My son, oh my son. This child has a knack for shedding light on situations and bringing truth to the table with innocence and blinding accuracy. My life is so much richer because of this boy who made me a mother. You must see the card he made me for Mother’s Day.
You can see how he captured motherhood in all its complexity, with rainbows, screams, ponies, and 800 miligram ibeprophen tablets surrounded by love and Elmer’s glue.
It is important to note that this card was created when I, deeply invloved in work, ok-ed the hauling out of the art supplies and glue to keep them busy. Earlier that day I had dropped a few pills as I battled a headache and instead of putting them back in their proper place, stashed them way up high in a cupboard, which apparently was very accessable when you’re five and climbing to get your art supplies.
Now, every mother tells their child that the Mother’s Day card he made for them is the best, but I got to mean it. If I live to be 100, I don’t think he will be able to top this.
Jonas, thank you. You will understand someday why I love you so.
Posted by Lou on May 17, 2008 @ 8:11 pm | 2 Comments
Jonas will officially no longer be attending school as of Friday.
I’m a little nervous- but mostly, I’m relieved. I’m going to let him detox from regular school a bit, and slowly start to build the routine we plan to follow over the summer. We have a long, relaxed vacation around the corner, and it will be so good for all of us to pull back from projects and work and unplug from the constant phone, internet and television and spend some quality time together. I have been busy gathering some fun books, games and activities to get started on the fun of learning together.
I do want to clarify one point. I have had some people be very critical of me, taking my choice to homeschool for a season as a personal attack on teachers. I have nothing but the highest respect for good teachers. And I think there are a lot of them. I was blessed to be taught by some very, very fine people who have permanent places of honor in my heart, and who I think of often with fondness and gratitude. There are many dedicated educators who go above and beyond helping our children, and they deserve a lot of respect and gratitude. We, as a society should be absolutely ashamed of the wages we pay the people to whom we entrust our children’s education.
Not only are teachers underpaid, but they suffer from a system and administration that continues to tie their hands and demand results that are not conducive to a truly happy, educational classroom. Many teachers who could be fabulous are scraping by with mediocrity because they have too many students, are expected to police and parent children more than teach them, and lack the funds to have a well stocked classroom.
The educational system is in trouble because our society is in trouble, not because the teachers aren’t doing their jobs. The educational system is in trouble because parents don’t parent, society doesn’t want to suffer the taxation necessary to fairly pay educators, and we are more focused on what the world can give to us, rather than what we can give the world. Society is selfish. People don’t want to give the time and money to make improvements, and expect government red tape to fix problems that started in the home and will continue to run rampant until the home is fixed and given the place of honor in society that it deserves.
This is everybody’s problem, and it is something that will need to be changed by everyone stepping up and making changes for the better in their own sphere of influence. That is all I’m trying to do here.
Posted by Lou on May 6, 2008 @ 5:55 pm | 5 Comments
I was recently asked to review a fun new cd/dvd set called, “That Baby”. It is a collection of toned down popular favorites that translate well into the gentle early childhood vibe. I have found that there are two main schools of thought when it comes to kid music: one is hate and one is toleration. Very few people want to listen to Row Row Row Your Boat and Do You Know the Muffin Man ad nauseum, as small children may prefer.
This is where this cd comes in. Artist Stephanie Schneiderman has done covers of many favorite songs such as:
Happiness Runs/Circle Game
Pony Boy
Get Together
Garden Song
Anything is Possible
Songbird
I Will
Both parent and child could easily enjoy this music, so for a parent who is a little stuck on finding songs that work well for everyone, this cd could be a great tool. I have always put together my own playlists for my kids that are a combination of folk, children’s, rock, and other genres, careful to select music that is uplifting to all listeners. My kids love the “That Baby” cd and were very excited to see something come into the house just for them. However, my son still prefers his favorite song Cecelia by Simon and Garfunkle. Old habits die hard.
If you are interested in That Baby, you can Enter the coupon code “MotherTalk” when purchasing and save 20% on your entire order! From now until May 18th, all orders using the coupon code “MotherTalk” will be entered in a drawing to win a new iPod nano.
Posted by Lou on @ 12:12 pm | 0 Comments
Ok- interestingly enough, most questions have been coming to me by way of my e-mail contact forum. So I will respond to a few things quickly with as much honesty as I can give.
#1: Any comments about how I’m an awesome mom should be edited to add that I am also completely freaked out, worried, overwhelmed, and prone to moments of overpowering self doubt. I’m human. I get tired. I get fed up. I get hormonal and cranky and feel the stress life pretty acutely. And I doubt myself when I’m feeling these things. I doubt myself a lot.
I try to remind myself that me at my worst, although pretty awful, isn’t me entirely. Me at my best is me, and me at my worst is still trying to do better, so me averaged out is actually pretty good. If out of an average month I give my kids me at my best two weeks, me mediocre one and me awful one week- I’d say I’m still on top. I’m not awesome, I’m average. I’m just trying to do what I can for my children, flying by the seat of my pants most days notwithstanding.
#2: Am I still going to put Jonas back in 1st grade at the end of the summer?
That is a good question, and really only time will answer that. I’m sure Jonas will let us know what he needs, and we will go with that. While the fundamental principles of teaching your own children make a lot of sense to me, I recognize that situations change and that there is much value to school as we know it. Oh, there is a lot wrong with it too, and a good teacher can make or break the entire year, but ultimately, Jonas will learn basic skills from elementary schools. Will he become educated? That’s debatable.
At the end of his extended summer (since we will be taking him out of K early), we’ll see where he is and what we want to try. At worst, this foray into summer homeschooling will be a great supplement to what he has already learned. At best, it will be the stepping stone he needs to a lot of success and growth- so aside from losing my mind, I can’t lose, right? (That’s supposed to be funny. . .)
#3 Curriculum, curriculum, curriculum!
What curriculum will I be using to teach Jonas? I have spent hours looking into several curriculums that can be purchased, and I have found a lot of very valuable resources. I have also found some that go against some of my reasons for homeschooling (flexibility, freedom, and a belief that children should lead their own education and not be expected to perform at levels that their bodies are not developed enough to handle). There are curriculums that are completely free, but require you to follow them to the letter, and there are curriculums on which you can spend almost a grand, which, to me is a little nuts (and impossible financially).
My educational philosophy guides me to believe that people learn best from real life scenarios, and that most basic factoids and skills required for life are things that can be learned along the way. You don’t need a month of math worksheets to teach simple fractions when baking a few meals and splitting a candy bar two ways is going to let you know very quickly that you’d prefer 2/3rds over 1/3rd of that hunk of chocolate. You need someone to verbally and visually guide you through the process so you can understand not only what you are learning, but how it benefits you. Don’t get me wrong, practice is good, but I believe in real life application.
I have found a variety of resources to teach Jonas with, many are games that reenforce skills and activities like letter writing and reading together that encourage real time practice. I did order one book of math worksheets and ideas-but those are more to give Chris and I ideas of how to teach Jonas certain topics. As far as reading goes, Jonas and I already spend about an hour a day reading, so my resource there is a library full of books that he will love.
I really feel that younger children mostly need to solidify the basics of reading writing and arithmetic. Science, art, and other pursuits are things that will occur naturally as all children are artists and scientist, experiencing and experimenting in the world around them, while also engaging in activities that display their emotional and artistic reactions to those things. Very few subjects are mutually exclusive of each other; as we have read we have touched on many bits of history and science, with a little extra thinking on the parent’s part, you can easily take what you have read one step farther. A simple example from yesterday, we read a book about Abraham Lincoln. It was an easy reader, one that Jonas could help read. It was his first introduction to this great man and period of history, and when we were finished reading we had a small discussion about it. I then showed him a penny and told him that he has seen Lincoln many times before. Jonas was incredibly impressed with this.
I don’t think that little children need to be drowned in a vat of information- they already are, and they are already skilled at processing this information. In areas of academia, it is best to provide opportunities to use and learn skills, and allow then time to really know the stepping stone skills rather than drag them through and hope they’re catching on. This is one reason why I’m pulling Jonas out right now. While he has caught on to a lot, there are steps in both math and reading that he would benefit from having more time to master. A perfunctory knowledge of algebra does not prepare a person for calculus. You have to really understand, and you can’t be rushed to the next step, particularly if your body and brain have not matured to the developmental level that allows you to masterfully process certain types of information.
#4- This brings me to my next thought, which is on labeling children.
To label a young child, barely past toddlerhood as gifted or learning disabled borders on the absurd, particularly with the scientific evidence we have that tell us that all human beings develop at different rates. We are neurologically wired to grasp, walk, talk and function on different levels of comprehension at different times. You can practice walking with your three month old for hours a day, but because he is not physically and mentally ready to walk, he will not walk. These levels of readiness can vary by a number of months for an infant, and vary by years for the young school aged child. Some children will be ready to read at three and others will be ready at seven. Eventually, most children hit the norm. Because of these vast differences in maturity, your average kindergarten class is anything but average. One teacher for twenty or more children will have no choice but to gear her lessons toward either the lowest common denominator in the class, alienating anyone functioning above average, or she will teach to the average which will frustrate both the top and bottom spectrums of her students. Even the very best of teachers is going to find it impossible to gear every lesson to every child.
Additionally, children are people, and people tend toward unique natural gifts, likes and interests. There are things that every child will be better at whether through pure talent or from interest led motivation to excel. On the flip side, there are areas that individuals will not enjoy, and therefore will not spend as much interest led time perfecting. Does my dislike of math mean that I am stupid or delayed? Not at all. It means I don’t like it, and I would rather spend my time doing something I find pleasurable, like reading. Now, I do excel at reading, but this may be more from my drive to inhale books, thereby practicing reading every day of my life. I have the math skills that I need to get by in my day. I practice them through their application to my daily life.
Now, the real question here should be, “Why don’t I like math.” Math started out as a fairly ok thing, and then soured in the second grade when I had a teacher who could not explain a subtraction concept to me (and who, frankly, didn’t try very hard). She then labeled me as “bad at math,” “stubborn” (because I literally couldn’t understand), sloppy (because I was a doodler- she could have acknowledged the talent behind the doodling), and bratty (because I was tenacious enough to be upset with her for obviously not liking me and saddling me with these unkind labels). After that year of school, I have been afraid of most math problems, and honestly surprised when something mathematical would come easy to me- and many concepts did. Because of my belief of that label and the fear it caused, I never tried at math, feeling that I was doomed to failure.
So, aside from my own experience, why can we learn? We see that a child who enters school and lacks the developmental readiness to master a concept, whether it be academic or behavioral, is going to be labeled negatively. Even some children who enter school overly ready will be labeled because they skew the norm so far that people find them irritating! Either way, they become attached to labels that can be very damaging and very inaccurate. Every child is smart. It is the job of the teacher to learn how that child learns and take them higher.
If you think that small children do not respond to these labels, let me tell you about what happened last week. We were running errands after Jonas had had a difficult day at school. His substitute teacher had spent quite some time lecturing me on his various misdemeanors when I picked him up. I knew that he had tried his hardest, but he just wasn’t at his best that day, which became increasingly obvious to me as we tried to navigate several errands. Each time he would misbehave, I would point it out, and he was quick to apologized and try harder. This was repeated many times throughout our trip, and I tried to keep pretty cool about it because I knew he was trying. As we were driving home, Jonas suddenly burst into tears and said, “Mom. I think I’m a bad kid! I keep trying but I keep messing up. The teacher says I’m bad, and I got in trouble at the store, and I can’t help it. I must just be bad.”
He felt terrible. He honestly thought that maybe he was just a bad kid, and trying wasn’t going to help, that was just who he was and there was nothing he could do to fix it. We talked about how hard he had been trying, and about how we are here to learn, not to be perfect, but to grow. We discussed the concept of repentance and forgiveness, and I assured him that he was a very good boy because he had tried very hard, and he had very honestly apologized when he had misbehaved. It stopped his tears, but I could still see the worry in his face. It crushed my heart.
How can I, in good conscience, leave him in a situation where because of his developmental readiness and intense temperament, he will be labeled negatively? He is not a bad child, but I can see how some bad children are made. Children need positive labels. Save negative labels for true acts of delinquency by people who are old enough to have actual accountability for those acts, and allow children to be children and learn from their mistakes.
That’s all for tonight. I must go soak in the tub. It has been a very long day.
Posted by Lou on May 1, 2008 @ 7:31 pm | 5 Comments
The internet is my gateway drug to the hardcore information found in published magazines and books. You know my interest is serious if I’ve bought a book off of Amazon or gone and spent an evening reading at our local bookstore. The fact that I have so many books I just have to read that I’ve already done those things multiple times and checked out (and read) a stack of books from the library means that I’ve reached critical mass. Armed with the kind of information that I’ve been inhaling the past few months, I am now pretty well sold on homeschooling.
I’ve always been like this. If I have an interest I just have to research the stuffing out of what ever topic I’m currently stuck on, be it hamsters or educational theory. When we were deciding to start our family I read more pregnancy and baby books than I can even remember, and then proceeded to develop such obscure complications that they weren’t even mentioned in the scads of information I’d processed in preparation. Kind of figures, doesn’t it?
The great thing about being weird like this is that in the process of all of the insecure, perfectionistic searching for answers is that by the time you make your decision, you really know why you are doing it. You know exactly where you stand and you can articulate your reasoning. Being a very verbal person, I need to be able to completely verbalize my reasoning to myself. I do not do well running off of gut feelings and instinct; I like my facts cold and hard, and I like my opinions to make a heck of a lot of sense when argued.
The trouble with needing those facts and logically reasoned out excuses is that sometimes I don’t jump on a gut feeling that does deserve some attention. Sometimes I take longer in making a change than I really needed to or even ought to have taken. However, I am pretty comfortable with myself, knowing that it is better for me to be a few weeks off with my head on straight and my eyes on the target and my heart in a happy place on the matter.
I think the biggest reason why it took so long for us to come to this place is that I don’t have one solid reason for wanting to have him learn at home. I have many reasons that span all the way from knowing my son’s temperament to disagreeing with some of the very fundamental principles that public schooling uses to educate. I will go more into those reasons later.
So, we will remove Jonas from school. We are not 100% certain if we will do this before the school year is up or wait out the last five weeks. We will be finding out in the next few days if Chris will be able to take leave for a two week vacation that we would like to do in May. That is one of our largest deciding factors, as well as Jonas’ increasing dislike and frustration with school. We are on our third week of a substitute who makes Jonas’ regular teacher look like a saint, and he is already growing by leaps and bounds through our efforts to work with him at home. So we will see. An early exit might be just what he needs.
I do plan to blog about many of the reasons why I am choosing this course for us for right now. Because there are so many different facets to my choice, I’m sure it will take a few posts. If you have any questions, do ask them here, and I will answer them.
Posted by Lou on April 30, 2008 @ 8:59 pm | 13 Comments
It all started a few weeks ago when Jonas discovered the Dragonolgy books at the local bookstore. He was enraptured. He wanted them all, and the more expensive they were, the more he wanted them. Now, I am all about buying books for my children, and I have spent embarrassing amounts of money on them in the past six years. (The first thing I bought to prepare for my first baby was not baby gear. It was about fifteen books my kid just had to start off with when he was still a bug eyed noodle in my womb. Priorities, right?) However, these Dragonology books are expensive, and I’m already buying him several chapter books a month. We discussed the price of the books, and even put it into comparisons like “five Magic Tree House books for the cost of one Dragonology book.” Jonas understood the concept, but did argue that it was a really, really cool book, and I had to agree. It is pretty awesome.
I gave the usual “maybe for your birthday” answer, and thought it would be over, but throughout the next few weeks those books just kept coming back up. Every trip to the bookstore involved him spending an hour perusing several of them and ended with more pleas to take one home. This was not a passing fancy. We also had several talks about the cost of things and how expensive many of our wants are. He was really bummed about not having any money, so I gave him the opportunity to earn some, and earn it he did.
I do not believe that children should be paid for doing every day chores. I think that routine home maintenance is something that you learn to do because it is a part of life, a part of taking care of your family, and a part of contributing to a healthy society. Because of this, I couldn’t have him just sweep the floors to earn the money. Instead, I had him bake cookies to sell on the curb. He did nearly all of the work involved in baking them. He measured, mixed, rolled out the dough balls and even cleaned up after himself. The only thing I did was put the cookies through the oven. He made a cookies for sale sign ( I made one too), and he sat outside with our piano bench and a few plates of cookies for an hour and a half.
He sat for the entire first half an hour with absolutely no sales. People drove by, smiled and waved, which drove Jonas mad because every time a person acknowledged him, he thought they were going to stop. His little sister had to be banned from the front yard for cookie rustling. This was serious stuff to Jonas.
(Could you resist that face? I couldn’t.)
After much patience on his part, I finally got on the phone and called two friends, both who were kind enough to drop by or send one of their kids to buy a cookie. I called Chris at work and he told his coworkers what was up, and a few stopped by as well.
(Aw, Rosy and a perfect stranger buyin’ cookies! See how stoked Jonas is?)
People came in spurts, even quite a few who the little entrepreneur’s mama didn’t call behind his back, and when he finished up, there were four cookies left and he was $15.50 richer! He was extremely excited and wanted to go to the bookstore right then, but I explained to him that he still didn’t have enough cash to buy the book from the store, but I had found the book on Amazon for only $13.50, so he could order it and even have some pocket change left over. He is already stalking the mailman.
Posted by Lou on April 25, 2008 @ 11:31 pm | 7 Comments
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