January 5, 2013 · 2:00 pm

The Neverending Teen Reading List

I posted on Facebook a few weeks about seeking book suggestions for my 13yo, who can never find anything she wants at the library. Books marked “teen fiction” are mostly awful — or checked out — and adult fiction is just huge if you don’t know what you’re looking for. This is the mostly unedited list that developed from friends’ comments. If something on here is awful, I disclaim all responsibility.

And please feel to add comment on what’s here or add to it! I promise to update eventually.

Adams, Richard — Watership Down
Alcott, Louisa May – Little Women
Anderson, M. T. – Feed
Alexander, William – Goblin Secrets
Bear, Greg – Songs of Power
Bradley, Alan — Flavia de Luce Mysteries
Bronte, Charlotte – Villette
Carriger, Gail – Soulless
Chevalier, Tracy – Girl with a Pearl Earring
Clayton, Emma — Roar and Whisper
Connolly, John – The Book of Lost Things
Cooper, Susan — Over Sea Under Stone and sequels
Dashner, James — Maze Runner
Davidson, Avram
Farmer, Philip Jose
Fforde, Jasper – Thursday Next series and Nursery Crimes series
Gier, Kerstin — Ruby Red
Gilmore, Robert — Alice in Quantum Land: An Allegory of Quantum Physics
Haig, Matt — The Dead Fathers Club
Hillenbrand, Laura — Seabiscuit
Holt, Tom – Expecting Someone Taller
Kean, Sam — The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness
Le Guin, Ursula
London, Jack — Call of the Wild
Magorian, Michelle –Goodnight Mr. Tom
Mantchev, Lisa – Eyes Like Stars
Pfeffer, Susan Beth — The World as We Knew It
Pierce, Tamora
Stoker, Bram — Dracula
Sutcliff, Rosemary
Zusak, Markus — The Book Thief
Voight, Cynthia
Wells, Dan — Partials

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January 1, 2013 · 11:26 pm

2013: A Year in Preview

Because some friends did, I made a year-in-review video of our family activities, just to share with family and closest friends. I can’t post it here, but I can report that my daughters are gorgeous and growing up too quickly, my husband is hilarious, and despite my constant nagging suspicion that I am doing everything wrong we have an awful lot of fun and get around a surprising amount.

This gives me hope — after the revelry, January be can a gloomy time of year. But apparently I have been wrong just about every January, and life turns out to have a shocking number of awesome moments.

A chronic depressive for much of my life, I approach new years and new days with no small amount of dread. Only in the last year did I learn a little trick, to make a conscious effort to identify things to look forward to in the short- and long-term. These will be on the full-year calendar just to the left of my desk, to cheer me on.

Here’s what I’m expecting to put on my 2013 highlights reel a year from now, whether on video or just in my head:

— more sessions with my personal trainer
— Broadway Songbook concerts at the Ordway
— seeing Violet and the rest of the Shakespeare Youth Theatre troupe in Julius Caesar
— a trip to Harry Potter World in Orlando and to Ft. Myers
— meeting up with friends from all over in Reno
— visiting with my mom at her lake house rental
— camping all around Minnesota
— the Minnesota State Fair
— finishing a book project
— going back to the Black Hills
— getting visits from friends overseas
— throwing a 100th birthday party for our house
— throwing a 50th anniversary party for Dr. Who
— biking all over the place
— teaching a class for the first time in a long time
— surprises

Our surprises were the best parts of 2012: that trip to Europe was totally unexpected and nothing we could have pulled off without many many stars aligning. The gathering of PG friends last spring was an event I still can’t believe we pulled off. And we never know when we’re going to get more visitors — all I know is that we seem to have more than anyone else. Everyone on Twitter seems to be quoting Neil Gaiman today, and his New Year’s wish for this year seems especially appropriate.

In the spirit of the ongoing Christmas season, I would only add, may we all have the grace to say yes to the surprises we receive.

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December 29, 2012 · 11:33 pm

A Few Eggnog-Soaked Thoughts on Wieseltier’s TNR Education Article

An article in The New Republic this week kept poking at me, so I decided to jot down a few thoughts about it despite it being the holidays and all, because I just want to enjoy my excessive eating, drinking, sleeping, game playing, and then guilt-ridden gym-going without this nagging at me.

Naturally I found this article through an angry homeschooling parent online, who didn’t like the stupid stereotype of homeschoolers:

The new interest in homeschooling—-the demented idea that children can be competently taught by people whose only qualifications for teaching them are love and a desire to keep them from the world—-constitutes another insult to the great profession of pedagogy.

And normally, you know, who cares? People think homeschoolers are ignorant creationist isolationists — whaddya gonna do? After seven years homeschooling this stuff is like mosquitos in a Minnesota summer — you can complain about it, but you can’t really do anything about it.

But in the course of the short editorial Leon Wieseltier said a few things that were way off base, and something that struck close to home as right.

First, because it’s fun for us homeschool veterans, another choice howler:

The only form of knowledge that can be adequately acquired without the help of a teacher, and without the humility of a student, is information, which is the lowest form of knowledge.

Should we have contest to see who can come up with 100 counterexamples the fastest?

But in decrying the anti-college, pro-entrepreneur, pro-make-your-first-million-on-an-app attitude of many home/unschoolers, Wieseltier, I had to concede, was describing a phenomenon that has bothered me too.

“Here in Silicon Valley, it’s almost a badge of honor [to have dropped out],” a boy genius who left Princeton and started Undrip (beats me) told The New York Times. After all, Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg, and Dell dropped out—as if their lack of a college education was the cause of their creativity, and as if there will ever be a generation, or a nation, of Jobses, Gateses, Zuckerbergs, and Dells. Stephens’s book, and the larger Web-inebriated movement to abandon study for wealth, is another document of the unreality of Silicon Valley, of its snobbery (tell the aspiring kids in Oakland to give up on college!), of its confusion of itself with the universe. To be sure, all learning cannot be renounced in the search for success. Technological innovation demands scientific and engineering knowledge, even if it begins in intuition: the technical must follow the visionary. So the movement against college is not a campaign against all study. It is a campaign against allegedly useless study—the latest eruption of the utilitarian temper in the American view of life. And what study is allegedly useless? The study of the humanities, of course.

I see this in lots of ways, especially in the gifted homeschooling world. Parents (and I include myself in this group) will spend big money to get a good science co-op class for a kid because they “can’t do it at home,” yet they feel sure that their vague memories of reading “The Good Earth” in ninth grade are more than enough to do justice to the Western (let alone the non-Western) canon. One homeschooler told me to my face — to my face! — that she would discourage her children from following my educational path or entering my profession.

Much of this, I’m sure, is born of ignorance — you can’t miss what you never had, and many people running around with a Bachelor of Arts degree have never had a real liberal arts education.

But there is something more disturbing at play as well, which I think Wieseltier gets at:

The equation of virtue with wealth, of enlightenment with success, is no less repulsive in a t-shirt than in a suit.

You could argue that in saying this Wieseltier does not get the class privilege built into his own argument: seeking enlightenment through Homer and Shakespeare takes a backseat to breaking the cycle of poverty or just staying debt-free for many lower- and middle-income students.

At the same time, it’s sad to think that kids are stepping off the institutionalized education treadmill merely to get on the professionalization treadmill even sooner. I love books like Blake Boles’ “College Without High School” and Cal Newport’s “How to Be a High School Superstar,” but it’s easy to (I hope, misguidedly) take away the message that the secret to many of their case studies’ success is not being precocious learners but precocious income-earners. So yes, Wieseltier is talking about something real, and something it pays to be mindful of when thinking about homeschooling the high school years.

Nevertheless, what Wieseltier is missing is that homeschoolers and unschoolers could truly be his allies here. Classical and humanities-based education is being embraced by homeschoolers in droves: consider the popularity of “The Well-Trained Mind,” “A Thomas Jefferson Education,” or the work of Charlotte Mason, or so many other popular homeschool authors. He needs to read, or re-read, “Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns.” Homeschoolers *are* the “nonconsumers” whose innovations have the potential to improve education for everyone. Online classes like those from Online G3 are leading tech-obsessed kids who IM in class to fall in love with Shakespeare.

Humanist education in a variety of forms is alive and well on the educational frontiers. No doubt it has its enemies, too, but they aren’t the well-read ladies in the denim jumpers.

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December 20, 2012 · 10:26 pm

End the World (or the week) with a Poem

Assorted thoughts rolling into Christmas, plus a link that will make your day:

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I got a piece of mail today that said on the envelope, “Will 2013 be the year that writing becomes your day job?” and I had to laugh. I have supported myself and my family as a writer of one kind or another for 20 years, and sadly very little of my writing happens during the day. If 2013 was the year that I stopped writing late into the night to meet deadlines and got more done during the afternoon I would be thrilled.

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I head-wrote about three different little blog posts on the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary, none of which I could post. They may all have been brilliant. Certainly they would all have had a morsel of nice wordsmithing. But the risk of being pseudo-profound or getting it wrong seemed too high for whatever benefits I might achieve. I cried watching my 9yo sing in church that Sunday, something about children’s stars shining a brilliant light into the night. It was Gaudete Sunday– “rejoicing Sunday” –and it felt so weird and wrong. But I was reminded that my church, at its best, offers comfort not merely with the promise of a better world to come some far-off day, but with the willingness to walk alongside people in their deepest suffering.

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My last post, “Closing Doors,” has been my most popular so far on the current blog, and I have been delighted by how many people that idea resonated with. Neurotics need reassurance, people! My friend Kelly, a feminist blogger at How I Learned to Wear a Dress (SPOILER ALERT: She hasn’t!), reblogged it today, which I thought was very generous, so I’m paying it forward. But really, it is a gift to anyone who takes the time to click the last link.

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My friend Molly also keeps a blog, The Stanza. She’s a poetess, but when I met her we were moms and lay leaders together at our old parish. Talk about walking alongside you during your suffering! The things we lived through then. She moved away, which made me sad, but since moving she has flourished like crazy as a writer, which makes me happy. I cannot believe the poetry she writes now that she has been able to carve out a space for it. This poem put tears in my eyes — you will have to scroll to the bottom of the linked page to see the rest.

Prayer Before Dawn

Lord of the spun globe,
of roofline silhouette, pale wash
of coming sun,

this thinning hour is the only threshold
I’ll ever need.

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December 10, 2012 · 12:56 pm

Closing Doors

[in mid-November DH and I sent the kids to the grandparents and went on a short European tour of Zurich, Vienna, and the Czech Republic. I took way too many pictures of doors.]

Even the most relaxed homeschooling parents usually still have some bottom line subjects they insist on, or a level of competence they expect no matter what.

Often we talk about this in terms of keeping doors open. A kid who says “but when will I ever really use algebra?” is likely to grow up and a) want to go to college and quite possibly b) go into a field in which solid math skills are necessary.

IMG_5430

[These were in the back of the Spilberk Castle in Brno. I especially liked the hinges.]

Sounds reasonable so far.

But then the questions come: How long do you hold the doors open for your kids before you let them close? How many doors can you keep open at once? For parents of kids with multiple interests and multiple talents, stretching far enough to keep all the doors open starts to feel like spinning too many plates. So which doors do you keep open?

IMG_5699 IMG_5492

[The door on the left is from the Einsiedeln Abbey in Switzerland; the door on the right is from the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul in Brno.]

Math is a big one for most families. “Math is cumulative,” people say. Slack off for a bit and that lost time will come back to bite you later. For some “English” is big: spelling, grammar, vocabulary building.

As we move further along the relaxed spectrum, and as my 13yo reaches high school transcript age, this is a big question for me: Am I keeping the doors open? What doors am I closing?

IMG_5393 IMG_5410

[More castle doors in Brno. There must have been quite an artisan in the area at some point in the castle’s long history.]

So far I’ve figured out two things:

1. At a certain point, it’s no longer my job to keep the door open. That feeling that I am stretching too far probably means that I am stretching too far. I’ve shown the kid the door, I’ve made my best argument for why we should leave it open, but I just can’t make someone walk through. Anyway, most doors that have closed can be opened again by a motivated young adult.

2. There are more doors than you think. I have to say, I have never heard anyone argue, “I insist on my child continuing music lessons because I want to keep the door to a musical career open.” No parent has ever told me, “I told my child to spend lots of time role playing, because I want to keep the door open for a career as a novelist, playwright, or actor.” Aren’t drawing skills cumulative too?

IMG_5429

[I want this for my garage.]

I suppose it’s easy to argue that if a kid is “really passionate” or if it’s “meant to be” she will find a way. One could argue that math is a door you have to keep pushing open for them; art is a door they will run through at every opportunity.

But hogwash, to put it mildly. A kid who’s keeping every door open doesn’t have that many opportunities. She’s too busy scraping herself like butter over too much bread. And some kids know very clearly that some doors lead to parental (or social) admiration and support, while others are for lesser minds and also-rans. In other words, there is a point at which insisting that some doors stay open means that others close.

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[The Grossmünster in Zurich; Spillberk in Brno. The Grossmünster door at least is relatively recent: no doubt Zwingli and Bollinger would not have approved.]

Careers in the arts are incredibly competitive — that’s what makes them so scary to parents who want their children to grow up and support themselves. All the time that goes into building a robust Plan B, however, is time that is not going into developing a craft. And whether either or both of our kids have careers in the arts, they’ll likely find that having some fluency in a creative medium makes life a lot better.

I can’t say that I feel totally confident about moving in a more unschooly direction: blog posts like this are about convincing myself, not necessarily sharing my brilliant insights with the world. But I can’t say that I felt totally confident about the path we seemed in danger of starting down: relegating genuine talents and passions to the back burner in order to be sure our homeschooling met some made-up definition of “college prep” — to say nothing of what happens to our relationships and quality of life along the way.

IMG_5612 IMG_5472

[Doors to one of the many art museums in Vienna, nearly three stories high; a yarn-bombed door on an office building in Brno.]

I am curious, though, whether we’ll eventually find out that “keeping the door open” has been an insufficient metaphor all along.

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December 5, 2012 · 11:35 pm

I think I get Advent, a little bit

I was baptized Catholic just over 10 years ago, and the vibrant liturgical calendar, lived in full color with songs for each season, is one of the things I love about being part of centuries-old traditions.

I wanted, back then, to embrace Advent, but the main thing I understood was that I should not put my tree up too early or start listening to Christmas carols too soon. And the mood of the season? Waiting. Right — waiting for Christmas. Being prepared — preparing for Christmas. What’s the big deal? Isn’t that what we’re all doing already?

Since then Advent has been coming back into fashion. And a good thing too, because I am finally getting the idea.

I am enjoying Professor Carol’s Advent Calendar — daily blog posts on art, music, and literature and Advent traditions. (I came to know of Professor Carol through her awesome music/world history curriculum Discovering Music, which among other things made my recent trip to Europe much richer.)

But more than that, something in the Gospel reading from Sunday hit me in a new way this time around (more liturgical calendar magic!). Speaking of the return of the Son of Man, Jesus tells his followers:

Beware that your hearts do not become drowsy
from carousing and drunkenness
and the anxieties of daily life,
and that day catch you by surprise like a trap.

Now I was a little distracted when these words were spoken, because before them the reading was talking about the Son of Man “coming in a cloud” which of course paints a picture in my head that wakes up my not-that-inner skeptic and starts an active mental dialogue that could persist all the way to “Mass is ended go in peace.” But I heard them anyway, and not because I am given to carousing and drunkenness. What I am, much of the time, is tired. Too tired to try.

Which really is OK these days. Effort is for chumps. It’s understood that we’re all so busy and we’re all enlightened beyond the need to “go through the motions” — but it’s the motions that are the point of being here in the first place. I don’t know what giving up looks like in your life, but in mine it means a cluttered house, dirty clothes, haphazard and unhealthy dinners, untended writing projects, great homeschooling ideas left undone while we sit on individual computers. It feels like being out of shape and not getting enough sleep. It sounds like arguing and sharp reactions — mostly “no” — to innocent questions.

While it’s not good to beat yourself up about that kind of stuff, and it’s wise to accept some chaos, there’s a line somewhere, a different line for everyone I assume, and as I sat in the liturgy of the first Sunday of Advent I understood that at some point I had slouched across it and was lingering there a little too long.

And this is what Advent is for. I don’t think anyone has explained it so succinctly for me as Sally Thomas did in a recent blog post:

“I wake up to myself . . . and my reflection in the bathroom mirror of the soul is not pretty. This is always the case, of course, but with the Bridegroom on the way, you notice. So: pinch those cheeks and back to it.”

As any good Latin student knows, “Advent” means “coming to” — something is coming. Something new is on its way, but you have to 1) keep at it without giving up and 2) pay attention. This is, I think, the essence of all my religious/spiritual experiences to date, be they Christian, Buddhist, yogic or other: Wake up, dummy! Open your eyes! Even now something wonderful has started — do you not perceive it?

I have not done so well at passing this newfound insight on to my children. Victoria came home from choir practice complaining that there was no “Hark the Herald Angels,” no “you know, some fa-la-la-la-la?” “What do you mean it’s not Christmastime?” she asks indignantly, and she does not care that Advent waiting looks like taking the one seat when she is frosting Christmas cookies and reminding us daily that we need our tree this weekend. That’s OK. I think Advent is more of a grown-up season anyway. My 9yo lives with eyes wide open much of the time, without much help from me. Me, I need every tool in the box to stay awake and keep seeing what’s in front of my face.

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November 25, 2012 · 11:17 pm

Homeschool Dropouts

It’s not been all lapbooks and readalouds in the old home-schoolhouse these last few months. Well, really, it’s never been lapbooks, because although the pictures I’ve seen look cool I’ve never quite understood what they are or why you do them.

In any case, the road to homeschooling high school has been bumpy, and we need to get out of some bad habits now. As of tomorrow, Violet, the 13yo, is cutting back her formal learning activities (classes or curriculum) to just a few: chemistry, an online current events class, and a literature class at co-op. I guess officially we should also count Shakespeare Youth Theater and maybe piano in the “formal” realm. And that’s it for a while.

Victoria, the 9yo, also has the option to cut back, but for now she is really happy with the progress she has been making in math and French and she wants to keep with what we’ve been doing. And history is reading, and who doesn’t love reading?

It should be noted that Violet has big plans for writing, and for reading more and more about linguistics, and doing lots of art, and opening an etsy shop for selling art, and getting her Chinese writing and reading caught up with her conversation skills. I’m forgetting a bunch of other stuff she has written in a notebook. Tomorrow she’ll be catching up on chemistry after a vacation with Mimi and Papa while her dad and I were abroad and after a leisurely Thanksgiving weekend. She’s decided to extend her upcoming current events presentation to include something called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation. She already had some kind of mind-reading story lined up, so now she’ll have a broader theme of “Ethics of Brain Science,” or something like that. Or that’s the plan for now.

Also, she’d like to do more baking.

It makes me a little nervous, nudging our family further along the “relaxed” spectrum of relaxed homeschoolers. I have many good qualities, I like to think, but “relaxed” is not one of them. But it also makes me nervous to wonder what the consequences of the insane schedule and the frequent arguments over things neither of us really care about might be.

Violet baked two pies this week, and I think the consequences of that were excellent.

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November 2, 2012 · 7:38 am

Make-Up Does Not Get You Pregnant

Last weekend we were shopping for Halloween gear, and I picked up some extra mascara for Violet, the 13yo – for Halloween, that is. She has minimal interest in wearing make-up daily.

Victoria, the 9yo, is quite another story. She has been sneaking into make-up and trying to get away with wearing it out of the house for years.

“Do you think I can wear mascara when I’m 13?” she asked as we walked to the Target checkout. This being the 9yo, it was a lengthy conversation full of hypotheticals, so it lasted long enough for everyone in line, and the cashier, to listen in.

As I concluded “13 is a long time from now, it’s hard to predict what we’ll be OK then, so I can’t make any promises” (a key stall tactic), there were some smiles in our general direction, including from what looked like a teen mom with a little baby all covered in fleece in the shopping cart.

Since we made eye contact, and she was looking admiringly at Victoria, I asked her, “What do you think is a good age to start wearing mascara?”

She hemmed and hawed, seeming even younger than I had thought, clearly wanting to say the right thing to an impressionable child—and possibly wanting not to piss off the child’s mom. She decided 14 was about the right age just as the cashier finished ringing her up. That’s when I noticed the teen dad, who was paying. He turned around with a friendly smile, nodded at the fleece bundle, and said wryly:

“Don’t wear any make-up or you’ll end up with a baby.”

It came out funny, and I hope this went down OK with teen mom, because they seemed like nice kids doing the best they could and they sure don’t need trouble. But I wouldn’t blame her if she gave him a little talking to in the car.

I turned on the radio as we started for home and this super annoying song that we all dislike came on (One More Night, Maroon 5)

Try to tell you “no” but my body keeps on telling you “yes”.
Try to tell you to “stop”, but your lipstick got me so out of breath.
I’ll be waking up in the morning, probably hating myself.
And I’ll be waking up, feeling satisfied but guilty as hell.

“What is he saying?” Victoria asked. “He wants her to stop wearing lipstick?”

Maternal lecture launch codes, activated.

Me: You hear in a lot of songs about people who say they can’t control themselves, because the other person is so beautiful or awesome.

I was saying this slowly, editing myself as I went to make it as gender-neutral as possible – yes, men are usually the ones portrayed as uncontrollable beasts, but we didn’t have to go there . . . today.

Her: If anyone ever said that to me, I would just say, “Listen, you are responsible for your own behavior. You have to control yourself.”

Mother panic neutralized. . . . for today.

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September 30, 2012 · 8:46 pm

Rethinking Talent Development

I did mean to write about my 9yo’s schedule, but all I really have to say is that I can’t wait til she can have the routine she craves. It’s been lacking since mid-August, as she’s been sick with whooping cough (and this past week a cold on top of it). Ever heard whooping cough called the 100-Day Cough? Well, there’s a reason for it.

Anyway.

If you aren’t part of the GT education community, you might wonder why a totally benign, focus-grouped phrase like “talent development” has come to be a flashpoint.

My friend Stacia, who has been an advocate for gifted children for many years, put her finger on one part of the “talent development” movement that has always irked me. Talent development tends to mean STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) development, but not all students who have talents to develop want to develop in that direction.

Our society has also begun to send a second message,”Artists and philosophers are not as important to society as scientists and mathematicians.” I beg to differ. There is balance in all things. The great minds of science and mathematics were often also philosophers and artists. We can’t separate out talents like we are separating the wheat from the chaff because art and philosophy are not chaff. They are wheat just like science and mathematics.

It’s not hard to observe this in any circle: the “geniuses” are the ones who go far and fast in math and science. Sometimes I wonder if this is just because so many adults have mediocre math and science educations that they are impressed by what seems impossible to understand — and sometimes I wonder if it’s because they’ve had even worse educations in language and the arts, to the extent that they don’t even know the difference between adequate and excellent.

Anyway.

As homeschoolers we try to have a balance: keeping open as many doors as we can by having a broad-based education, not completely ignoring the necessity of earning a living, and making note of every person we know who earns a living being creative or finds a way to maintain creative pursuits in a busy life. What I’ve observed so far is that telling the wheat from the chaff is a lot harder than you’d think.

And on the other hand, sometimes we watch way too many episodes of My Little Pony while we wait for good health to return.

Truly, Friendship is Magic

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September 19, 2012 · 10:17 pm

A Misleading Guide to This Year’s Resources, Part One

It’s mid-September, and I’d like to do what some other homeschool bloggers have done and post my kids’ rough schedules. I’d like to, but that could be hard. I haven’t even ordered the books for all of them yet. I figure summer isn’t officially over for a few more days yet anyway, so how behind am I really?

How can anyone concentrate on ordering books when there are hummingbirds everywhere just begging to be photographed?

Still, in the interest of sharing information, here’s what my 13yo is doing as of now:

AP American Government via Thinkwell
DD13 is really enjoying this. She took a great American Government class with Online G3 this year and enjoyed it so much that I thought she might as well continue with the subject. The Thinkwell class has some review, but it’s enough material for a whole year – and supposedly the AP exam – so I believe she’ll still get a lot of new stuff out of it. So far, she likes the format and the lecturers, and I think she’s getting some good note-taking practice. Besides, this is a great year to be studying American Government. Speaking of which . . .

Current Events via Online G3
I admit that this class was initially an afterthought. I wanted DD to keep in contact with Headmistress Guinevere and her longtime G3 classmates, but this was the only class that fit our needs at all. Wow, has it been great! I love turning on NPR and having her say “Yeah! We talked about that in class!” and then share more about what she knows. I’m so happy that she is part of the class.

Geometry via Life of Fred
DD did took a chemistry class and a physics class last year, so at some point we completely abandoned math as a formal subject. There was plenty of applied math—and brain overload—happening as it was. We also skipped ahead to trigonometry for a while so she’d be ready for vectors in physics. So there’s some geometry still to do before moving on to what we had actually planned for this year, which is:

Precalculus via Thinkwell
We’ve really liked Life of Fred. DD seems to have a math talent without having a strong math interested, and this has suited her well. But I think we need to move beyond the totally self-taught approach at this point. Once geometry is done she’ll start this up.

Dystopian Literature via co-op
This is a co-op class I proposed to the retired teacher who’s taught several literature classes for our group. It’s kind of a “What to read after The Hunger Games and City of Ember,” including 1984, Brave New World, Animal Farm, and Gulliver’s Travels, among other things.

Japanese via VHSG
This is DD’s first time take a class through this group. So far so good! Community college was just not in the budget this fall, but this still allows some exposure.

Chinese via Chinese Pod
DD has been working through Chinese Pod for some time. While it doesn’t really force her to develop her reading skills as much as she’ll need to eventually, she has a great ear and is pretty fluent in conversation with her teacher, so I’m satisfied with the time and money spent here.

Chemistry via SSE
This is a 2-year chemistry class billed as Honors Chemistry. Several of the students will be studying for AP Chemistry, DD among them, though she may do the SAT Chem test instead/also. I can’t say enough about the great instructor for this class. He does not know how to worry and takes each student as he (or she, but really almost entirely he) comes. He does offer online classes, but we’re lucky to have access to the in-person version.

Fire Good!

Still to come:

Korean via Rosetta Stone
DD was doing this over the summer but has dropped it over the last few weeks to start Japanese. She would like to pick it up again, but we’ll see.

Linguistics via MITOpenCourse
I really need to get the darn book so she can start this!

Writing via Mom
It could be that I am putting this off.

Oil Painting via art teacher
I have been talking to one of Violet’s former art teachers for almost 6 months about getting this on the calendar. Ugh! But since one of her co-op classes was cancelled at least I have the money set aside to get her started. I will do it — I will!

Of course typing it out like this makes it all look so formal and organized. Don’t be fooled! No, we will never be mistaken for radical unschoolers, but we do aim for as much self-direction and freedom as possible.

It’s just that the self-direction and freedom can’t be typed up as neatly as the official-sounding resources we use. There is no official “tumblr creation” time or songwriting time or obsessive drawing time, and yet these take up at least as much of the day. Not to mention bike-riding time and skyping time and novel-writing time and lying-on-the-sofa-reading time. Oh, and piano. Always lots of piano.

Staring-at-stream time is also very important.

Typing it all out may also make it seem like we are more test-oriented than I think we are. We are, to some extent, following the advice of Blake Boles, who suggests in College Without High School that a few College Board-y test scores will make it easier to have an unconventional adolescence and still go to college, if that’s the desire. I’ve also seen plenty PG kids at this point who reach mid-teens and say, “forget it, I’m ready for college NOW.” That’s not the road we’re on today, but it’s happened enough that I think we’ll just take a few precautions. Besides, this particular child doesn’t mind taking tests. When the other daughter reaches this age, I feel pretty sure a different path will be laid out before us.

Speaking of which, I’ll lay out the 9yo’s current resources in an upcoming post.

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