The Rinrins

School and no school

We are taking another break from homeschooling, but this time it's in the form of attending actual school. I really wanted to be able to do another year, and I was excited about it, but I think that moving to a new state, having an infant who doesn't sleep EVER, and not knowing a single soul here proved to be a triumvirate of sabotage. We went and checked the new school out, interviewed the principal, had her show us around, asked a ton of questions, and jumped in. I was a little heartbroken at first, but the kids are happy. They are making a lot of friends, and this year, I suppose that's all it's about, since I learned last year not to fret over their academics, test scores, or speed math.  I try very hard each morning to maintain the fine balance between teaching them to responsibly be on time while not succumbing to the ridiculous stressed out mania we feel when we aren't.  After all, I'm a mom trying to get my kids to school, not a pediatric neurosurgeon trying to get to a emergency lifesaving procedure. Perspective.

We tried, though. There is a group nearby that arranged tuition based classes for homeschooled kids to take, non graded, non compulsory, and free in structure. I signed G and B up for a few classes, and we were excited to go. I took the baby, and sat in the back with a few other mothers.

When the baby needed to nurse, I headed for the babycare room. There was a mother in there with three kids, and she looked pretty laid back. She had blue hair, and her 2 year old toddler did, too. Pretty cute, I thought to myself. Maybe I will strike up a conversation!

But then she opened her mouth. The oldest girl wanted her to play, but the mom kept saying in a very angry voice, "I am not a toy. I do not play." Over and over. The first time it was funny, but after the fourth time I started to feel a sense of discomfort not unlike the kind you get when you KNOW a booger is hanging out your nose but you've got nothing to wipe with. In fact, I was very close to that as I had been battling a sinus infection.

The toddler was playing with some farm animals. They were "talking" to each other the way farm animals do when being animated by children. Suddenly the little girl animates her sheep into saying "What the HELL?!" at the poor shmuck of a farmer. I snorted and chuckled, expecting the mom to react the way 99% of moms would react, but she said, "Now, now, Zion; remember: context." 

Zion dutifully nodded. Apparently her farmer wasn't abusing the sheep quite enough for such expletives.

The middle boy had a little playmate, and they were playing with action figures. There was some pretend shooting, some blasting noises, a few declarations of victory and defeat, the normal stuff. The mom interrupted to say, "Now, now, Photon...(his name wasn't really Photon, but since I couldn't remember, Rick thought that was a good substitute. I agree.)"

"Now, now, Photon, remember to make sure the Play is Consensual."

These are 4 year olds.

The other kid looks at the son and says, "What's consensual?"

"It's when you are Okay With the Level of Aggression I am Displaying."

"Oh."

"Are you Okay?"

(shrug) "Yeah."

"Okay."

It was at this moment that I erupted in a stifled snicker that caused a long string of snot to blow onto my lip. I had to wipe it with the baby's pantleg.

Chalk

As anyone who knows me can tell you, I have three children, not just a baby, as you might think by looking here. It's just that babies change so rapidly and we have family members who are 3,000 miles away (hi Mom!) and don't have the luxury of seeing them throughout the year, and I don't want them (her) to miss anything, so I post a lot about Ellery. Garrett and Brenna, however, haven't changed much since she saw them last month (which was the first time in almost a year---far too long), except for slightly longer hair, looser teeth, rattier clothing, and a larger vocabulary.

Today while the baby was napping I hopped outside with the kids, monitor in hand. Well, okay, the monitor was back in the kitchen on the counter and the screen door was open. This is my third child after all, not my first, in which case the monitor would have been strapped directly to my ear with a belt around my forehead. Third children are notoriously self sufficient. Most of them can make a pb&j for themselves before they potty train.

So, the kids were playing with sidewalk chalk. They don't actually draw with it, though. They use it as a medium for art, yes, but not in the conventional sense. Remember last year when chalk paint showed up in Target and it was all cool and you thought to yourself, damn, why didn't they invent this years ago? Brenna came up with her own method of that a few months earlier, and we had a good giggle when we saw it for $14.99. She had spent hours grinding up all the chalk by hand and made many different small test batches with water before settling on just the right amount for the perfect paint consistency. Then the kids made handprints all over our fence with that paint. All of it washed away except for the blue and red, which had to be powerwashed off. Whoops.

Today they were at it again, mutilating the chalk. Despite my pride at the paint episode I still found myself harping at them: "I just bought that giant container...where IS it all? How can you go through a tub of chalk in one day? I can't buy a tub every day, you know..." I am really annoying to them, I bet.

They were each doing their own thing. Brenna was digging vertical holes in rods of chalk and filling it in with another color. So she had a pink stick with a blue core to draw with. This took a lot of effort and a lot more patience than I would have. Garrett had made powder out of about ten sticks over the course of three days, then pounded it into a hard cake inside a container. Now he draws in it like a Zen garden that can be smoothed and etched in over and over again. Man, writing this makes me feel even worse. Note to self: buy children fourteen tubs of chalk tomorrow.

Brenna says, "Hi Mom!"

Garrett says, "Mom, will you leave us alone already??"

I love Brenna's hands here. They look like those of an artist. She has always been fascinated by mixed media art, always gluing, cutting, rearranging, whatever she can think of. Like changing the core of a chalk stick to a different color.

And the boy's hair in the sunshine? Nothing to do with chalk, but Pure Heaven.

Perfect summer day.

Homeschooling break

I don't think it's possible to take a homeschooling break considering our very relaxed style of homeschooling. We're not unschoolers, but we're not really homeschoolers, either. Maybe we're someschoolers. Learning is always happening somewhere around here. We're not a sporty family; we go to museums for fun. Every night the kids ask for "just 5 more minutes" of reading time, and every morning, instead of hopping out of bed, they open their books and continue on until I drag them from their nests with threats of retribution if breakfast doesn't happen before 10 am.

But as much as we can do it, we're taking a break. This year was our first full year of homeschooling. The year before that, we removed our son from second grade in March and did the rest of the year at home, and because he was in such a state of anxious uproar from a ruthless barage of misdirected authority, the "schooling" was very minimal. This year, we did first grade for Brenna and third for Garrett.

We didn't use a curriculum since I couldn't find one that fit. I loved the look of Oak Meadow, but our kids' abilities didn't fit into the package's assumptions. I searched and searched; there was no curriculum out there that fit our family at all. Plan B was to make a list of where I thought they needed improvement and work from there. For instance, Brenna finished her public Kindergarten year without learning how to write legibly. Penmanship wasn't stressed heavily there, and nine months later her handwriting was exactly where it had been the previous September. She had so many things to say and no way to do it. She wanted so badly to make wee books and write long stories, and her hand just wouldn't cooperate with her mind.

When a person searches for third grade standards on google, the answers can vary greatly. Some schools in the country are teaching long division with remainders to their third graders, as we found out on our California Achievement Test at the end of the year. We followed the guidelines of our local district, which does not approach it until fourth grade. I've already written a little about why I am not a big fan of standardized tests so I won't repeat myself here. What I found was that in many areas, I was free to choose. Social studies can mean learning about civic community workers or ancient Rome. Science can be building a model of a cell or learning about air pressure.

So I asked them what THEY wanted to learn. Both of them already had ideas of things that intrigued them. Electricity, hamsters, mythical creatures, weather. We made sure to cover the basic language and math to keep them current, but the rest came along naturally. When one of them asked a question I tried to supplement it by finding books in the library. Garrett loved pirates back in September, so we beat that dead horse for months. We were able to learn a bit about history, geography, sailing, colonialism...I couldn't possibly list it all. Mostly we enjoyed the stories of the more famous individual pirates of the 1700's.

Once Garrett came to ask me something very specific, and after answering him I elaborated on the subject, thinking it was a perfect opportunity for him to LEARN SOMETHING. As a new homeschooling parent, the fear of our kids not really learning anything was a great one. Even though I know logically that it is not possible to move through the day without learning something (soap floats, wood floats, pennies can if you set them on the surface juuuuuust right), the anxiety is there for me. So after going on and on about whatever it was (maybe it was the Roman Empire) Garrett said to me, "Mom, why you do have to turn everything fun into school?"

Heh heh. That was at the beginning of our year. I changed gears right about then.

But even knowing what kind of environment I wanted to create, where I needed to go in terms of filling in the gaps, why we had chosen this, I still laid awake many nights worrying. And then the day after that I would be fussy about whether or not they finished a project, or whether they proceeded through the project the way I had planned. ("Planned" is a hilarious word to many types of homeschoolers, by the way.) I have more memories than I care to admit of days where I lost my focus and my temper when they just. wouldn't. cooperate. I was constantly torn between wanting to give them the freedom to approach things naturally and wanting them to sometimes, just once, do exactly what I ask them to do.

Even within our microcosm of school I couldn't use the same technique with both kids. Brenna loves projects. She loves the planning, the executing, the finished product. Sewing is something she let me teach her this year and we had a great time. Garrett bristles as soon as he sees words like "step one". He will go through the motions just long enough to announce that he has experienced that particular thing, thank you very much, and now intends to continue on his way. The insights we got from my mostly futile efforts and failures was probably more valuable than anything I could have read about teaching your own children.

I suppose, then, that the one taking the homeschooling break is me. I have absolutely no plan for the summer. No agenda. No workbooks. If they ask something, I will give them the short answer and write the subject on our library wish list. Then I'll tell them to go back outside, where they will likely be testing every single thing in the yard to see if they can make it float.

Why I hate standardized tests Part II

Brenna was working on hers today, burning through it with no problems. Comprehension and Science went smoothly.

Then came Social Studies. While we certainly studied socials, like Leonardo Da Vinci and Laura Ingalls and Ben Franklin, we apparently didn't study the RIGHT socials.

Shown were three drawn pictures of what supposedly should be very obvious to the public schooled child as the very first Thanksgiving: Pilgrims and Indians praying over a meal, Pilgrims and Indians squatting in the dirt, and Pilgrims carrying suitcases with a looming tallship (presumably the Mayflower) in the distance. If you were looking up at your teacher instead of staring out the window when she read aloud every First Thanksgiving book she could get her hands on during reading time every day of November, and looked closely at the figures on your mimeographed cut-and-paste Thanksgiving crafts until you wanted to kill yourself with the wishbone, then you'd recognize the iconic characters anywhere. Fortunately for Brenna, I spared her that drudgery last fall.

Which picture happened last? it asked.

If she had instantly concluded the series to be the first Thanksgiving, then she could tell you all about it. We don't ignore the basics here, you know. But the pictures made no sense to her. She didn't see the tiny little bonnets as Colonial American garb; she didn't recognize the tallship as the Mayflower. She likely thought those people had just been ejected from a pirate ship onto a deserted island, thankful for their lives and their Samsonite. And whatever those four people were searching for in the dirt she couldn't see, either.

She started to lose confidence.

Another question required me to ask, "Which of these people (again, hand drawn): Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Susan B. Anthony never saw an American flag?"

Susan B. Anthony??? Do first graders really learn about her?

Cripes, if she hadn't been lied to in preschool and Kindergarten that Columbus discovered America, she would've been able to get the correct answer even without remembering who belonged in which century.

It seems a hilarious farce that we are having to go through, but today she began to get quiet and sad and said, "This test is making me feel like I don't know anything."

By the way, Brenna chose number 3 as what happened last, as it appears the couple took their belongings and left after a gathering with the other two folks. It makes such perfect sense. Not Standard sense. But perfect sense nonetheless.

And this is why I am against standardized testing

I am homeschooling Garrett and Brenna this year for 3rd and 1st grades. As per the laws of our state, I am required to have them tested at the end of the year with my choice from a list of approved tests. I chose the CAT, California Achievement Test. It's used by many states.

It's your standard standard test: listen to the question, fill in the bubble next to your answer, make your mark heavy and dark. We're not even halfway through Garrett's test yet and already I am foaming at the mouth.

One section was on vowel sounds. Here is one question: Which of these words has the same sound as "split"?  fair, noise, spine, brick---the answer is brick. Okay, easy enough.

What about "braid"? The possible answers are frank, match, lawn, lace.

Uh..... When he first told me there were two answers, I told him (without looking) that one answer should be better than the other and he should just choose his best answer. Then I looked. Unless you're a recent German immigrant who eats frahnks, there are definitely two correct answers.

Another question wants you to choose the word that will fit in both sentences. The sentences: "The large _____ strayed away from the pasture. It was difficult to _____ the car on the icy curve."  Choices: bull, calf, steer, control.

Well, the answer is obvious for all us adults. I thought maybe he was moving too fast so I had him read the question to himself again, actually saying the sentences with each word. He said, "I chose bull. But it doesn't fit in the second sentence." After he marked his answer I told him it was "steer". He looked at me like I was trying to sell him the Statue of Liberty. "STEER? The large STEER strayed away from the pasture?? That doesn't make any sense!!"

See, we're not from beef country. We don't live in beef country; we don't visit beef country; we don't even eat beef! We eat hamburger, but everyone knows that's not really beef.

He knows cattle, cow, bull, longhorn, calf, ox, steak, and sirloin. I know he knows sirloin because he explained the Bugs Bunny skit joke to Brenna the other day. Remember the Singing Sword? And Sir Loin of the Round Table? Yeah, bite that, Department of Education. Now if we were a family living in Texas and all our best friends raised cattle, and everywhere we drove we passed pastures full of STEERS, and when he spent the night at a friend's house they'd pet the STEER, then I guess he'd know exactly what that word meant.

"Bull, calf, steer, control". Do you like how steer is placed in the line up to make it look like there are two animal choices and two verb choices? Yeah, I liked that a lot. So fun to trick the little children.

So the kid will be getting that question wrong. In vocabulary, the thing he made his full time career since the age of 13 months, something that lets him read Harry Potter, Charlie Bone, the Narnia books and every little scrap of paper he can get his grubby little fingers on, something that sometimes gets him in trouble for his smart little clever mouth, yes, in VOCABULARY Garrett will get these two questions marked wrong.

I told him I didn't care. We don't care.

I realize we are made to do the test because the state wants to ensure that all these hippy homeschooling organic families aren't letting their kids drool in front of the television all day long and make daisy chains for their hair instead of training them to be good Workers who will Contribute to Society. But they give these tests to the kids right there in plain view at school, too! Where teachers could easily be the judges as to whether your kid is progressing or not.

I read an article for homeschooling parents that talked about one of the biggest fears we have: "How will you know if your child is learning?" And the answer is, the same way you knew when she found her hands, and when she was ready for potty training, and when you no longer needed to reach down and tie her shoes. A teacher should be able to make the same assessments about vocabulary and math after being with your child for 6 hours a day, 5 days a week, 9 months of the year. Don't you think?