Synonyms or Misnomers?

 

With the shuttering of essentially every school building except the houses that are homeschools, there are some misconceptions going on with the attempt to now share the term "homeschooling".

I read a comment under an article that basically indicated it is splitting hairs to not just call it all homeschooling because "same materials, same things being taught". I beg to differ. I, for one, sometimes have no idea what materials we will be using on a given day or even what we are going to be learning.

Don't be alarmed by this. I have a plan within that chaos. For us, learning is a whole lifestyle. It isn't relegated to a certain set parameter that we step into for a given time then step out of when we are done. We are never done learning. At least that is what hope to instill in my kids.

Take, for instance, moments ago... My thirteen year son Clark was missing in action until just now. (He was washing eggs for a suspiciously long time.) He came in pointing out the weird clouds going on right now. Today we all just looked out the window and oohed and ahhhed and did a quick check with Accuweather to see if a tornado might be imminent.  Some other days we might look up the official terminology for the cloud formations. 

Opps. I am now in a car waiting for my fifteen year old's lawn mower customer. Yeah. It's what he does right now. He buys mowers, lists them, then sells them. With time to kill, he is sitting beside me on his phone shopping for clothes.

I left the younger ones at home pulling up the 1974 version of Where the Red Fern Grows on Amazon Prime. I figured it would make the questions in Clark's language arts assignment easier to answer if he would be better acquainted with the story. He is currently backlogged and isn't quite done working through reading Caddie Woodlawn or else I might've assigned Where the Red Fern Grows, the book.

Days ago I came across a picture of my old elementary school auditorium on Facebook. I was telling Clark that in that very place I once sat watching, you guessed it, the 1974 version of Where the Red Fern Grows. I was probably seven and bawled my eyes out.

He also got some wistful reminiscing of Westfield Center history when I began to side track. I may be slightly ADD.

Back to the homeschooling terminology thing and not really planning. I snapped a picture of the stuff I did with my almost nine year old son Clay today. He always does math (sometimes with manipulatives, sometimes without). He always does a few pages of Explode the Code (phonics). He picks books for himself to read, currently it's an Alice and Jerry reprint. His neighbor-grandma has her original copy of Alice and Jerry; she delights in listening to him read (as she has done all her grandchildren).

I have an enormous collection of picture books. Nearly every day, we pull one out and read it. Today I selected one called Mississippi Morning. Oh boy. I should've preread it. That one was a little messy. I wouldn't have necessarily chosen to deal with KKK people of 1933 today, but it came up and we tackled the subject head on. Who wrote a book about that for kids anyhow??? Sigh. Realities can be ugly; I would rather my kids hear it from me than somewhere else.

Yesterday the selection was the sunnier Snipp, Snapp, and Snurr and the Buttered Bread. Ah, Sweden. Looked it up in our map book. Learned a little about Dalecarlian horses and Pippi Longstocking.  Oh yeah, we discovered Carl Larsson paintings are great. Read a bio blurb. Today we watched his paintings parading across our computer screen. Gotta love YouTube and Google.

Trevor, he is eleven. I tell him when he is  done watching Nancy Pelosi's daily briefing to please do his math (fractions!) and read his book (also Caddie Woodlawn like his slightly older brother).

Ok, very funny. He side tracked after the Pelosi presser to produce an original political cartoon. (Don't be offended if you don't share his views. He is eleven.)  He grumbled and fussed over the fractions, but he survived.

Same materials, same topics? Not necessarily. Same goal, I would hope: well educated, well adjusted humans. 

I do not have the magic formula for educating children. I have no corner on the market. Some days I may or may not know what I am doing. I would hope everyone creates a plan that works for their unique situation. I don't hope we ever have to go with some inflexible, homogeneous formula that we come to consider "education", especially given our current climate where the term homeschooling may be evolving to also include distance learning at home.

We had been afforded the luxury of choice in our educational methods up until now. It's been understandably difficult for those who choose to utilize a school system who then had to figure out how to function within that system in their home this year. Many of those are anxious to get their children back to the routine of brick and mortar school attendance.  

For myself, I continue to be invested for the long haul to learning more stuff with my kids at our home. I don't hope legitimate homeschooling gets a black eye by some ill conceived  comparisons to the pandemic-induced, isolation, distance-learning some have had to work with.

-Colleen

X Marks the Spot

You know how social engineering happens? Often it's slow, almost benign suggestions that make you second guess your life choices.

It's a headline that reads "Joanna Gaines Says Never Make These Design Mistakes".

Or a click bait that lets us all know which baby names are no longer cool. (Oh my. I ruined a couple of my kids with their names!) Conversely they let you know which ones are now in vogue instead. (Sorry, but some of those names, in my opinion, are just terrible...)

New words are coined ("social distancing" anyone?) and now we find ourselves awkwardly trying to figure out our relationships.

If you are personally fine with other people redefining life as you know it, there are plenty of people ready and willing to tell you what color to paint your house, what to name your next kid, what shoes will ensure lasting friendships, and what you will now be calling things. (....And where to sit, where to stand, where to be, what to say, what to do….)

I am discovering things about myself in these recent times.  I am not good at following directions.  I have come to consider so many things to be loose approximations instead of hard and fast laws.  Take, for instance, floor tape.  I had been thinking of the placement of these “social distancing” tapes as suggestions for how customers might budget the space between themselves and the other customers.  I was wrong.  At least gauging by the scolding I received for NOT STANDING BEHIND THE X at one store.  Alrighty, half a step back remedied that situation.  But apparently I ticked the cashier off  and the rest of our transaction leaves the decision to ever go there again in limbo.  Come on, yell at me for not resigning myself to stand on the X, but I am not unaware that I had to be closer than 6ft social distance to place my items on the counter and to give payment.  Plus, not that I care but to bring some fairness to this, the customers ahead of me completely brushed inside my 6ft social bubble to leave the cashier to head for the exit.

We are in a rapid societal evolution right now.  They have told people to wear masks.  The verdict on that is still out.  Just weeks ago we were all cautioned against it and told explicitly not to.  Now you have people filming you as one of *those* who did not come to town donning one.  I lean “to each his own”, but really?  I have seen the way people manage their mask wearing.  If you envision them making the same adjustments to their bare face, it would seem insane.

I live on a farm.  I have people arrive to pick up food on a regular basis.  Hey, wear a mask or don’t wear a mask, I don’t care, but I have to wonder if breathing in fresh country air does a body more good than breathing in your own recycled carbon dioxide.

Superbugs are growing more resistant to hand sanitizer. Oh wait. That was so last year. Now we can't keep it on the shelf.  People are so conditioned to apply hand sanitizer that they are ignoring their own chemical burns and our previous knowledge that it wasn't biologically sustainable to keep using it on a regular basis.

 I am not endorsing compliance or revolt, but I sure think we would all do well to at least know what and why in world we are doing things.  

 If you would still like an opinion and your own unique voice, be aware of how willing you are to embrace all the latest anything.
~Colleen

Bright Hues

I once watched a forklift operator load a pallet of something onto a truck. He was talking as he went about his work. If I would substitute his profanity for ordinary words, his sentences would've sounded like, "Truck van could you sheep van move truck car that pallet van truck sheep over truck van there?" I seriously wonder if he had a form of Tourettes or something.

People lace their speech with explicatives for added emphasis all the time, yet our rich English language has so many beautiful and specific synonyms we can trade out for weak words. We miss out on so much. Speaking is a little like painting. Quality words hone a crisp image. Dirty words are like spilling your brush water onto your canvas.

I have always had a visceral reaction to the F word in particular.  I am surprised with #metoo that the F word is still getting any press.  Look up the most basic meaning. When a word that means what the F word does is used to underscore with vehemence, doesn't it become such a rapey word?  Think of the context where people infuse the F word. It's pretty inappropriate when you think about it.

Quality people use quality words. People who are prone to use overworked explicatives might try picking up a Thesaurus sometime. They might discover a more authentic way of expressing themselves while unearthing their inner wordsmith.

-Colleen

Sock Dust

You know, I was going to avoid the whole covid19 talk altogether, but I decided not to.  At least not until I get done unwinding in this space for a bit.

I was at Aldis yesterday where a guy was employed strictly to wipe down carts and meter people in and out of the store to keep a constant of 40.  I made the erroneous assumption that I would somehow find the cart handle cleaner than normal.  I do not know what that sticky stuff was, but it wasn't sani-wipe residue.  Not being a complete germophobe, I just shuddered and then rolled with it.  The cart corral guy seemed like an upstanding sort.  I am sure whatever he missed was unintentional. (I was especially mindful to keep my hands from my face for the duration of my trip, though.)

I was reminded at regular six foot intervals to maintain proper social distancing from the people in front of me.  I left it to the people in back of me to hold up their end of the stick.  A few times I am pretty sure fellow customers encroached on one another's space with the solemn vow to not breathe for the brief moment of shared air as we all reached past one another for crackers and ketchup.

The older lady around the corner had to be frustrated with the faulty rubber bands she used in the assembly of the make-it-take-it mask she saw on Facebook.  I would've been disappointed if I were her.  It had to be so unhandy to shop for groceries while keeping her mask held up with the other hand.  She must've been ambidextrous because she seemed to be able to switch hands with relative ease.

The lady with the tidy fitting mask may have been a medical professional.  At least hers looked like it came out of a hospital supply closet.  Her gloved hands were a nice touch.   If coronavirus germs are somehow proven to absorb through hand skin, so many people will be glad they had worn them.

I was camped out on one of the social distance floor lines waiting for a register to open when I was asked by a fellow customer if I was waiting in line.  I'll admit, it didn't look like it, but the next social distance line would've put me in an awkward parking spot in the middle of cross-aisle traffic.  She shared sympathetic words that it did look a little confusing.

The lady across the way from us, in another line, had her chin cupped in her hand while she leaned on the cart handle, stroking her lower lip with her fingers.

I plucked my credit card from the machine and bid good day to the plexiglass enshrouded cashier.  I wasted no time rolling my cart of loose groceries straight out the door.  As I exited, another person entered, all in perfect rhythm.  At my car, I tossed everything into the milk crates I had lined up on the backseat, all the while wondering if my groceries were crawling with little invisible covid19 bugs.

I noticed a fellow traveler on my trek home looking like a wayward kite had crashed into his face.  He was keeping his vehicle on the road, so he must've been able to see.

Facebook is chock-full of ideas to stay safe.  Some of them should come with warning labels.  Like the face mask made from cut up socks.  This has me wondering how much raw sock dust the human lung can withstand.

I am not foolhardy to think I am somehow exempt from any of the calamities that befall other random people.  I could be the next Wayne County covid19 death for all I know (though, one would need to conclude you can go from completely asymptomatic to death in an impossibly quick sequence if it happens any time soon).  I was born with a weird ability to see situations from a birds-eye-view.  Even serious things can wind up looking inappropriately funny to people like me.  So I find myself watching the many interpretations of "safety protocol" in today's strange, new world and finding myself both appalled and amused.

Until next time....
~Colleen

Learning Language Arts Through Literature

We're in our third year running with Learning Language Arts Through Literature (LLATL).  We have had starts and stops with it over the years, but my youngest set of children have settled in comfortably now.  I don't think we're going anywhere else from here on out.

I read a lot.  I have done enough curriculum research in the past 25 years that I have probably earned an honorary degree of some sort.  This is not an uncommon thing among homeschooling mothers.  We want the best for our kids and that sometimes means going on a quest to find the PERFECT curriculum.  (Spoiler alert:  It does not exist.)

Charlotte Mason (a 19th century educator in England) spoke of a "science of relations".  The more you know, the more you know.  What we learn today builds upon what we already know and will be added to things we will yet learn.  Karen Glass wrote such a succinct article about this here.  I encourage you to read it.

Children are not future people, they are people now.  God gave them talents and gifts, curiosity and intellect.  It's our job as parents to give them "mind food" and create an environment where they will be exposed to great thoughts, high ideals, and many other positive things.

One of our lessons in the Purple LLATL book this week had to do with the poem "America the Beautiful" by Katharine Lee Bates.  I happened to have a book on hand from one of my many eagle- eyed browsings at thrift stores. (Hint: study quality book lists ahead of time so you can spot the good ones when you are out and about.)

 Purple Mountain Majesties by Barbara Younger is a nicely illustrated picture book that tells the story of the cross country trip Katharine Lee Bates took that inspired her to write the poem that was the subject of our LLATL study.  

Ironically, I happened to wily-nily select books at our public library this week, one of which was Mr. Ferris and His Wheel by Kathryn Gibbs Davis.  Without retelling the entire story, Katharine Lee Bates visited the World's Fair in Chicago the year Ferris debuted his wheel (and took a ride!).  It was a fun interconnection that I didn't plan. 

 Another irony: I had also grabbed the book Electrical Wizard, How Nikola Tesla Lit Up the World by Elizabeth Rusch.  Tesla had been awarded the assignment to light up that same World's Fair where all this other stuff I have been talking about happened in 1893. My thirteen year old sometimes struggles with reading. It was his job to read this and narrate the story back to me.

I said to the boys, "Isn't it weird how we keep running into things we are studying about?"  My ten year old said, "Not really weird.  It happens all the time."  This is true.

All this to say, it isn't so much picking the "perfect" curriculum as awakening a curiosity in your children and helping them to notice how often a word you just learned in your read-aloud pops up quite unexpectedly other places.  Or how often you "meet" a person in your reading one day, then find that same person tucked away in another story at a later reading.  We are alert to notice.

My boys are half ways convinced we caused the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral and the flooding in Venice, Italy, because both disasters happened soon after we learned of those places.  (wink, wink) As a mother I lean more toward those places having taken on some significance to them because we spent time there in our books.

~Colleen

New Beginnings

Such a trite way to begin a new blog.  But, alas, rather than sit here with writer's block, I decided to just launch into it headlong and see what happens.

I have been thinking about starting a blog (again) for some time.  For various reasons I have been putting it off.  So why now?  I guess it's because I have bigger projects in mind, and I felt like I needed to start somewhere.

Stay tuned (or not....I realize there may be some p-r-e-t-t-y boring content up front).  You will likely find in me just another ordinary human along life's pathway.  I am too old to pretend I have all the answers, yet too traveled to think I don't have at least a hint of a few. Probably my greatest asset is that I am insatiably curious and love to learn new things.

This is a view from my front porch in the summertime.  Here, have  a few more ice cubes for your lemonade while we chit chat and enjoy the fact that my mother-in-law is awesome with plants.  (She gets nearly all the credit for everything you see here.  I lack all botanical skill.)

~Colleen