Archive for June, 2012
The always wonderful Handmade Homeschool on the dearth of blogs focusing on the details of homeschooling through high school:
I would like to see older homeschoolers represented online with the same enthusiasm. Why? Well, because I’d like to have my reality reflected, too. I’d like to be inspired. I’d like to be reassured. And if it was a slightly more glamorous image than reality, my heart would welcome that, too. A little salesmanship of the day-to-day. Calgon, take me away…
Lets do better. I’m busy. So are you. It’s harder to find the anecdote, perhaps, or to remember to pass it along. But we owe it to ourselves to memorialize this homeschooling stage as well as we did in the cuter years, and we owe it to each other.
(Read her whole post.)
I posted this link on my Facebook page and it sparked a thoughtful conversation, and I thought I’d share it here too. Our FB discussion centered on the difficulty of protecting and respecting the privacy of our older kids—their stories are their stories—while acknowledging that many of us do crave the experience-sharing and resource-sharing we enjoyed in our homeschooling blog circles and discussion boards when all our children were small. It’s a line I’ve walked cautiously here. I’ve often written about my decision to blog less about my older children as they’ve moved into their tween and teen years. (Metadiscussion junkie that I am.)
At the same time, I’ve missed it, the long education-philosophy chats* and the nitty-gritty resource-sharing. (Education philosophy and resource-sharing junkie that I am.) I don’t know how one threads that needle—respecting kids’ privacy while blogging freely about the thoughts and activities that occupy our days—and I always enjoy a peek into others’ homeschooling lives.
What do you think? Where’s the sweet spot on that fine line?
(UPDATE: My FB friend Angela chimed in with a link to a brand-new blog, hilariously titled Homeschooling Mother Clucker, that aims to find that sweet spot. I’m thrilled. I’ve missed Mother Crone.)
*While it’s true I’ve missed the ed-method threads that dominated the early years of this blog, around four years ago I deliberately dialed down my musings in that direction, in part because once I found my groove, my whole tidal homeschooling thing, I didn’t need to think out loud quite so intensely; and also because I ran out of energy and time for the occasions where the discussion turned to debate. We found what fits our family culture and I didn’t have any desire to proselytize nor defend it; it simply was what it was, is what it is, an ebbing and flowing rhythm of structure and freedom that suits us. We shift gears so often I can’t begin to tell someone else how to drive. 🙂 And lots of times, “thinking aloud” comes across as opining. I’m keenly aware that every family is different (even different from itself, season to season), and school works best for some, and unschooling works best for some, and rigorous classical ed works best for some, and a messy hodgepodge works best for others. One of my favorite comments I’ve ever received on this blog was from Bonny Glen reader Sashwee, who remarked (in my post about comics making you smart): “This confirms my impression of your approach to education, non-dogmatic, open to what’s good in whichever vessel it is borne.” I so appreciated that comment, because it gets at the heart of what drew me to home education in the first place: the freedom to custom-tailor education to suit each individual child within the context of a close-knit family life. For us, right now, in this season, that includes having Wonderboy happily enrolled in a special-day class at the public school around the corner, and sending Jane to spend the summer in Texas, soaking up another family’s culture and getting her first taste of the working world at an internship at a software developer, and allowing thirteen-year-old Rose long spans of hours for writing her Warriors fanfiction and other tales, and charting a high-tide of math, German, and history lessons for Rose and Beanie, and then chucking that plan out the window for a week of obsessive gaming when the big Glitch housing reset occurs. And now this postscript has turned into a full-fledged post, but I’m going to be lazy and leave it dangling here at the end of an entirely different topic, and maybe the combox discussion will wind up as comfortably jumbled as my family’s approach to life and learning. Jumble away, my friends.
June 20, 2012 @ 3:26 pm | Filed under:
Books I’ll be there Saturday and Sunday. Looking forward to it! A giant convention hall filled with book geeks—bliss.
June 19, 2012 @ 8:10 pm | Filed under:
Family 
Perfect weather
An old favorite park we hadn’t visited in a while
Eucalyptus grove
Secret path under pines
Donut holes (I over-ordered, counting for six kids)
(We missed you, Jane!)
(Huck ate most of yours)
City Farmers Nursery
Bumped into friends, also just arriving
Chickens, ducks, a turkey, rabbits, dog, horse
Home for lunch
Moved plants around the yard
That kind of day.
June 18, 2012 @ 8:15 pm | Filed under:
Books 
This one’s going to take me a little while to find words for. I don’t know how to write about it, and I don’t know how not to. I was fifty or sixty pages in when I turned to Scott and said—I felt breathless—I think I found my favorite book. I knew I would probably enjoy it; I love Elizabeth Goudge’s writing; I’ve loved Linnets and Valerians more each time I’ve read it. But The Scent of Water went even deeper, burrowed right into the center of me. I kept thinking, I didn’t know, I didn’t know.
For now, while I’m sorting out why, I’ll let Elizabeth do the talking. Never in my life have I marked so many passages in a single novel.
“…a silver tankard of lilies-of-the-valley stood on an oak chest. The flowers and the polished silver gathered all the light to themselves…”
That one comes early, and I marked it not knowing how important the objects, and the gathering of the light, were going to be—in that first encounter, it was the sheer beauty of the image that made me gasp. I started the book a few weeks ago and then set it aside, and all through those days this line kept repeating itself in my mind. The flowers gathered all the light to themselves. What a poet she is.
The piercing clear deep ringing and ringing seemed thrusting through her almost intolerably. She believed she had not heard such birdsong since she was a child; yet every year they had been singing like this in the tall woods of England…
The poets did at least put it into words for you and ease the pain of it.
I have at least thirty more quotes marked but the evening has run away with me—as usual! I can’t possibly type them all out, anyway. I need to read it again. Soon. The night I finished it, I dove right into Linnets and Valerians to ease the pain of parting, and now I’m onto The Bird in the Tree. I have nearly her whole body of work ahead of me. Such riches!
June 14, 2012 @ 8:26 pm | Filed under:
Books 
“A garden had to be your own before it would let you in, and even your own garden did not give up its secrets unless it liked you. But if a garden had once been your own, did it disown you when somebody else took possession of it? She did not think so.”
—The Scent of Water, Elizabeth Goudge, p. 30.
June 13, 2012 @ 8:34 pm | Filed under:
Books 
I didn’t mean to reread The Blue Castle again, but then I never do plan it; I just seem to tumble into it on a regular basis. Somehow it gets better, richer, every time. I feel like I could walk out my back door and be in Muskoka, watching the moon over the lake. You wouldn’t think it possible Montgomery could make any place sound as lovely as Prince Edward Island, but oh, those woods, those views.
I love LMM’s character transformations, and Valancy’s arc is one of her best—as satisfying as Jane’s, and despite a plot heavily dependent on coincidence, even more believable than Jane’s character arc. Montgomery does repressed, emotionally abused young women painfully well. I love watching Valancy shed her chains, coil by coil. One line in particular jumped out at me this time:
“Meanwhile she was giving herself such freedom of thought as she had never dared to take before.”
It never struck me until now how much Montgomery does with that notion of ‘freedom of thought’ being vital for a character’s happiness and growth—we see Anne thriving under the most miserable circumstances in her early childhood because of the saving power of her imagination; and Jane escaping her grandmother’s tyranny and general misery via her nightly ‘moon sprees’; and Valancy, finally, at age 29, giving herself free rein to evaluate her relatives’ behavior and make her own plans. Hmm, there’s an essay to be had there. Probably someone has written it already. 🙂
Must run, but if you want to gab about this much-beloved book in the comments, I won’t complain…
Related: Jane of Lantern Hill
June 10, 2012 @ 7:50 pm | Filed under:
Books My 48 hours is up. Thanks to my three-year-old who took a good long nap today, not to mention my very amiable husband, I got some long stretches of reading time and managed to clock a total of 16 hours 15 minutes. I logged a little under 2 hours of blogging/commenting/social media time: 1 hour 50 minutes.
Total: 18 hours 5 minutes. I passed my goal!
Books read:
The Year of Learning Dangerously by Quinn Cummings (final 67 pages)
Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt
Welcome to Lizard Motel by Barbara Feinberg
Wise Child by Monica Furlong
Juniper by Monica Furlong (first 140 pages; I hope to finish it tonight)
Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading by Lizzie Skurnick, chapter 1.
To various children:
Brambly Hedge: Winter Story by Jill Barklem
It’s a Tiger! by David La Rochelle
Take Two!: A Celebration of Twins (a poetry collection by J. Patrick Lewis & Jane Yolen—my three youngest are fascinated by this tome; each one of them came to me with the book at a different point in the afternoon).
I’ll aim for a more detailed summation later, but right now there are bedtime things to do around here. And Rose just came to me in search of something new to read. Music to my ears. 🙂
MotherReader’s finish line roundup is here. Thanks so much to everyone who stopped by to cheer me on, and congratulations to all the other participants. Big thanks to Pam Coughlan for organizing all the fun!
“After breakfast,” she went on, “you must have a look at Daisy and the rest of the garden. Then we’d better do some lessons.”
“In magic?” I asked. I was both curious and scared.
Juniper laughed.
“I thought we’d begin with reading, writing, astronomy, fairy stories—that kind of thing. Later on we’ll do a bit of Latin.”
“Girls don’t learn Latin,” I told her. “It unfits them for marriage.” (I was quoting my Uncle Gregor’s views on the education of girls.) “And I never heard of a school that taught fairy tales.”
“All learned people learn Latin,” she said. “It’s bound to come in useful. Fairy tales, on the other hand, are about real life.”
—from Wise Child by Monica Furlong
I first read Wise Child in 1993—I remember because my boss at Random House was Monica Furlong’s editor on Robin’s Country, and everyone there said ‘Oh you’ve got to read her other books, they’re wonderful,’ and they were right. That was before I had children, before I’d ever heard of homeschooling, much less considered doing it. So I’m amused, now, to find that what I’ve been doing all along is really Juniper’s version of education. Minus the good cow, Daisy.
(Also wonderful: Juniper, a prequel to Wise Child.)
June 10, 2012 @ 7:24 am | Filed under:
Books 
It’s Sunday morning. I woke early and snuck in a half hour of Wise Child time before I dragged out of bed. That brings me up to:
10 hours 15 minutes of reading time
1 hour 20 minutes of social media/blogging time
Books read:
The Year of Learning Dangerously by Quinn Cummings (the final 67 pages)
Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt (entirely because of a conversation on my FB page yesterday—I had a sudden need to reread it; first time in years)
Welcome to Lizard Motel by Barbara Feinberg (also mentioned in that FB discussion by my friend Kathy Ceceri; I’d bought it months ago—also based on her recommendation—and her mention of it yesterday reminded me to pull it off the shelf)
Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading by Lizzie Skurnick, chapter 1. (A reread for Girl Detective’s Summer of Shelf Discovery reading project. Now I get to pick one of the books mentioned in the chapter—or another book with a heroine who made a big impression on me as a kid. Wrinkle in Time is there, if I want to indulge myself with a favorite. But I’m thinking I should visit something new. Would you believe I’ve never read Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself?)
Plus a good-sized chunk of Brambly Hedge to Rilla at bedtime. That totally counts, right? Oh, and a new picture book, It’s a Tiger!, which arrived from Chronicle for review yesterday, and I squealed because ART BY JEREMY TANKARD (you know we adore him) and the book is hilarious and it’s a safe bet I’ll be called upon to read it at least seventeen times this week.
I’ve got just about 12 hours left in my 48-hour window. Will I finish Wise Child? Will I veer off on another rabbit trail? (Lizard Motel added at least four titles to my TBR list.) Will I wind up playing trains on the back patio all afternoon? It’s anyone’s guess.
