Scattered Seeds

Books for nerds

2011-06-27T09:36:00.000-07:00

Perhaps it is just further proof of what a hopeless nerd I am, but the most compelling book I’ve read in a long time is about the Oxford English Dictionary. I don’t think it is just my quirky interests that made The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary a compelling read. Simon Winchester is a brilliant author in telling the story of how the dictionary was compiled and the brief history of dictionaries. There’s wonderful definitions from the OED at the head of every chapter and a detailed defense of the plural “protagonists”. But best of all, and the real focus of Winchester’s story, are the eccentric and, in one case, mad characters who did the actual writing and research for the OED. He is at once straightforward in telling us about their lives and quirks, but it tempered with an warm and genuine affection for them. It is a delightful and fascinating combination.

There is yet another nerdy reading choice to report. I loved Packing for Mars. I had put off reading it because I assumed that with all my hours watching NASA-TV, I knew most everything about astronaut training and space ship design. That was a silly assumption -- I apparently knew nothing! It could have easily been a very dry read, but Mary Roach’s science writing is at once clear, interesting and very, very funny. I was sitting in the waiting room at the doctor’s, reading the section on the research of bodily waste issues in zero-gravity, and got a serious case of the giggles -- not just because I have a scatological sense of humor, but because it was so very funny! It is extraordinary the things people do for a living, researching issues things that are a serious matter in the business of space flight.

Fellow nerd and author AJ Jacobs enjoys poking fun at his own foibles and OCD tendencies, and invites his readers to laugh along with him. His Year of Living Biblically could have tipped over into pure farce, but he was earnest in learning as much as possible and fleshed out his experiment with many interviews with both serious Biblical scholars, rabbis and ministers and with some of the more fringe religious elements. I also enjoyed The Know It All, an account of his reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, in pure alphabetical order, in a year.

Happy Birthday, Dorothy Sayers!!!

2011-06-13T21:39:00.000-07:00

It is a happy coincidence that I'm currently reading Clouds of Witness.

My boys...

2011-05-13T21:18:00.000-07:00

It's been such a treat having both boys home for the last 5 months.

They've been enjoying each other's company as never before.

Photos can't capture the rapid fire sarcastic repartee.

But they can capture the brotherly bond that warms this mother's heart.

"Really now? Brotherly love? Get a grip, woman"

The oldest leaves for college in August and the youngest will be leaving next year for college.
It's going to be awfully quiet around here, but these few months have felt like a payment for all those long, tedious and frustrating homeschool years!

Daybook, February 12, 2011

2011-02-12T16:16:00.000-08:00

Outside: Simply beautiful. Sunny and 72 degrees

In the garden: Blueberries and strawberries are developing. Calla lillies and camellias are in bloom and the bird of paradise planted last summer has a couple of blooms that are radiant in the late afternoon sun.

At the feeder: Finches and more finches. White crowned sparrows, towhees and a couple of iridescent green hummingbirds that won't pause long enough to let me identify them.

In the kitchen: Counter tops rediscovered! Pumpkin bread that I've been wanting to bake since November.

On my music stand: Elgar Salut d'amor for prelude tomorrow morning at church. Beethoven string trios that need to be practiced with a metronome.

On my night stand: Two non-fiction works, that are wonderful but not catching my attention, and a stack of fiction.

On my mind: Finding joy in the most mundane parts of the week while I savor the time we are sharing as a family. My older teen boys are at a stage where they are fun to be around, and they are simply entertaining. This may be the last extended time we share as a nuclear family as the oldest will head off to college in the fall.

January reading

2011-02-02T11:09:00.000-08:00

My reading has gotten off to a very slow start, partly due to life, partly that I haven't had a page turner in my hands so far this year.

Terry Pratchett's Discworld series continues to be a staple of my audio book life. I read Thief of Time in January, with its riffs on quantum mechanics and string theory and time made it tie in quite nicely with all the Fringe episodes we've been watching. My current "car book", which is what I turn to when on the freeways, is Nightwatch. It is another Discworld time travel book but this time featuring my favorite character, Sam Vimes caught in the ol' Star Trek paradox of being stuck back in time but having to be careful to not change history.

Someone asked me where to start with the Discworld books, and I have to say I think the best starting place is Going Postal, a book about bringing the mail service back to life in the Discworld city of Ankh Morpork. It has all the best Discworld elements: terrific characters, very funny writing, and a terrific story that you want to finish. Discworld is, well, I'll let Terry Pratchett's cite explain what it is.

Bridge of Birds was the first book of the year for a virtual book club organized by a friend. What a delightful discovery! It is an epic fairy tale set in a "China that never was". The story follows the epic quest of Number 10 Ox and Li Kao who must find the cure for the children in a small village. It is a Chinese epic, rather than a Western one with the hero who discovers he has unknown skills and gifts. The elements of the story are all based in real Chinese myths and stories, which for me with my Chinese Studies background was so much fun. One thing or another would seem familiar, would niggle loose a memory from college classes, and I'd have to put the book down to research the Chinese word or story to refresh my memory. It is one I'm going to have to re-read in order to simply enjoy the story instead of treating it like a comprehensive exam.

I've been re-listening to Bill Bryson's At Home when I just need something to fill few minutes. It is as great the second time as was the first, and as it is so packed with information you pick up something new each time you listen (or read.)

Daybook January 17, 2011

2011-01-17T21:27:00.000-08:00

I was just visiting the always lovely Shades of White blog and really liked her daybook entry for today. I'm copying the idea, but it won't be as lovely and poetic, nor as profound and thoughtful.

Not this week.

Just look at the photo on the left. That pile is in the hall on the way to the garage. It has been there since the beginning of December and it is growing. Like a cancer.

There are books and math manipulatives to donate now that I'm done homeschooling.

There are toy dragons to donate and bags of clothes.

There are boxes left from Christmas.

And now there are suitcases my son brought home after living in Florida for the year.

But we didn't just bring my son and his suitcases home from Florida. Nope. We also brought home the flu. For the last 5 days I have barely looked outside a window, have not gotten dressed, have not read more than a chapter of a book, have not thought a single coherent thought. Well, I wasn't totally useless. I did manage to watch 3 discs worth of Fringe episodes.

I felt human enough today to putter around the house a bit and was startled when looking at the calendar to see that the month is halfway over. Huh? Last I remember it was the 3rd or 4th. A week in Florida followed by a week with the flu and I've missed half the year already. I feel as disoriented as Agent Dunham does when she gets spit out from a parallel universe.

So no thoughtful daybook from me today. Just a sharing of my surreal and jarring slide into the middle of January.

2010: The year in books!

2010-12-31T14:21:00.000-08:00

This is the year of Discworld. My 15yo reading buddy and son was having too much fun listening to and reading all the Discworld books, so I finally took the plunge. They are filled with dry humor and some laugh out loud humor and often have great characters and compelling stories. I think I’ve read 9 of them:

Lost Continent -- surreal visit to the Discworld version of Australia. Some of the funniest lines.
Going Postal -- perhaps my favorite. The story of the post office in Ankh Morpork
The Truth -- The story of the Newspaper in Ankh Morpork. Not as good as Going Postal
Guards! Guards! -- the beginning reads like a Monty Python skit.
The 5th Elephant -- more Sam Vimes and the Night Watch
Thud -- Where’s My Cow? I loved this book and the previous 2.
Jingo -- rather unmemorable
Reaper Man -- Death takes a holiday. What can I say? It is silly and funny.
Unseen Academicals -- just read this one. Good characters, but not a favorite.

I should have known it was going to be an odd year of reading as my first book of 2010 was Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy!

I read some classics this year, too.

Mansfield Park -- a very different Austen book.
Pride and Prejudice -- from cover to cover for the first time since my teen years
Jane Eyre -- I really liked this and it prompted me to read a biography of Charlotte Bronte
Wuthering Heights -- I couldn’t finish. Catherine and Heathcliff annoy me to no end.
Moby Dick -- I didn’t hate it, in fact it was an enjoyable listen. Not always compelling, though.
Heart of Darkness -- it almost seems cliche, but it was the first “evil white colonialist” book

Other older titles that I enjoyed were The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, which was an unexpected joy to read and The Sign of Four, one of the Sherlock Holmes novels. The plot for Sign of Four is now confused in my mind with The Moonstone as both stories deal with stolen goods from India.

My son and I both loved At Home by Bill Bryson. It really brought so much of 19th century England to life, the details from all that British literature I read now are not something I gloss over but actually describe something tangible. A couple of other titles from same time period was Remarkable Creatures, a historical fiction about Mary Anning's life and The Fossil Hunters, a biography -- poorly written -- of Mary Anning. (She is the woman who sold sea shells by the sea shore in Lyme, and discovered the ichthyosaur and plesiosaur fossils.)

I listened to The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, based on my son’s love of the book. It made for a great car trip as we wound up talking about politics and Heinlein’s libertarian leanings. Far North was the most evocative book I read, I think. The landscape and situations are still vividly real in my imagination. Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn series was entertaining fanstasy, but not memorable.

I haven’t read all the books I bought at Comic-con, but I thoroughly enjoyed the one I have read. The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss has a terrific protagonist, someone who is NOT the chosen one, NOT going to fulfill his destiny. That alone is refreshing!! But the setting and the plotting are refreshing too. His second book comes out in March, and my son and I are clearing our calendar for that one.

All in all I read 55 books this last year, though admittedly a few were put down somewhere in the 2nd half and I only skimmed the end. I've got a stack ready to go for next year, including a few more Discworld titles...

Ch-ch-ch-changes...

2010-12-29T07:46:00.000-08:00

We made the plunge to start homeschooling in January 2000. It was a fairly sudden decision as it was over Christmas break that I knew I could not send my oldest son back to school. The withdrawn and unhappy child from the fall semester disappeared over Christmas break and the buoyant irrepressible child returned. I finally accepted it was pointless, even heartless, to force him to adapt to the classroom. The classroom had to adapt to him, and homeschooling was the best choice.

That child who prompted us to start homeschooling graduated back in May 2009. He is still an effervescent being, not following the standard and expected path of going to a traditional university, but is instead forging ahead with his own plans for himself, and doing very well.

And now my younger son is moving on. At the tender age of 15 he will be attending community college full time. He passed me by in math and science, the two subjects that most interest him, so needs the higher level courses, and he has had enough of mom as teacher/mentor/nag-in-chief. He is ready to move on, and proved himself quite capable in his intermediate algebra course at the college last fall.

So after 11 years, my primary identity as a homeschool mom is no more. I'm back to just being mom!

That is a huge change. Another big change coming with 2011 is that my husband will be working at home full time, something he hasn't done in 20 years. And my oldest boy will be back under our roof after living in Orlando for a year. It is going to be a very full house!

I'm no longer going to be writing blog posts about book lists and course or lesson plans. I'm trying to wean myself from the 11 year old habit of hanging out on the WTM boards every day. And yet, I'm still interested in education, still honing my skills as a teacher and mentor as I move into my second year of teaching private violin lessons. And I'm still an avid reader, still sharing books with my youngest. There should still be blog material worth reading!

Happy New Year!

Stylish Blogger?!!

2010-11-09T10:42:00.000-08:00

What a great way to start a morning! Stephanie from Daisies and Dominos passed the Stylish Blogger Award to me and 14 others this morning. Thank you, Stephanie! I'm always pleasantly surprised that people even read my blog, and am really delighted that you find it stylish!

The rules for accepting the award are to:

Thank and link back to the person who gave you the award
Share 7 things about yourself
Pass this on to 15 other bloggers you've recently discovered
Contact the selected bloggers and tell them about their awards

So...7 things about myself...

I've been married almost 25 years to my college housemate's cute brother
I play violin and now teach violin, a topic I've yet to blog about
I have a golden retriever that foams at the mouth an embarrassing amount when on walks
I have an MA in Chinese Studies, read Confucius in the original back in grad school.
My Chinese language skills are now reduced to the limited but useful ability to order a cold beer
Worst job I ever had was demonstrating a toilet bowl cleaner at Long's Drug Store
I have yet to master making a pie crust from scratch

Now to pass this on to 15 other bloggers. Except, well, I don't think I know of 15 other blogs! It seems I'm as much of an on-line introvert as I am in real life. I do follow bigger blogs like Pioneer Woman, but wanted to give props to other humble efforts like mine. So here's 12 stylish blogs that I know and love and 3 big national blogs that make me smile.

1. Golden Grasses Stephanie sent her the stylish award as well.
2. Shades of White This is a peaceful spot to visit, with lovely photos and poetry
3. 52 Books in 52 Weeks Robin keeps us reading, and has inspired me to start writing book reviews of my own.
4. My Two Blessings Robin's non-book blog
5. Without Excuse Sydni is a creative homeschool mom and I love seeing photos of my home town, Albuquerque
6. Tumbleweed Road Sydni's other blog makes me want to start homeschooling all over again. She profiles all her terrific projects and the books they are reading.
7. Agenda Forty is by a homeschool DAD, yes folks, there are such creatures in our midst!! He is also a NaNoWriMo kind of guy, and the DM for my son's bi-weekly D&D games.
8. Four Squares is another cool blog by a creative and interesting homeschool mom.
9. Slowly Climb Mt. Everest yep -- another creative homeschool mom!
10. Home is where you start from is by a fellow Southern California homeschooler, yet another creative soul
11. Herding Ducks I like to stop by here now and again to look at the photos of farm animals. Not due to some weird proclivities on my part, but 'cause I'm a city girl who can't imagine living in the country!
12. A Little Rebellion is by another thoughtful homeschool mom.

Visiting each of the above today inspired to get busy and start blogging again more regularly!

The final 3 -- the bigger blogs that I enjoy:

13. Strange Maps, which is exactly what the name says. Check it out!
14. Patrick Rothfuss -- a blog by a fantasy author who usually makes me laugh.
15. Pioneer Woman -- I have "known" Ree from the old WTM days, and have loved watching her become a national phenomenon.

Rigorous Rant

2010-10-06T09:42:00.000-07:00

A “rigorous curriculum that is easy to implement” is oxymoronic. Reading, answering comprehension questions, memorizing highlighted vocabulary words, and having the grading rubric predetermined by the publishers does not make for a rigorous education. It is simply learning to identify what to regurgitate the points someone else has determined are important.

A rigorous education is thinking for yourself about what you’ve read, analyzing, finding what points resonate with you, then persuading others to see the work as you do through persuasive and logically constructed arguments. It is taking what you’ve read and learned then applying it in unique situations. Of course it is harder on the mom -- it is harder for the student, too and that is the point. It is far harder to think for yourself and defend your thoughts, but that is ultimately more important than being able to parrot what you’ve read.

Grade levels, reading levels, lexile numbers -- all those are handy measurements when dealing with a school full of children. In your home all that matters is the child in front of you. Meet each child at his or her level then move forward. Read, explore, talk, create and have fun. And talk some more, encouraging your child to express opinions and all his or her creative ideas. That is when the real learning happens. Spend some time each day on skills but don’t make it the sum total of your existence. The skills are simply tools for furthering the joyous endeavor of learning.

52 Books: September Reading

2010-10-03T08:43:00.000-07:00

September was a productive reading month. Here's a few short reviews and one rant.

Dreaming in Mandarin by Deborah Fallows is a quick and delightful read about her three years of living in China and trying to master the language. She nails the challenges of coping with such a foreign language where there are no familiar hooks. The grammar is easy, but the tones and compound words are tough, and the language is even more confusing to master it reflects an entirely different way of experiencing the world.

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson is a nicely written, literate and charming romance. I figured out the ending probably before the end of the first chapter, but it was a pleasure to get there because of the characters and the pacing of the plot.

Wilkie Collins is an author I had never heard of until there was a thread on the Well Trained Mind forums about his books. The Moonstone was the first book I read on my new iPad, a free download from the Project Gutenberg site.

I loved it. Loved reading on the iPad, loved the mystery, loved having the story told from the different perspectives of different characters. It is considered the first British mystery. Collins was a friend of Dickens, and it is a shame he isn't as well known as this mystery, especially, still holds up. If you've read the Sherlock Homes Sign of Four story, read this as it is a perfect companion piece.

Now for a short review and a rant about an audio book. I really wanted to like Zoo Story: Life in the Garden of Captives by Thomas French. It is a look behind the scenes over several years at Tampa Bay's Lowry Park Zoo. When the book is straight journalism it is quite good as it explores the ethics of zoos, the logistics of caring for dangerous animals, the blurry line between conservation and entertainment.

But the author and especially the narrator couldn't leave it as straight journalism and had to play the emotion card, anthropomorphizing the animals with whole passages like "What were the animals thinking just then? Were they remembering the warmth of the sun on their back in the open savannah?" There were too many passages like that, all unnecessary interruptions in the narrative, and all insulting. Do journalists not trust readers to have imaginations and empathy? It also made the author seem like he couldn't make up his mind if he wanted to write an objective piece on the zoo or if he wanted to write about his own conflicting opinions about the role of zoos.

The narrator made things even worse by reading the story like a bad tv anchor on the local evening news. He felt he had to use different voices reading quotes. I like a good reader using different voices in fiction where there are fleshed out characters and the voices make sense. but in a piece of journalism it sounded stupid, especially when he used a bad Southern accent. When the book inevitably got to the death of some of the animals, the author's words sufficiently captured the emotion of the event -- how the zoo keepers reacted, how the other animals reacted. But the narrator decided it wasn't enough, so he read the passages with a choked up, deeply emotional voice. It was a jarring and unnecessary cheap ploy. I turned it off with about a half hour left as I just couldn't take the narrator any more. It left me angry with the book for the rest of the day!

Words to Live By

2010-09-27T07:14:00.000-07:00

Spotted on the back of a plumber contractor's truck, this profound motto:

"Where Quality is Always an Option"

"How much do you suppose they charge for that optional package," quipped my son. "An extra 50 bucks?"

We considered all the companies and institutions that could adopt the motto, such as a college, an airline, a hospital. As my son said, it is a very versatile motto. Indeed they are words to live by.

A whole new world

2010-09-20T07:17:00.000-07:00

My son has a community college math class that meets at 7am 3 times a week. 7am!! The kid who hasn't been up before 10am for the last 2 years sets his alarm clock, has his book bag packed the night before, and is ready to head out the door at 6:30. That alone is stunning.

What is even more stunning are all the people who are out and about at 6:30 in the morning. I had no idea. The freeway is packed with heavy traffic. It isn't gridlock and isn't the frenzied panic traffic that we hit on the way home from his class at 8:30. I figure those are all the people who are worried about being late to work so ride your tail, accelerating to pass you and cutting you off when your lane ends. The 6:30am traffic is a more sensible, though sizable beast.

Starbucks is packed by 7am with a never ending line of 10-12 people. There are school kids with their parents, college students, and people dressed for work. As I write there is a little boy who asleep in one of the over-stuffed chairs. And Santa Claus just walked in wearing a bright aloha shirt festooned with tropical Santas. I may need more coffee...

As we get back to our neighborhood on the way home the elementary kids are heading to school. Another slice of life I've never experienced. Their backpacks are bigger than they are!!

6:30 to 8:30 am has been my quiet time for the last 11 years. If I'm up, I'm reading the newspaper, enjoying a quiet house. Or I'm out walking the dog or getting grocery shopping done before the family gets up. The grocery store is great in the early morning hours, although you have to dodge pallets of boxes while the shelves get re-stocked. And if you time it wrong on Monday morning, they haven't gotten around to restocking milk after the weekend rush so you have to make a second trip to get milk later in the day.

I was dreading this 3 times a week early morning routine, but it hasn't been bad at all. And it's been fascinating seeing how the rest of the world lives!

Wordless Wednesdays

2010-09-15T07:25:00.000-07:00

52 Books in 52 weeks: More Moby Dick and some reviews

2010-09-13T09:28:00.000-07:00

My reading list continues to be very eclectic -- a few “great books”, some good books and fluff and some non-fiction. I’ve slowed down a bit thanks to Moby Dick, which I’m still enjoying but isn’t quite the page turner of an epic that I thought it might be. But I’m past that “wall” that marathon runners describe, that point where you feel too fatigued to go on and realize the end is still so far away. At least now the end is in sight, the white whale is almost in sight and I’ll have a terrific sense of accomplishment when it’s all done.

But I was going to write about what else I’ve been reading.

First up, some light but entertaining fantasy. A friend lent me a copy of Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson promising it to be a fun read, and indeed it was. Fantasy is one of those hit or miss genres, too often a miss for my taste. Mistborn started off leaning toward the “miss” category because of the expository rush at the beginning of the book. There is nothing that kills a sci fi or fantasy novel like heavy handed explanations -- the world should be revealed through the story. But, the exposition wasn’t too clunky and the characters and plot soon caught and kept my attention.

My son and I attended a reading and signing with Sanderson just last week, and in a serendipitous coincidence he happened to mention Moby Dick, describing it as a kind of fantasy novel. I liked that analogy. What my son and I find quite amusing is that Sanderson’s newest book, in audio format, clocks in at a whopping 45 hours! Moby Dick was only 24, and is a self contained book whereas Sanderson’s book is the first in a planned 10 book series!!! 10 books! I can’t imagine a story that warrants 10 books of 400,000 words each! And yet the author was engaging, Mistborn was readable, so the 45 hour marathon may be worth a try.

Another recent read was Moonstone, a Victorian detective novel by Wilkie Collins. What a delightful read! The story is told from several viewpoints, each of which is a very distinct and entertaining character. The loyal and funny servant and the fundamentalist spinster aunt are the two best, but the detective and secondary characters are fun too. There are some terrific red herrings and a solution that works even though it defies reason.

I had never heard of Wilkie Collins until some of the ladies on the Well Trained Mind high school forums started talking about his books. I looked him up either on Wikipedia or Sparknotes (can’t remember which) and was surprised to find out he and Dickens were great friends. I assumed he is an author slipping into oblivion (because, of course, I hadn’t heard of him!) only to discover there is an essay contest for teens sponsored by Penguin books on the Moonstone, and a local bookstore’s book club is discussing the book later this month.

It seems the more I learn the more ignorant I feel! There are clearly more wonderful titles and authors out there that I’ve never heard of and so many literary references that still go over the top of my head.

Does this mean I have to vacuum more often?

2010-09-10T07:00:00.000-07:00

I'm getting a taste of what life is like after homeschooling and it is really odd. I'm not entirely sure what to do with myself.

During my 11 years of homeschooling I'd relish the quiet hours before everyone got up, sipping coffee, browsing the internet, reading the paper. I'd fit in an errand or load of laundry before it was time to brace myself for the homeschool routine. I'd cement a cheery smile on my face while the kids rolled their eyes over math or while they dragged their feet getting out the door for a class or activity. If one kid was at an activity the other was supposed to be doing work -- I was constantly juggling my attention from kid to kid, to school to the calendar and where I needed to be next. I even found a way to shoe-horn in my own interests, but it made for some crazy busy months.

This September I suddenly find myself free from math and science, two time consuming homeschool subjects, and virtually free from driving. I still start my day with my own quiet time, still get an errand done fairly early, but I realize I don't have to start the juggling routine of homeschooling and driving, I really have no responsibilities to anyone for the balance of the day. It is unsettlingly bizarre. I can't figure out what to do with myself, what my own priorities are. I start making lists of things I've wanted to get done, of tasks that could be done in a more timely manner, and it is all Suzy Homemaker stuff. Vacuuming. Dusting. Organizing closets. Yuck!! Is that all I have left in my life?! Then I think of my interests such as reading, writing, practicing violin, gardening, knitting......and that seems sooooo self-indulgent. I feel guilty to think that I get to just do that as much and as often as I want. Then I think of how I could be exercising daily now, and I feel even more guilty that I'm sitting in Starbucks writing a blog entry!

I know -- what a horrible problem to have. This is NOT a complaint, really, but more of an observation of how strangely different life my life is now. For the first time in almost 19 years of motherhood, I'm not having to react and adjust to and juggle the needs and demands of others. After organizing everyone else, I have to organize myself.

It is so bizarre.

Wordless Wednesdays: Creature Feature

2010-09-01T07:07:00.001-07:00

Moby Dick!

2010-08-23T07:24:00.000-07:00

Call me astounded.

Moby Dick is epic, and I don’t mean in just in the literary sense of the word. It is epically over the top, full of terrific lines that have been adopted into the geek lexicon thanks to Star Trek. It has grand characters, unexpected detours, and, eventually, a whale of an adventure tale.

That there will be an adventure story I’m taking on faith as so far -- and I’m not quite half way into it -- the action can be summed up in a couple of sentences. Ishmael meets Queequeg, they join the crew of the whaling ship Pequod and sail out of Nantucket. Ahab announces he wants to hunt a particular whale. I’ve just summed up over 300 pages!! No wonder people give up on reading this book.

But I’m not reading it in print form. I’m listening to a wonderful recording of it as read by, actually performed by, Anthony Heald. Talk about epic. (And I’m not just referring to the 24 hours of audio!) He can take the most clause-choked sentence and make it sound natural. Make it interesting and worth listening to. Melville’s writing is made lively and brilliant. The Shakespearean nature of Ahab’s speech comes to life, lines that the average reader would miss because his eyes had glazed over suddenly pop out in all their poetic drama. Even the chapters detailing whaling life or the natural history of the period are a good listen. It is simply brilliant.

I find myself taking notes, looking things up on the internet, pulling out the print copy to reread a particularly interesting passage. And I’m getting a kick out of all the literary and mythological references that I now get thanks to all the reading of classics my kids and I have done while homeschooling.

My 15yo son is also listening to Moby Dick and loving it. I often hear him in the next room chuckling over speech by Ahab, not because it is comical, but because it is unexpectedly familiar. We are constantly asking each other “have you read the part yet ....” and comparing reactions. He keeps saying, “This is soooo much better than the Iliad!!” Sorry Homer, you just don’t make the cut!

(Not Very) Wordless Wednesday

2010-08-11T08:07:00.000-07:00

First a short explanation of last week's WW. The bubble men were part of an advertising campaign that was outside of Comic-Con. That it took us 2 days before we figured out what they were advertising shows that the ad campaign was cool but not effective in its message! Anyway, the bubble men were made by Flogos, a company that specializes in large bubble figures. You can read the FAQs for the company here.

This week's (Not Very) Worldless Wednesday features "Chinny", the Black Chinned Hummingbird who has taken on the mission of guarding our backyard from any and all hummers who are tempted by my feeders.

Can you find him in there? He likes to perch on a small twig that gives him a view of the whole yard.

There he is! He knows us, so doesn't even flinch when I'm right on the other side of the fence.

Summer Reading

2010-08-07T14:47:00.000-07:00

I’ve managed to read at least 15 books since mid-June, putting myself ahead of the book a week pace after being behind for so long. Here’s a brief summary of the hits, and luckily, no real misses.

The happy new discovery of the year for me and for my son Mike, has been all the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett. I know we’re late to the party as everyone else seems to have read them already, but we’re awfully glad to be here! I’ve only read 4 of his books so far as I’m also reading other genres, but Mike is on a steady diet of the things, impatient for me to get to certain titles. I love the dry humor, the absurd situations, the colorful characters, but I especially love that there there is a story that draws me in keeps me turning pages.

I finally got to Laurie R. King’s 2 most recent installments in her Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes mysteries, The Language of Bees and The God of the Hive. I also went back and reread the first from the series, The Beekeeper’s Apprentice. Maybe I’m outgrowing these books, because while I like the writing and the pacing, I’m starting to find them a little too fan-fictiony. Mary Russell is a good character, and her meeting Sherlock Holmes in the first book makes perfect sense, but the books could have been just as strong with her as the only detective and without her marrying the man. I also tried Laurie R. King’s other detective series, The Art of Detection, that happened to have a Sherlock Holmes tie in. Really good mystery, good characters, a real police detective book. Nice to know there another series by this author I can turn to now.

I’ve finished the 3rd Temeraire book by Naomi Novik. The Napoleonic Wars! With Dragons! It sounds bizarre, but it works, and she manages to weave in some interesting themes, such as the issue of slavery, making these especially good reads, I think, for teens. Fantasy loving adults have lots to enjoy too.

Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco was terrific, but depressing as could be. His realistic depiction of Medieval life was just a tad too much for me -- I couldn’t focus on the mystery as I was too upset by knowing a poor girl was going to be burned at the stake. I came to realize that I prefer a more romantic version of olden times than a realistic version, hence my enjoyment of fantasy lit.

Simon Tolkein’s The Inheritance was a great page turner suspense/mystery.

My favorite book of the summer, though, is one I picked up at Comic-Con. The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss is a terrific beginning to a fantasy series. The prose is lovely, the characters are slowly revealed in a clever manner, and the world is believable. There is none of the clunky exposition that bogs down many fantasies. The passages where he puts us inside the mind of a musician transported when making music are poetic yet realistic. A dragon getting high on opiate trees is a funny adventure romp. It isn't an epic hero quest, but there is an epic hero whose story we are learning almost in a backwards fashion. Now I have to wait until March for the next installment.

Wordless Wednesdays: Bubble men

2010-08-04T10:08:00.001-07:00

Beginning of the End...

2010-08-02T13:27:00.000-07:00

I made a list at the beginning of the summer of all the books I thought I'd get to with my son before he graduates. Too many books for one last year of homeschooling and he has a long reading life ahead of him, so I winnowed the list down to a manageable number. Recently I've been organizing the titles into somewhat logical groupings. My plan is to have us do all the grouped books together, but we can do the groups in what ever order feels right.

I've got the Southern grouping, featuring civil rights, integration and race relations:
Huck Finn
To Kill a Mockingbird
Flannery O'Connor short stories
Invisible Man.

I've never read Flannery O'Connor nor Invisible Man, so am looking forward to reading them myself. Mike expressed an interest in re-reading Huck Finn as he had read it when he was 10, I think, and was disappointed that it wasn't more like Tom Sawyer.

Then there's the Shakespeare fest:
Bill Bryson's Shakespeare book
Macbeth along with Terry Pratchett's Wyrd Sisters to liven things up
Midsummer's Night Dream along with another Terry Pratchett book
The recent BBC Hamlet with David Tennant and Patrick Stewart

Mike has been exposed to Shakespeare since he was a wee lad, either attending Old Globe plays, acting in kid versions, or reading them in class. I'm not entirely sure what Terry Pratchett will bring to the study, but everything is better with a bit of Discworld thrown in!

Back to American Lit, we've got some early American authors to explore:
Moby Dick (which we should be starting this week)
Nathaniel Hawthorne short stories
Edgar Allen Poe short stories

Moby Dick we are reading just because it seemed like a terrific summer project. It is already August and we haven't started, so clearly we weren't that enthusiastic about the idea...

I'm going to inflict more poetry on the lad. I have yet to pick out which poems, but I am going to make sure he writes an academic paper on a poem, just to stretch his writing muscles.

I've got a couple of chemistry titles for him, too. If these were available at Audible.com I'm sure he would have read them already:

Uncle Tungsten
The Disappearing Spoon

Because Mike enjoys fantasy, sci-fi, and a good parody, I thought I should introduce him to gothic literature by way of:

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey.

I can't bring myself to assign something by one of the Bronte sisters -- I myself have never been able to get through Wuthering Heights.

I may add other titles to the final short group:

Animal Farm
Fahrenheit 451

Or I may decide, due to homeschool guilt, that he needs to read Steinbeck or Dickens before he graduates and assign Grapes of Wrath, or Great Expectations.

I've got my list of related Teaching Company lectures to go with most of these titles, and have happily spent many hours reviewing SparkNotes before deciding on a title. I just love the planning part of homeschooling. I'm going to be lost next summer when I no longer have to plan, no longer will have an excuse for searching the library catalog and Amazon for hours on end in order find the perfect works to assign my kids.

Wordless Wednesday (a day late)

2010-07-29T07:53:00.000-07:00

Scenes from Comic-Con 2010

Trolley station signs in Klingon

Boba Fett and a storm trooper kicking back

Shrek getting a touch-up from Fiona

Comic-Con 2010

2010-07-25T11:51:00.000-07:00

Comic-Con, the annual pop culture extravaganza in San Diego, has one more day to go, but I think I’ve had my fill for the year. My nightstand and wallet can’t quite take anymore book purchases! Comic-Con has nearly been taken over by the Hollywood marketing machine such that comic book artists, writers and retailers are an after thought, shoved into the far corners of the exhibit hall. But interestingly enough, book publishers such as Penguin and Del Rey have a fairly strong presence and bring in many well known genre writers for signings and panels.

I sat in on 4 of these discussion panels, and was as always entertained and wowed by how interesting and intelligent these authors are. Well read, as you would hope, and articulate, as you would also hope, and full of interesting opinions and a passion for their favorite genres.

This was the third time I’ve seen Christopher Paolini at Comic-Con, and once again he was delightful. The topic for his panel was “The Hero in Epic Fantasy”, and the question came up about the trope of the protagonist being a “chosen one” or having a “destiny to fulfill”. The first author to address this, Patrick Rothfuss, enthusiastically proclaimed he detested it, that it was a weak and hackneyed plot device, just a bunch of crock perpetuated by weak writers. Christopher Paolini was sitting next to this guy, and said, “Well, as someone who has invested most of my life now to writing a series about a boy with a destiny, I have to disagree with you,” and then he went on to very eloquently defend the trope. I wish I had taken notes on what he said, but I was really impressed by him, by his bringing up examples from literary history to discussing how and when the trope works.

I did buy Patrick Rothfuss’s book, The Name of the Wind, as he was a riot on the panel and I myself am rather sick of chosen ones in every fantasy book I read. Got him to sign my copy, too!

I was also very taken with China Mieville who was a special guest of Comic-Con. His recent book, Kraken was reviewed in the New York Times Saturday. What I love about him is between his intimidating looks (shaved head, lots of piercings in one ear) and his educational and political background you’d expect his books to be dark, brooding and full of heavy political themes. In reality he is a regular geek who simply lets his active imagination flow onto the page. He was very funny, humble, thrilled he can make a living as an author, and clearly intelligent. I’m really looking forward to Kraken and exploring his other titles.

The one author I wanted to meet but just didn’t get to was Naomi Novik, who writes the Temeraire books. I did get to see her on a panel of authors who mix genres. They talked quite a bit about the challenge of pitching their ideas, of publishers and booksellers categorizing their books. I would have loved for them to talk more about how they research and plan these mixes of genres, but they ran out of time.

I waited in line for a signing with some other fans of scifi and fantasy, and we talked about not having books for authors to sign as we use e-books and audiobooks. We were joking about autographable skins for iPods and iPads and Kindles. As we talked we shared favorite authors, and one woman recommended I try Lynn Flewelling, so I picked up The Bone Doll’s Twin.

I also wound up with free copies of George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones and China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station. I now have quite a stack of books to get to between these new titles and the books already queued up at home such as the rest of the Temeraire books, all the Discworld books my son wants me to read.

When I wasn't in panels or waiting for an autograph, I was busy taking photos of people in costume. I'll post some of those in the next few days.

52 Books in 52 weeks: A review!!

2010-07-16T12:39:00.000-07:00

Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks

by Ethan Gilsdorf

I started out really enjoying this book. Ethan Gilsdorf’s personal story of being an awkward and unhappy teen who found refuge in weekly games of D&D was honest and resonated with me even though I’ve never played D&D. I liked that with each chapter he explored all the various permutations of fantasy fandom from Tolkein society meetings to D&D gamers to on-line MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, to the people who are building a castle in France using only Medieval materials and methods. It was an honest and affectionate, if sheepishly uncomfortable look at all of these groups of people and activities.

And yet it wasn’t as satisfying a book as it could have been. He never got past his own deep embarrassment of his geeky D&D playing past. He swung between being a star-struck fan-boy of the Lord of the Rings movies and being incredulous of adults who spend weekends deeply involved in role playing games. His chapter on on-line RPGs like World of Warcraft sounded the stereotypical alarms of adults who give up on real life in favor of their on-line avatar. He ultimately couldn’t settle on whether the book was about his own unresolved issues or about the burgeoning fantasy and gaming industries.

I think the book would be best for people who know little to nothing about all these different fantasy worlds but have children, siblings or friends who are happily immersed. It explains different games, and groups, and profiles normal and well adapted people who love their spending their weekends deep in fantasy mode.

Wordless Wednesdays: Summertime

2010-07-14T13:39:00.000-07:00

writing...

2010-07-08T09:11:00.000-07:00

It is the silliest thing.

I write and write all kinds of creative and passionate posts on the WTM homeschool forum, but when I try to put some of those posts into a short essay for my blog, I can't do it. I've got at least 4 carefully crafted introductions that lead to no where, and in the meantime this blog stagnates.

Very silly. I clearly have opinions and things to say, but I'm not saying them.

Stay tuned.....

End of the school year

2010-06-02T07:27:00.001-07:00

It is a mixed bag of a home school year, I think.

The good:

my World History and Literature survey course, if I do say so myself.
all the terrific books he read, the discussions we had and the papers he wrote
my son's taking responsibility for his own education

The bad:

all the terrific books we didn't get to
my not pushing enough here at the end of the school year

I'm reaching the end of my homeschool career as my ds will be taking some of his courses through the community college next year. He wants to be challenged and pushed, just not by me!! And that is ok, because I'd rather be a mom than a homeschool task master, I've decided. A huge part of our mother/son relationship centers around books -- fiction, science, great and silly books. We love to share books with each other and discuss them. I'm thrilled for the chance to be left with only being responsible for literature as it is what we do best.

One more year, possibly two, but my homeschooling days are waning.

Wordless Wednesdays: A tasty cookie tribute to Lost

2010-05-26T13:10:00.001-07:00

About Those Dreaded Gaps

2010-05-07T15:39:00.000-07:00

I’ve heard it in person, I’ve seen it on message boards. Homeschooling parents are terrified that one way or another they will fail their children by leaving gaps in their education. Gaps in history, gaps in grammar, gaps in math. Something or another will be forgotten unless a rigorous curriculum published by an expert company is used exactly as laid out.

To this I say “phooey”.

Of course there will be gaps! Thousands of years of world history and literature, music and art, not to mention language and math, and you expect your child to have covered it all, and remember it all, by the time they are 18? Nonsense! Why waste your time in worrying about gaps when gaps are inevitable?

But parents are still stuck with the worry. What should a homeschool parent be doing if it isn’t cramming facts into their children on a regular basis? What is learning if it isn’t reading, answering comprehension questions, then memorizing those key points for the chapter test?

Here’s what I think. Education isn’t about memorizing dates, names, formulas and facts, especially these days with the internet at our fingertips. It is about mastering the skills you need to continue learning: reading, writing, being able to analyze the worth of the sources you use, being able to gauge the soundness of the logic in the arguments you hear. It is about learning to listen, to take the time to think, and it is about the joy of discovery. It is about building a knowledge of the world around you so you have a context into which to fit new information. The context comes from travel, from reading historical fiction, from reading biographies of scientists or explorers or through a pure study of history, but the context is best built through an exploration of something of interest.

What does it look like in real life homeschooling?

It starts with lots of books. Books about math, mathematicians, and numbers. Fiction and non-fiction books about anything -- airplanes, dinosaurs, theater, sports. Mythology, poetry and silly verse, classic literature and the much maligned twaddle that sometimes is the only material kids want to read.

Reading alone isn’t enough. Books should be shared and enjoyed together. Read together or read the same books separately and talk about the books. Read books you don’t want to read, but read them anyway because your child is passionate about them. Talk about the characters, talk about what you think is interesting and WHY you found it interesting. Point out facts that you never knew before and share your excitement in learning something new. Ask questions, then look up the answer on the internet and share what you found out. Learn about the author. Pull out a globe or atlas and look at the place where the book takes place. Use Google Earth.

Get the newspaper or good magazines. Muse is a great one for older kids and young teens.

Get out of the house and visit area zoos, parks and museums, and visit the same ones repeatedly. Kids will take something new from the same exhibits as they get older. Look at the book section in the museum gift shop to see if there is anything that relates to something that interests them. Attend lectures at the museum. Take your kids to classes at the museum and let them ask questions, but teach them good manner to not dominate a conversation, or not show off their knowledge. We think our kids are fabulous, but others are at these classes to see the teacher, not to hear your child enumerate all the facts she has picked up.

Talk about what you see at the museum or at the zoo, and make connections between what you’ve seen and what you’ve read.

Play games. Mad Libs, monopoly, scrabble, chess, poker or other card games. Let your kids teach you how to play Pokemon or Magic or other of the more recent card games. Do craft projects and science kits, let them build with legos, let them make movies or picture books with actual photos.

If you travel, make a point of visiting area museums or go on tours of national parks. If you don’t have the opportunity to travel, watch travel documentaries on places you’d love to visit. Pull out the atlas and Google Earth again and look for the Acropolis or look at the streets of St. Petersburg.

Listen to music, try new food, snicker at the silly clothes people are wearing in paintings from the 1700s.

ALL of this is part of learning, and by conversing about what you see and read and do, your children WILL be making connections between all those disparate pieces of information. Keep a small reference library at home -- a good atlas, a history and science encyclopedia. Plan your outings and readings around topics you’d like to cover, but be ready to follow your kids down random rabbit trails.

Be persistent in working on the three Rs, but remember the rabbit in the Aesop’s Fable -- slow and steady wins the race. Grammar one day, some dication the next, spelling the next. A bit of math practice each day. Oral narrations with younger children, adding in written narrations as they get older and essays in the teen years. Tackle a foreign language and tackle logic, but the centerpiece of your lives is the exploration of interests, and finding interesting ways of exploring those boring subjects.

So what about gaps? Doesn’t this approach mean that some critical period in history will be skipped? Some key literary concept overlooked? Some fundamental science facts missed? Maybe, maybe not. I’m simply not worried about it. My kids have a lifetime for filling those gaps, just as I continue to fill in my own gaps, and they have the skills and desire to continue learning.

I think an educated person is well aware of his gaps and is constantly learning and filling in those gaps. An educated person has a context into which he can place new information, and will have opinions on how important that information is, or on what significance it holds. An educated person is fascinated by the world and feels a lifetime isn’t enough for learning everything. My job as a homeschooling parent -- my quest, my goal -- is to produce young people with exactly that kind of education -- one with gaps but the ability and desire to fill those gaps.

When to give up on a book.

2010-04-18T15:10:00.000-07:00

My son and I both gave up on Galileo's Dream a few days ago. We each really tried to like it, and in fact did like very much the historical aspect of the book. As I wrote last week he brings Galileo, warts and all, to life. But the sci-fi part of the book -- not so much. The characters of the future sci-fi world are one dimensional, not very likable, and their motivation, their reason for intruding into the book, is very unclear. They were so patronizing to Galileo -- I didn't want them to have any influence on him or his work. If that wasn't bad enough, the sci-fi story completely "jumped the shark" into silly and unbelievable territory.

And yet Kim Stanley Robinson is such a good writer that we both kept thinking there had to be something more to the book, something that we just weren't getting. It made us feel dense, as if we were too stupid to see the profound message buried in the story. I finally started reading published reviews of the book, looking to see what exactly we were missing, but it seems the book has many people scratching their heads. The reviewers who did like it didn't convince me that reading to the bitter end would be earth shattering and worth while.

So, we put it down. I'm intrigued with his writing enough that I'd like to try another of his novels. The premise for The Years of Rice and Salt intrigues me, and I'd be reading it this weekend but the copy in my library is missing a huge chunk of pages.

Wordless Wednesdays

2010-04-14T08:34:00.000-07:00

52 Books in 52 weeks.. a long overdue update

2010-04-11T09:43:00.000-07:00

It is week 15 of the year and I'm on my 14th book but only my 5th blog post about books. Here's my list thus far...

1. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglass Adams
2. Leviathon by Scott Westerfeld
3. The Final Solution by Michael Chabon
4. The Little Book by Shelden Edwards
5. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
6. Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle
7. A Guide to the Birds of East Africa by Nicholas Drayson
8. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
9. Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier
10. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein
11. Sign of the Four by Arthur Conan Doyle
12. Country Driving by Peter Hessler
13. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
14. Galileo's Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson (still in progress)

Lost World, Remarkable Creatures and Galileo's Dream each have made me stop to think about the science I take for granted as each of these books deals with the state of science in a given time. Lost World of course isn't a modern book so when Professor Challenger's expounds on science facts it seems quait and antiquated. But Remarkable Creatures and Galileo's Dream are both newly released, and the authors had to put themselves into the minds of historical figures and have those figures react to their discoveries and grapple with what it might mean. It gives me pause that idea of extinction, for instance, was earth shatteringly new, 200 years ago, and it is extraordinary to me to how the authors bring that sense of wonder, awe and confusion to life as these characters struggle to make sense of what they discover.

My ds and I are both reading Galileo's Dream, but haven't quite finished it yet. So far --I'm about half way done-- we agree that the historical fiction aspect of the book is our favorite part. Galileo has come to life. The sci fi part we can't quite decide about, why it is there, whether it is worthwhile, how it is central to the story. It's that big question -- WHY did the author write this book? Tune in next week when I'll see if my son and I come up with an answer.

This and that

2010-04-08T14:18:00.000-07:00

I've experienced more earthquakes in the last 5 days than I have in the last 25 years. I'm beginning to get good at figuring out the richter scale number. "That was minor, probably a 4.6." "Now that, that was over 5" and the big one last Sunday was just plain WOW!!! Can't imagine what it felt like in Chile several week ago when they had that almost 9 earthquake. Don't think we'd enjoy that massive a quake as much as we do these little ones.

I've been slacking off in my reading. For no good reason other than I'm too preoccupied with the neurotic clutter rattling around inside my head.

This week's Lost was awesome. Desmond episodes always rock.

Need to practice violin today or I'll embarrass myself at quartet rehearsal tomorrow.

Back to that mental clutter. Can't decide if I'm a brilliant homeschool mom or a failure. I think I'm fairly reasonable and creative, but I'm not one of those hard-nosed "rigorous" moms who post all the time on the WTM board. What if I'm screwing it all up?!

Nerd cred

2010-04-06T08:37:00.000-07:00

Apparently the word "nerd" is not a pejorative these days -- it is rather a compliment of the highest degree. So says my 15 yo son, who patiently explained recently that "nerd" "geek" and "dork" are not interchangeable words.

Nerd, according to him, is a label you have to earn. You have to actually be knowledgeable and smart while living and breathing science or engineering or computers. Geek is a close second, but it is more of a wannabe level. Both nerds and geeks enjoy the same gadgets but geeks can't reach nerd status without earning some cred. Dorks are just idiots -- there is no hope.

My son has been working hard on his nerd cred. He has the geek level down pat -- Rubik's Cubes, logic puzzles, World of Warcraft level 80. He loves his USB missle turret that he has programmed to target anyone who passes too close to his work space. He makes bad puns referencing Lord of the Rings.

But he is making progress towards being a bona fide nerd. He built this from a kit, which to him means any fool could do it, but I think it is pretty cool and nerdy. It is an old fashioned Pong game:

What really cemented his nerd status in my mind, though, was how much fun he was having yesterday in learning how to use his new TI 83 calculator. He spent hours with it, and was ready to move on to new math topics so he could explore new functions on the calculator. It reeks of nerdom!

Wordless Wednesdays: Gifts from El Nino

2010-03-31T07:45:00.000-07:00

Wordless Wednesdays

2010-03-24T08:17:00.000-07:00

Time

2010-03-23T11:39:00.000-07:00

The one thing every homeschool mom yearns for is a little bit of alone time. If only we had some time to ourselves, why we'd be reading great books, quilting, knitting, we'd have a sparkling clean house. We'd be reading that book in a smartly decorated room, cuddled under a homemade afghan while enjoying an uninterrupted cup of tea. It is the ultimate fantasy of life without kids underfoot.

Here's the bizarre thing. With one child out of the house and the other done with all his outside activities for the school year, I'm finding I have hours each day to do with as I please - and I can't figure out what the heck to do with myself. If I spend time reading or working on a quilt, then I feel guilty about the dirty dishes in the kitchen sink and the piles of laundry waiting to be put away. If I spend time cleaning I resent that I'm using my free time on that instead of doing something interesting. I even am questioning the homeschool time I spend with my youngest, as if somehow that isn't a worthwhile use of my time either. I have this luxury yet am paralyzed with the worry that I am not using it wisely!!

It seems I'm at a loss without deadlines and young people needing my immediate attention. And I'm stunned that after 24 years of marriage and 18 years of parenthood, I still find it hard to fathom how much time it really takes to keep a house running smoothly -- the laundry, the groceries, the dust bunnies, the piles of stuff.

**sigh**

So much for blogging deep and profound insights into homeschooling. I have to empty the dishwasher now.

The joys of car schooling

2010-03-05T14:19:00.000-08:00

Homeschooling high school is, and this is a glaring understatement, a lot of work. More work than the earlier years because it really matters and it is the last chance for cementing skills and imparting wisdom before your kids fly the coop. I find older teens to be interesting young adults, but they still don't necessarily LOVE every subject, don't greet each school day with heart-felt enthusiasm. They still don't give me all the praise I am due for creating such brilliant courses of study for them.

The 4 day car trip I had with my son last weekend turned out to be a wonderful break from the worries and pressures of high school. It reminded me of the old days when learning was a simple, natural and unrushed endeavor, and it was a relief to see that meaningful learning, without assignments and expectations, can still happen with a teen.

I could have insisted we listen during the drive to a work from his world history and literature syllabus, but instead we listened to a book he had been impatient for me to read, Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. He talked about what he liked about the book, I talked about what I didn't like, we talked about Libertarians, and utopia and current politics. We compared the book to Dune, he compared it to Starship Troopers and told me not to read that one based on the things I disliked about this one. It was relaxing yet engaging and the hours passed quickly.

We also went on a couple of organized tours. Neither was really planned to connect to this year's science or history, they were just interesting and available. One was a behind the scenes tour of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which was quite interesting -- we could have spent another hour with that docent. The other was at the beach where the Elephant Seals hang out in the winter. That was quite amazing, and my son surprised me with some random knowledge of the physiology of the animals.

Part of me wishes we could school like this for the rest of high school. I'm a former unschooler who only planned for math during the early elementary grades, otherwise everything was learned simply through exploring the world via books, videos or being out in the world. My kids thrived with this set up, yet they adapted and thrived as things became more formal and structured. I guess it was a good reminder for me that it is still worthwhile to spend some unstructured time outside of our routine, that simply sharing books can be more edifying than dissecting great works. And with the high school years passing by so quickly, we definitely need to make time for a few more of these excursions.

Wordless Wednesdays: Ano Nuevo State Reserve, CA

2010-03-03T09:24:00.001-08:00

Car Schooling

2010-03-02T16:31:00.000-08:00

My 14yo and I spent the last 4 days together in northern California. We went up there for a robotics tournament in San Jose, but one of the unexpected pleasures of the trip was simply driving past all the happy California cows. It looks like Ireland or New Zealand, but the green hills are in California after a winter of El Nino rains.

We spent a day at the Monterey Aquarium, both in the exhibit halls and behind the scenes on a tour. We were delighted earlier in the day, though, to spot an otter or two out in the ocean just off the bluffs. This guy kept bobbing on his back, disappearing to get more food, then popping back up on his back and eating. Another happy, laid back California critter

The most interesting part of our trip was the naturalist led tour around the elephant seals of Ano Nuevo State Beach. Talk about your laid back creatures. They are slugs from the time they are born!

The above group are a bunch of pups called "weaners" because they have been weaned. Their mothers nurse them for about 4 weeks then take off. The little weaners hang out for another 2 months then get hungry enough to head out to the ocean and start feeding. Nobody protects them from predators or clumsy 1 ton bulls who sometimes flatten them. No one teaches them to hunt or swim -- they just hang out. The wild El Nino storms swept about a third of them away last month.

But aren't they cute?!!

The bulls definitely get a little weird looking, like some sci-fi creature from another planet, and they are only capable of galumphing along on the beach for a short stretch before they collapse for a rest. This one wanted to join our little tour group!

Elephant Seals were thought to be extinct back in the late 1800s as they had been killed for their blubbler. It was much easier to hunt the slug like seals on the beach than the big whales in the open ocean. A small group somehow survived and started reproducing and today a couple thousand return to Ano Nuevo beach each winter to give birth and mate, and again in the spring to molt. There are new colonies also forming on beaches further south along the California coast.

But the Elephant Seals seem unimpressed with their history and small gene pool.
The bulls in particular seem eager to loudly proclaim their awesomeness to the world!!

On my nightstand...

2010-02-23T13:53:00.001-08:00

Robin of My Two Blessings started a thread at the WTM boards asking "what's on your nightstand?", prompting me to pull out the basket of books gathering dust next to my bed and see what goodies are waiting for me there.

It looks nice and tidy, which is not typical for my house, but I have my rare artistic moments of organizational inspiration. There's at least 14 books in there, a small LED reading light, my paisley reading journal. And the basket leaves enough room for the all important kleenex box!

My iPod dock usually is on the table top, but it just died. I have at least 3 audio books to start and several that are favorites to listen to during the occasional bouts of insomnia, bringing my total nightstand library up to about 30 titles!

Some of these are Comic-con purchases -- the interactive Sherlock Holmes mystery is published by the same folk who brought you Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. The Peter S. Beagle and Wizards books are collections of short stories, and red lips is the first of the Charlaine Harris vampire novels. The book seller described the series as "literary crack"! I'm sure I'll devour them once I start.

The book with all the red rings is a collection of articles about wine. Loving Frank is historical fiction about Frank Lloyd Wright and it sounds interesting. Banana is a non-fiction history and economics and science tale about, well, bananas. I never read the Beedle Bard tales, which is silly because I'm a Harry Potter fan and it is a short book. The Nine Tailors I have read, and it is there for when I want to re-read it as it is brilliant. The collection of short stories, Say You're One of Them is amazing, but almost too visceral for bed time reading.

I started the Book Thief a while back and will have my 10th grader read it before the year is out. Which means I'd better get around to finishing it. Finally, Looking Beyond the Ivy Leagues is something I'm reading casually as the entire college search process has barely started.

Guess I'll avoid the library and book stores and get to reading all the good stuff I already have!

Wordless Wednesdays: Mid-morning in February

2010-02-17T10:15:00.000-08:00

Wordless Wednesdays

2010-02-10T11:24:00.000-08:00

Shouldn't a bird this exotic be someplace other than suburban Orlando?

Releasing my fledgling

2010-02-04T06:20:00.000-08:00

Last week my firstborn ds turned 18 and moved to the other side of the continent to start living his dream. I flew out with him to help him get settled in his new apartment and to share in the excitement of the first days, then said good bye and came home without him. I didn't cry when we hugged good bye -- he is where he wants to be in an excellent situation and I'm so happy and excited for him.

It struck me during the last week that setting your child free is much like giving birth all over again. The nesting instinct kicks in as you help them buy things they'll need, and help them choose what to take. The need to feed them and nurture them feels as primal as it did when they were newborns. Emotions are running high. And there is both the excitement of the new and the relief of not having to deal with the things that have become so annoying -- in pregnancy it was getting rid of that big belly, with a teen it is getting that huge teen personality out of the house. Just as when you gave birth, life will never again be the same.

Now I have to get used to a quieter house, but I'm looking forward to hearing all the news from my ds. I guess I'll eventually have to learn to wean myself from updates several times a day, but for now I'm thrilled to have Facebook and Skype and text messaging.

Homeschool Mondays: reality check

2010-01-25T19:39:00.000-08:00

I was going to write about how to create a course, or more specifically how I create a course around my ideas and all the materials I find while researching.

But I think I need to throw in a caveat here. All the brilliant plans, exciting reading lists, and carefully delineated check lists don't do any good sometimes because life gets in the way, or more often than not, your student just doesn't "get 'er done". My 10th grader is in many ways the ideal homeschooler. He loves to read, is inquisitive and articulate. But he has hit a wall this year, which I can partially attribute to his stage of life -- the brain-dead-throes-of- puberty-stage. Much of it, too, is pure laziness. He is still doing good work, but just enough to get by and all at the last minute.

I'm distracted by all the details involved in packing up my oldest for his move across country so I'm not being a hyper vigilant and involved homeschool mom. Ah the guilt!! Here I want to blog about homeschooling to encourage others to find the wonderful world outside the curriculum box and yet I can barely squeeze an essay out of my 10th grader. Ack! The hypocracy!

The reality check is that I'm like every homeschool mom: wracked by doubt and second guessing and positive that all those other moms are really doing a much better job....

52 Books...week 4

2010-01-23T09:59:00.000-08:00

The Little Book by Seldon Edwards

The table of paperback books at Costco is much too hard to resist as the pile of unread books on my bedside table can attest. The Little Book was an impulse buy from last summer which I finally got around to reading. Part time travel book, but mostly historical fiction set in Vienna of 1897, it is a fun, interesting and unpredictable read. I think the back cover blurb by Maureen Corrigan from NPR's Fresh Air has the best summation: "A...thing of joy whose only purpose -- and I mean this as a compliment -- is to delight and entertain."

What makes this book even more delightful is that it is the first novel by author Selden Edwards. He explains in his note at the end of the book the genesis of the idea over 30 years ago and it's subsequent evolution through many drafts over the years.

My boys....

2010-01-20T10:13:00.001-08:00

I took this photo of my 2 boys and our dog on Thanksgiving Day.
Now the boy in the brown shirt is taller than the boy in the blue.
And next week the boy in the blue is moving to the other side of the continent.

They drive me nuts, and they drive each other nuts.
But they are going to miss each other.
And I'll miss all their silly conversations and jokes.

Book Review

2010-01-16T05:50:00.000-08:00

The Final Solution by Michael Chabon

I don’t know what took me to the “C”s in the fiction section while I was searching for a library book, but I happened upon a lovely short mystery by Michael Chabon that features a very old and retired Sherlock Holmes. While Holmes is never mentioned by name, it is obvious who the old man is because of his bee hives, and how his skills of old come into use, and because his neighbors have heard was once a man of some renown.

It is the summer of 1944 when a young boy and his African Grey Parrot wander into the view from Holmes’ front window. The boy is a Jewish refugee from Germany, and his parrot spews out long lists of numbers in German. The parrot disappears the same morning as a murder and the local police come to ask for Holmes to help in solving the case. The murder doesn’t interest him, but he agrees to assist the constables in order “to find the boy’s parrot”.

Chabon’s prose is simply lyrical. It was just a joy to read and, this is a silly comment, but he used so many wonderful words, some of which I didn’t really know, but that couldn’t have been replaced by anything else. “...the flashing heliograph of his smile”, for instance. I just loved it.

Homeschool Mondays: The Joy of Researching

2010-01-11T07:32:00.000-08:00

True confession: A very strong argument can be made that the only reason I homeschool is to have an excuse to a.) buy books and b.) to pretend like I'm back in grad school doing research.

I love doing research. I love the process of discovery, the serendipity of finding a wonderful book on the library shelves when I was looking for something else. I love making new connections between seemingly unrelated topics. I love Google though there are times when I clearly need to learn how to refine my search parameters. I love that Amazon has reader reviews and the lists other readers create. I like the simple act of scribbling down titles and ideas, I even love the look of my notebook pages when they are filled with messy lists and tiny sideways commentary about books or library call numbers. I love how much I have learned by simply researching topics for homeschooling.

I also love discussions on the WTM high school discussion board about books that teens have loved or that moms recommend. Over the years I've jotted down several pages of titles, and while I have used only a fraction of them, it has been an excellent starting point for planning a reading list or a course.

The research part is easy. Start with a germ of an idea and do a Google search. Throw in the words "lesson plans" to get a different subset of hits. Go to Amazon and search for books on the subject, read the publisher's description, read the reader reviews, then click on the related titles they suggest. Look for documentaries. Then search your local library to see if they have any of the titles you like. Head to the library and browse the section where books or DVDs on this topic are shelved and look for other titles that you missed in your searches. Sit down right there in front of the shelf and flip through all the books on that topic. Do the same thing at your local book store.

Deciding what is worthwhile isn't always so easy. There are many insipid reader reviews on Amazon, but there are also thoughtful reviews about the merits or shortcomings of a title. I only bookmark a tiny fraction of Google hits. I look for sites that have really useful activities, or that have nice back ground articles. You have to trust your judgement, something that will become more refined as you gain experience in teaching a class or developing a course for your kids.

I do this kind of research for every course and class I have ever planned, and I don't find it all that time consuming or overwhelming. It does require some quiet time, but since I enjoy it, I'm happy to spend my free time googling and searching. Some of the wonderful things I stumbled upon include a wonderful series of NASA lesson plans on Newton's 3 laws of motion which I have used in co-op settings and just with my kids. I found playground physics activities I did with an elementary science co-op and I found high school level biology projects for my 10th grader. I ordered a cinematography book from Amazon for my oldest ds based on reviews, and learned after it arrived that it is considered "The Bible" of cinematography titles.

The funniest part is that between my research and Christmas shopping, Amazon has no clue what my real interests are. The recommended titles that show up when I open the main page are laughable -- today I am greeted with a list of Lego books and sci fi titles, several editions of Arthur Conan Doyle's Lost World and a smattering of Disney trivia titles. They'll never know the real me!

Book Review

2010-01-07T14:04:00.000-08:00

Leviathan by Scott Westerfield

I bought this book solely based on the cool map on the inside cover. It is a stylized map of Europe during WWI, with the countries drawn as beasts such as Russia as a giant bear with it's mouth open and giant teeth ready to eat Germany, and Italy as literally a boot. I love imaginative illustrations and there are more by artist Keith Thompson scattered throughout the book.

Leviathan is a young adult, steam-punk adventure novel. It is WWI, but in an alternate universe where Darwin learned to create hybrid creatures that work like machines and the Germans designed enormous walking tanks much like the AT-ATs in Star Wars. This alternative world felt real and plausible and I was immediately drawn into it, and wanted to spend time in this world.

The main characters though are the standard issue for all young adult novels -- the tough and feisty girl who is out to prove herself in a man's world, and the uncertain boy who has a destiny to fulfill. I liked them, but my 14yo gave up on the book about a third of the way through because he said he has had enough of these types of characters, that their story arcs are always the same. While he appreciated the unique illustrations and steam punk setting, it wasn't enough to keep him engaged.

My biggest problem with the book is really a quibble, though. It could have been a stand alone book, but it is of course set up without a resolution because there will be another in the series. Harry Potter at least had a conflict and resolution in each of the 7 books, but this was 440 pages of exposition.

I think this would be a great book for any young lover of fantasy and sci-fi, and for any reluctant reader. It has enough real history for introducing a young reader to WWI, and cool machines and "beasties" to keep them interested. I love the fact that there is a trailer for the book which uses the illustrations to promote the book on YouTube (and imbedded in the author's website.) Check it out here on You Tube.

Wordless Wednesdays

2010-01-06T11:34:00.001-08:00

The view from my book. Two weeks ago.
Wanting to be there with another book.
Right now...

Homeschool Mondays

2010-01-04T05:56:00.001-08:00

Based solely on the forums at the Well Trained Mind, I see a trend among homeschoolers to abandon the unique freedom of homeschooling in favor of formulaic learning in the form of prepackaged curricula. They may not all be doing "school in a box" like Calvert or Sonlight, but it seems everyone describes their school years and their children in terms of products: Lightening Lit, Omnibus, IEW, Beautiful Feet and so on.

I think it is such a shame that the art, the freedom and the joy of creating a unique education for our kids is being lost or abandoned because of the shiny and simple offerings of publishers. Just as the standard public schools have squashed independent thinking in their students, these products do nothing more than offer summary questions and essay questions that are designed to shape a certain "world view". There is no room for opinion, no room for interpretation and the need for the student to defend his position.

There is almost the mind-set that an auto-didact is inferior to someone who passively receives pre-packaged information.

There is an obvious need in some subjects for a curriculum, the most obvious examples being foreign languages, math, logic and grammar. By high school there is a need for a science text for the formal lab sciences. But why for history and literature? Why limit science to a text book and lab manual? Why limit math to the problem set after each lesson? Why is it that homeschool parents can't or won't research, think through then distill material and ideas when those are skills we want to instill in our kids?

I'm going to spend Mondays writing about the nuts and bolts of being an independent minded homeschooler, and hopefully be honest too about my shortcomings and how I'm handling them.

Mind Voyages

2010-01-01T19:23:00.000-08:00

My virtual WTM homeschooling buddy and reading partner in crime, Robin from the blog My Two Blessings, has come up with a reading challenge for 2010 called Mind Voyages. It is a reading challenge designed to get the reader to explore a broad range of sci-fi and fantasy. There were several titles on the lists of Hugo and Nebula award winners that caught my eye, and I'm reading Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy at the moment, so I figured, why not?!

Robin asks "what do you think about" when you hear the words science fiction and fantasy. I think about some of my favorite tv shows and movies -- Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Doctor Who. (I'm writing this in fact while watching the Doctor Who New Year's marathon on BBC America.) But when I think of the literary genre I see a real crap shoot! There are books I love and books that have astonished me, there are brilliant and imaginative authors. But there are so many books that are too bloated, too predictable and formulaic. While reading Dune last summer I started wondering what it is that makes one author able to immerse a reader so effortlessly into a believable alternate universe. Taking on this challenge offers the opportunity to look into that question more deeply, and while I may not come up with any profound answers, I'll write some reviews and ponder on the good and the bad of the books.

I'm also going to keep reading everything else under the sun, and continue blogging about homeschooling the high school years, but I like having something to focus on.

52 Books in 52 Weeks wrap-up and moving on

2009-12-30T21:34:00.000-08:00

I did it!! Yay!! I read 53 books in the last calendar year!!! (Actually, I read more but didn't officially start counting "school" books until April)

I just answered some basic questions about the year on the Well Trained Mind forum but thought I should expand a bit here especially on the question of what I learned through all this reading.

It isn't surprising that my list is so eclectic as I'm a fairly eclectic person in my tastes and interests. My list reflects this as it includes everything from fluff to classics to science to biographies and history. I learned so much about the world, made new connections through studying the Iliad and Beowulf. I originally left "school" books off the list, such as Beowulf and Lord of the Rings, but I shouldn't have. Reading The Two Towers after studying Beowulf was an enlightening experience -- there, in Tolkein's work, were kennings and the details of heraldry that I had learned about through Beowulf. It wasn't simply description to skim over as it was when I'd read it before, it was there for a reason and evoked a long gone world. The Iliad has proven just as enlightening to me.

I learned that I'm still fascinated with China, and can easily re-enter grad-student mode. I finally read The Good Earth, which I can't believe I skipped while being a Chinese Studies major! I'd have to look at the book again to fully explain my reaction to it, but Pearl Buck definitely was pinning lots of positive Protestant qualities on the protagonist while yet painting an accurate picture of pre-revolutionary life in rural China.

I learned a great deal about science, thanks to A Short History of Nearly Everything, and Death By Black Hole and The Pluto Files. I learned about crazed and obsessive birders in To See Every Bird and The Big Year. I loved learning in Julie Andrews' memoir that she knew TH White because I had just finished Once and Future King and had really enjoyed it. I was intrigued my Maria Tallchief's life -- ballerinas are fascinating women.

I learned the beauty of listening to a good reader by listening to Nadia May's recordings of several Jane Austen books. I never laughed out loud when reading Austen to myself, but Nadia May made the dialog and comic characters come to life. I loved the narrators for Life of Pi and Citizen of the Galaxy. I crocheted an afghan and 5 scarves while listening to books!

I learned that many books are forgettable. There are books I know I enjoyed, but they left no lasting impression on me. I learned that I don't like mystery books featuring sleuths who solve the mystery by dumb luck. I want them to have some brains and a method. It took most of the Stephanie Plum books for me to realize that, but now I know.

I learned the joy of having a fellow reader in the house. My 14yo ds has been a great book-buddy as he recommends titles to me and loves discussing what we read and listen to.

As for next year? Well, I've got Julia Child's memoir about life in France, my ds really wants me to read Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, I want to read Marcel Theroux's Far North and I have a stack of books by my bed waiting for me to open them. I want to finally read Austen's Masnfield Park, but don't think Nadia May has a recording of that one -- egads I'd have to read it on my own! I'm going to read Kim with my ds and Book Thief, but haven't settled on a major classic to tackle in the spring semester.

(Not very) Wordless Wednesday

2009-12-16T09:06:00.000-08:00

Here are some pictures of Team 135's adventures at the FTC robotics competition held in the Los Angeles area last Saturday. While our team came in 13th out of 14 due to a series of battery issues, we homeschool moms and dads were really proud because our kids didn't give up, and kept working on and tinkering with the bot until it was time to pack up and go home. They spent last night's meeting planning on redesigns and solutions to other problems that they can fix before the next competition in mid-January.

In the "pit area" tinkering on the bot.

In the staging area before the first round.

Our sparkly MC who works at JPL.
Someone joked they had never met an extroverted engineer until that day!

Each team gets to have 2 drivers and one coach on the field for each round.

One of the rounds in which our bot actually moved and scored points...

Our motley but loveable team of homeschooled kids!

Home (school) for the holidays...

2009-12-08T16:22:00.000-08:00

My first Christmas season homeschooling left me stunned because I couldn't figure out how to homeschool while at the same time letting my inner Martha Stewart out for her annual holiday run. Moms who have kids in school have those hours during the day to shop, decorate, vacuum, and have fun. Working moms at least get a lunch break and commute time without kids. But homeschool moms get to deal with the hyped up spirits of their kids 24/7 during all the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas. How do you shop and prepare holiday surprises for the little darlings when you are with them all the time? How do you get them to focus on math when the ornaments for the tree, or the wrapping paper is out?

I used to give up on anything that looked remotely like school during this period. We baked and decorated cookies and made lots of crafty presents for Grandparents, aunts and uncles. Lucky them!! I still have the sculpy clay ornaments we kept along with the "Palantirs" or giant clear balls into which we'd pour and swirld around paint. We read aloud, went out to look at lights, watched old movies.

After 10 years it is just as difficultto focus on school. The college kid is already done with classes and recently quit his job, so he is home and underfoot. And sick. There are music obligations that pull me away mentally and physically. And there are rain storms which beg for afternoons of cookie baking. I made school plans for December, and the State wants evidence of schooling for the month.

But....

Regular school just ain't happening this month. Soon enough my youngest son will be away at college studying for finals during these weeks -- we might as well enjoy ourselves now. We spent yesterday afternoon, during the rain, watching the movie Shakespeare in Love. I made cookies and we started putting up Christmas ornaments. Today we started reading The Tempest while listening along to an audio dramatization. We're going to watch Forbidden Planet next week and compare it to Shakespeare's play.

We're going to the Getty Museum on Friday, staying in the area to head to a robotics competition the next morning. We'll listen to audio books in the car, he is keeping a journal for the month about all he reads and does. Add in a little biology, geometry and Spanish and it's a month well spent.

Wordless Wednesdays

2009-12-02T08:33:00.000-08:00

Update...

2009-11-30T13:47:00.000-08:00

Life is busy so you'd think there would be so much to write about, yet I have so little to say about any of it. My attempt at posting something each day utterly failed, but it isn't necessarily a bad thing....

Homeschool -- we're staying on track, but I wonder incessantly if we are going deep enough or if he is retaining any of it. In other words, is all this work worth while? Is he challenged enough in math? Memorizing enough biology terms? Making any headway into learning Spanish?

Music -- It is the crazy Christmas madhouse of music obligations. And yet, every year I get to play such wonderful music with a great group of people that it isn't a chore, just a drain on time. I will find out tonight if my assessment of the Rutter Magnificat is right, that it isn't difficult to play, and the make or break element is how well the conductor handles all those changing meters.

Motherhood -- my oldest is flying the coop in 2 months. I wonder if I have prepared him well enough for the real world, will he know how to handle money, checking accounts, bills, the odd head cold?

Christmas -- having fun being creative in making gifts. Too bad this creative impulse didn't hit earlier or I could have gotten more done! Looking forward to making cookies in a few weeks, and really looking forward to hanging out in Hawaii!!

Project Feeder Watch Starts Again!

2009-11-15T19:43:00.000-08:00

Project Feeder Watch has begun. We'll be doing our first counts this week, and I'm already excited that we get to add Lesser Gold Finches onto our list. I finally broke down and bought some Nyjer seed, which apparently to the gold finches is the "good stuff". I had no idea they'd be so picky, or that so many of them were hiding in our neighborhood all this time.

They clearly love the stuff -- even hanging upside down to get to the one spot that is missing a perch!

Thorougly Thursdays

2009-11-12T20:45:00.000-08:00

Thursday afternoon included a team meeting for Mock Trial and a visit to the Natural History Museum, where, lo and behold, they were having a book sale!! Oh frabjous joy!!

One of the books I picked up is this fat and silly gem that was 60% off list price:
Yes, it is called 10,001 Titillating Tidbits of Avian Trivia, and that is what it is.

There is a section with 10,001 bird trivia questions followed by a section with 10,001 answers. There is also an index so you can look up titillating tidbits on your favorite bird, such as the Turkey Vulture, or Mourning Dove. Hours of nerdy fun for the bird obsessed and bird brained. Our drives up and down the freeway will be ever so much more entertaining!!

(almost) Wordless Wednesdays

2009-11-11T09:03:00.001-08:00

Holly the golden retriever loves it when we decide to do math on the living room floor. Her boy is doing a geometry proof on the white board, so she squeezes right in between us, happy that she once again is doing her duty as Math Dog.

My Philosophy of Home Schooling

2009-11-10T21:55:00.000-08:00

I've had this page in my homeschooling notebook since the first year I started homeschooling:

I don't remember exactly what my day had been like to prompt me to write this out, but I know it was written during our first year of homeschooling. It is something I still turn to if I need to remind myself of what it is that we're trying to accomplish in this crazy journey.

So you don't have to get out a magnifying glass to decipher my handwriting, it says:

What is my philosophy of education?

That learning is possible anytime, anywhere, forever
That there is nevertheless a body of knowledge that must be absorbed:

world history
world geography
arithmetic
general science
literature
arts

That there is some discipline, organization of thoughts critical thinking

that has to be learned
questioning, critiquing, categorizing, connecting>analyze
expressing the ideas in clear organized fashion, speaking writing,
logic, then and Latin added as subjects.

My problem is: how much time does it take to do this?
each day? week? year?

These thoughts that I jotted down one night still resonate 10 years later. I still struggle with balancing my unschooling impulses -- I believe wholeheartedly that learning is a life long endeavor and works best when not structured -- with my pragmatic side that recognizes the need for teaching and refining skills. This has been the method to my madness.

Did I succeed? Are my kids successful? Well, yes, they are as a matter of fact.

Did I fail in some things? Well, world geography isn't a strong suit of theirs, in spite of my best efforts. Latin? Yeah, well, choose your battles. And a fellow homeschool mom gave me grief recently (in a teasing way) because my 14yo didn't know who Benedict Arnold was. I figure he at least knows how to use Wikipedia and NOT to use it as a source in a research paper.

A real homeschooling day...

2009-11-09T17:34:00.000-08:00

What is a real homeschooling day?

One where I'm home all day and available to help and share in every subject. It is a rare treat!

We listened for an hour to the Iliad, through Hector's death. While we listened I did some crocheting and my ds played the card game SET, and with a stack of strong magnets. He is someone who needs to fidget with something while listening. Ds thinks I should refer to him from now on as "my glorious, blazing boy" just as Hera addresses her son Hephaestus. Will watch the next lecture by Dr. Vandiver on the Iliad while eating dinner.

We played with the Rummy Roots card deck, reviewing some basic Greek and Latin root words. We hadn't looked at those cards in years -- I found them while searching for SET. Planning on using the Rummy Roots game cards for fun once in a while. Ds suggested we combine it with Mad Libs...

DS watched a biology lecture, and is continuing with a Douglass Adams natural history book. It makes him laugh out loud from time to time.

We did a geometry lesson together -- the text that was perfect for his brother is a mixed bag this time around with this kid. I think we'll stick with it and fill in the time with algebra review and maybe some algebra word problems (if I can find that perfect suplement...)

I read a Spanish story aloud, then had ds translate. Reviewed vocabulary and some grammar.

Ds also fit in a Logic lesson and based on the sounds coming from the next room is currently waging battle on World of Warcraft. He has an hour of Par Kour tonight.

Impending doom?

2009-11-08T12:48:00.000-08:00

So much for daily blogging!

Friday was a busy but great day with a robotics team meeting, listening to The Iliad in the car and spending 2 hours exploring the non-public, science areas of our Natural History Museum during their annual open house.

Saturday was a rare treat -- a day at home doing nothing more taxing than vacuuming, laundry and watching a movie.

Today I am dealing with a deep sense of foreboding. I normally try to fight my inclination to be a pessimist, but I sense doom. My husband has a violent stomach flu and knowing how virulent those flu bugs are, I'm thinking there is no way to duck this one. I've got to prepare the house, kitchen and the homeschool to do list so the menfolk can function without me! And on top of that is just the simple horror and uber ick factor of the stomach flu.

**sigh**

Crepuscular

2009-11-05T20:09:00.000-08:00

My ds and I had some time to kill in between an afternoon class and an evening meeting so we headed to the zoo just before closing. It was the perfect time to go as there were very few people and many of our favorite animals were up and about. And best of all I got to use the word "crepuscular" in its correct context. Crepuscular was a favorite adjective to use in Mad Libs, for some odd reason, I guess because it is simply fun to say. But rarely do we get to use it in everyday speech!

Wordless Wednesdays

2009-11-04T13:14:00.001-08:00

NaBloPoMo

2009-11-03T20:03:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure why I decided to join this daily blog posting group. I mean, my life isn't all that interesting to have something profound and worthwhile to write about on a daily basis! But, perhaps the pressure of needing to write something, or post a picture of something each day will give me an incentive to do something useful each day this month.

My useful task for the day was spending an hour doing music homework. In this instance it was listening with headphones (earbuds) to a recording of John Rutter's Magnificat which our church choir and orchestra is performing in early December. I'm concert mistress of the orchestra, aka 1st chair 1st violin, and I figure I need to know the work really well before we head to dress rehearsals with the hired guest musicians. So I listened tonight, tried to figure out all the changing time signatures and made notes about things to ask the conductor. I pencilled in bowings, marked some cues in and made sure rests are marked at page turns.

I had never heard of John Rutter until I started playing church music, and he is now one of my favorite composers. He is a modern, living composer whose music has the dissonance and changing meters of modern music yet is very melodic and deeply moving. And it is fun to play! Not quite the marathon of notes that is the Messiah and Vivaldi's Gloria, but with all the changes of time signatures it keeps us musicians busy and focused!

52 Books in 52 Weeks update

2009-11-02T21:30:00.000-08:00

I haven't written about books since school started back up, but I'm still plugging away at the 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge, and am currently on book #49. woohoo!!

When I look at my list I want to categorize the titles into tidy groups by genre, because I'm somewhat smugly satisfied by all the different kinds of books I've read. Then I see the 10 or more Janet Evanovich books and think that I cheated in this challenge by devouring those books like a guilty pleasure snack. But balance is the key, and I definitely have balanced the fluff with some good stuff.

These aren't exactly formal genres, but the categories I see in glancing through the list.

Fluff
Janet Evanovich's books, all except #s 2 and 3 and the newest title.
Timeline by Crichton (my 14yo son and I both heartily disliked it)
State of the Union by Brad Thor (fluff for men that I started reading when bored at the beach)
Lost Symbol by Dan Brown. (never finished it after the bad guy died -- noetics, schmoetics)
Leopard Unleashed (a pure, guilty pleasure read which leads to the next category....)

Historical fiction -- some of which are also very fluffy
Vivaldi's Virgins (about the girl's orphanage where Vivaldi taught)
Jane and the Genius of the Place (a mystery with Jane Austen as the sleuth!)
Dreamers of the Day (Paris Peace accord after WWI)
Gurnsey Literary and Potatoe Peel Society (kind of, sort of historical fiction)
Physik Book of Deliverance Dane (also kind of, sort of...)
The Reader (read the book instead of seeing the movie -- seemed appropriate)

Science most of which I wouldn't have read except my 14yo son urged me to read them
The Pluto Files by Neil De Grasse Tyson
Death by Black Hole (same author as above)
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Classics
Northanger Abbey
Persuassion
Emma
Candide
The Iliad
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
The Good Earth
Once and Future King (is that a classic?)

Memoirs/autobiographies
All My Edens by Pat Welch (a local gardening guru)
Maria Tallchief: America's Prima Ballerina
Home by Julie Andrews
The Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson

History
The Man Who Loved China (about Joseph Needham)
In the Footsteps of Genghis Khan
Gengis Khan - a biography
The Lost City of Z (I liked it so much I'm assigning it to my son next spring)
The Right Stuff

Other good books, including some sci fi:
Dune (I had never read it!)
Dune Messiah (gave up on the Dune series after this one)
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince (had to re-read it before the movie came out)
Life of Pi (one of my favorite books of the year)
Garden Spells (maybe this is fluff)
Citizen of the Galaxy by Robert Heinlein

And finally
Non fiction
The Big Year (about fanatic birders)
To See Every Bird (part memoir, part biography of the author's dad, also about obsessed birders)
Catapult: Harry and I Build a Seige Weapon.

I'm surprised not to find a long list of mysteries as that is what I've mostly read in recent years, but they just didn't appeal to me for some reason.

Day in the Life

2009-10-26T21:15:00.000-07:00

Monday.

7:00-10:30 Quiet time for me. Coffee, breakfast, reading the papers. Shower, tidying up, filling the bird bath and one of the feeders. Decided to make muffins and almost burned them because of the spectacle outside the kitchen window -- 5 mourning doves on the fence all watching the finches zooming around the feeder. I had to grab the camera and try to capture it.

I couldn't get all the birds in focus fast enough -- still learning the digital SLR.

10:30 Kids up, thrilled to have muffins for breakfast.

11:00 The teacher from the charter school arrives with boxes of biology lab equipment for us!! Microscope, blank slides and 3 different single-station AP labs. Feels like Christmas in a geeky sort of way.

Brought the teacher up to date on everything and he reads over my son’s work. He sees this son weekly in the Mock Trial class, so it isn’t as if he has no clue what is going on in our lives, but it is his job to review work and assign grades.

12:00 Dad and college son out the door as is the teacher.

12:30 Head to the library to get books, and to stop by the pond next door. My son has made a collection net out of a plastic cup and a section of old hose. After getting a cup-full of pond water, we admire the ducks but as we didn’t bring binoculars and it is hot, decide it isn’t a great day for water-fowl watching and head home.

1:30 Decide it is going to be a lazy homeschool day. While the pond water critters settle to the bottom of the cup, we listen to and read books 10 and 11 of The Iliad. The audio recording skims over the gory battle scenes, actually it pretty much skips book 10, so I read aloud the highlights.

2:30-4:30 Indulge in a lazy afternoon. My violin student has cancelled, college student is out for the remainder of the day, so I don’t have to drive anywhere. Hallelujah!!

4:30 - 6:30 Play with microscope, slides and pond water. Try to identify critters through internet through sites like “Micropolitan Museum”. Dad comes home and has a turn with the microscope.

Decide not to cook. While the menfolk head out to rustle up some fast food grub, I fill in the lesson plans for the remainder of the week. We’ll have to be good about doing real school the rest of the week but really enjoyed our lazy day. Watched a recorded episode of Flash Forward while eating burgers from Chili’s, then will finish laundry and settle down with library book.

Wordless Wednesdays

2009-10-21T11:59:00.000-07:00

Happiness is a pair of warm puppy slippers.

Sunday afternoon planning

2009-10-18T15:39:00.000-07:00

I can't decide if this is lazy procrastination or necessary work. Probably a little of both. Here I sit on the couch, surrounded by a biology textbook, a SAT II biology subject test prep book, and the outline of lectures from a Teaching Company biology series. Thanks to google I have added to my list of biology bookmarks. I've got us signed up for Project Pigeon Watch so we can have fun with a unit on Mendelian genetics.

My goal? To match Teaching Company lectures to the text book and to be sure every biology topic gets covered before the middle of June next year. Do I follow the order in the text book or the order in the lecture series? Can I find lab ideas and work sheets to match all the topics? Does something at least cover material in the SAT II prep book? Does my ds appreciate how much work it is to do this homeschooling prep work? (I don't want to know the answer to that one!)

This is what the pile of work looks like from today. Sadly that last cookie is now gone, and I still have to finish planning Spanish lessons for the next few weeks. That may call for a glass of wine.

The sad thing is I have no idea what we will eat for dinner. Even sadder is that there is no coffee in the house for breakfast tomorrow morning. Now I am in procrastination territory. Sit here with a glass of wine while looking over Spanish materials, or face the Sunday afternoon grocery store hordes? Hmmm.

Wednesday

2009-09-30T12:08:00.000-07:00

If I were a Twitter Tweeter, the morning would look like this:

Googled "Iliad teacher guides". Best hit? A where's Waldo style find it cartoon including, Zeus, Waldo, the Trojan horse and a catapult.

Google search of Iliad Fagle is much more fruitful.

Searching for Celtic fiddle books for my students. $70 and an hour later have books and fingerboard tape on order.

Good grief it is time for lunch.

DS has a blog more random than this one. Why does he hide his entertaining writing???

In denial of marathon afternoon and evening of 5 violin students and orchestra rehearsal. Need chocolate. And coffee.

Friday

2009-09-18T12:33:00.000-07:00

I spend my life organizing and managing things, driving, teaching, coaching and cajoling. I am not one fulfilled by completed tasks, however. I can easily ignore dirty dishes in the sink. I recharge by reading, researching and wasting time on pointless video games on my iPod Touch. Aurora Feint is my addiction, though I also love Chicktionary.

But not being motivated by that great feeling of completed tasks leaves me here on a Friday afternoon, surrounded by all that is undone. The clumps of dog fur that need to be vacuumed. The laundry sitting wrinkled in the drier. The bills that need to be paid. The Beethoven that hasn't been practiced.

So in keeping with the spirit of doing anything but housework, I now shall stop and count my blessings, listing all that I have accomplished this week:

My quartet rocked the sanctuary last Sunday playing Mozart at 2 services.
I got the orchestra music organized, numbered and passed out.
Created a schedule flier to give to all the orchestra members.
Taught 3 violin lessons.
Played in orchestra rehearsal.
Finished reading Life of Pi.
Read Persuasion and sighed once again over the line "You pierce my soul". I am such a sap!
Drove ds#1 to the train station for college classes Monday and Tuesday
Drove ds#2 to robotics, par kour and mock trial classes
Reviewed and corrected 3 geometry lessons (not much to correct, really).
Taught 2 Spanish lessons.
Cajoled ds#2 to write an overdue thank you note (which he finally did.)
Celebrated with ds#1 and family over his acceptance into the internship of his dreams.
Reviewed biology chapter and watched a dvd lecture in order to finish planning for the week.
Poked about on internet for inspiration for writing assignments to give to ds#2 next week.
Walked ds#1 through his first banking transaction.
Met a friend who is recovering from an operation to get a bit of slow exercize with her.
Tackled the dishwasher filter system to try to figure out why dishes aren't coming clean.
Made dinner last weekend -- 2 nights in a row!
Remembered to buy ice cream at the grocery store...

By the end of the day there will be a few more things to add to the list, then it is time for some wine and movie watching with the family!

Tweaking

2009-09-11T17:31:00.000-07:00

Almost all the outside commitments have been scheduled and we've had 2 weeks to settle in and see how the planned curricula fits. Now comes a weekend of tweaking and modifying the plans to a workable routine.

I've not got a permanent biology text yet, though it has been ordered. In the meantime we're using a 10 year old edition from the library. The DVD lectures are a hit and there are some wonderful labs and extras on-line so everything should be covered. This is just going to be the course that will require weekly research on my part to figure out labs and quizes and projects as I haven't made a semester long syllabus.

I'm enjoying Spanish as it is at a level I am comfortable with. I realized quickly that Breaking the Barrier is not a great independent study program, but it is perfect for a homeschool mom who knows Spanish. I'm throwing in some Rosetta Stone as a supplement since we already have it and it will help with aural comprehension and with vocabulary development.

Geometry and logic look to be entirely independent courses. No muss no fuss which is great by me!

My history and literature course is good except I can't quite come up with writing topics or good discussion starters with this first unit. We've had other good discussions recently about bad literature and stupid exposition devices, but those discussions related to other books. Ah well, everything is a learning experience, right?

We're still trying to figure out how to best use the grammar and vocabulary books. They don't seem to require much time, yet I want to be sure they are still being studied and the material absorbed. It's one of those cases where I see why teachers (and homeschool moms) resort to lots of work sheets -- even though I don't think those really prove any learning has happened. It just **looks** better because a sheet of exercises has been filled out.

So begins 10th grade...

2009-09-01T07:28:00.000-07:00

The school year is starting -- time to dust off my blog and start writing again! We are going it alone this year with no outside academic classes, but more than enough outside activities to keep us busy.

This is how it looks:

Biology: Teaching Company DVD series -- two lectures per week. I'm waiting on Campbell's Biology: Concepts and Connections text but will use the Holt text in the mean time. We've got a microscope on loan from the charter school and I get to start planning labs. The goal is to take the SAT II exam in June.

Geometry: Jacobs -- fun text, algebra review mixed in. No muss no fuss!

Logic: Traditional Logic from Memoria Press.

Spanish: Breaking the Barrier. I remember enough Spanish from my youth that this seems easily do-able. I'm hoping too that my friend, a native speaker, will be available for some regular conversation practice.

Western Civ: A combo history and literature class of my own creation. I'm so jazzed about this, though my 10th grader may not love it as much! I'm framing it on another Teaching Company series called "Western Literary Canon in Context". I'm also using History of the World in 6 Glasses as an overview for different periods of history and DK's Story of Philosophy for background reading. His literary reading list is a combo of classics and modern works as follows:

Genesis and Exodus
Walking the Bible by Bruce Fieler (just sections)
Plato Apologies
An epic of choice, either Illiad or Aeneid
Shakespeare's Tempest
Longitude by Dava Sobel
A poetry unit using a series by Michael Clay Thompson
Candide
Faust
Kim
Lost City of Z by David Grann
All Quiet on the Western Front

Grammar and Vocabulary: Michael Clay Thompson has a nice grammar review series for high school and a corresponding roots-based vocabulary series.

Outside activities:

Robotics team with First Tech Challenge
Mock Trial
Fencing
Par Kour
Project Feeder Watch
and, time permitting, youth choir at church (his least favorite...)

All in all a very ambitious schedule around which I have to schedule violin students, quartet and orchestra rehearsals. Oh my!

Adventures with audio books

2009-06-29T14:42:00.001-07:00

I started listening to Sword in the Stone while commuting to a gig that was a 40 minute drive from my house. I really enjoyed it because it is so whimsical, so random as my teen sons would say. I can see why JKRowling counts it as an inspiration for her writing. It kept reminding me of the Harry Potter books.

I did not know, however, that when TH White decided to compile his Arthurian books, including Sword in the Stone, into The Once and Future King, that he edited and even rewrote big sections of each individual book. This fact set me up for a major case of befuddlement!

One afternoon when I was home and listening to Sword in the Stone, I drifted off to sleep. I could remember that Arthur was learning to be an owl with Archimedes, and when I started to regain consciousness he was in a giant's castle and King Pelinore was looking for his toothbrush. I wondered what on earth I had missed, but thought, no worries. I'll just re-read the section from our print copy of Once and Future King and continue on with the book.

Only problem was I couldn't find any mention of giants or toothbrushes. I started thinking maybe I had dreamed it all.

The next time I had a chance to listen to it, I started once again at the owl part of the story and once again started drifting off to sleep just as the episode with the giants was starting. Aha! There really is a section with giants, I thought. But the next morning when I once again flipped through the print edition I couldn't find it! I was beginning to think I was losing my mind. I was further perplexed because I also couldn't find in the audio version a section I had seen in the print edition where Arthur has an adventure with storks.

I was a perplexed. Puzzled. Befuddled. And a little worried about the state of my mind.

Fortunately my ds was also listening to Sword in the Stone, and I had told him about my confusion and questionable state of mind. He finally caught up with me in the book and was able to reassure me that there is indeed an adventure with giants, that King Pelinore had indeed been looking for a lost toothbrush! Hallelujah, I wasn't crazy! He was confused that there should be a chapter featuring storks, and was adament there hadn't been one.

I finally looked it up on Wikipedia and learned about the differences between the original Sword in the Stone and the version of it in Once and Future King. What a relief! The Naxos company, for some unknown reason, decided to produce an audio version each original book rather than the entire Once and Future King.

I have also learned that when my eyes start getting heavy to use the "sleep" function on my iPod dock so it shuts down after 15minutes!

52 Books in 52 Weeks: update

2009-06-27T17:55:00.000-07:00

I haven’t been blogging, but I have been reading. I’m up to 30 books now, though at least 9 of them are from a period of binging on Janet Evanovich books. I needed some escapist reads during the hectic month of May, and these provided a good diversion and some laughs. Her earlier books are better as by the 14th book it is getting old to have the protagonist continuing to be such a clutzy dope! Shouldn't she be improving by now?

There have been some other easy fiction reads, too. Garden Spells and the Gurnsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society both were predictable but enjoyable reads. Dreamers of the Day was good historical fiction placed in Egypt just after WWI. I enjoyed the first half of the book better than the second half when the author just couldn’t quite leave her academic voice out of the picture.

My 14yo convinced me to read Death by Black Hole, and I’m glad he did. It was intimidating to start simply because learning about astrophysics isn’t really something I look forward to reading for enjoyment, but Neil deGrasse Tyson is an engaging author. I learned so much, and want to go back to reread some sections that left me a little puzzled. What I especially loved was his exacting English that only a physicist can have. It reminded me so much of my physics professor father, and how he would get mad with tv reporters who weren’t exact in their explanations of things. Of how he would explain things. It reminds me of how great it was to have a physicist in the house to explain how things work!

Merry Month of May

2009-05-03T09:56:00.000-07:00

On the homeschool schedule for the next 5 weeks:

9th grader:
reading list:
Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff
finish DK’s America’s Century
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, watch Teaching Company lecture
TH White’s Once and Future King (possibly only the first book or 2)
last 3 chapters of Foerster’s Algebra, plus do the word problems I’ve been avoiding!
fit in at least 2 more geology field trips from Rise and Fall of San Diego
finish health book and create a final project
final projects for 2 charter school classes
final project in computer programming
Par Kour classes twice a week
apply for Zoo corp

12th grader:
finish IEW co-op class
tech week and 10 shows of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat
write two essays for honors award applications
cinematography final project
vocal ensemble concert
behind the wheel driver’s ed class
weekly theater class

Both must have work samples ready next week, final exams and projects ready early June.
Both have one more Sunday singing with Youth Choir then the awards dinner to attend

But wait -- there's more!

On the mommy schedule for the next 5 weeks:

Finish reading Right Stuff, Sir Gawain and Once and Future King; study Algebra
rearrange lessons for my 5 violin students around rehearsals and productions of:
Pirates of Penzance - 2 dress rehearsals and 4 performances, immediately followed by
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat -- 3 dress rehearsals and 10 performances
Faure's Requiem - 1 more orchestra rehearsal, 1 dress rehearsal, 2 church service performances
Quartet rehearsals for June gig with vocal group

Clean the house, do a bit of gardening to get ready for visits from family who are arriving for my niece’s college graduation in the middle of the last weekend of Joseph performances.

Plan something for 12th grader’s graduation.

***whew***

Who has time for a Swine Flu pandemic?!!

Wordless Wednesday

2009-04-22T08:24:00.001-07:00

More from our geology expedition last week. This stretch of canyon is surrounded by urban sprawl, bookended on east and west by major interstate freeways and on the north and south by suburban cookie cutter housing tracts. But once you hike in, as we did heading down from a housing track, you forget the city is surrounding you.

Field Trip

2009-04-17T22:21:00.000-07:00

My youngest son is doing Earth Science this year using a boring text book and taking a class that has some projects and labs. I decided it was time to break free of the formal studies and get out of the house to see the geology in our area. The inspiration for this is a terrific book by San Diego State professor Patrick Abbott called The Rise and Fall of San Diego. Starting with the Jurassic, each chapter describes what was happening in San Diego during each geologic period and includes field trips to see specific formations.

It was a beautiful day, so we grabbed the camera and a couple of water bottles and went hiking in a nature preserve to see some Jurassic period rocks.

The canyon floor is long and flat, a popular route for horseback riders and bicyclists. We were just about to turn around and give up hopes of finding these rocks when we rounded a bend and spotted this:

A giant boulder sticking up out of the ground. We were joking that it is San Diego's own Uluru.

Behind this monument is a small waterfall with lots of perfect boulders for climbing around and over. But what it really is, we learned today, is sedimentary layers that formed under the ocean during the Jurassic period. They've been up-ended and are lying on their sides now as you can see:

The boulders are especially cool as they are not the generic granite you'd expect, but volcanic-clast conglomerates as you can see below. The lovely green plant next to it is poison oak!

The sediment was also quite varied in color with red layers and gray layers that are apparently mud sediment. We never did find the traces of fossils, but hope to on our next outing to find some Cretaceous formations by the ocean.

That's me on the middle right , providing a bit of scale for you. I was enjoying the view while the 14yo youngster made like a mountain goat and scampered about all the boulders. All in all we hiked about 2 miles and agreed it was one of the coolest outings we've had in a while -- and the way homeschooling should be more often!

Audio books

2009-03-27T07:43:00.000-07:00

My 14yo loves listening to books. Always has. He can't get enough of them, re-listens to his favorites over and over. He listens while building legos or drawing, he listens while just hanging out. His working vocabulary was impressive at an early age, due largely, I think, to his hearing the words in use from his audio books. When he was 8 he was correctly using words like "affronted" and "resolutely". His syntax varies depending on his current favorite author as does the rhythm of his speech. He currently is sounding like Bill Bryson, and what is even funnier is that his older brother, who hasn't heard those audio books, is picking up on it and now is sounding like Bill Bryson too.

I really enjoy audio books, too, though I'm not able to listen for the endless hours like my son. I like how a good narrator can bring a story to life with different voices for the different characters, or how their phrasing can clarify the meaning of a sentence or paragraph. I like that hearing a book aloud, or for that matter, reading a book aloud, prevents you from being an impatient reader and skipping past the descriptive paragraphs or tedious expositions to get to the action.

The only problem with them is that you can't dog ear a page, or underline a particularly striking sentence. You can't stop and look at how that striking sentence is constructed, or stop to think about it's deeper meaning -- the narrator just carries you on to the next page, the next plot point.

I just finished listening to Northanger Abbey, and found myself laughing aloud quite often. The narrator was fabulous, but I need to get a print copy and find some of those sections that made me laugh. For instance, there was some very astute satirical commentary by Austen -- I don't think it was in the dialog -- about the perceived attractiveness of women who act dumb, or are dumb or stay uninformed on purpose. I was driving the car and laughing when I heard this bit, but I need to find it again to get the quote right.

I'm also reading aloud The Lord of the Rings to my 14yo, and am amazed at how much more I am getting out of the books by reading them aloud. I read them when I was a teen, but I've only re-read my favorite sections since then, and I had no idea how much I was missing such as plot points and characters. All that geographical detail still bogs me down, though! We're having a good laugh, too, over the biblical sounding language in the 3rd book. "And lo! Aragorn did crush the athelas. And the scent filled the room filling all hearts with gladness." Or something like that -- it gets to be a bit much!

52 Books in 52 Weeks: update

2009-03-20T06:43:00.000-07:00

If my 14 year old son has his way, I'm going to be reading mostly science books for the rest of the year. It is really sweet that he wants me for his reading buddy -- he told me last night that he needs me to read the same books so he will have someone to discuss them with. Problem is, I can barely keep up with him!

Since February, we've read To See Every Bird, by Dan Koeppel, A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson, and The Pluto Files by Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Quite the diverse range of topics, going from hard core birding to the far reaches of the galaxy to everything in between, but what ties these books together is one of the fundamental challenges of science -- how to define and categorize the things around us.

To See Every Bird, which isn't really a science book, but a memoir of the author's life with his birding obsessed dad, has a chapter all about "splits and lumping". It simply means that a single bird species can be split into 2 distinct species or conversely two can be lumped back together into one. It matters greatly to hard core birders as it changes the tallies of the numbers of species they've seen. Birders don't particularly care about the details that make one species distinct from another -- they have the single obsession of keeping a count, but it is the work of ornithologists who must decide what makes a parrot distinct from a pigeon from a peregrine falcon. Is it something structural? Is it their song? Their diet? It was a fascinating chapter.

Bill Bryson goes on at length in several different chapters about how many things in the world still defy classification. He seems a bit obsessed about the all the microbes and lichen and hominid fossils that have yet to be definitively labeled and classified, as if scientists are slacking off on the job. He also has very colorful stories of the lives of scientists, their mistakes and foibles, and the mistakes of the greater scientific community when they are reluctant to embrace a new discovery or theory. The book is a result of Bryson's own endeavor to educate himself. His enthusiasm is infectious and the twists and turns of his curiosity are unexpected and delightful, making all 500 pages go by quickly and effortlessly.

The Pluto Files is all about classification as it chronicles the discovery, naming and demotion of Pluto, which has gone from being "Planet X", to being the 9th planet, to being a simple dwarf planet in the Kuiper Belt. Neil DeGrasse Tyson was in the thick of it all in his position as director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City. He was in charge of the team designing the new exhibit space, which does not display our solar system as a line up of 9 planets, but instead displays them according to like characteristics. As Pluto is neither a rocky planet nor gas giant, it got left out of the display and a media fire storm ensued. The issue of Pluto's classification was finally voted upon by the members of the International Astronomical Union, who had to come to grips with the defining characteristics of what makes a planet.

Reading these three books has had me thinking about what science is and what should constitute a science education. Not that I'm thinking the work of science is only about classification, but rather I'm struck that science is a very active discipline which requires constant questioning and continual observation and lively debate. It has made me more convinced than ever that learning science solely through the passive activity of reading text books is a huge mistake, especially in the earlier grades, as it makes science seem like a static subject of memorizing terms and data. Good scientists and young children share the characteristics of observing the world then incessantly questioning why, qualities squashed by forcing learning from dull text books.

My son's science text book this year isn't helping my opinion on the matter, either. He dutifully reads each assigned chapter, but finds it dull, not in depth enough and written to confuse rather than enlighten. These books I've just described are, on the other hand, making his eyes light up, making him ask for more like them. He has already finished a book on Black Holes and is currently on Temple Grandin's book on animal behavior and is impatient for me to read them as well. I truly may never catch up with him!

I've been keeping up with my 52 books by balancing the non-fiction with fluffy non-fiction. Maybe I'll get back to serious fiction over the summer...

Wordless Wednesday

2009-03-18T09:58:00.000-07:00

It's springtime and the mallards are out shopping for a cozy cement pond for two...

Measuring Success

2009-03-14T17:16:00.000-07:00

The child that triggered our entry into the homeschooling world 9 years ago is going to graduate in June. He is a terrific young man, and I am for the most part satisfied that I've done the right things for him.

Yet I have to admit his education never quite lived up to all my hopes and aspirations. The detailed plans I had laid out, all the great books I had listed to read in each grade, and all the tomes on art, philosophy and science I had bought were put aside in resignation, one by one. We went from great books to "pretty darn good" books, to "dear God just let him read something" books. My dreams crashed head on into his reality somewhere in 7th grade. It shouldn't have surprised me as we had a similar crash when he was in 2nd grade that led to the decision to pull him out of school.

That decision to homeschool was the first radical adjustment I made to accommodate his educational needs, but it was an easy adjustment in those elementary school because he was a little sponge. But between his puberty and my increasingly grand educational plans, things stopped working in 7th grade and I had to readjust my expectations of what his education should be. But we hit a wall again in 8th grade and again in 9th, even 10th. Each year I'd have grand plans for hard core academics, get-him-ready-for-college academics, and each year I'd get frustrated and angry that it wasn't working. But I also knew enough to realize the fact that his interests are the best way to get through to him, the best way for him to connect with a subject and learn. He actually tests as gifted, but is hard wired differently than most. Somehow I had to make math relate to Disneyland, 20th century American history to theater, or theater lighting relate to science, that was the only way he would learn and thrive.

I finally raised a white flag during 10th grade and decided to just let him have lots of theater electives, pile them on and graduate him early so he can get out into the world and start working. The kid has not been typical since the day he was born -- what was I thinking in expecting him to be typical now?

I know he has at least some basic academic and life skills. He can write a decent 5 paragraph essay and writes with a passionate voice. With the help of ritalin he can read, take notes and study, but he will always need every accommodation a school can offer. He can clean a bathroom and cook some food, balance a checkbook. He may yet learn how to drive. But where he really shines is in the theater where he can easily put in a 12 hour day, singing, acting AND programing lights, and be happy as a clam.

Other moms congratulate me all the time, saying what a great job I've done, about what a neat kid he is. I don't know quite what to say. I don't know if I can take any credit as I feel like I've just been trying every creative way I can to keep up with this kid for 17 years now. He wasn't cut out for the typical school, so I have just tried to create an education where he can succeed. It is absolutely terrifying to have given him such an unorthodox education when everything in me screams for the traditional route.

The biggest credit to his success I think goes to the wonderful mentors who for the last 4 years have patiently let him explore lighting design, who have coached him in singing, and who have loved him through his ups and downs. Those same mentors now trust in and rely on his expertise. He has earned the respect of all the adults with whom he works because he takes his work seriously, is talented and has a tremendous creative energy.

So how do I measure my success in homeschooling him? If it had to be measured with SAT scores and college acceptance letters, then I am a dismal failure. But if I get to measure it by the kind of young man he is, then guess I am a success. Even if I can't quite take all the credit!

Project Feeder Watch

2009-02-26T07:17:00.000-08:00

My youngest son and I have been keeping track of all our backyard avian visitors as part of Cornell University's Project Feeder Watch. http://www.birds.cornell.edu/pfw/ We keep a tally for two days each week of the birds that come into our yard, then report our data on-line.

I've been amazed at the variety of birds we have and have been endlessly entertained by all the action happening right outside my kitchen window. I've also been trying my hand at nature photography, hoping to capture each of the species that stop by for a nibble or drink or bath. Pictured above is a white crowned sparrow. This little guy is a song sparrow who seems to build up quite a thirst with all his enthusiastic singing. He (or some of his friends) stops by to get a drink several times each day.
Talk about your giddy singers. This is a California Thrasher who has a song repertoire that rivals a Mockingbird's. He spent a weekend hopping from tree to tree just singing his heart out. Don't know if his performance was enough to win him the female Thrasher of his dreams. Or a spot on Idol...
The birds (and bunnies) seek cover anytime one of these is over head. It's a Red Tailed Hawk. They love to fight with the area ravens and don't do enough to keep the backyard population of bunnies in check.

This is a Western Tanager that stopped by for a drink last fall during a long streak of dry Santa Ana conditions. According to the folks at Project Feederwatch it is rare for these to visit backyards. My son and I were thrilled to get credit for a "rare" sighting.

52 Books: weeks 3 & 4

2009-02-03T07:38:00.000-08:00

For week 3 I read one of Stephanie Barron's Jane Austen Mysteries. This time it was Jane and the Genius of the Place, a foray into French intrigue and English fears during the Napoleonic wars. It's really just a cozy mystery, a period drama, all wrapped up in empire waist gowns and flowery Austenesque prose.

Week 4 took me back to China with another scholar from my Asian Studies past. John DeFrances, who passed away in January, wrote the text books I used to learn Chinese, and in fact was Professor Emeritus of Chinese Language at my alma mater, the University of Hawaii. I have no idea if I ever met him, as he certainly didn't teach any of my courses. I worked in the department reading room for a year, but I don't know if he ever wandered in while I was on duty. I discovered this week's book in an obituary about him, and was stunned my local branch library has it.

The book is In the Footsteps of Genghis Khan, the story of his 4000 mile journey in 1933 on a camel caravan, his imprisonment by a Mongolian war lord and his journey back to Beijing via raft down the Yellow River. The book wasn't written until 1993, and the first chapter is fittingly entitled "You Can't Do That Anymore", because you couldn't do such a trip today. There aren't camel caravans because trains take care of trade along those same ancient paths. Much of the area had been off limits to foreigners since 1949 because of tensions along the Soviet and Mongolian borders. (I don't know the current geopolitical situation -- do the Chinese and Khasaks get along better?). The western end of the Yellow River has been dammed, too, cutting off that route to the rafts of inflated sheepskin like he used.

It is a great read and an extraordinary story. He details the life of traveling with camels explaining just how sensitive they really are to the elements. They'd let the camels graze in the morning, have a large mid-day meal themselves, then start traveling mid-afternoon -- in the heat of the day -- through the evening. If the temperatures dropped too fast after nightfall the camels would have to be covered so they didn't get chilled. He describes in detail the varying terrain of the Gobi desert and how their guide would find the next well where they'd camp for the night. He describes the ruins of cities which Marco Polo once visited, and the ruins of ancient temples. He also tells the story of the Mongols and their migrations and the stories of Ghengis Khan. He doesn't make a big deal out of this point, but the raft journey down the Yellow River was necessitated by the advance of the Communist Chinese who were finishing their Long March and fighting to take control of the area.

This was the perfect arm-chair travel book, and has inspired me to pick up a biography of Ghengis Khan. But, I'm reading some fun and lighter fare before that, as I'm heading on vacation in a few days.

AWOL

2009-02-02T21:56:00.000-08:00

Weeks 3 and 4 of the 52 books challenge have passed and I haven't reported on my books. Homeschooling has happened, but I haven't reported on that either. It is all due to the sugar-induced stupidity that comes from celebrating two birthdays within a span of 10 days. But we've finished both cakes, the doughnuts are long gone and the brain is beginning to clear. I'll bring things up to date tomorrow.

52 Books in 52 Weeks week 2

2009-01-15T08:23:00.000-08:00

I have no regrets about the roads not taken in my life, especially since I get to vicariously enjoy one of those roads, my abandoned career as a China scholar, through wonderful books written by other travelers. The Man Who Loved China is one of those wonderful books that takes me back to my college and grad school days when I was a student in the Department of East Asian Studies.

The Man Who Loved China is a biography of Joseph Needham, the author of the multi volume Science and Civilization in China, one of the main reference tools from my student days. I still have on my bookshelf a condensed version of it, and pull it out from time to time to look up some date or fact when I'm thinking about Chinese history. One of the things that amused me while reading this biography was the realization that as a student I never even stopped to consider who had written Science and Civilization -- what kind of man would be driven to do that sort of tedious research, how did he do it and when. It was one of those reference books that was a fixture in the library -- that the author was still alive and publishing further volumes while I was a student came as a huge surprise!

The book isn't just for washed up sinophiles like me, though. Simon Winchester is a very readable author who has captured both the brilliance and eccentricities of Neeham. He also brings to life the atmosphere at Cambridge, the chaos of WWII China and the paranoia of the Cold War. It is engaging and edifying when it could so easily have been a dry, stultifying read.

I especially loved reading about Needham's travels throughout China during WWII. He spent weeks following the old Silk Road, finally getting stuck in an outpost noted for a system of caves filled with Buddhist statues and paintings. In another trip to Fujian narrowly escaped being trapped by the Japanese. He was based in Chongqing with Chiang Kai-shek, but managed also to befriend Chou Enlai.

I learned while reading this book that the author of my Chinese textbooks, John DeFrances, had just passed away, and in reading some obituaries and memorials discovered that he had traveled along the Silk Road in the 1930s. His memoir about those travels, In the Footsteps of Ghengis Khan, was amazingly on the bookshelf in my branch library, and is my current read. I plan on staying in China for a while yet, as I never read The Good Earth, and there are a few other titles that have caught my attention.

People often say to me how sad it is that I never used my degree, but I truly enjoy settling down with good books on China and revisiting my old student days.

Wordless Wednesday

2009-01-06T21:41:00.001-08:00

I call this one "Mourning Rush Hour", as the Mourning Doves love to crowd around the feeder every morning. There are 7 doves in the frame, and 5 more were pecking away on the ground below!

Beowulf

2009-01-06T07:43:00.000-08:00

The best part of teaching, whether for homeschooling or for a class, is the research and planning. I love wandering through the stacks at the library, or searching through all the books that are cataloged under the same call number as the title that brought me to that particular shelf. I can google for hours, cluttering my bookmark folders with links to all kinds of sites that I might never visit again. I love learning about things I never knew, and I love planning on how I'm going to share all this with my students. To me it is like the best part of grad school, without having to fret over formatting footnotes and bibliographies.

The current topic that has caught my attention is Beowulf, and the intended victim, er, student, is my 13yo son. He actually listened to the Seamus Heaney version a year or more ago, and was totally underwhelmed by it. How this can be, I just don't know. He is your basic fantasy geek -- plays D&D, World of Warcraft, collects dragon figurines and knows all kinds of dragon mythology. Has read most every fantasy novel shelved in the "Young Adult" sections of bookstores. Beowulf has all those elements, is the foundation for all the fantasy he loves, what was he missing when he first listened to it?

I've decided now is the time to do my best to bring Beowulf to life for him. I've read the material about it in the English curriculum we are using this year (Literary Lessons from Lord of the Rings), I've spent several hours on line and found a wonderful lesson plan (amid many awful lesson plans) that has taken one section of the poem and has it in the original Old English along with about 10 different translations. Coolest of all, in my opinion, was the recording of someone reading that same section in Old English.

So, yesterday morning, full of optimism, armed with great ideas, I launched us into a 2 week study of Beowulf. The lesson for the day, after going through an introduction to the work, was to listen first to the Old English recording, get a feeling for the alliterative meter, then compare 3 of the translations and decide which best captures the work and why. Is it better to have a prose version, or a more literal translation, or one that tries to capture the original meter?

It all started out well enough. The introductory material was interesting, so we moved onto the issue of translations. We listened to the Old English version which I thought was exceptionally cool and wanted to keep listening to. But my son wasn't so easily swayed by either the Old English or my enthusiasm. "Nah, I get it already. I hear the alliteration, I get it." Meaning, can we move on so I can hurry up and finish school?

I left him after that to study the translations and decide upon the best, and will hear back from him later today as to which he likes and why. Then we'll start actually reading and re-listening to the Heaney version, and if he still is unimpressed, then so be it. At least I know, after 9 years of homeschooling, not take it personally when the kids don't get excited over all this wonderful material.

52 Books in 52 Weeks

2009-01-03T15:55:00.000-08:00

In a euphoric fit of feeling like an integral part of the Well Trained Mind homeschooling-forum community, I joined the Book a Week club. There weren't any solemn oaths we had to pledge to join, so I'm not going to violate any codes of conduct by not keeping up, but I do feel a sense of duty with my reading now.

For that reason, I've been plugged into my iPod for most of the day listening to Bill Bryson's The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. I love the ability to enjoy a book while doing mundane housework, although my kids find it disconcerting to hear me burst out laughing in the next room. And I'm laughing quite a bit with this book. Bill Bryson has a very dry sense of humor, uses the most unexpected adjectives when describing ordinary things, and best of all with this audio book, he is the one reading his book aloud.

So much of his 1950s childhood reminds me of my 1960s childhood -- the Dick and Jane books, the cloakroom in the classroom, kids having lots of unsupervised time roaming the neighborhood. I think things in my hometown stayed rooted in the 50s until the hippies at the University became a force to be reckoned with, probably not until 1968 or so. I also am enjoying all the history he weaves into this memoir, things that had no bearing directly of him but are part of the history of the time.

But what really has me laughing out loud is that my 13yo son has already listened to this book, and I now understand why he had told me somewhat cryptically that he only really liked parts of it and the rest hadn't been so great for him. I realized today that what he didn't like was when things turn toward girls, nudity and anything slightly sexual. Nothing is graphic or pornographic, and there is nothing I regret him hearing. I also figure much of it probably went over his head as he has had a rather sheltered life thus far. But after I finished one chapter in particular, I had to pull out my ear buds and comment to my son, "My but you got quite an education with this book!"

"Yeah," he said with a disappointed look on his face. "That chapter was one of the parts I didn't really like."

"Well," I replied. "You can look at it as a sort of an introduction to the health course you have next semester. You've got to learn some of the nuts and bolts of things sooner than later."

He groaned in disgust, then mentioned something about the section in the book where Bryson talks about his teen years.

Oh my.....I can't wait to find out what more he learned from this book!

Happy New Year!

2009-01-01T09:21:00.000-08:00

New Years Day 2009 marks a big anniversary in our household. 9 years ago today I decided to pull my 2 boys out of school and start homeschooling them. It was a very simple decision to make, though the reality of homeschooling has been anything but simple! But here we are, starting our 10th year of this life, with my oldest ready to graduate in June, and the youngest in 9th grade. How did we get here?

I kept fairly detailed journals of our first few years of homeschooling. It was such a simple and sweet time, sprawling on the floor and reading aloud Greek mythology or all the Harry Potter books (there were only 4 out at the time) while the kids did dive rolls over me. I used to stop reading in a huff, insisting that they weren't paying attention, but they'd give me a very detailed synopsis of the plot proving that audio/kinetic learners do indeed exist.

Life got complicated when the oldest hit middle school, and we had to face the real challenges of all his learning disabilities. Things got even more complicated as my mom's health started to decline and I had to become more and more involved in her care and affairs. That period is such a blur except for the hours I spent reading aloud -- Hound of the Baskervilles, Christmas Carol, Watership Down.

Life is still crazy busy -- I almost titled this blog scatterbrained because that is how I feel some days. But it is a good kind of busy. I'm blogging to keep a record of this special time before the kids fly the coup, and to share with other homeschoolers as we all learn so much from one another.

Happy New Year!