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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