviously she may come to associate reading with hate and frustration. Not what we want. Sure there are kids that pick up reading naturally at four or five. I have a few of these kids at my work as well (and Eaden was this way). But we cannot force all kids onto that same path. It doesn't work and it only causes harm. If we want kids to love reading we don't torture them through learning it. We read to them until they show an interest. Then we follow their lead, meet them where they are, and do so with patience and a positive attitude.

I really need to reign in my book situation. I have probably twenty I am reading. I came up with a system for myself. One fiction, one historical, one spiritual (for me that often means about nature/science), one on education, and any related primary sources. I don't think this system is going to work...

I spend a lot of time thinking about how I want to live, how to organize my days, how much I read, drink, exercise, get on social media, what I eat, etc. I experiment with completely abstaining and then sometimes that leads to then overconsuming. For me, I believe in, but don't always practice, moderation. It's a struggle and I just want it to become habitual already. Right now I am trying to focus on writing my thoughts and asking my questions. Not just writing down the work of others (commonplace journal). I am also continually thinking if the way we homeschool is best. I also think a lot about public schools and private schools and charter schools. More so now that I have a kid and am about to have another in public school. I feel like there is always a better way we could do things if we just get our minds unstuck and become more creative. We need to think way out of the box. 

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From Homespun Mom Comes Unraveled by Shannon Hayes: "And when the people who were closest to the departed can find ways to share their memories with the subsequent generations, their sharing is truly a gift-one that will not wind up in a landfill, that will not pollute the skies, that will not clutter a home, that will always fit perfectly, and will last through time...And as I raise my own children and guide them into this fast-changing world, those collected experiences will enrich our family's bank of wisdom, and become one of the sweetest gifts I've known."

And that is why I blog. To share and pass down stories. What we did, where we went, how we felt. I have 15 or 16 years of blog memories now. I would never have remembered what happened if I had not documented it. I truly think it's the best gift I can give my kids. Even if they don't want me to take their picture as much now or I have made much of what I wrote private, it is still there for them and they still go back and read it often.

From The End of Education by Neil Postman: It is better to have access to more than one profound truth. To be able to hold comfortably in one's mind the validity and usefulness of two contradictory truths is the source of tolerance, openness, and, most important, a sense of humor, which is the greatest enemy of fanaticism...What kind of public does public schooling create?...Any education that promotes a near exclusive concern with one's own group may have value, but is hostile to the idea of a public education and to the growth of a common culture...Sameness is the enemy of vitality and creativity...The law of diversity makes intelligent humans of us all...The history of learning is an adventure in overcoming our errors...There is no sin in being wrong. The sin is in our unwillingness to examine our own beliefs, and in believing that our authorities cannot be wrong...It holds out the hope for students to discover a sense of excitement and purpose in being part of the Great Conversation...Is the idea of a 'public school' irrelevant in the absence of the idea of a public, that is, Americans are now as different from each other, have so many diverse points of view, and such special group grievances that there can be no common vision or unifying principles...

From Age of Reason by Thomas Paine: You will do me justice to remember, that I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it...The word of God is in the creation we behold: and it is in this word, which no human invention can counterfeit or alter, that God speaketh universally to man...Human language is incapable of being used as an universal means of unchangeable and uniform information, and therefore it is not the means that God useth in manifesting himself universally to man...The Almighy Lecturer, by displaying the principles of science in the structure of the universe, has invited man to study and to imitation...Speaking for myself, if I had no other evidence that the Bible is fabulous than the sacrifice I must make to believe it to be true, that alone would be sufficient to determine my choice...We should never force belief upon ourselves in anything...The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion. It has been the most dishonorable belief against the character of the Divinity, the most destructive to morality and the peace and happiness of man, that ever was propagated since man began to exist...What is it the Bible teaches us?-rapine, cruelty, and murder. What is it the Testament teaches us?-to believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married, and the belief of this debauchery is called faith...What is it we want to know? Does not the creation, the universe we behold, preach to us the existence of an Almighty Power that governs and regulates the whole?...But the belief of a God is so weakened by being mixed with the strange fable of the Christian creed and with the wild adventures related in the Bible, and of the obscurity of obscene nonsense of the Testament, that the mind of man is bewildered as in a fog. Viewing all these things in a confused mass, he confounds fact with fable, and as he cannot believe all, he feels a disposition to reject all...A man, by hearing all this nonsense lumped and preached together, confounds the God of the creation with the imagined God of the Christians, and lives as if there were none...

From Teaching as a Subversive Activity by Neil Postman: All authorities get nervous when learning is conducted without a syllabus...Good learners can change their minds. Changing the character of their minds is what good learners are most interested in doing. Good learners are not fast answerers. They tend to delay their judgments. Good learners almost always have a point of view about a situation, but are capable of shifting to other perspectives to see what they can find. Good learners know how to ask meaningful questions; they are persistent in examining their own assumptions, they are apt to be cautious and precise in making generalizations, and they engage continually in verifying what they believe...[Curriculum] is largely designed to keep students from knowing themselves and their environment in any realistic sense; which is to say, it doesn't allow inquiry into most of the critical problems that comprise the content of the world outside the school...We do not think it unreasonable to suggest that there are many influential people who would resent such questions being asked-in fact, would go to considerable trouble to prevent their being asked. Such people depend heavily on the continuing irrelevance of most school curricula...Quotes from others within the book-Man comes pretty close to living in a house that language built...The universe is not only stranger than we suppose; it is stranger than we can suppose...

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Baking pumpkin cookies for Tuesday Teatime.

Lela and I have been reading a new page in our Usborne history encyclopedia each day. We are just now getting to the death of the dinosaurs.

Math explorations.

We finally had our book party for Year of the Dog. We ate at a Chinese restaurant and went to Hong Kong Market to get some Chinese candy. The M&Ms are part of the storyline in the book. 

Hanging out with Ella at the Arboretum.

Then to the water wall for a picnic.

More football. Only one game left, and so far, no major injuries. Knock on wood.

Lela's creation.

And Then There Were Three

    I am only homeschooling three kids this year! Eaden has graduated and Taven is going to public school. We started off having an hour and a half family time with Mirek and Naia together at 9:30 and it was going well. Now Naia is working weekdays starting at 11am. I am all for her working. However, it makes planning a challenge. For now, we have moved family time up to 8:00 AM and then she has a checklist of things she needs to get done when she is able. She wants to work in restaurants and attend culinary school (likely at HCC). 

    As far as Taven and school, he says he doesn't like actual school, "nobody does." I asked him how his classes are going, if they are hard. He said French is pretty hard and Chemistry doesn't really make sense (he does have A's in these classes). He said in English all of the answers seem right. I'm like oh! You're talking about multiple choice. Yeah I never taught that to you because it's dumb. The end. Just kidding. I told him I could teach him how the test makers are trying to trick you and how to pick the best answer pretty quickly. Where I work, that is all the 4th-9th graders do. Then the older kids do SAT prep which is more of the same. Thankfully I am with the youngest kids and have a lot of freedom to do what I want. Which is not multiple choice. I'm honestly not going to be overly concerned with his grades. My concern is if it is challenging and he is learning. So far it's challenging and whether he is learning is still out for debate. He is in all honors by the way. I didn't want him going to school and getting teachers whose primary concern is discipline.

    Because Mirek wants to try 9th grade public school I am forced to pay for Acellus (the school wants an accredited program even if it sucks). I am also going to have him mess around on IXL (it matches well with what kids are learning in each grade). I really don't want him to do Acellus for hours a day, but I also don't want to pay for it over 9 months. I have decided to wait and have him start it around December and finish as fast as possible. He has decided  to do Algebra in addition to Saxon Algebra 1/2 and he has added Biology to his Physics. He is all about the math and science. He hates the spiral approach of Saxon and wants to learn something new. Right now it is a lot of review. I told him he should write out his Lego story he has been working on for years. He showed me his notes on his phone and they are amazing!!!! He said it's way too much lol. It is a lot...

    Somehow, a lot of our work/units all finished up together right before Labor Day weekend. So in that first two and a half weeks, we were able to finish our chemical reactions and matter unit and will move onto chemical reactions and energy. We finished our Israel-Palestine unit and will move on to The Story of Stuff. We finished one critical thinking unit and Naia and Mirek finished the books they were reading (Other Words for Home and The Crossover). Lela and I also finished the chapter book we were reading (Year of the Dog). We are now starting a lot of new books/units. Naia chose Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children and Mirek is reading American Born Chinese and Beast Player. Lela and I are reading Ways to Grow Love. These are all Brave Writer picks but I am not buying the guides anymore. It gets too expensive. The kids do keep a literary journal. 

    It took Lela a little while to get used to the new routine, but she made it...I think. 

    Our two days without internet were really interesting. I never rushed. When we do have internet, there is nothing for me to watch or do specifically, but I feel in a hurry to go sit and do it (what is it?). We have much more time to mull about than we think, but it's all lost to screens. I didn't rush through the Y, or the library, or watering the plants and feeding the chickens. I took my time with dinner, then read, and sat on the porch. I sat with no music. Just a beer and the song of the cicadas. Slowly, my mind began to think original (to me) thoughts. If there was music, I would be singing along. But in this quiet, my mind went somewhere new. It reminded me how much we need quiet time to reflect on what we have learned or experienced and process it. Pretty relevant as I am currently reading Fahrenheit 451 to Mirek and Naia in which the constant noise drowns out any chance for reflection. There are also few porches or gardens in the novel as they would encourage conversation and thought. Most everyone is distracted by the fast pace, screens, and shallow entertainment. Sounds familiar. I stayed out a little later than normal because I knew I wasn't going to lay in bed and watch tv. I was going to read for a bit, then go to bed. I prefer this life. I teach from rest and I like to think I live from rest, and I'm sure I do relatively speaking. But not really. Not having connection as an option is completely different than having it and avoiding it. If it's there, your mind is not.

Randomness:

      I love reading and planning and thinking of how great everything will be. Then real humans get thrown in the mix and it all gets messy. The romance dies lol. But I have to keep trying, keep changing, or not. Maybe give something more time, build a habit. It's crazy how different kids are. I mean not really. What's crazy is that people try to teach thirty kids the same thing in the same way at the same time. It has to be the most colossal waste of time.  

From books I've read recently:

Original Sins by Eve Ewing

"Compare this to how the American Revolution is discussed in class. When Patrick Henry or The Sons of Liberty resist their colonizers, they are heroes. When Indigenous people do it, they are hostile savages." [also, think of how Palestinians resisting Israeli occupation/genocide are discussed]

Freedom of Simplicity by Richard Foster

"Trinkets are added to products to make you unhappy with the old model...Stress the quality of life above the quantity of life. Refuse to be seduced into defining life in terms of having rather than being...If you are too busy to read, you are too busy...Deliberate and calculated waste is the central aspect of the American economy. We over-eat, over-buy, and over-build, spewing out our toxic wastes upon the earth and into the air...

Where We Stand by bell hooks

"Tragically, the well-off and the poor are often united in capitalist culture by their shared obsession with consumption...Constant vigilance (that includes a principled practice of sharing my resources) has been the only stance that keeps me from falling into the hedonistic consumerism that so quickly can lead individuals with class privilege to live beyond their means and therefore to feel they are in a constant state of 'lack,' thus having no reason to identify with those less fortunate or to be accountable for improving their lot...If privileged people feel 'lack' there is no reason they should feel accountable to those who are truly needy...Commitment to consumption above all else unites diverse races and classes...Poverty need not mean that people cannot have reading groups, study groups, consciousness raising groups...When we work too much and are bereft of meaningful time, we overcompensate by spending. This is why children and teenagers are the new consumers; they are given economic rewards in place of genuine engagement and connection by parents who are not fully emotionally developed and who lack time...

Excellent Sheep by William Deresiewicz

"'Don't put any ideas into his head:' a request that is honored all too well. Everybody wants their child to get an education, but nobody wants them to get an education education... A professor's most important role is to make you think with rigor: precisely, patiently, and responsibly... Life is finally a long process of learning how you ought to have lived in the first place. Or it is if you do it right...You concentrate in one field, but you get exposure to a range of others. You don't just learn to think; you learn there are different ways to think. You study human behavior in psychology, and then you study it in literature...Your mind becomes more agile and resourceful, as well as more skeptical and rigorous. And most important of all, you learn to educate yourself...Teaching is a slow, painstaking, difficult process. You have to get to know your students as individuals-get to know their minds, and you have to believe completely, in each one's absolute uniqueness...Teaching well takes time...Public universities are usually far more diverse with all of the invaluable experiential learning that implies. Kids at less prestigious schools are apt to be more interesting, more curious, more open, more appreciative of what they're getting, and far less entitled and competitive...Colleges should remember that selecting students by GPA more often benefits the faithful drudge than the original mind...We have to give lower-income children more to balance out inequities at home. Either course would entail funding schools out of general revenue rather than primarily through local property taxes. The former, is what most developed countries do. The latter, by design, is a way for the affluent to perpetuate their privilege. Starving public education, higher and otherwise, doesn't benefit them only in the form of lower taxes. It also rigs the economic system for their children. Take most of the kids out of line, and yours are going to get a whole lot more."

The Marriage Plot by Jeffery Eugenides

"Listening to Leonard, Madeline felt impoverished by her happy childhood. She never wondered why she acted the way she did, or what effect her parents had had on her personality. Being fortunate had dulled her powers of observation Whereas Leonard noticed every little thing."

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Nature study.

Hanging out on "the porch" with Lela.

Fall mantle with Grandpa's lovely garage sale finds (the scarecrow, pumpkin, and witch).

Lela's art.

Baking Daddy's birthday cake.

Frozen beer.

Eaden's first car!

Testing out a homemade parachute.

Taven's first high school football game.

Some backyard science.