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Specialization and generalization.

Yesterday was a very busy and raucous co-schooling day at my house, but it was fun, for a couple of reasons.

The first is a welcome new development for this year:  H and I now have our friend M joining us again after a few years of working through different options, with the one child that she's homeschooling this year.  It's so lovely to have her back with us twice a week; we've really missed her and her kids.  I made taco salad for lunch (general recipe at the end of the post), and M brought apple crisp and cheese for afternoon snack, and we kept the coffee flowing.  Faster now that teen boys drink it.

The second thing is that I have fun things to teach this year, practically all high-school level.  I had to skip geometry today because of an unintentional late start, but I still got to teach one of the enjoyable parts of civics, and a challenging-to-communicate topic in chemistry, and all about relative clauses in Latin.  By the end of the day I was, truly, happy about how I'd done (at least from my end; can't know how well the kids absorbed it all).  I enjoyed interacting with the kids each time, and as I looked back on the day, I was left feeling:  "Hey!  I'm pretty smart.  I did a good job."  Which always feels nice.

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Mark, too, has been having some successes at work that leave him feeling good.  We were talking about our days last night over dinner out (new "soul-inspired, chef-created" place went in a few blocks from our house; grits and biscuits and collard greens and country ham feature prominently, as well as brioche buns and good craft beer); we talked about them some more over coffee this morning.  A lot of Mark's research and development work winds up being proprietary to his employer, but he occasionally gets to publish with his colleagues:  there are eight patents, for example.  He doesn't have to be secretive about the fact that he's done significant work on prominent and popular brands.  And soon he'll be an author on a new open-access  item that's the culmination of a lengthy collaboration he's really proud of.

"It's very weird to work on the same project for years," he told me this morning.

"I know what you mean," I said.  "I am not sorry that I had the opportunity to become an expert in one very narrow subject area.  It was a valuable experience, to learn how to focus that tightly for so long.  But I am glad that I did not spend my life's work on it."

"I'm not sure if I'm a specialist or a generalist," he said thoughtfully.   "On the one hand, I'm definitely one of the go-to guys in my specific area of work--" [this sentence heavily paraphrased to remove technical details --ed.] "--on the other, I enjoy being the person who generally knows how to solve whatever problem happens to come up anywhere in the process."

"Perhaps you're not all that different in scope from an academic.  I mean, they may be the worldwide expert on one very narrow thing; they do active research on a set of narrowly related different topics; they have to have a working understanding of everything closely related to the field so that they can spot new directions of inquiry and support or criticize their colleagues' work; and they have to stay well-enough grounded in the basics of the field that they can deal with it if they have to teach some random undergraduate class."

I didn't get to hear his thoughts analyzing that one, because he looked at his watch and had to jump up and give me a kiss and run out the door because he had a 7:00 a.m. call to Europe and a meeting across town right after that. 

Me, I poured myself another cup of coffee and wrapped my bathrobe more tightly around myself and settled back on the couch, thinking about writing a blog post in the time before the children wake.

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Chemistry yesterday was the most challenging to teach, not because I don't grasp the material well, but because the material is not very easy to explain to newbies.  The language that's used by convention seems poorly designed; maybe it's the best we could do, but sometimes you'd like to go back in time and straighten people out before they named things.  ("Ben.  Trust me.  You want to label the resinous electricity as 'positive.'  Not the vitreous electricity.") 

Anyway, I was laying the foundation for understanding electron configurations:  the four principal quantum numbers, how they give a unique "address" for each electron in the multielectron atom.  At one point the teen boys were laughing:  "Wait, the numbers are called n, l, m... and SPIN?"  and:  "Wait, l is also s, p, d, and f?"

["No... l is allowed to have the values zero through n-1.  It's just that when it's zero, we call it s, and when it's 1, we call it p, and so on.  It's like a code.  I don't think the reason why we haven't changed to using numbers is anything other than that it's less confusing to label, say, 3p instead of calling them 3-1 orbitals."  I've since looked it up and been reminded what I had forgotten, that s, p, d, f stand for sharp, principal, diffuse, and fundamental, and refer to groups of spectral lines.  I'll be sure to tell them next time we meet.] 

The whiteboard was a mess, but it made sense.  I loved it.

Then in Latin we read through a long passage of a story from the textbook which was designed to teach them about relative pronouns (qui quae quod, "which/that" as in "the fruit that rotted was an orange") and the use of the same words as interrogative adjectives ("which/what" as in "what fruit rotted?") and demonstrative adjectives (ille illa illud, "that" as in "that fruit was really disgusting") and demonstrative pronouns ("that" as in "that made me sick) and third person pronouns (is ea id, "he/she/it" as in "it totally had to be trashed.")  In all five cases ("the fruit that made me sick"/"the person whose lunch this is will be disappointed"/"to whom can I complain about the fridge?"/"the odor that I smelled is tremendous"/"the bin in which I will throw this is over there").  It's relatively elementary stuff but there was a giant chart on my whiteboard and also some passages in which I had to keep switching marker colors so I could show them how the relative clauses and the prepositional phrases can be set apart from the main thrust of the sentence for easier translating.  And it was all very fun.

And finally there was Civics, where I am going through parts that are not so suffused with gloom and disappointment, but the workmanlike stuff of, having discussed the history first, outlining the Constitution (Preamble.  Articles, I-III in the first group, IV-VII in another.  Amendments:  1-10 in the first group, 11-27 in another,)  giving them the big picture as they get ready to read it straight through for the first time.  All laid out once again on the same whiteboard.

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I have to think about all of these things, and how to communicate them, and I like that it's languages and politics and chemistry.  I never get sick of it.  I'm not saying I would necessarily have been sick of it if I was concentrating on only chemistry, or only languages, but I do like having to think hard about all three.

Am I a generalist or a specialist?  I specialize in a small group of kids, and I specialize in putting things into terms they can understand.  That's kind of a special skill.  But it requires me to know a fair amount about quite a lot of different things.  Not very prestigious; no publications yet (since I quit academia); but day to day, pretty fun, and I count it valuable to our family.  I suppose that's more important than how it is categorized, and that goes for what Mark does too.

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*Taco salad:  a lot of ingredients but a relatively simple and low-mess way to feed a crowd with varying tastes.  My crowd had three 4yo, two elementary schoolkids, two junior high age kids, two high school boys, and three adult women.  I do this:

• Put a cup (dry) of brown rice on in my rice cooker in the morning
• brown three pounds of 80% lean ground beef, season it generously with a mild spice mix (packets or your own), and put it in the crockpot with some water to stay hot; when the rice is done, mix that in (the rice absorbs the fat and flavor, and extends the meat some, and also rice served separately gets all over the place).  That will keep till lunch.
• shred half a small red cabbage, chop 1 green bell pepper, and tear up two hearts of romaine; mix
• put out the salad mix and the crockpots with bowls of: spicy pinto beans, plain black beans, sliced black olives, chopped avocado, sour cream, cheddar cheese, mild salsa, hot sauce, and tortilla chips.  Let kids decide what goes in their salad, unless they are four, in which case parents make the best guess.

The year of three languages.

Mark and the three older kids are gone camping this weekend, and Saturday was cold and drizzly, and the house was already clean because Friday I had paid a person to come clean it, so I gave the two little boys leave to play quietly and watch videos while I dove deeply into hours and hours of brain work. 

About half of it I spent on Latin---plans for teaching it---and about half I spent on Somali---at a tedious but necessary stage of learning it.

And somewhere on my mental to-do list, Swedish is lingering around, and I'm going to have to turn to this eventually, in June or so.

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Somali first.  (My most recent post on learning Somali is here, containing links to earlier posts.)

I've been cruising through the textbook at seven pages per week, aiming to hit the reading goal by the time my little study group meets again in a month.  Mainly I advance through the book all at once in a few hours on a Saturday, making flash cards as I go out of the exercises, and I review the flashcards daily thereafter.

I didn't quite make my goal last week because when I ran up against declining nouns with the definite article appended, I couldn't hold all the different rules for spelling changes in my head at once.  

Summary of what I'm trying to learn. 

• Noun cases are subject, genitive, vocative, and absolutive (think none-of-the-above).  To change the case or the number, you change the ending, mostly, and also the stress-tone pattern.
• But when you append the definite article suffix, you have to use a fifth form, called the premodifier, that is unmarked for case.  It may have a different ending, too.
• The case marker appears instead in the choice of article:  -ta, or -tíi, or -ka, or kíi, for absolutive, and -tu, or -tii, or -ku, or -kii, for subject. 
• (-t- is for feminine nouns and -k- is for masculine nouns). 
• But for sound-production reasons, depending on the ending of the noun's premodifier form, a -t- may change to a -d- and the -k- may change to a -g- or a -h- or be deleted.  Also sometimes before -k- the last vowel of the noun changes to match the vowel of the article.
• In most of the declensions, pluralizing the noun changes its ending and its gender.

So far, given a noun, I learn the singular absolutive; the plural absolutive; then I learn how to change both to the premodifier form; then I have to decide "is it masculine or feminine?"; then I have to work out whether the ending is one that requires changing the -t- or -k- to something else; finally, if it's a -k-, whether I need to change a vowel too. 

(I'll get into the difference between, say, -ku and -kii, some other time.  I haven't entirely learned it.  The latter is kind of like a demonstrative, but with some additional layers.)

So, I didn't do very well on my first set of exercises, and I decided yesterday that what I really needed was to write out a whole lot of nouns from all seven declensions, one case and number at a time, so I could see the patterns.  Then I could sort the nouns in each declension into groups according to what happened to their endings.

Behold!  Ecce!  Waa kan!   I have about ten pages of this, organized by declension and number.

 

The issue here is that the book teaches the organization of nouns in a way that isn't the way I've had success in other languages.  I need to mentally hang each new noun on a "hook" that's, essentially, "nouns that decline just like this one."  There are more hooks in Somali than there are in Latin or French, but otherwise the process is essentially the same.  

So my next step is a Big Sort, and then I can start thinking about nouns, "Well, this one declines like saaxibad" and I'll be able to start hanging them up one at a time.

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Okay, moving on to Latin.  I'm going to save most of this for another series of posts, but I spent a lot of yesterday working out how to put all the different pieces of next year's Latin goals together.  I really, really love Lingua Latina, the curriculum I've now switched to, and the kids are enjoying it a lot; but it's super freeform compared to the Mother of Divine Grace lesson plans for Henle Latin , which I used with the kids who are now graduating.   

Last time, I needed the structure of MODG/Henle when I was learning along with the kids.  MODG's spiral-bound syllabus literally laid out exactly what the student was to do every single day, five days a week (which vocabulary to drill, which charts to recite, which grammar concepts to read about, which exercises to do) and had a complete set of quizzes and tests.  It's also set up for self-teaching.  

But the approach of Lingua Latina is much more fun for the next batch of kids (ages 11-15 now).  And I've got enough Latin under my belt that I can actually guide them through it.  (A motivated, language-loving, puzzle-solving sort of person could probably self-teach with it, but for all others it's better to have a guide.)  Incidentally, LL is fairly popular as a two-semester college course, which means that for me it will function as a two-year high school course and so I can get through about half of it next year.  I have a five-chapter head start so I'll do half of what's left, i.e., chapters VI through XX.

Anyway, besides working through the text, I need to do assessments, form drills, grammar reviews, some English grammar teaching, and additional cultural/historical stuff.  And figure out the best way to fit it into each week of two 90-minute classes (each class in two sessions with a break between) and two homework assignments.  So yesterday was Massive Spreadsheet Time, but everything I put in was a placeholder; later I have to go in and work out what pages to read for each assignment, etc.

I've generally worked out that I'll do each chapter in four class periods:  introduction, text, text, followup; introduction, text, text, followup.  We'll see if I can fit all the bits for each class into one 90-minute period plus one homework assignment.  

Don't @ me for putting in my spreadsheet, e.g., "Show me exercitia" instead of "Show me exercitiam."  I can't code-switch that quickly when I'm trying to organize.

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OK now, Swedish.

Not much advancement in that area, just a little tickle in the brain, but I'm pulling together the resources to pull one of my kids out of Latin and enroll him in adult language classes at the American Swedish Institute, which is a 30 minutes' walk from my house. 

The American Swedish Institute.

This is a classic case of Adapting the Homeschool to a Child's Specific Needs.  He is having a rough time of it in Latin with the other three kids, and he's not enjoying it at all.  Having dabbled with him in other languages here and there, I'm convinced that the problem isn't just that he Hates Latin; he is going to have to work disproportionately hard on any language, certainly harder than he wants to.

But... foreign language is not entirely optional.  Two years are required for freshman admissions at most four-year-colleges he might apply to.  Although there are of course numerous other options out there besides freshman admission into a four-year, he wants to have a shot at this path, and so we need to find a way to hit that minimum.  

So, this has been a mini-epiphany for me, the kind of person who always felt ashamed to be anything other than The Best or at least Near The Top.

Sometimes... the most important thing is hitting the minimum, and doing so with the least damage to other parts of the whole person.

And when you shift your focus from "what is the absolute optimal learning experience we can have, with the most joy and excitement and fascination and love of learning?" to "what is the best way for us to hit the minimum requirements?" --- you often wind up going in an entirely different direction.

I'll save some of that for another post, probably after we've gone to the ASI and had our introductory Swedish class.  Anyway, the point now is that I am trying to plan so that he can earn his two credits at half-pace, over four years.  I only have a vague idea at this point of how it's going to work, and to some extent we are at the mercy of the class schedule, which hasn't come out yet. 

So the extent of my preparation is a lot of muttering of  Please please please don't let his only choice be Monday evenings.  

This is going to be a very linguistic year.

Language teaching milestone, and musings on teaching what you aren't qualified for.

A Milestone, upon which I will give my two cents:

On Friday, I wrote and hit "Send" on the very last assignment for the fourth year of high school Latin, at least for this particular cohort.

I've been teaching Latin to a small group that included my oldest and H's oldest since they were about nine years old.  (I started with my oldest when he was seven; here's the proof.)  I can barely believe that after this week I won't be sending them any more assignments.

I didn't take Latin in high school or college. I majored in engineering, not classics. I was an absolute beginner when we started, just like them---with the advantage that I had plenty of experience learning one language, namely French. 

But I got a couple of kids all the way from beginner stuff through high school Latin IV, by dint of staying a few steps ahead ahead of them in homeschool curricula, and searching for things I didn't know whenever I realized I needed more information. 

And, of course, by buying books.

Behold, most of the books I used (or at least bought) over the years to teach myself and the kids (that's an aluminum meter stick in the picture for scale):

(Not shown:  books that fell apart, books I couldn't find this morning, books still in my teenager's school bag, online resources that didn't cost me anything, and a few months' subscription to https://aeneid.co/ .)

Now the money question:  Did I do an adequate job?

Did I satisfy the relevant goals and purposes of learning a foreign language in high school?  (See here for a discussion.)

Did they learn it well, compared to how they might have done in an institutional school?

Well, I wasn't able to talk either of them into taking the AP^® Latin exam, but they did sit for the National Latin Exam every year and always scored pretty close to the national "par"; a couple of times one or the other earned a certificate or a medal by scoring above average.  If either of them ever sits for a placement test for college, I'll let you know.

Their grammar work definitely interlaced with their work in English grammar and rhetoric, and their studies of literature, culture, and history interlaced with the heavily-classical program of literature study that H. designed for them.  (Ninth-grade English literature was practically all ancient authors, plus Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.).

At the advanced levels, they translated and read a lot of Caesar, read a big chunk of Vergil, and dabbled in the translation and reading of an assortment of other writers:  off the top of my head:  Horace, Catullus, Ovid, Pliny, Eutropius, probably a dozen more.  They liked some more than others.  

Both are thinking seriously about college-level language study now:

• My son has already corresponded with freshman advisors and decided that if he has to take any language in college, he'll start with a 200-level Latin class that provides a comprehensive grammar review followed by studying Ovid's Metamorphoses, which we've only dabbled in at home.  

• H's son is studying modern Italian on his own and hopes to continue.   Motivation?  A beloved uncle has married an Italian citizen and moved to Sardinia to start a family.  He's already remarked on the head start that Latin gave him for this.

Finally---I can't be sure of this, because they are kind young men who don't complain to me much---but I think they enjoyed themselves.

I definitely enjoyed myself.

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Anyway, all this is to say: There's this idea that you have to know a subject to teach a subject. Sometimes that's true; but another way is for a lead-learner to set the pace and learn alongside the other students. 

(Psst:  Eventually, the boys got better at parts of it than I did.  They spent much more time doing homework problems; I could cheat with the answer key.)

Let me be clear:  I had a lot of advantages that not everyone would have here:

• It helps to be interested in the subject.
• It helps to have experience with self-teaching.  (I do.)
• It helps to be motivated to help the kids succeed.
• It helps to be rich in resources, time, and connections, all of which I have the privilege of enjoying.  (How much do you think those books cost me, in money and time?  How many of my friends who have studied Latin or classics do you think I reached out to for a question now and again?)

I would never call it an easy way to do things.

But I'd also never call it impossible, at least not with sufficient support.  And don't forget, you always get to ask for help.

If you get a takeaway from this, here's what I suggest: Don't talk, ever, as if it's necessary to hold an external qualification in x, y, or z to help your kid learn it at home.

Don't say it about yourself, and don't say it about other people.

Seriously:  I never want to hear you say "Oh, I'm not qualified" or "Do you really think you're qualified?"

There may be obstacles, but there's no reason to add to them by giving voice, unnecessarily, to a certainty of failure that isn't certain at all.

(Behold the closeups you're going to ask me for.  Left to right:)

 

 

 

 

Co-schooling lunch: why so fancy?

I got a new Instant Pot electric pressure cooker for Christmas.  The first thing I made in it was frijoles negros, which worked beautifully, last week.  

The second thing I am making in it right now is chicken stock -- I hope -- from two rotisserie chickens which I chilled overnight and picked not-quite-clean of meat in the morning.  

The third thing, I will make in it right after the chicken stock is done:  soup with barley, leeks, and carrots, to which I will return some or all of the chicken meat at the end.

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This soup is for lunch on a co-schooling day, along with a loaf of whole wheat bread from my bread machine and a clementine or two for everyone.  While the pressure cooker I thought I'd stop and write a bit about hot lunches in general for the homeschooling family, and then about hot lunches on co-schooling day.

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If I could poll a hundred homeschooling families and get a detailed answer out of all of them, I think I'd love to ask this question:  How do you manage lunch?  Not because I can't manage it:  After eleven-plus years of trying to feed children in between their lessons and studies, and especially now that I am out of the nothing-but-small-ones years, we have a system that works pretty well.   (More on that below.)  No, I just am curious to hear about the ways that diverse families have solved the problem.  

And it is a problem, in the sense of a series of questions to answer:  

• How long after breakfast do you have lunch?  
• Must you clear off a schoolwork surface to make room for cooking and eating?
• Is lunch to be a dinner-like occasion, with a set table and everyone at their places on time?
• Does everyone eat the same thing?  Do all the kids eat the same thing but the parent has something different?
• Who makes lunch?  Is it the parent?  A particular child?  Do children take turns?  If children make lunch, may they choose the menu?  Do people make their own lunch from what's available?
• Is lunch-making time a time for the parent to teach food preparation to young children?
• Do you insist on a balanced meal or that children eat their vegetables at lunch time?
• How much time can you take for lunch?
• Do you have a rest time or "recess" afterward?
• Do you decide what to make in advance?
• Do you try to use dinner leftovers in your lunch?
• Do you have a regular rotation of lunches-of-the-day?  Or do you often eat the same thing day after day?
• Who cleans up? Will you completely clean up the lunch before going back to the rest of your day, or will dishes wait till later?

Different families:  different lunches.

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I keep it relatively simple in my three at-home days.  This year, the regular rotation is sandwiches on Tuesday, pizza (usually from frozen) on Wednesday, and quesadillas on Friday; all with fruit on the side. 

On Thursdays, when I host, there are twelve to fifteen people here for lunch, and the adults have quite a lot to do.  You would think I would want to go even more simple on those days, but in fact I do not.  Here is why.

Point one:  Scale-up.

It turns out that it is not actually simple or quick to prepare most sandwiches, frozen pizzas, or quesadillas for twelve to fifteen people, nor to let those twelve to fifteen people prepare their own sandwiches.  

• Assembling large numbers of sandwiches is a surprisingly fiddly, messy affair.
• You can really only do a couple of frozen pizzas in your oven at once.  That'll feed maybe five children?
• Quesadillas also have the sandwich problem combined with the heat source problem.

No, what you want to feed people simply and easily in your house is probably a couple of deep pans of something you can cut into pieces, or a vat of something scoopable. 

 

Point two.  The co-schooling kids' time is better spent on schoolwork than on lunch.

On our home days, helping me put lunch together is part of my kids' job.   My "simple" lunches for days at home are chosen in part because I need to be able to bark down the stairs, "Elder Teenager!  Please start the quesadillas while I clean up this mess!"  or to be able to ask, "Younger teenager, can you put the pizzas in the oven at eleven-ten so they're ready when I get home from toddler music class?"

But the co-schooling time is short, and we really need all of the kids to be either productively schooling or productively having recess together most of the day.  I'm not going to have them make their own sandwiches by digging through my fridge looking for the fillings they like best (although sometimes in warmer weather I'll set out a tray of meat and cheese and a basket of buns on the table).  Usually there comes a time in the late morning when the students are working independently, and that gives me time to set out lunch trays.

We do assign a pair of children each day to be "servers." It's the servers' job to keep the water pitchers refilled, to fetch second servings, and to retrieve condiments from the fridge (in between bolting down their own lunches).  This little innovation from a few years ago made it a lot easier for  us parent-teachers to sit down and eat.  Servers also have to clear the table so it's ready for schoolwork.  

 

Point three.  Once you've got comfortable with a dish that really works, it's not always all that hard.

Chicken noodle soup from scratch is, on the surface, a bit complicated.  One must immerse the whole chicken in a big pot of cold water, add a few flavoring vegetables, bring to a boil,  and turn down to a simmer.  One must skim the scum that floats to the surface, then an hour or so later remove the chicken and let it cool.  Diced vegetables go into the pot, and that boils again for thirty to sixty minutes; meanwhile the meat must be picked off the bones, and the broth salted and tasted.  Towards the end, in go the noodles, and you must stir so they don't stick.  Once the noodles are all done, the meat goes back in.  If you are frugal, you'll put the bones to boil again in another pot, because there's another pot of broth left in them.

So yes, many steps, spread out throughout a whole morning.  But if I am in the kitchen anyway -- and I teach my co-school students in my kitchen -- I can make chicken noodle soup practically in my sleep.  I have done it so many times that I know exactly when the pot will come to a boil, when to skim, when the chicken will be done, how long the noodles have to go and when to wander back and stir them.  So a vat of chicken noodle soup is something I can make for a co-school day.  It sounds hard.  But because it's one of the things I know how to make work for me -- I make it work for them.

It can be even easier than that.  A perennial favorite is meatballs (read:  from a bag, frozen), heated all morning in my crockpot in a simple tomato sauce (read:  straight from a can -- even plain crushed tomatoes will do because the meatballs flavor them).  I boil spaghetti -- that's the most complicated part -- and serve with buttered rolls and green beans (frozen, steamed in the microwave).  Another is chili (it all goes in the crockpot in the morning) with tortilla chips and a bowl of cheese to pass around.  Mashed potatoes (made in the morning, kept warm in the crockpot) and a tray of oven-baked chicken legs is another.    I also like to do a pot of coconut rice (thanks, rice cooker) with plain poached chicken breasts, steamed broccoli, and pineapple chunks.  Give them a bottle of soy sauce and those are some happy kids.

H. tends more to casseroles than I do, and usually preps them the night before so they can be popped in the oven.  The three things she makes most often are a ridiculously plain and ridiculously delicious salmon loaf (it's so great, you must try feeding it to your kids),  a sort of cheesy noodle bake made with mostly parmesan, and ... hm, I think number three might be little mini meatloaves.  I hope so, because I love mini meatloaves.

These things are not as hard to get on the table as you might think, at least not once you have the routine down.

 

Point four:  You might want to eat something tasty, too.

Let's be real:  although my children are happy to eat it, I do not want frozen pizza for lunch.  Certainly not every week.  I do like quesadillas and eat them sometimes, but not every week.  

On the other hand, I would be perfectly happy to eat H.'s salmon loaf or meatloaves or cheesy noodle bake every week.  They are yummy.  A bag of steamed vegetables on the side of any of those, and I'm very happy.  (Salmon loaf especially makes me happy.  We make a sort of rémoulade of mayonnaise mixed with homemade hot sauce for it, and it's really nice.)

 Likewise, I could eat chicken noodle soup -- my own homemade chicken noodle soup, that is -- every week for the rest of my life, and I would not tire of it, at least if I had copious amounts of saltine crackers and black pepper.  Or mashed potatoes and chicken, or even the spaghetti and meatballs.  

Co-schooling days are very busy, especially traveling to the other's house in the morning -- what with gathering together all the stuff and piling it in the car, fighting morning rush hour traffic, setting up all the stuff again -- and it's nice to have a good meal to look forward to, shared with a friend.

 

Point five:  It's welcoming.

I can get stressed out by the details of hosting everyone, to be sure.    But in the long term, I want my house to be a place that kids remember fondly being a guest in.  Sometimes I get frustrated when I teach.  Sometimes I get irritated picking up after people.  I'm sure the kids see this all the time.  But I do hope they like sitting around my table with their friends scarfing down my chili.  Maybe they'll remember that as a good time, remember a feeling of being welcomed and fed and among friends once or twice a week (between being hounded for their history homework and quizzed on their Latin grammar).    I have to believe that it makes a real difference to them to sit down to (say) a bowl of hot soup with fresh rolls and a piece of fruit.

 

Point six:  You can always order pizza.

Which sounds like a jokey way to end a post, but in fact, it is actually a real point.  Once, maybe eight years ago, H. and I sat down and worked out about how much it cost per serving to feed the kids a home-cooked lunch.  I am sure the price has gone up significantly since then, partly because food prices have risen significantly, and also since we now have some teenagers.  If I remember right, we figured that we spent about $2 per serving back then.

That turned out to be a very useful thing for us to have calculated, because we realized that it didn't actually cost us significantly more to order Domino's pizza for the kids (at $5.99 for a two-topping medium pizza, the lunch special that has been going for years in this area).

We didn't want to order pizza all the  time; we wanted to have balanced meals that would be good for everyone, as much as possible.  But we'd also been assuming that pizza delivery was kind of a luxury, and so we definitely didn't want to order pizza all the time.

Turns out that it's not.  I think it might even be less expensive relative to home-cooked meals now, because the prices of a delivered pizza have not risen as fast as the prices of groceries.  (Although four teenage boys can put away a lot of pizza, it should be noted -- probably more pizza than salmon loaf.)

Anyway, the point of this is that if your home-cooked meal backfires somehow, or if you wake up in the morning and you just can't stand the idea of cooking, you could order pizza (provided you live somewhere that you can get it).  H. and I have given each other carte blanche to resort to pizza whenever that seems necessary.  I think we're both committed to making a good-faith effort to a lunch that is not pizza, for the sake of balance and variety; but we're not fanatics, and sometimes the pizza is the best thing to happen to the day.

Remember to tip the driver, and then make your peace and get back to your school day.

 

Crunchy Hawaiian Chicken Wrap: or, How to get a dozen kids to eat their vegetables, courtesy of the USDA and some of that mayo-vinegar-sugar dressing.

You guys!  Believe it or not, this sandwich wrap (in which broccoli slaw figures prominently) was just proclaimed unanimously a hit by three families' worth of homeschooling kids.   And also their moms. 

I adapted it from the USDA school lunch recipes by taking the 50-serving quantity and, approximately, quartering it.  The filling is gluten-free, so have a corn tortilla option for the GF kids.

Our kids, oddly enough, thought it was a little too sweet.  It does have a lot of sugar -- but I thought the sweetness was perfect.

Crunchy Hawaiian Chicken Wrap  (12 generous servings)

Dressing:

• 1/2 cup       mayonnaise
• 6 Tbsp        white vinegar
• 1/2 cup        sugar
• 1/2 Tbsp    poppy seeds
• 1 Tbsp        garlic powder
• 1 Tbsp        chili powder
•                     Salt to taste

Also:

• 2.5 lb         frozen, boneless skinless chicken breasts, cooked and diced
• 12 oz          bagged "broccoli slaw"
• 6 oz            bagged julienned/matchstick carrots
• 5 oz            baby spinach leaves, chopped
• 20 oz        canned crushed pineapple, drained
• A mix of burrito-sized and taco-sized tortillas

Combine dressing ingredients with a whisk.  In a large bowl, combine broccoli slaw, carrots, spinach, and pineapple.  Fold in dressing.  Chill. 

At mealtime, serve about 2/3 cup of for a burrito-sized wrap, less for smaller taco-sized wraps.

It took me about ten minutes to throw the filling  together in the morning before school (with chicken I'd cooked ahead of time). I served these with peas and with string cheese on the side.  We all agreed that a bowl of honey roasted peanuts would have been a nice topping for added sweet-and-salty crunch.  Some of the kids requested a side of beans to make it more "taco-like."  

Definitely going in the permanent rotation...

 

The light at the end of the tunnel that is 2014--2015.

Have we quite finished all of our work yet this year, the children and I?  Not quite.  I had planned to do a bit more.

Once upon a time, we used to continue "doing school" in each subject until we'd finished the book, so to speak (except for math, which is never done... there is always another book around the corner, and we just keep chugging along... a little slower in the summer, perhaps).  

This meant that we emerged gradually into the summer sunlight.  History book complete!  A few days later, perhaps the science curriculum would run out.  And so on until there was nothing left but the math books, so that the children would be rewarded for "I'm bored" all summer with "Well then!  Go do a math lesson.  It'll keep you sharp!"

This year it isn't going to work that way.   We took a look at the calendar.  In a few weeks there's a week blocked off on the calendar for a family vacation.  Then a week that isn't blocked off -- but H's family will already be gone on their  family vacation -- and then a week where the boys are at scout camp -- and then soon thereafter we'll go to Ohio to visit family -- and then the boys will stay a little longer with Grandma and Grandpa -- and then the boys go on the high-adventure Scout trip... and then we're going on a bike/camping trip with friends...

They've all managed to defeat me by scheduling their summer to be full of valuable experiences that will prevent them from checking educational boxes!

+ + +

What this means is that, like it or not, I have about three full weeks left in the school year (one of which has Memorial Day in it).  

It is time for me to stop asking "how much longer will it take for me to finish all the stuff we are supposed to finish?"

It is time for me to ask instead "what is the best use of our time in the last three weeks of the school year?"

+ + +

Mark laughed and said, "You know, I've heard that once or twice there was a public-school teacher who had to stop for the year before she finished the last chapter of the book."

+ + +

So, for example.  I've got five sessions left to work with the two high school boys on geometry.   But if I didn't have a time limit, I'd have 17 more sessions (why am I so behind?  Because last school year H and I had three babies between us).  However, by happy coincidence, there are exactly six lessons left in the book, and the second-to-last is much more important than the last one (it lays the foundations for understanding calculus by introducing the notion of building up volume formulas by constructing solids from a large number of very thin "slices"), so I'm going to spend one day on each of these lessons.  I won't get to do two chapter reviews, I won't get to do two chapter tests, I won't get to do a final exam, and I won't get to spend two sessions per lesson.  Oh well!  It will have to do.

I had five weeks left in Modern World History, with the last week to be spent on a capstone timeline analysis.  The capstone week is probably the most important and so I'll keep it as the last week.  But I'll need to remove half the material from the rest of the course to reduce four weeks' assignments down to two.  Since they're trying to finish a course-long research paper at the same time, I'll probably do that by reducing the writing workload to almost nothing.

I'm going to totally finish 9th-grade Latin though!  Woo hoo!  Two weeks of lessons left in the book!

+ + +

The elementary schoolkids' work will just stop at one point.  My 9th-grader was put in charge of his own schedule for a few other subjects -- Algebra II and Evolutionary Biology -- and I'm going to let him live with the consequences of being just a little bit behind on those, meaning that he might need to schedule some time finishing up the books over the summer during the weeks he isn't at Scout camp.  I've checked -- it isn't an onerous amount, and doing a little bit in the mornings here and there should be enough.   I am not in charge of that, though.  He is.

Which means that... after three more weeks of work...

... I'll be done.  

And my last schoolday of the year will be a Thursday at H's house where we have dinner there and the elementary school kids will recite the poetry they memorized all year long.

I just realized I will have a perfect use for the bottle of decent bubbly that Mark brought me at Valentine's Day.  I think I will struggle on until then, with the pop of that cork awaiting me in the light of summer.

Change of plans.

Co-schooling today was pre-empted by a vomiting baby, in this case my vomiting 15-month-old.  All the worse because it was supposed to be the first co-schooling day after Easter break.  It was going to be the first "normal" day after Easter break.  It was going to set the tone for all of the spring trimester.  

Alas, it was not to be.

I really thought he was done with it.  He'd had various symptoms for well over a week -- it might even have been two weeks -- starting with a runny nose and fever, followed by more than a week of low appetite and frequent, watery stools.  Then yesterday, he went more than 24 hours without symptoms!  Hurray!   So I made plans.  And all was well until 5:50 this morning when he threw up a bellyful of breastmilk next to my head.

+ + +

As I wrote on FB this morning:

• Life would be easier for me if I didn't have to pass through the five stages of grief every time my plans had to change.

   

   
•  Stage one: that is not vomit. this is just a little spit-up.

   

   
•   Stage two: WHY DID YOU HAVE TO THROW UP TODAY YOU DID THAT ON PURPOSE

   
•  Stage three: If only you don't throw up any more, then maybe everything will actually turn out all right and I won't have to canc ARRRRGH STOP THAT! ON THE TOWEL! THE TOWEL!

   
• Stage four: My beautiful lunch was already made and in the crockpot. The kids will get behind in schoolwork. I'll be lonely ALL DAY

   
•  Stage five: Oh FINE we'll do school by email and we'll eat the lunch for dinner and I'll see you on Monday.

 

+ + +

 

H sent her English assignments by email:  

 

Today we were scheduled to start reading The Confessions by St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo. (That's a place, not an animal, wise guys.) 

It is widely considered to be the first autobiography in the western tradition.  In beginning this reading, I would like you to consider the following questions. 

• What is the purpose of an autobiography in general?
• What do you guess may be the purpose of this particular autobiography?

Type out your answer to these questions and email me.

Your reading assignment is Book 1, Infancy and Boyhood. 

 

I sent my geometry assignments by email:

(1) read Lesson 8-7 on pages 310-311, "Locus and Construction."  If you have the teacher's edition I suggest you work through the two Classroom Exercises on pages 311 and 312; I was going to do them in class as part of the lecture.

 

(2) do written exercises 4--8 and 10 on pp. 312-313 -- all of them must be turned in for a grade.

 

(My assignments are much more prosaic than H's.)

 

(There was other work for the high schoolers too -- kicking off a week of Latin verb review, and work on a paper for modern world history.  But I didn't want to belabor the point.)

 

The younger kids had stuff too -- a map to draw, Latin flashcards to practice, poetry to recite, a story to retell in their own words (Belshazzar's Banquet, aka "The Writing on the Wall").  We got it all done, but it was much more boring.

 

 And now Mark is home, but he's going to spend the evening doing the taxes.  Sigh.  I mean, Yay!  I'm so glad he's doing them!  But... sigh.

Co-schooling flow.

This morning as I was driving the kids out to the northwest suburb where H lives, thinking over what I was going to teach today, I felt... really, really happy.

Astonishingly, co-schooling twice a week with three toddling babies underfoot has turned out... okay.

This year, the subjects I am teaching actually excite me. I realized that I was looking forward to introducing the third conjugation to the 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th graders. I was pondering which verb to use: I needed a transitive verb that could still be used without an object without sounding too weird, one that was easy to spell, one that could be used with most nouns as an object. Pono, ponere (to put or place)? Ago? Definitely not. I settled on "send."

I am also loving every lesson of the geography curriculum. We are having so much more fun this year than last year, when a couple of the kids (well, mostly my daughter) rebelled against Story of the World. This year all four kids love drawing maps and playing sailing games rolling dice and moving little ships around portolan charts.

Thursday we are going to bake giant sugar cookies shaped like Africa, and paint them yellow and green for the desert and the rainforests, and decorate them with chocolate chip mountains and blue-icing rivers, and then eat them for afternoon snack. I can't wait. The kids will love it. So will I. It is so much more fun to work with kids when they enjoy the material. Which has truly been a learning experience for me.

I use a lot of documentaries for the high school boys' modern world history this year. I learned my lesson two years ago when they were learning about Henry VIII: if my goal is for them to remember the story of history, a well-made documentary beats text readings every time. Text readings have their place, and I haven't given up on them, but whenever I can find a really good documentary, we use those and the text is demoted to "supplement." Thank you, BBC and YouTube uploaders. Today we are starting in on WWII with "The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler." My 5th grader is voluntarily watching along with them instead of taking a break.

The weather is unseasonably warm, though I would still call it "chilly." That hasn't stopped the younger children from going out barefoot.

H's crockpot is full of chicken cacciatore that I brought. It is my turn to bring dinner. Tonight the four older boys (between our two families) have Scouts and the two older girls have American Heritage Girls. I will slurp it down along with the girls before driving them to their meeting.

 

And bring some planning materials with me, too. High school marches on. I need to get set up for chemistry, and for more Latin.

And somehow figure out how the two of us are going to fit it all into our days, two days a week, next year. This year has given me so much confidence, though. It is really working very well, and I am confident that it will work next year, too.

I started homeschooling years ago because I wanted schooling to revolve around our family life, instead of our family life revolving around a school. It has paid off many times over in that department.

Some days there is real drudgery and frustration in it, especially when I have to deal with the tussles between my 3rd-grade daughter and my 5th-grade son. I detest whining and I have been hearing a lot of it lately. And there is the constant wish that the house would keep itself clean, the constant internal refrain of "I should really be doing more..." ... more reading to the children, more field trips to local museums, more walks to the park; all those things.

But as the years have gone by -- I am a good ten years into it now -- there has also been a great deal of delight and discovery. And challenges that feel good, not frustrating: teaching myself material so I can turn and teach it to others, learning to work with kids who learn in different ways, encountering material I learned a long time ago (meeting it as if it were an old friend).

These days go so well, all together. The kids get English, Latin, social studies, and a bit of math for the high school boys. And they work efficiently! They know that if they finish quickly they get to play with their friends.

My home days never seem to go quite so well for the younger ones. Maybe it's because math and spelling aren't as fun (they do like art and science pretty well). Maybe it's because the dreaded DOUBLE MATH DAY that comes once a week (since we spend two days a week doing no math at all) hangs over everything like a cloud. Maybe it is because of chores.

But my high schooler gets so much done on those days, barricaded in a quiet room with his to-do lists and his syllabi, that I have plenty of hope for the future.

God help me, I am really starting to enjoy this. Everyone eventually comes up with theories of how the young should be educated, because theories of education are only proxies for theories of humanity. We who educate our own children are really putting our money where our mouth is, and finding out if we understand these young humans in our care the way we think we do, and finding out if we understand how to explain humanity to the humans and vice versa, as we go along. It is theoretical and it is empirical. It is exhiliarating and it is frightening. It is learn-as-you-go and throw-out-everything-you-thought-you-knew all at once. It is a life's work that is simultaneously broad and wide, and narrowed to the very dagger's point. I have learned so much. I have so much more to learn. Some of it is sticking, and some is falling away, and at the end the shape will be different for each one of them, and I will be different, too.

 

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The costs and benefits of accountability.

I knew it was coming, because they asked me last year and I told them then that, sorry, it sounded fun but the notice was too short, and anyway I had a new baby. Maybe next year, I said. And then next year turned into this year, and they called again.

Nothing big, a small thing, really: an idea that attracted me, though. A homeschooling co-op had started up in one of the outlying suburbs. They wanted someone to facilitate high school general chemistry, in 90 minute sessions, once a week, on Tuesdays. One of the other parents must have known of my background and suggested my name.

It was a paid position -- I don't know exactly how much it would have been, because it depended on the number of students who signed up: the fees came directly from each student to the tutor ("not 'teacher,'" it was explained to me; I get it, the idea is that the students do most of their learning independently, and then meet once a week for feedback or discussion or something like that.) On the order of a couple of hundred dollars per student for a semester. There was a science lab space available, apparently, which is more than I have at home. I would be free to choose the curriculum, even design my own, as long as it helped the students acquire the equivalent of a high school chemistry credit.

I have a high school student of my own who plans to study chemistry next year, so that was another point in in its favor -- some of the work of curriculum preparation, I would be doing anyway. The money made the offer attractive not so much for its buying power, but that it turned the gig into an actual -- you know -- job, relying on some of my professional knowledge and experience as well as some of the skills I have enjoyed developing behind the scenes, so to speak, over the past ten years.

I had a lot to think about, so I started researching available high school chemistry curricula and lab kits, and also musing about exactly why the offer attracted me.

+ + +

I have zero regrets about walking away from the paid workplace in order to concentrate my efforts on running a family and educating our children. Sometimes, however, I consider a hypothetical future in which I decide I would like to return to it, and I wonder what I might put in motion now in order to help that happen more smoothly.

The missing piece, at least in a tight job market, is really experience that has measurable accountability.

I measure much of my own work against more-or-less objective criteria, of course. Over the years I have grown more and more efficient at setting out a syllabus for the year and more and more disciplined at following it, while also figuring out how to adapt it to make room for interruptions. I have learned what to look for in a textbook, and how to work with what I have available when the only texts are flawed. I have taught myself in a few weeks a years' worth of an unfamiliar technical subject, in enough depth to write a week-by-week guide for a student to work through it on his own. To different extents, I have taught myself three languages. I have spent many hours of trial and error figuring out how to present material to young people who learn in a style vastly different from mine, and to measure the learning of young people who express their acquired skills in ways vastly different from my expectations. I have learned how to give a mathematics lecture on the fly with a quick glance at the book -- let's see, what are we supposed to do today? Oh, that. Well, here we go. I have developed my patience and my flexibility. I know that all this is happening, because every year it gets easier and runs more smoothly, at the same time as it seems I should have more and more tasks to do in less time. This basic sense of growing competence -- at least in the parts where I organize time and environment, write curriculum, and teach willing students -- means that every year I enjoy my work more.

But none of this belongs on a résumé.

Do not bristle about this showing that the work of parents in the home is not valued. The difficulty is that work of parents in the home is not measurable. Home educating develops skills that may be measured; but it doesn't, itself, measure them.

This is inherent to its genius. There is wonderful freedom in home education, which is one of the things that makes the work so satisfying to me. I have no supervisor, and rely on my innate desire to see the children succeed -- plus my desire for order and peace in our home -- plus my own pleasure at digging deeply into a subject -- to motivate me to excel. I know from talking to numerous other home educators that this same freedom can, to others, be intimidating, which is one reason why there is such a big market for school-in-a-box curricula. "I want accountability," they tell me. Whether one wants it or not is a matter of self-confidence and working style; it's absolutely true that, in homeschooling, freedom is free and accountability is something you have to pay for if you want it.

Not being accountable to anyone who is paying us -- trading economic value for economic value -- means that we can't verify these particular skills and strengths for the purpose of selling them. We cannot demonstrate having had to perform to external standards, because the standards we keep are not external. There are no professional references that may be checked to confirm our fitness as an employee. It is a bit like being self-employed, except that even the self-employed can point to the successes and struggles of a small business in a market of other people and the constraints of budgets and regulations, all of which are external and, in principle, verifiable.

This is not something to take personally. It's not about whether parents' work in the home is valuable; it's about whether parents' work in the home is ever capable of demonstrating to a particular potential employer that the candidate in question has something of value in the immediate future to offer to that employer. You have to own the fact that it usually cannot. You have to be satisfied with internal accountability, because there is no other kind. I cringe when I read nonsense like "I'm employed as a Domestic Engineer" or (what is infinitely worse) listing children or spouses as the "employer" on a FB or LinkedIn profile. Even as a joke, this cheapens us all.

+ + +

So I thought seriously about the challenge of having accountability -- with cash on the line -- to other people for a change. I bet I would enjoy it for its own sake, and then, I imagined it could come in handy later; a thing that produces references, and a line on a hypothetical future résumé, a line that combines the professional interests I used to enjoy with the practical skills I have developed doing my, shall we say, undocumented work.

In the end, the attraction to hypothetical future benefits was not enough to overcome the immediate costs. I would have had to drive forty minutes each way; and the subjects that my younger kids could be doing at the same time were not ones I really wanted to outsource; and this particular co-op, it turned out, didn't offer any onsite activities for preschooler siblings. If I weren't already co-schooling two days a week with H, taking one day a week for a co-op day might fill a social void without cutting too much into our schedule. But -- I am, and those co-schooling days are far more valuable to me.

This year things are running more smoothly than ever, and -- when you get right down to it -- adding accountability might strengthen my résumé, but it would weaken my real, day-to-day performance at my primary responsibility. The ultimate end of all work (including work done for personal development and enjoyment) is the support of the family; judged by that standard, this particular work at this particular time would only undermine mine.

Some other year.

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Snow a-coming.

This weekend Mark and I pulled out all of the wintry gear.   

An impending visit by Mark's parents is what spurred it; we habitually toss out-of-season and recently-outgrown clothes through the door of the spare bedroom and ignore them until we have to do something about them.  But we would have had to do it anyway, because tomorrow... it comes.

The snow.  The first sticking snow, the one that the fire hydrants foreshadowed all through the spring and summer and fall.

I'm a little ahead of the curve; I needed my warm hats and scarves and wool socks already this week, even though the thermostat reads  68° F, because I am still (slowly) losing postpartum weight and that makes me cold.  My nose and fingers and toes are cold right now.  

Mark says I should take cold baths and then I would acclimate myself and the cold wouldn't bother me, but I'd rather just pull on an extra layer and pour myself another cup of coffee and grumble.

+ + +

I called H this morning to plan for tomorrow.  I want to be in denial about the possibility of changing plans on a co-school day, but the first snow of the season always makes rush hour positively horrific.   I need to face reality, and reality says there's an extremely good chance I won't be driving across town to her house tomorrow at all, let alone on time.  

 I'm supposed to bring dinner, which was going to be chicken adobo in the crockpot with rice and pineapples.  I'm not going to defrost enough chicken legs for 14 people if there's a good chance that I won't be cooking them.  I have meatballs in the freezer; if it turns out that I'm going over there in the afternoon, I'll bring those.  They defrost fast and cook fast.

As for schoolwork, the younger kids (assuming it snows) will just get a snow day.  Our high schoolers, however, need to stay on track.   Fortunately, they don't need a lecture for geometry tomorrow, and they don't need one for history either; but I have a lot of stuff to hand out.  So I'm going to head over to her house after church today -- church is about halfway there -- and drop off all the materials I was going to hand out to her ninth-grade son, and spend a few minutes explaining how to use them.  Then I'm going home to enjoy the rest of my Sunday and batten down the hatches.

 I might conduct a Latin class tomorrow over Google Chat by audio, since I'm planning to introduce personal pronouns in the third person.  I really wanted to do a slew of oral exercises and recitation for it.  If the snow isn't too heavy and the roads are clear by the afternoon, we still might make it over there on Monday for dinner and to get the kids to Scouts.  But I'm not counting on it. 

+ + +

This represents a significant advance in my ability to deal with plan changes.  Previously the threat of snow on a co-school day for which I had already made my lesson plans only drove me into deep denial.  The snow might not be that bad!  I've got snow tires on my van!  I might just leave a little bit later!  We can keep going!

Yeah, no.  Not for the first snow of the season.  I'll still be ready to head over there, just in case it turns out to be a false alarm, or the snow holds off tonight and doesn't start till afternoon tomorrow.  But I'm going to be more ready for the snow.  And I'll be glad, tomorrow, that I did, if we wake up to a thick white blanket over everything, and all I have to do is wrap a scarf around my neck and pour another cup of coffee.