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Reading.
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The Fellowship of the Ring - as it appears is the destiny of all homeschool children who originally struggled to read.
At least, all homeschool children whose parents reached out to reassure me in my moments of doubting worry.
The last time my in-laws came to visit, I made a new discovery: I don’t finish tasks.
Now, having a German mother-in-law teaches a woman many things about her housekeeping skills and standards, not the least of which is when to raise them and when to laugh and know you’re a different person with different priorities. The fact that they have come to visit us for 1-4 weeks every year since I can remember has been very good for teaching me what I wasn’t doing and what I might do. It often raised me up out of the survival mode of motherhood in those early years into a mode where the house thrived. Eventually I realized that if those standards were good enough for guests, well, who were we? Chopped liver? No, we also deserved a certain baseline of household harmony. (A certain baseline. Mine, not Anni’s.)
This last visit I realized that I would leave things mostly done. I realized it because I often felt like a child caught in the act of some small transgression. I hate that feeling. I don’t like feeling small and rather disappointing. (It’s important to note that this is the way I felt, not the way she made me feel.) What would happen is this: I would get the bulk of some task done and wander away ‘for a break’. And it was when I was on the break, dishes done but counter unwiped for instance, that she would walk by and I’d feel embarrassed.
Discomfort is a wonderful thing. Really. It’s a sign that something needs to change. You’ve got to take the pebble out of your shoe. Or switch to a better fabric softener. Or get off your butt and stop watching so much television before sections of you go numb. The internal poking and pinching that is mental discomfort is a signal that part of you knows better.
Here’s the thing: when I complete a task first – even if I am weary, even if I have to push, even if I am feeling like a martyr – when I am done, the break feels real. Like time earned rather than stolen. And let’s be frank – life is busy, with hundreds of demands and more than enough hobbies, and I often don’t get back to finish.
Lately, I’ve been missing Anni’s presence because without that external check, I’ve fallen into my old ways. I’ve been longing for the way I perceive time when I complete tasks rather than leaving things dangling and telling myself it’s multi-tasking. When I finish something, time seems mine. When I’m leaving things incomplete so that I can start the next thing – making breakfast but not tidying it away before starting homeschooling for instance – I feel like I’m the tool of the To Do List. I feel mastered rather than the master. In other words, somehow this notion of finishing tasks implies a luxury – the luxury of enough time.
It’s been coming on slowly, but yesterday and today are the dawning of the realization, the yellow-white light cresting the horizon.
Don’t put things down, put them away.
If it’s worth starting, make every effort to finish it.
Don’t scramble. Breathe.
Pay attention to the task at hand. It has its own elegance.
Tend and nourish.
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Squander it all!
Hold nothing back.
The heart’s a deep well.
And when it’s empty,
It will fill again.
Greg Orr, “How Beautiful the Beloved”
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What are you holding back?
a few things I’d like to pass on:
Animal Review : a blog that rates animals. An odd, comic, wry look at the fauna around us. Is a turtle a B- animal? Or a worm a C+?
excerpt from the T. Rex review: “On the cosmic scale of things, the fact that grizzly bears frighten us is a bit laughable, for if they stepped out of a time machine and into the age of the dinosaurs, grizzly bears would spend the majority of their short lives screaming like children and running away from everything they saw – including the plants, probably.”
They’ve got a book out now – the hilarious interview on CBC radio was what lead me to them in the first place – and I’m thinking it needs to make its way under the Christmas tree.
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The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie: a charming, odd novel that’s part mystery, part ode to the oddities of life in England – for only in Britain can I imagine the indomitable Flavia De Luce, 11 year old chemist.
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Camp Creek Blog: a homeschool mother with a way of crystallizing big thoughts into small, sharp, useful phrases. Not sharp in terms of pain, but in terms of their ability to cut through the muddy waters. See the post on “Real Hands-On Learning” and check out what I mean.
Shawna asked: “1. Do you schedule breaks similar to our summer, Christmas and Spring breaks or do you keep at school all the time, letting the breaks fall where they are most advantageous to your family?
2. Transitions between tasks must be complicated. I think of the time I spend setting up the table so that the kids can paint and then the cleanup and set up required for switching to reading. Do you try to accomplish small amounts of multiple tasks during the day or do you tend to stay focused on a bigger picture?”
We go year-round and always have. I originally wanted to avoid the Forgot Everything over Summer Syndrome, but discovered that it was important for many more reasons.
1) One of my main tenets in life is: We are not robots. So many things in our culture seem to be structured on the premise that we are a) willing and b) capable of doing the same thing every day.
In the 90′s Interval Aerobics was a popular concept in the exercise world. Hard minutes followed by easier minutes. I like to think of my approach to homeschooling as ‘Ecclectic Interval Homeschooling’. We follow no one particular program and we have days/weeks where we’re motoring along followed by days/weeks when we’re strolling. It just makes sense. Kids (people) can’t learn the same amount each day. Brains just aren’t ready to process the information at the same rate all the time. Going with the flow by paying deep attention allows me to avoid fighting and frustration.
2) Summer isn’t the only season for taking a break. In a heat wave, sticky-hot afternoons are best spent indoors with a glass of something icy and we may as well do a little learning. Besides, I can’t imagine being stuck to a schedule when that glorious first week of high spring arrives or when crisp autumn whirls into our lives with breezy, dancing leaves.
3) A little structure goes a long way in our family. No structure = arguments. My kids are very different from each other and keeping certain habits on most days keeps the friction lower.
4) Burnout isn’t as big an issue. We still have phases where burnout looms (oh, cruel and dismal March), but we never push ourselves beyond what’s reasonable until we have nothing left. We are not the tools of the schedule; the plan is our tool. Mindful parenting coupled with the understanding that my moods drive family moods lets me toss the plan out the window for a while when it seems necessary.
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As for the second question: yes. Yes to both options. Yes to options not mentioned. We’ve tried every method I can think of to make smooth transitions. And what is working has changed as the kids have gotten older.
Mostly what worked when they were smaller is something I call ‘anchoring’ a chain of events. I’ll find something that we’re doing anyway (think food, food works really well) and add an activity to that. So to breakfast we added storytime. Then in a bit I added another activity to storytime. And then added another subject. I’ve found our days always go smoother if I can get us going in the same direction first, then add the learning. Like creating a current in a body of water.
But transitions are hard at times, particularly if there is a mess to clean up between. I tend to put messy things last in the chain so that if the kids wander off, they’re wandering into a break anyways.
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What works, what fails, what inspires…all is always changing. “Life is not orderly. No matter how we try to make life so, right in the middle of it we die, lose a leg, fall in love, drop a jar of applesauce.” Natalie Goldberg
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All of those are clickable, if you want a little more information about them.
Not spinning my wheels, though. Things are busy here, marvelously busy or frustratingly busy depending on the day. But I’ve managed to spin a little every day of the Tour de Fleece, with one rest day.
This latest batch of fibre is so very, very soft. Clouds of blue.
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Korrigan in Black Annis Top by Gaia’s Colours
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“Folks say I’ve never been quite right since – but they only say that because I’m a poet, and because nothing ever worries me.”
Cousin Jimmy in Emily of New Moon, by L. M. Montgomery
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What are you reading this summer?
Celery Finally Tamed by Scientists
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I can’t say enough good things about this kit, from the product quality to the sci-fi storyline that guides you from experiment to experiment. It’s written as the journey a young robot takes as he learns about electronics so that he can help run a space station. Simple enough concept and they never let it get in the way of things by over-doing the story sections. There are 148 experiments, and they have you leap right in. We still know very little about the parts we’re using, but we’re using them to do very neat things. As we go, the information about the parts is slowly slipped in – but how clever of them to avoid the typical front-loading of definitions and background knowledge. After all, when you start off by pushing in 6 parts and watching as a red light alternates with a green light, you’re hooked.
This celery experiment was of Sandra’s thinking. We had made a few circuits that used water – putting wires into potted plants, for instance, to show how you can build a circuit that alerts you when the soil is drying out. Sandra has been studying ecology and plants with my father, and knew how much water was in celery. So we tried it. The light lit up. Can I tell you how much this delighted me? Probably not. I was really delighted. By the light, by the use of the knowledge she’d gained elsewhere, by the stalk of celery with blue wires coming out of it. (Tias said, “This is a little what it might be like if the aliens ever attack.” Snicker.)
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Multitasking as usual.
In the midst of a full morning, complete with homeschooling, breakfast, tea, opening owl pellets, electronics, running, and spinning, I asked Matthias to take a photo. At this moment we’re learning math and spinning.
