From Womb to Waves Goodbye

The school year is drawing to a close. I can't think of a single year when I have learned so much about what education is and isn't and how parenting fits in, and doesn't, as I have this year. I am in no way done learning. I started my homeschool year with my son attempting to replicate school at home—only better, I thought, and more tailored to his needs—and I have learned that homeschooling generally doesn't work that way for a reason. Seeing what and how things can be learned by doing less has been eye-opening, but more than anything, if I'm honest, it has been terrifying. When my kid learns without my overtly planning everything, I feel moorless and I come right up against the deep and paralyzing dread that I am ruining him, setting him up to fail, leaving him behind, not doing my job. These moments of doing nothing are scary. All evidence to the contrary, doing what is closest to what everyone else is doing just seems the safest thing. I have learned that I will just keep on doing this act of imitation until I realize that I am sacrificing my son's happiness on the altar of my fears. So, now I'm looking again and asking myself how much of what I ask of him is what he needs and how much of it is like a little comforting rhyme that I repeat to myself in the dark so the closet zombies will not come.

Parenting my older kids has also been an opportunity for growth. With one child suffering from chronic health issues and the other peaking at perfect grades before suffering apathy and depressed disinterest in school, this year, I have learned that I care more about my kids' well-being than their grades. I didn't used to know that they were necessarily separate things or could be in conflict occasionally. I used to feel like if I just kept baking special cookies and serving healthy salads with dinner and giving hugs and attention and guidance, then the grades would obviously come. It turns out life is more complex than this.

At the very core, I've learned that my worst fear—that my kids will turn out like me—says something about the gratitude and joy for my life that I'm clutching to myself and hiding from my kids, lest they also wish to become teenage alcoholics who don't complete college. It's time to give that up.

The ultimate task of parenting, from womb to waves goodbye, seems to have something to do with first connecting with this other human so that you do not know where they end and you begin and then learning to understand that you are ultimately not in control and not responsible for how their lives shape themselves. To the extent that I can do this well—that is when I love. As long as I am attempting to control the experience and trajectory of a person who isn't me, the two of us will suffer, because I cannot make them grow up to whole and happy, I cannot make them find their way to spirituality, and I cannot even make them clean their rooms, no matter how much love I mean. I have power to influence and love, but none to control.

I am profoundly grateful to these children of mine for letting me test-drive my infant soul with their very lives. They are quite forgiving, quite patient with the efforts of all these silly adults to control their hearts with our tiny dams. They roll over us—sometimes smiling, sometimes yelling—like the swelling ocean breaking over our walls. They ebb back, patiently cooperating, and then surge forward, to finally grasp the adulthood that was always theirs.

Fortitude, and the Secret Truth about Home Education

The kind of thing I photograph: Here is my child, cooperating with a plot to teach classification using LEGOS. 

Two weeks ago, my fifteen year-old was in my kitchen dry-heaving into a garbage can. Eyes watering, between retches he shot questions at me about what his coach would say when he missed track practice, the details of a math test, and the history assignment he needed to turn in.

"Go lie down," I told him. "You cannot go to class if you're throwing up. They won't want you there." I placed a bowl next to him on the couch, smoothed back his darkening blond hair and again directed his homeschooled youngest brother, who was spinning in circles with a bow, to continue practicing his violin. My seven year-old's eyes, now dark with something like evil, fixed on me, and a harumph escaped his tiny chest. He collected his instrument with all the enthusiasm of a person holding a now-familiar dead rat.

"Nice bow grip,"  I told him. "Check your foot position."

This is the sort of comment I am supposed to make.

"My feet are in position," he told me, imperiously, and turned to play as if drawing a crossbow, ninety degrees from the music stand—like Hawkeye at Carnegie.

Trapped between the rapidly approaching walls of pleasant indifference on one side and firm and loving commitment on the other, I chose the latter and was crushed between them like a bug.

"Fine," he wailed. "I'll do it your way! I can't even see my music!"

Obstinately, he thrust his violin into an unnatural position, his waist twisted, shoulders thrust and lifted, and, standing uncomfortably, abutted the scroll into his stand. "See?!"

"OK. I'm not going to argue with you," I explained, impersonating Ghandi, as passive and loving as a gently swaying shrub. I would let his anger complete itself without my participation. I was a master of non-violent communication. I was modeling patience. I let myself fill with inner peace.

In the new and ridiculous position, my youngest applied his bow and let out several tortured sounds: "Go Tell Aunt Rhody" played as the unsettling interlude to a Megadeth song.

"See?" he continued to demonstrate.

"I don't want to argue," I explained, from my happy place, as peaceful as a dove.

Moans sounded from the couch, and again I stroked my oldest's hair.

The argument, with or without me, continued, the pitch of violin and voice reaching a sustained staccato whine.

"Put it away then," came a voice from my lips, sounding a bit more cross than Ghandi's would have, "If you can't do it without getting angry, put it away and do your grammar then."

The tone was somewhat grumpy, I reasoned, but this is more or less exactly what the great man told Britain, if I remember correctly. "If you can't stop acting like an asshole, just take your crap and leave," he said. "I'm setting boundaries here."

Having failed to embody non-violent communication, I now attempted to channel Gloria Steinem: rational refusal to be stepped upon, firm boundaries, an unflappable sense of self.

"I don't think," I said, firmly, "that I told you to pet the dog." My youngest was stooped by the couch, midway between violin and grammar book, and, for two full minutes, had now been gently stroking our family pet. "The choices are: continue playing violin but without whining or stop, and come and do your grammar pages."

I was glad that, from my years of work at an elementary school, I have retained my teacher voice.

He put the violin away and stomped over to the open grammar book where, subsequently he decorated several lines of grammar with wavy patterns, like verbal Easter eggs. I erased the lines. He aggressively misread directions. I corrected. He scrawled in cuneiform. He was told to sit on the stairs, was talked to, agreed to behave, then came back and started up again. Gloria Steinem began to stew.

For several more minutes, I had strong boundaries and an unflappable sense of self. Following the tenth act of grammatical sabotage, I was broken. I became June Cleaver and turned, pleadingly to my half-dead teenager on my couch, a look of constrained panic in my eyes. Let the oldest male in the house save me, the look said. I am clearly dying here, and it is only 9 AM.

"Stop being so difficult," he told his brother, firmly, in his deepening male voice. "You could have had this done by now."

There. See? From Ghandi to June Cleaver in so many minutes and we've not even finished one page of work. I blamed my child for this transformation. Even Ghandi couldn't have stood up to this kind of bull crap. My eldest slumped back into the couch cushions, disintegrating into nausea, as his brother, now chastened, did some work.

Things went on from there, haltingly, in fits and starts. Handwriting was aggressively looped and scrawled, subjects insulted verbs. We were on thin ice the entire morning period until I mentioned the hero's cycle to him. Then, suddenly, pencil racing, the rebel, now a writer, put down the beginnings of the heroic tale of Silly Dog and Super Kitty Paws, his unexplained rage forgotten. Watching him with gratitude and relief, I turned into Sigmund Freud.

What was his problem anyway? (The mother. Freud's answer is always the mother.) After several moments of irritated contemplation, I switched psychiatrists, becoming instead an anonymous, empowering female—frumpy but clever, and wearing low beige heels.

Jealous? Could he be jealous that his brother is home, lying moaning on the couch?

At any rate, the cloud of dark rage seemed to have passed. We went on to the subject of history and finished strong with a start on the early Greeks. I wondered only periodically if it would be worthwhile to get him a psychiatric evaluation. (Perhaps, if I had not, at some point, had this thought of all my kids, I might have taken it more seriously.)

The day ended with laughing neighbor children in my backyard, petting our chickens, and with the quiet work of making a green salad and thinking in the kitchen by myself. Again we had made it through.

I follow several home-school blogs. On one of them, the mother—who is a fabulous photographer—splashes the web with images of her gorgeous  almond-eyed children dressed like fairies, felting rainbow wool, having tea parties with real china, and studying clouds through the pursuit of art. On another, the mother publishes complicated unit studies she has developed to tackle everything from dinosaurs to natives of the northwest coast. From hers, too, smiling, happy children beam up, engaged in hands-on learning, and absorbed in happy, loving play with their adoring mom.

Searching Google, it would be easy to think that home schooling is the art of taking little children who might, under normal circumstances, drive anyone crazy and making for them a utopian educational dreamscape—a measure I'm sure I could never meet. It's daunting—this idea we have of what education might really be, what we have to make it. I also think it's crap.

Maybe it's because I've worked in public school classrooms and seen the debacle of a kindergarten child who has peed through her pants onto the gym floor—just before the other children race back in her direction during a game of tag. (School: the place you send your child to slide through a puddle of someone else's pee.) I've seen the ever-patient teacher, just like me, lose her patience with the child who refused to do his work. I've seen the worksheets—some clever, some boring—the art projects, the play-dough ground into the floor.

Human beings work at schools, as frail and real as mothers. You would not confuse them with saints, once the parent volunteers leave and shut the door. They are ordinary, like I am. Ordinary in personality and extraordinary in commitment. They are dedicated, kind, wrong-headed, inspired, angelic and destructive, and doing the best they can.

Maybe having seen all that, I realize that it's always easy to assume that if I can send my kid Somewhere Else, that Somewhere Else will do a better job than messy, impatient me. (Which, of course, is fine, as long as it's true in the particular case of my kid. I've decided I have to evaluate the truth of this notion on a case-by-case basis, one child and one year at a time.)

I am guilty of this misrepresentation. I put pictures up on Facebook—show my friends the gorgeous paper fractals (without any pictures of me snapping at my child that he's not gluing fast enough) or the day we were Phoenicians and used blueberries to dye our socks. I show them our ecology with Skittles, our owl pellet dissection—replete with smiling faces and a love of learning glowing in the scene. I leave off the glowers and stomping feet, the jealousy and defiance, my ineffectiveness to the background sound of dry heaving on my couch.

But all of these together are the truth of what it takes to educate my child. Because I worked at his school and was stopped in the hallway in the middle of my workday to discuss the stomping feet and scribbling that happened there, I have no illusion it would go better Somewhere Else.

My point is not that everyone should homeschool. It's not necessary for every child, and most parents don't want to. And that is that. (Most of these pro- and con- conversations about child-raising come down, of course, to what a parent wants to do or not. The rest is largely noise.) My point is that education, like parenting, and like life in general, is kind of messy. It requires talent, commitment, and a sort of stubbornness. It seems to require a lot of toilet paper tubes and white glue and endless pencils and most of it does not make good photographs. Perhaps that's why we respect teachers—because we know they're in the trenches with our children, their hair flecked with glue and scraps of paper, and that they're demonstrating a patience we fear we may not have.

They probably don't have it either, sometimes. Then, they take a breath and just keep being there. That's when they have fortitude and they have no other choice. There is no one else coming to teach this trying child.

Fortitude. In parenting and in life, it can get you to the end of a great many trying days.

The Only Self I Have

Photo Credit: Morguefile by Flutterby

Some days, when you are a parent, just suck.

Yesterday was one of those. It was not without its pleasant moments. A flash of brilliance in my older son's writing and a smile exchanged afterward. A hug from my littlest. A moment cuddling the chicken, whose feathers are now growing back.* Most of it, though, felt like slowly being bludgeoned with the hard surface of a pair of fuzzy dice.** I couldn't teach anything. We were learning a new step in adding: two digits each addend with neither a multiple of ten. Carrying. All mental. No quick-pencil algorithm in this math. Numbers lay in disorder on the floor—their teeth bloody and broken; they refused to stay in columns, refused to join one another into sums. Nothing I did would work. It was the second day with the same small problem set. My anxiety was starting to rise. My child was stubborn, belligerent, spacey, despondent and disinterested by turns.

This is where my large decisions come back to bite me in the ass. Last year, at public school, he refused to work in his first grade class. He dawdled, dropped pencils and languished in his chair. At the end of the year, he knew less math than he'd come in knowing at the start. We kept waiting, waiting—and his teacher kept waiting, too. We waited for him to decide to try. We encouraged, gave consequences, gave love, sent him to therapy. We didn't know what to do. None of us.

"What can he do in Math?" I asked his teacher. "What does he know?"

"I don't really know," she told me. "He won't do anything."

And so went the entire year.

When I decided to home school my son, I did it knowing that, when he doesn't know how to do a task, he will go to war with anyone, rather than having to try and fail. He will show you he is choosing not to learn, so that you can't see he has no choice. It's the strategy of a learning disabled child. I felt that my job would be to love him, to show him that it was always OK to try and fail. And to never let him win by refusing to do his work.

Yesterday, my patience went bankrupt. It wasn't OK for him to fail. He needed to do it right. I needed him not to struggle to add together eight and two. And I was stuck with myself. There was no one else to do the job.

"I would just give up for the day," said my husband, reasonably.

It sounded so right, so obviously the perfect thing to do. And maybe it was. But I couldn't do it. Tomorrow was coming after me, already the same way as this day and the one before. I can't get away from my learning disabled child. He is brilliant and confounded, all in the same breath. He is epic in his thinking; he is stuck on basics; he is mine. He is mine. And I am his.

This is the only self I have. This self I have is the sort that will become impatient when it takes ninety seconds for a child to recall a math fact that we both have filed as "known." I will try to conceal it. I will stifle my sigh. I will scrunch up the frustration on my face. But I will be frustrated. I will be that way today and tomorrow and Friday and next week and next month and forever. My son will notice. He's sensitive. And he will always be the sort of person who answers slowly, who doesn't hear what I said, who has the slipcover over his ears and is refusing to do his work. He will be that way today and tomorrow and Friday and next week and next month and forever, too. His is the only self he has.

I can give this unpaid teaching gig to someone else. I really can. It's a valid thing to do. That's why we have public schools with fine teachers and administrators and speech language pathologists to help him. It makes all the sense in the world, especially on days like this. But...he has gone there and...I have worked there. And so I know that they are just trying their best with all their knowledge and commitment to teach the children, same as me. Sometimes they succeed and sometimes they fail.

In the end, no one is more committed to this one child than I am.

My art as his mother and teacher, then, becomes one of avoiding false choices, getting past do it or leave it alone. I have to know that there is always another option, always another way. He can learn and I can teach. The problem is with neither of us. It is the method that is wrong. And then, back to the drawing board, over and over—how will we learn this thing? The art I speak of is of never giving up.

The child in psychic pain rushes at me like an angry bull, teased by crowds, poked and prodded, bullied into a fight. You're telling me I have to learn this, woman? OK, the fight is on! The child has no choice but to fight me or must give up being a bull. To sit there, passive, when provoked with education beyond him, is too much. He's heated, angry, petulant. He's coming after me. When I'm tired, when I'm foolish, I will stand there. I will argue with the bull. Holding back its horns until my arms are aching, wrestling with its nature, yelling curses about crazy cows, I'll drain myself of everything I need to win the fight. Some days are like that. Other times, I remember what to do.

The bull charges, tears toward me, ripping up the earth. I stand still; my heart is pounding. Still, I remain there; I can feel its musky breath fill the air just near my face. And then, as the horns lower to gore me, seconds from my end, I make one movement: I slowly step aside. The bull expends his energy in the run. My own is preserved to face him another time.

So it is with children. My job is to be that matador—to let them have the power and anger of their run and to keep from getting impaled on the process of their growing up.

1 PM.

"You did it!" I tell him. "You really did it. You finished that whole sheet. You got all of it correct. I am so proud of your hard work."

He beams.

"I learned it."

"Yes," I tell him. "Yes, you did."




*Yes, I got her a diaper. She has only worn it once since it came two days ago. Her feathers are regrowing on their own. We are all very happy she is doing so much better now.

** This is what I say it feels like being worn down by adorable little people—kind of like being tied up by Ewoks.

Ragnarokk

I know that these are Egyptian gods, not Norse.  We are equal-opportunity mythologists. Photo credit: chelle at Morguefile

Yesterday, my alarm did not go off. My husband woke me up, and the house was already alive, crawling like ants with humans needing to acquire food. There goes my writing time. (NaBloPoMo, my ass.) My middle child—the one who inherited my sleep disorder—woke under my jostle, a mess of softly breathing blankets, a monster of slumber-stolen, and begged me for more sleep. Finally, I relented, and consented that he miss Language Arts. I went downstairs.

The coffee was made and the house was warm. My teenager was up, glaring hostile at me for my participation in the indentured servitude he knows as high school. But he remembered he had half a left-over Subway sandwich for lunch and this cheered him immeasurably.

"It was nine dollars!" he tells me. "What happened to a five dollar foot-long?"

"This," I told him, "is why you never have any money."

We woke my youngest and stole him out of the bedroom he shares with my middle son.

"Today," I told him, "will be pajama day at school."

Since I am the principal and sole instructor of this school, I can make these last-minute decisions. Everything seemed quite auspicious until Mike got mad at him for not answering a question, for the hundred thousandth time. Then he fell into a sullen sulk and refused to eat his breakfast. He pushed at me with angry hands because I am his mother and therefore I am the force there always is to push. Talking this out did not assist him. We had to have a pillow fight. Afterwards,  he ate some cinnamon toast and practiced his violin.

We embarked on a study of grammar, began to memorize a poem and read the first two chapters of Morning Girl. Everything looked good until we ran into a sheet on urban, suburban and rural communities. Then my headache caught up with me and it turned out I had the patience and teaching talent of a mountain troll. Sometimes, I wish there were cameras in my house to capture the brilliance and commitment of our educational adventures. At other times, I am very glad no one else is here. At any rate, we recovered quickly. That is sometimes all one can hope for, to recover quickly. The rest of the day was lost in Egypt. My littlest became a bookie taking bets on various ancient gods.

"Who would win? Ares or Set?"

"I tend not to think of things in terms of relative destructive power, " I told him. "You might want to ask your older brother."

And later...

"Who would win? Set or Zeus? I definitely think Zeus."

"Set," said Rowan at dinner. "Definitely Set."

Sometimes, I really worry about my oldest son.

"Why did all the Norse gods die?" Mikalh asked wonderingly.

"Odin broke his word. It happened after Loki was punished. Read about it. The book is over by the couch. Ragnarokk, it was called."

Ragnarokk. The day ends in destruction. Torn bodies litter the floor. The villain is vanquished, but honor is destroyed. The hour of death is nigh. Every night, the hour of death is nigh. In the morning, the day dawns new, the gods are born again and cover the earth with their works. Battles are fought, bets are placed and the food of the gods is consumed. Again and again, the arc of the day rises before setting at their doom.

Epic.

The Discipline of a Scholar

Yesterday morning I got the audio file above in my email box, and I have been turning it over in my head ever since. The link is to an NPR show discussing the different attitudes that western and eastern cultures have to a child's struggle with academics. (I'm going to talk about the ideas contained in it for the rest of the blog post, so make sure and listen to it and then come back to read. Here it is in print if you'd prefer. )

When I first pulled my seven year-old son this out to homeschool this August after two turbulent years at school, the biggest hurdle we both had to overcome was the sense that school work should be easy. Mikalh's experience at school had been anything but. Hampered by auditory processing disorder, what looked like dysgraphia, and symptoms of depression and low self-esteem, school for him was difficult and frustrating. What he knew for sure is that it shouldn't be. The depression and self-esteem were the natural results of his conclusion that work should be easy for anyone smart, and was hard only for people who were dumb. He sat and dropped his pencils and refused to do his math. A first-grade year went by without anyone being sure what he could do.

My own school experience took a different path. At his age, I could read grade levels above my peers and therefore had filled my world with background knowledge that often found resonance in what I was taught. This was before No Child Left Behind, before three-week tests administered with covered walls and silenced bells, worried adults and all the pencils and the gum. I did not shine in math or sciences, but the rest of school for me left ample time for daydreaming and consisted largely of the filling out of forms that, once turned into the teacher, signaled I was free. I liked school. Why not? It was easy and I was held up, with very little effort, as an example for other kids.

All this was true until middle school. Grades, it developed, were measured based on effort, as in work produced,  rather than on native talent. This was disheartening in the extreme. I, like my son, dropped pencils and refused to work, but with an adolescent flair. All my life, I had mistakenly believed that my talent would get me through, while it turned out something else entirely would be required. My adult life has proven the truth of this to me. It is completely irrelevant that once I was an early fluent reader, now that everyone else can read. It makes no difference if I am smart. What matters is what I can work for and achieve (or not). To a large extent, my life has been defined by the ingenuity with which I approach the matters that I don't think I can deal at all, almost entirely non-academic.

Sitting across the table from Mikalh, within a few weeks, it became clear that we would have to go to war with this notion of entitlement to ease.

"If you weren't making any mistakes, it would just mean you didn't need to learn this," I'd remind him.

"There are no dumb mistakes as long as you are trying."

He repeated these refrains sagely to his stuffed bear.

I tailored his whole academic program to his learning style, but I wouldn't allow him to guess at math problems and insisted he ask for help if he was stuck. If he refused to work entirely, I cleared his schedule, so he had time to complete it all, and waited, sometimes adding more. This makes me sound like a terrible person, but I am honestly less concerned with his momentary irritation than a lifetime of flawed expectations.

I want to open up the world to this child who imagines everything. I want to nourish in him the discipline of a scholar, no matter what he should choose to be.

It's mid-November now. Four months we have been working together, and this is what I see. A child who is ridiculously proud of his achievements and frames them in terms of hard work rather than ability or smarts. Someone who is developing the discipline to memorize a poem, to copy a passage, to correct a series of grammar mistakes without frustration as a matter of course.  I see a child who expects to work, and who complains that I have canceled school for Thanksgiving because there is something about that work he likes. There is, after all, something satisfying about pressing oneself hard into something worthy and feeling the ache of effort as you learn.

None of this is to say that there are not groans and dirty looks when some new difficult thing is assigned. Sometimes we still go to war. But, at the end of a battle, when my son emerges with a writing journal legible and grammatically correct, and the two of us both say, "Look a capital letter at the start! No reminders," then I know we've done something right.

In my work life, first at a public school and now as a tutor, I have taught for some time the kids who struggle, the ones who do not know, the sideways learners, misfits, misspellers and chatterers during class. I work with the ones who cannot sit in a chair or remember phonograms or tell me plot from plural noun. Wouldn't I just love a world that prized their effort, rather than the ease with with the answer can be summoned to their lips? Wouldn't I just love to see their work displayed as an example for the class, their thinking through to the right answer be rewarded with applause? Wouldn't I love to see them know themselves as something other than dumb? Wouldn't I love to see the discipline of a scholar cultivated in them, too?

I think we put too much stock in ability and it hurts all of us—the bright, the challenged and everyone in between. We speak too much of what we can do, as if it is the sum of all we have done before, rather than remembering that new neural connections can always be forged. We are playdough, rather than stone. We say "I can't" when we mean "I won't" and "I don't want to" when we mean "I'm scared." We are afraid to fail, so we mumble answers quietly under our breath, rather than glorying in the courage it takes to raise our hand when unsure of our success. We give our kids the impression that those without the right answer should shut up and let a few students, leaders, and bullies have the floor. Personally, I am one of the worst in this regard.

Being a homeschooling parent is teaching me better. It is teaching me to try, even when I am wrong, to thumb my nose at no subject area, to try and find the answer, and to demonstrate an ability to work without complaint. We're being watched. All of us. I hope we make a good lesson of ourselves.


Team Ambiguity: What do you think? I'd like me your honest reflections. Let's have a real coffee klatch in the comment section and find out what we all think and have experienced with this. (Don't forget to subscribe to comments if you want to play.)

Frantic Fractals, Fascinating

Building the puzzle/model of the human ear that comes with the Moving Beyond the Page curriculum

Every Thursday, sweet Larissa of Papa is a Preacher, sets up a linky party on her blog, to which I have been cordially invited and, every Thursday, I forget that it is Thursday and don't post anything there. Or I write something unrelated and stick that up. I am as good at linky parties as I am at Tupperware parties and other womanly things, which is to say, not good at all. Larissa, though, is someone of whom I am very fond and she deserves better than this. So, today, rather than spewing some writerly, ambiguous word spatter at her blog, I am going to respond to her question:

What have I been up to?

Please see below.

That, my friend, is a fractal six feet tall and eight feet wide, made of itty bitty triangles glued onto larger triangles. It took about four days to complete and represented the cutting of one thousand small triangles and one hundred larger colored ones. Mikalh and I worked together to glue them all where they should be. This ambitious thing is called the Cotter Tens Fractal. It is an elegant representation of our base ten number system and a project that my seven year-old Mikalh and I did for his homeschool math curriculum. The math he is using, Right Start Level B, is actually a first grade program, but I have not found so far that it is placing him behind his grade-level peers except in subtraction, which Right Start teaches late. What is great is that he understands place value so well at the level of multiples of tens that he started asking me to show him division signs so that he could think through what he had learned. (We haven't even discussed multiplication.)

I have hated Math all my life and it turns out that I hated Arithmetic. I am thrilled beyond belief to actually be teaching (and, perhaps, learning) Mathematics, which is a subject that I find infinitely more interesting so far.

Anyway, without getting into detail about the arcane world of homeschooling, that is what I have been up to. We have constructed a model of a human ear and are doing a series of demonstrations to model changing pitch and the passage of sound waves through all the states of matter. We are reading about Helen Keller and, through her experience, exploring the power of words to create a world. I am spending hours geeking out on homeschool websites trying to figure out what classical education is and whether I like it, and whether or not grammar should be taught through dictation and copy work or by workbook or by reading books.

It's rather frantic. This is how I get when something interests me. I jump into it and lose myself. I wake up thinking about grammar. I go to sleep wondering about teaching ancient Greece. After a while, I'll settle a bit. Until something else catches my wandering eye and I fall in love with that.