Sunday afternoon planning

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

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

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

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...

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

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

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!