bearing blog

The dangers of having "putting places."

Look closely. There's a baby in there:

 

See him now?

I have gotten more use out of this little bassinet, bought when I was pregnant with my oldest, than I ever did with the others. This guy? He is a napper. I have almost forgotten that babies can do that, after #3 (who gave up her nap entirely at age eight months) and #4 (who readily fell asleep but was such a light sleeper that despite lots of tiptoeing we could never count on the nap lasting long).

This little person takes a solid morning nap and a solid afternoon nap and usually a few little catnaps in between. A sudden loud noise, like a shouted "Moooooooooom!" or the blender turning on, or my husband talking loudly into the phone to someone's voice mail, will wake him; but ordinary conversation doesn't, and neither does picking him up (carefully) and moving him from one place to another.

Which is good, because a few days ago he rolled out of bed ("Was it the old THUMP........'WAHHH?'" asked my FB friend. Yep) and though he was not, of course, hurt, I resolved not to just leave him up there anymore.

Hence, the little bassinet in the living room.

+ + +

For this upcoming school year, I have finally purchased an item that I swore for four babies I didn't need.

(I choose not to remember ever swearing that I "would never need" such a thing. Let's hope I didn't.)

That item is a B.F.P. (big effin' playpen) like what they used to make:

 

I am particularly amused by the brand name:

 

I need a BFP like what they used to make -- one that measures a square meter inside and thus takes up a lot of valuable real estate -- because of H's twins of course. We haven't yet stuck all three babies in there yet, in part because they're all still so young that at least one of them is nursing nearly all the time and also in part because we aren't teaching intensively, it being summer. In the fall, though -- when they're eight and nine months old -- Well, let's just say that I expect them all to be very good friends.

Since the newbornhood of our babies coincided with the wild popularity of The LEGO Movie and its assorted product tie-ins, I think I am going to be glad to have another option besides the old blanket-on-the-floor trick when I need to set someone down with a toy for a minute.

 

Never say never. Some learn it after one child, some after two. I am a slow learner, I guess.

I don't use the sling as much as I did with my first two babies. I have three kids who are old enough to carry the baby themselves. My back isn't as young as it used to be (although switching to a two-shouldered carrier, when that's convenient, has relieved the discomfort enormously). And, well, I am out of practice. The habit of putting a baby down instead of taking him with you reinforces itself. He naps. I get used to walking around and doing things with both hands and all my balance. Once I was really good at, for example, one-handed onion-chopping. Now I feel helpless unless I give him to someone else so I can use both hands. This bothers me, not so much because I feel that I must carry him all the time (he is usually being held by someone, after all), but because I don't like feeling helpless. I had a skill once; it's annoying to discover it has atrophied.

A couple of weeks ago, when I realized I was losing my ability to type accurately -- a skill I have had for 25 years -- I turned off the autocorrect on my iPad. Crutches have their place, but there are drawbacks to relying on them. There doesn't seem to be a good solution to the decline of my babywearing skills, though, because I am pretty sure that the "crutches" of handing the baby off to an eager sibling or letting him nap in a nearby bassinet are here to stay.

I will just have to force myself to carry him more often than I need to if I want to stay capable enough to carry him whenever I want to.

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Pivoting.

Once I heard a very, very good piece of homeschooling advice, perfectly tailored to my besetting character flaw of Stick-To-The-Schedulism.  You know, the kind of thing that makes me inordinately upset about unexpected changes of plan.

It was this:

When the s#!t hits the fan,

or something entirely unexpected (good or bad) falls into your lap,

and your entire day is knocked off kilter,

and you're unhappily surveying the list of Stuff I Was Supposed To Do Today,

at the same time that you are looking at the clock and wondering how on earth you will catch up,

particularly if, against all reason, you are tempted to try to cram the whole day's work into the remaining hours...

... that is the time to pivot to a new mission for the rest of the day:

The remaining hours of this day will be spent putting tomorrow in order,

so that tomorrow will be the best it can possibly be.

 

Look at  it this way.  The few hours you have left in this "ruined" day must be spent one way or another.  You can take them as "extra time for tomorrow" or you can take them as "remnants of today."  Extra time for tomorrow is much more fun, more relaxing, and probably more valuable in the long run, at least for me. 

Sometimes, when I've written off Today in favor of a head start on Tomorrow, we clean the schoolroom.  Sometimes I catch up on records.  Sometimes I make a meal plan or precook tomorrow's dinner.  Sometimes I do long term planning.  Sometimes I read to the kids or cue up a good movie.  The next morning always feels like a fresh start, and usually it really is a good day.

+ + +

I bring this up because recent turns of events have led me to apply this same principle to the entire third quarter of our school year.   Maybe the fourth quarter too, it's hard to tell.

Our baby was born Christmas week, just before the start of what I would call the third quarter, and three weeks earlier than expected.   Then just as we were starting up again, H., my partner in co-schooling, pregnant with twins, had to go on bed rest.  She delivered the twins five weeks early, around what would have been week 21 of my school year.

 A month later, of course, we are still nowhere near starting up our "together" subjects again.   My oldest hasn't quite stopped completely; he's working his way through Robinson Crusoe on assignment from H., and he's keeping up with history, but Latin and Geometry have been indefinitely suspended.  H.'s twins (one beautiful girl and one beautiful boy) are doing pretty well, but feeding them is a round-the-clock job for her right now and for who knows how long?  

So it's make-the-best-of-it territory.

•  I have been experimenting with an unschooling approach on the two free days, while I take the extra time to work on next year's curriculum and organize thoughts for the overall high school program.  
• We are using some of the time to polish up our Italian and French for our planned trip in the fall.  
• In a similar vein, we're working through a DVD lecture series on Greek and Roman engineering which we bought last month ($250 would have been steep, but it's been completely worth the $70 or so that we paid to get it on sale.)
• My seven-year-old has rediscovered our favorite chess-learning program.  And she's decided to work towards a sports pin (Bowling) for AHG, so we've checked some books out of the library so she can learn the scoring system.  (Now she wants her own bowling ball, which might not actually be a bad idea since there are never any 6-lb house balls at the local lanes and I have two smaller children coming up behind her.)
• My thirteen-year-old has been building computer circuits out of redstone in Minecraft, which must set some kind of record for meta.
• I've had some time to sit down with my four-year-old and start working on letter-sound correspondence.
• And we're working on handwriting again using a new-to-me program that everyone is much happier with, especially me, because the exemplar font is not unlike the way I really write when I'm writing neatly but comfortably -- a sort of joined-italic-printscript.  (I've had it with handwriting programs that don't have as their primary goals speedy and legible writing.)  One thing that made this program, BFH, good for our family is that you can purchase a "handwriting intervention" program (Fix It Write) for older students.  So my thirteen-year-old is using that, while the younger kids are doing beginners' sheets.
• Finally, I'm still working on my new time management resolutions (see previous posts starting here).

And you know, I think it's going all right.  The truth is, with a new baby myself, I'm not really feeling all that energetic right now.  I'm physically well, but I'm out of shape and tired, and having decided to take it a bit easy is turning out to feel like a better and better idea as the weeks go by and it gets more and more impossible to "catch up."

At some point, we'll just have to declare it Starting Over time.

+ + +

I have a feeling that when H. and I come back together again, we're going to be putting together something entirely new, based on our new needs.

But we've done that before, and it worked out beyond our wildest dreams.   So I'm pretty sure that starting over again will work just fine.

 

New baby's resolutions: Resolution zero.

New Year's resolutions are so passé.

Especially in February, she said. But I digress.

If you have messed up your New Year's resolutions already, you could wait till Lent starts, of course. Lots of people try new things then. I do think Lent can be a good time to try new self-disciplines, so to speak, though unfortunately many of us attempt to turn it into a diet plan. That can be counter-productive, when you consider the reason for the season.

I am now thinking that a really great time for a resolution -- a shaking up of the old routines and a turning over of a new leaf -- is several weeks after the birth of a new baby.

Because you know what?

There's no going back to the way things were before.

I might as well formalize it.

+ + +

Even before we decided to invite a new little one into our lives, I knew I didn't really have room for one more along with everything else I do. I knew, I really did, that something was going to have to give.

That didn't stop me from trying to hang onto everything, even as I struggled to stay awake through the first trimester and to keep up with everyone during the second and the third. It didn't stop me from trying to keep up what I had been doing and hang on to all my commitments, and that is probably good because I really have to try and FAIL before I am okay with giving up.

Early on, I figured out that I wasn't going to be able to keep up with school by advance-planning everything on the weekends (including copying and printing, getting books to and from the library, writing new worksheets, composing emails with instructions to my "independent" students, and writing answer keys) and then sticking to my preplanned work on weekdays, keeping careful records of what everyone accomplished each day.

Up till this last year, that has worked pretty well. It isn't going to work anymore. I have now hit the point where if everything were going to be preplanned and prepared by me to my own exacting standards, I would have to spend my Entire Weekend on that work. And this is not good for my family, even if -- maybe BECAUSE -- I kind of enjoy holing up in a locked room with a computer and a curriculum catalog and no human interaction for 12 hours at a time.

Something has to give.

And that is just one area of my life where I was overindulging in productivity. We haven't even talked about things like housekeeping, or dinner, or the few volunteer commitments that one or the other of us has made.

It's the same way there. Something has to give.

I warned my partner in co-schooling, H., before I warned anyone else, not long after I found out I was pregnant, that my standards were about to slip, and I didn't think it would improve matters by trying to plan out exactly how they would slip, so I was just going to LET them slip and see what happened.

+ + +

H. didn't really have a chance to give me much feedback before she found out she was pregnant too, and then that she was going to have twins, so, you know, any plans we had for the year were going to go out the window anyway and be replaced by ... Something.

+ + +

So what are the new baby's resolutions? I think I am going to spread this post out over several days because I still have to process some of them, and I have been having a damnably hard time blogging for the last few months.

Which might have something to do with my foggy brain. Though the causality could really be going either way.

But the first resolution... No, wait. The zeroth resolution, really, since it has to underlie all the others... Is to recognize that I have priorities. Priorities with names. Values.

It's like this. We need these things in our lives (no particular order here):

• Connecting with God.
• Resting.
• Showing love to, and taking delight in, each other.
• Connecting with people outside our family.
• Resolving conflict and encouraging generosity, particularly among the children.
• Helping each other work, and learn to work, with diligence.
• Caring for our bodies (and that extension of our bodies, our clothing).
• Meals.
• Physical activity.
• Order in our environment.
• Learning.
• Creative work.
• Work that serves others.

Resolution zero is to recognize and honor these priorities so that I can somehow use my time (and help the rest of the family use their time) in a way that gives each of these their due.

 

+ + +

 

So much for new directions. I only know one way to start anything, and that is by making a list. I have written and rewritten and re-rewritten the list over and over for a week, moving the bits around, and yet nothing has changed yet.

 

Sooner or later I will have to put down the pen and get out of my chair.

 

But not yet.

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Coschooling news.

I frequently write about our adventures in coschooling with H's family and M's. To recap, we have been

• spending the whole day together,
• in various combinations,
• once or twice a week,
• alternating at each other's houses,
• with all the children,
• for about thirteen years.

We have been doing it since before it was coschooling, because before anybody was doing school. It's pretty much our way of life now.

+ + +

So, ever since back in April or May or whatever when I told H. I was pregnant and due in January, I we have been expecting a speed bump in this school year.

At first it seemed a minor one to start with. I am responsible for teaching the three teens geometry, and supervising their self-teaching of history, and somewhere in between teaching and supervising Spanish and Latin. I also teach history and Latin to the elementary school aged kids. That is a lot, but we thought maybe it would not be too big of a deal to take off, say, three weeks, right around when the baby is born, with H. continuing to teach most of her subjects (English and language arts) to everyone, concentrating on the teens. Then, we figured, I would take another couple of weeks to phase back in all the stuff I do. I have done this before, four years ago, and that is about how it went last time; Six weeks or so post baby, I was mostly back up to speed.

We figured that if any extra challenges popped up, such as if my baby were to have health problems or my delivery were to have complications necessitating longer recovery, we'd cross that bridge when we came to it.

+ + +

What I haven't told you yet here on the blog, but I have known for a few months now, is that only a little while after I announced my pregnancy to H. and to M....

...it was H's turn to announce her pregnancy to the rest of us. O happy news! Soon our long-term school plans started to extend far into the future. These two little ones will be buddies, we said. And what a wonderful coincidence, since we had not each told the other that we were TTC.

We are due about six or seven weeks apart, which we decided would probably work out just fine. The tough part of pregnancy would just be beginning for H. when I would have my baby and we would take a break from school. And after my delivery, I would have time to get back up to speed before H.'s baby would be born, and hopefully be well enough to help out during her recovery.

"We'll have a crazy spring!" we told each other cheerfully, "but then we'll pull it together by early summer and things will be back to normal by fall."

And then... this past week... after some delays caused by a job change and insurance paperwork... H. got around (at 26 weeks) to having her first ultrasound, the kind most people get around 20 weeks. I drove over to her house Monday morning hoping H. would have found out if she was having a boy or a girl and that if she did, she would let me in on the secret, so I could know whether to give her all my stored baby girl clothes or whether to pass them on to someone else.

+ + +

I wonder if any of you have guessed where this is going yet.

+ + +

Oh yes. There will be no "getting back to normal" for our co-school, definitely not by early summer. I never did find out whether I should get rid of the baby-girl clothes or not.

But I did find out that she will be needing enough clothes for two babies!

Yep. She is having twins.

+ + +

"Fourteen kids in twenty-fourteen!" our children are exulting, counting all of them, H.'s and M.'s and mine. When spring comes, their ages will be 16, 14, 13, 11, 11, 10, 10, 9, 7, 6, 4... and newborn, newborn, newborn. And we'll all be together, twice a week!

+ + +

It has not escaped our notice that there will be three babies and three teenagers. Perhaps a major part of the high school curriculum will be "studying with a baby on your lap."

+ + +

Anyway, I am so happy for H. (and her husband, who later that same evening received from Mark a gift of a box of good beer and also some Red Bull). I really can't think of anyone else about whom I can say so confidently, "If anybody can do this and maintain her strength under pressure, she can." There is no question of quitting the work we do together; like I said before, this co-schooling thing is a way of life, and we will figure it out and help each other and keep going.

But I imagine it will be a bumpy ride for now!

If you are so inclined, please pray for all of us, but of course especially for H., who now has not a very long time to scramble together the information (and STUFF! And support! And backup plans and and and....) that she needs to get ready for the birth of twins. Healthy pregnancy and delivery and a smooth start to breastfeeding and all that good stuff.

You know the drill.

 

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Six small things.

(1)

I think my brain is de-stressing.  Mark and I saw his parents off at 5:20 this morning, then went back to bed.  Soon I fell back to sleep and promptly had a detailed dream about applying for a library card.

(2)

I was amused by this.  Summary in bullet points:

• Solo ultralight backpacker's wife suggests that the two of them take up car camping in order to foster togetherness and have fun together.
• Unsurprisingly, this leads to the need to BUY MORE GEAR!!!

 

(3)

Speaking of gear.  After I tucked the seven-year-old into her own bed for the first time in a week and saw her off to sleep on a dose of pain medication, I told Mark that I kind of missed the beeping machines.  "I think it'll be hard to sleep without wanting to get up and check on her breathing," I said.  "I almost wish I had a pulse oximeter."

He got an evil-genius look and said "Reeeeeeealllly?"  

I wasn't really thinking of the model from Brooks-Range Mountaineering, to tell the truth.

(4)

My nine-year-old turned ten near the end of his sister's hospitalization.  The night before his birthday, I sat him down and had to explain that we had not done anything whatsoever for his birthday, neither bought any presents (or thought of one) nor prepared to bake a cake nor planned a special outing.  

And no, this was not a setup for a surprise reveal on the big day, either.  We are last-minute people when it comes to holidays and birthdays, and we had nuthin'.

"You'll have to wait a few days for us to pull something together," I told him.  "Probably when the weekend comes around."

He put a brave face on it, but his eyes were wet.  Poor kid.

(5)

I did manage to get the younger kids' Halloween-costume supplies ordered while I was keeping vigil in the hospital over my sleeping daughter.   The girl wanted help with her "Egyptian cat" costume; I ordered a cat-ear headband and tail and some black clothes for her, and some yellow fleece to make a golden neck collar/shawl type thing and some glue-on plastic gemstones.

Amazon Prime has revolutionized Halloween costumes for me.  With free two-day shipping, I can order stuff faster than they can change their mind about what they want to be.  And I don't have to take a number at the fabric store.

 My 3-year-old, when asked about his costume, had announced he wanted to be an "orange knight."  (Last year my then-seventh-grader, having been immersed in the tales of Sir Gawain for some weeks, went as the Green Knight; I'm assuming this idea was related.)  I agreed quickly before he could change his mind, because "knight" is easy.  I ordered a cheap set of plastic knight accessories and some orange fleece.

 When they arrived yesterday, I draped the orange fleece over him to check size, cut out a rectangle and a long narrow strip, cut a hole for his head in the middle of the rectangle to turn it into a "tunic" (really more of a scapular) that hung down in front and in back, tied the strip around his waist, and then opened the Amazon box and gave him his helmet, shield, and sword.

Unspeakably happy boy.

This has got to be a costume-making record.  It took me about four minutes, not counting two-day shipping.  I didn't even need the hot glue gun.

(6)

This has been a wonderful object lesson in how homeschooling forces you into a different pattern than the common one.  Better or worse, it does not really matter, but it's definitely different.  If my older boys had been in school, they'd have gone on with most of their normal routines and kept up with their schooling; and we'd have had less worry about who was going to "watch" them, since they'd be occupied in a school building part of the day, but there would still have been the getting them to and from on time.  

As it was, school was entirely suspended for them on the first day of the crisis (as it was for the homeschooling family who took care of them for us).  The second day they had some assignments cobbled together from my hastily-scribbled list and from the things that the other family had on hand.  After that, my thirteen-year-old, lacking specific assignments, went on with Algebra by trying to select problem sets for himself that looked like the sort of mix that I would have selected.  My nine-year-old (ten now, gotta get used to that) went on with his math with the standing instructions.  Both read books.  Their grandpa taught them to play five-card stud.  

The lesson here is that our lifestyle choices are designed to make us interrelated.  We work together.  They stop working together.  We can adapt, but it takes time.  We are not an "institution."  We are a family.  We live like a family, and we learn like a family, and that means that sometimes we have a crisis, and it affects all of us, and we all have to pitch in, and -- even if we would like to -- we cannot pretend to make life "normal" for the other members of the family until the crisis is over.  It would exhaust us to try.  So we don't.

Anyway, all the public school kids in the state were off for a couple of days last week because of a gigantic statewide teacher's union meeting that cancels school in Minnesota for two days every single year.  I figure that if my kids operated on 60% power for a few days, they aren't any worse off than the rest of them.

 

Homeschooling "substitutes:" Building your own network.

Here's something on the co-schooling spectrum that I will bet any reader with older kids could start setting up now: a personal network of online "substitute teachers" to help each other out when one of the moms get sick, but older kids have tasks that need completion.

From the very smart Rebecca Frech at Shoved to Them:

Yesterday morning, as I curled up on the couch under my snuggly blankie (You know you have one too), I started making my calls.

"I'm sick," I told one of my homeschooling friends. "I need a sub today. #2 has a paper due later this week and needs his rough draft proofed."

"Have him send it to me," she replied.

I contacted another mom by email and asked for their help fielding math questions and called the only one who lives near me for help with the littlest kids, before I let myself begin to doze off.

There were a lot of years in homeschooling that I would have let my own sick day be an excuse for the kids to take a day off. As they've gotten to higher grades and more work, it's not always feasible for them to take a break. Add to that the battle to get back on track once we're off our schedules, and having subs begins to make a lot of sense.

 

I, personally, have a superpower that lets me fall ill on Friday afternoon, be sick all weekend, and be better on Monday morning. It tends to ruin my weekends but keeps me on track.

Nevertheless, I am not perfect, and occasionally I fall ill at 10:30 am on a Wednesday. This is not a terribly big deal for elementary school kids -- it is entirely workable to lie on the couch and watch nature movies with them, for instance, or let them start a big art project and call it a day -- but as they get into high school, even though they can do much of their work independently, they still need feedback. And often they need that feedback NOW or they can't go on to do the next thing. And then you're stalled out.

One of the things I love about this idea is that most of the homeschooling parents in such a network could be people you have never met in real life, since assignments can be emailed so easily, and we have things like Skype and FaceTime for direct questioning. I do a lot of this in my regular, real-life co-schooling arrangement, but I never thought about having a less formalized, more emergency-based reciprocal arrangement. It should be relatively easy to set something like that up, and could be fun, too. You might find yourself calling on each other in non-emergencies as well.

Younger children really need direct attention, so the online thing won't work so well, but it really strikes me that it would be a good idea for a mother of younger kids to identify another homeschooler living nearby who has children in the same age-range to serve as emergency substitute teacher. Here is what I would do if I found such a person and I was trying to build it from scratch:

1. Get together for two planned play dates a year to stay in touch.
2. Have a "basic lesson plan" that can be picked up at a moments notice. Will you squirrel away the materials for a big multi-age arts and crafts project, to be used only in case of emergency? Will the substitute teacher fold the "temporary students" into her own children's lessons? Will the children all do worksheets and reading interspersed with an educational video or play math and language board games together?
3. If you're troubled by the question, "But what if I get sick 4 times this year and she only gets sick once or not at all? That's not fair!" you could agree in advance to "even it up" at the end of the year by having the "freeloading" family offer a few afternoons of free babysitting, or host a couple of pizza-party playdates.

Hey, before you know it you may even be regular co-schoolers! But even if you aren't, think what you will gain in peace of mind.

 

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Battle of wits.

H. and I were dismayed at some of our seventh- and eighth-graders' writing recently.  We thought we had mostly mechanics problems, but some careful probing of their paragraph-composing ability revealed that they needed a refresher course in constructing logical arguments.  

So H. spent some time working with them on syllogisms.  

You know the sort.  All men are mortal.   Socrates is a man.  Therefore Socrates is mortal.  (Although it turns out that there are lots more kinds that I never learned about in school.  Fortunately H. is on the case.)

"Might as well do it anyway," I theorized.  "It's the sort of thing that lots of people get in school.  Can't hurt.  Might help."

Today H. gave them a copy of Vizzini's speech from The Princess Bride -- the one with the Battle of Wits over the iocane powder and the two cups of wine -- and challenged the kids to find and articulate as many syllogisms -- explicit and implicit, valid and not valid -- as they could.

 

It was a very fun lesson to overhear while I was making lunch.

 

This is the kind of thing they came up with:

• If you are strong, then you trust your strength to save you.  You are strong, therefore I can not choose the glass in front of you.
• If you have been to Australia, then you are used to people not trusting you. You have  been to Australia. Therefore you are used to not being trusted.
• If I can find out what kind of man you are, then it is simple.  This is not simple, therefore I can’t find out what kind of man you are.
• Iocane comes from Australia and Australia is populated by criminals.  You obtained the iocane.  Therefore you are a criminal.

 

We were amused to discover that the entire battle of wits includes one incorrect assumption (that one of the goblets is not poisoned) but that Vizzini repeatedly comes to the correct conclusion anyway ("Therefore, I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me" and "Therefore, I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you.")

 

 

Frederick Douglass and an inspiration: a rhetoric-based approach to high school history?

First, the Douglass.

Randy Barnett of the Volokh Conspiracy has posted the entire text of Frederick Douglass's speech of 160 years ago today, "What July 4th Means to the Negro."

Since this is a blog of religious practice among other things, I am excerpting (emphasis and some paragraph breaks mine) this part about the Fugitive Slave Act (which, among other things, required all states to enforce within their own boundaries the property "rights" of slaveholders):

I take this law to be one of the grossest infringements of Christian Liberty, and, if the churches and ministers of our country were nor stupidly blind, or most wickedly indifferent, they, too, would so regard it.

...But the church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors. It has made itself the bulwark of American slavery, and the shield of American slave-hunters. Many of its most eloquent Divines, who stand as the very lights of the church, have shamelessly given the sanction of religion and the Bible to the whole slave system. They have taught that man may, properly, be a slave; that the relation of master and slave is ordained of God; that to send back an escaped bondman to his master is clearly the duty of all the followers of the Lord Jesus Christ; and this horrible blasphemy is palmed off upon the world for Christianity.

For my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! welcome atheism! welcome anything! in preference to the gospel, as preached by those Divines!

They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke put together have done! These ministers make religion a cold and flinty-hearted thing, having neither principles of right action nor bowels of compassion. They strip the love of God of its beauty and leave the throne of religion a huge, horrible, repulsive form. It is a religion for oppressors, tyrants, man-stealers, and thugs. It is not that “pure and undefiled religion” which is from above, and which is “first pure, then peaceable, easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and with out hypocrisy.” But a religion which favors the rich against the poor; which exalts the proud above the humble; which divides mankind into two classes, tyrants and slaves; which says to the man in chains, stay there; and to the oppressor, oppress on; it is a religion which may be professed and enjoyed by all the robbers and enslavers of mankind; it makes God a respecter of persons, denies his fatherhood of the race, and tramples in the dust the great truth of the brotherhood of man. All this we affirm to be true of the popular church, and the popular worship of our land and nation-a religion, a church, and a worship which, on the authority of inspired wisdom, we pronounce to be an abomination in the sight of God. In the language of Isaiah, the American church might be well addressed, “Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me: the new moons and Sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting. Your new moons, and your appointed feasts my soul hateth. They are a trouble to me; I am weary to bear them; and when ye spread forth your hands I will hide mine eyes from you. Yea’ when ye make many prayers, I will not hear. Your hands are full of blood; cease to do evil, learn to do well; seek judgment; relieve the oppressed; judge for the fatherless; plead for the widow.”

...The sin of which it is guilty is one of omission as well as of commission. Albert Barnes but uttered what the common sense of every man at all observant of the actual state of the case will receive as truth, when he declared that “There is no power out of the church that could sustain slavery an hour, if it were not sustained in it.”

Let the religious press, the pulpit, the Sunday School, the conference meeting, the great ecclesiastical, missionary, Bible and tract associations of the land array their immense powers against slavery, and slave-holding; and the whole system of crime and blood would be scattered to the winds, and that they do not do this involves them in the most awful responsibility of which the mind can conceive.

In prosecuting the anti-slavery enterprise, we have been asked to spare the church, to spare the ministry; but how, we ask, could such a thing be done? We are met on the threshold of our efforts for the redemption of the slave, by the church and ministry of the country, in battle arrayed against us; and we are compelled to fight or flee. From what quarter, I beg to know, has proceeded a fire so deadly upon our ranks, during the last two years, as from the Northern pulpit? As the champions of oppressors, the chosen men of American theology have appeared-men honored for their so-called piety, and their real learning... [G]reat religious lights of the land have, in utter denial of the authority of Him by whom they professed to be called to the ministry, deliberately taught us, against the example of the Hebrews, and against the remonstrance of the Apostles, that we ought to obey man’s law before the law of God.2

My spirit wearies of such blasphemy; and how such men can be supported, as the “standing types and representatives of Jesus Christ,” is a mystery which I leave others to penetrate. In speaking of the American church, however, let it be distinctly understood that I mean the great mass of the religious organizations of our land. There are exceptions, and I thank God that there are....

...[T]he anti-slavery movement in this country will cease to be an anti-church movement, when the church of this country shall assume a favorable instead of a hostile position towards that movement.

The whole speech is long, covers many more points than this one, and is a wonderful piece of argument.

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Now, the inspiration.

I am preparing to teach 19th-century American History again this fall with a crop of late-elementary school kids, and Frederick Douglass is one of the personages whose biography we'll highlight; this piece makes me wish it were easier to teach 19th-century American rhetoric directly to kids under eleven or so.

In my vision for homeschool high school, I have generally assumed that a "survey of American history" course would be a necessary evil -- you know, pack the entire thing into one school year, anchored by a text that necessarily runs broad but not deep. I thought the best I could hope for would be to find a really well-written text (and that not necessarily a text made for schools).

I wonder now if, especially given the way I taught elementary school history, if I couldn't put together a sufficiently informative U. S. History course based primarily on pieces of rhetoric. I think you would still have to have the history spine to hold it together, provide a time-sequence, and give context, but perhaps I would not have to work so hard to find a wonderful "main text" if the intellect and imagination were fed by primary sources -- not meta speech, but speeches. And pamphlets, and laws, and opinion-pieces, and court opinions, even advertisements.

I suspect I would have to cut back a bit on other literary analysis in order to fit it in -- or conversely, I could make that the same year that "literature and writing" focuses on persuasion, analysis, satire, and the like -- er, rhetoric, I suppose -- so that History and Literature/Language Arts dovetail.

Thoughts?

Our own, and not our own.

Last week, the 13-year-old whom I co-teach two days a week, the daughter of my good friend M., did not come to my house with her younger sister to learn Latin and History with me, or English with my other friend H. She was off all day "shadowing" a ninth-grader at a high school near her home, a well-regarded "classical academy," because she and her family are trying to discern whether high school for her, instead of homeschool, is the best choice for their family next fall. So I gave a quiz in Latin (so she wouldn't miss anything), and her "classmates" (H.'s sixth-grade son and mine) worked on history by themselves -- an ordinary sort of lesson, I saved the art project for the next time -- and we thought about her all day while we were serving lunch and later making tea.

Yesterday, we asked her how it went. "It was really fun," she told me. "The girl I was with was one of those really fun, bubbly types. She had a weird schedule. We sat with her friend at lunch, and the friend had been homeschooled. Pottery class was fun -- I made an ear. I went to an astronomy class, and that was really interesting."

M. told me: "She really liked it. It's only four miles away from the house, too -- she could ride her bike to school."

H. told me with no little pride: "They were studying the Iliad in English class, and she got to participate in the discussion." I found a brochure in their kitchen she had brought home: "Why Study Latin?" explaining all the benefits to logical thinking, future language study, and vocabulary building. I wondered how I -- I mean she -- would do when she took a placement test before beginning school.

If she takes the placement test, I mean. "She isn't in yet. But she probably will, because they have a lot of attrition and turnover between eighth and ninth grade. And of course it isn't decided yet."

There is so much to think about here.

First, the inevitable: Can our kids really be this old? When I met this girl she was barely walking, toddling around with a piece of cake that fell off her plate and that she subsequently trod upon. I watched her learn to talk. She was the little girl whom I looked to to learn what I, the mother of a firstborn a bit younger than she, had in store for me in a year or so. It was bad enough when she turned thirteen last year, but can she really be getting ready for high school work? I guess I had better start getting our family ready too.

Next: if she goes to school next year, I will miss her so much! You might think that it would be more work to teach three than to teach two, but it really is not so. She is so delightful and adds so much to the discussions we have. The kids do a lot of teaching each other, of course, and it warms my heart to see someone so serious about printing labels on her maps clearly and legibly, about making the sketches and diagrams so detailed and beautifully colored. She loves writing verse that doesn't just tell the story, but that sounds elegant to the ear and has accurate meter. She loves composing sentences. And I truly enjoy working with her -- it is a real motivation to create a good lesson, for a young woman who will be eager to do the work and learn from it. I had been planning to teach the kids proof-based geometry when they had all finished enough algebra -- I just know she would love it, all those constructions and careful logical steps, and I was more excited about teaching her and sharing that (admittedly really geeky) passion I have for the subject than I was about teaching anybody else.

But: Whatever is best for her, well, I want that too. I will be so sad to see her leave our little school group. ("She'll come back around three in the afternoon," H. said to me hopefully this morning. "The boys won't be done with their work yet. Maybe she'll want us to tutor her.")

Still, the school exists for the child, not the child for the school. We don't send our children into the schools of any kind to spend hours per day just so they can improve the general environment. We send them to school to learn and grow and to gather, not to spend themselves for someone else's benefit. I know this. Most homeschoolers do. We are familiar with the accusation leveled at us that we, the involved parents, are selfishly keeping our children to ourselves instead of sending then away to strengthen the peer group at the neighborhood public school, instead of sending them out to float a foundering diocesan school system, instead of employing them to prop up the fragile charter-school movement. And of course we hope that the public school system will be stronger, that the diocesan schools will thrive, that the charter-school movement will flourish, because everyone is better off when there are plenty of good choices.

But every family's first responsibility is to its own health, safety, and growth. That is the whole purpose of being in families: to know and be known, to grow and to thrive, protected and cared for as someone's "own." Communities, extended families, even "chosen" extended families like our little tribe, all exist to support those little cores of "own-ness," not to supplant it.

So I want what is best for this young lady who is not mine, even if I have to do some work, letting go and standing back, learning to watch. As with so many other things, she is still teaching me what I have to look forward to.

Perceived deficits in the homeschool.

There are some good conversations going on in the comments on the recent post about the "one-room" schooling techniques and in the post about deficits in the homeschool.

I want to talk a little bit about perceived deficits in the homeschool.

What are you comparing your homeschool to, anyway?

If you think you are comparing it to an institutional school, do you have a realistic idea of what goes on in your average institutional school?  Sure, many high school students have access to excellent teachers and a great peer group, but even in the good schools there are often mediocre teachers and bad classes.  I went to a pretty good high school, and I encountered some really excellent teachers there -- my French teacher was absolutely top-of-the-line, my English literature teacher was memorable and engaging, my chemistry teacher could have taught Bill Nye how not to bore people.  I learned a lot in those classes.  But I also had some really bad teachers -- substandard ones, or mean ones, or incompetent ones, or lazy ones, or possibly-mentally-ill ones -- whose classes were a waste of time or worse.  A lot of it is hit-or-miss.  Few schools of any kind excel at everything.

Is the problem that you cannot give enough one-on-one time to each student?  How much one-on-one time do you think students get in an institutional school?  It is not the equivalent of a full-time tutor every day of the week.  

Certainly there are efficiencies in an institutional school that a large-family homeschool cannot match.  When one teacher teaches all the English classes and the curriculum is always the same, he just does not have to spend as much time on preparing and planning as we parents do when we are designing our curriculum and schedule to fit a family which forms a new configuration basically every year.   When there is a fully stocked chemistry lab available all the time, laboratory prep time is minimized.  It's easy to put together group learning experiences, like discussing literature or putting on plays or holding debates or setting up games, when there are many other students at the same level.  

But there are different kinds of institutional schools with different strengths -- set up purposely! -- and that's often something we celebrate.  Magnet schools!  There's a performing-arts K-8 public school up the street from me, and within close walking distance is a small public high school specially organized for students who speak Spanish in their homes.  There are language immersion schools and schools designed as interventions for students at risk of dropping out.  There are vocational schools which specialize in turning out students who are already prepared to enter the skilled-labor workforce at age eighteen.  And yes, there are college-preparatory schools.   They all serve different purposes, promise a different educational experience, and turn out young people who are prepared for life in different ways.  Even within those broad categories there are wide variations in style.

And this is a good thing.   People don't typically complain that their child graduated from a college-prep program without also learning in school how to rebuild an engine (though maybe they ought to).  It's not the college placement rate, but the job placement rate and job performance, that we're interested in when we measure whether a vocational-technical high school program is adequately preparing its students.  

The homeschool, too, has its own essence, its own reason for being, its own niche in the educational ecosystem.

 The essence of homeschooling is not academic excellence (although homeschools can provide that).  The essence of homeschooling is not preparation for a job (although homeschools can provide that).  The essence of homeschooling is not "special" education for students with particular challenges that make institutional schools a poor fit or a toxic environment (although homeschools can provide that).  The essence of homeschooling is not that it can set its own schedule rather than being tied to external ones (although homeschools can provide that).  The essence of homeschooling is not its freedom from externally imposed ideological structures (although homeschools can provide that).

The essence of homeschooling is simply that it happens within the family.

That schooling happens as an outgrowth of family life and family work.  

That the young person is surrounded by people with whom he has meaningful and permanent relationships:  parents, siblings, perhaps grandparents and cousins, friends who are connected to him through a web of relationships between families rather than a single point.  

That the "curriculum" and schoolday is designed neither exactly to suit him as an individual with the perfect environment for his own personal success, nor to shove him along in a faceless crowd that on average receives an education adequate enough to keep trouble away... but for the best interests of the family as a whole, the innate natural grouping of the human organism, the grouping in which we can truly be known as human persons and in which we can learn the art of balancing needs and wants of the self and others.

That is the essence of homeschooling.  That is its specialty.  That is where it shines.

+ + +

H. said to me yesterday, "My standard answer, when someone asks me, 'So, how is the homeschooling going for you?' is "Great.  I love having my kids with me all day.'  It's true, and it's the reason I do it."  Even though H. is confident that she is providing a really excellent education to her three children, she said, it isn't the academic excellence that she chooses to emphasize.  Because that isn't the primary reason she does it.

I laughed and said, "I could never get away with saying that I love having my kids with me all day.   Especially if it had been one of those days.  You know I have no poker face."  But I went on:  "My standard answer doesn't have anything to do with academics either.  I mean, if they press me I say so, and sometimes I tell them  that I enjoy the work of planning the curriculum and things, which is true.  

"But most of the time I tell people, 'What I really love about homeschooling is that my children spend all day surrounded by their siblings, and that they have wonderful relationships with each other.'  Which is also true.

"Sometimes I get the response, 'Oh, my kids drive each other crazy if they have to spend ten minutes in the same room.'  But it isn't hard for people to understand that if their kids spent lots of time together, they would probably understand each other better.  Most people get that."

+ + +

Why do homeschoolers judge themselves so poorly, so often?  I really think it's because we are constantly  judging ourselves based on external standards, sometimes imaginary ones, and often ones in which the homeschooling paradigm doesn't make sense.  

We shouldn't judge ourselves against the standards of the urban vo-tech high school, or against the wonderful parish school, or the impressive classical charter school out in the suburbs, or the neighborhood public school.  

We definitely shouldn't judge our homeschools against the imaginary standard of an imaginary school that somehow provides the best of all those worlds:  immersion in a foreign language, and valuable real-world hands-on job skills, and a broad liberal-arts education, and time to go deep into the subjects that are most loved, and an opportunity to learn to play a musical instrument, and connections with other young people who live in the same neighborhood, and education centered within the family's own system of values and philosophies, and preparation for the best colleges, all at once.  

Nor should we judge our homeschools against the imaginary standard made up of all the best things we read on the blogs of other homeschools, and none of their drawbacks, because who wants to write at length about those?  (Face it, homeschoolbloggers, we like to brag about our good ideas, not our bad ones, unless we can do it while sounding really Witty and Gritty and Real.)  So, please, let's not fret because we are not able to keep nature notebooks from age four through eighteen, and have all of our children in Suzuki lessons, and have a working wood shop, and collect and use all the official Montessori-method practical-life learning materials, and read the entire Ambleside book lists to the children, and co-school twice a week with another family, and have a field trip three times a month to a local museum/theater/zoo, and operate a working family business wherein the children will learn the Real Meaning of Money, and send them all to the National Spelling Bee...  because nobody else is doing all that either.  We can pick one or two things and do them really well and create massively cool experiences out of them.  We can't do it with everything.

We are families.  Families!  As different as families can be.  

We need to set our own standards for ourselves, and meet those.

That's all.