It seemed an innocent question enough. I knew someone who’d already started school. And the babies were bored. What harm could it do?

So I set out to start school two weeks ago.

First I had to hunt down all the curriculum. Problem: Imani’s 5th grade math book still hadn’t resurfaced. I had had to reorder. Good news: The new book arrived ca week 2. Problem: neither the answer book nor the test guide had arrived yet. So I gave Imani a 4th grade fact sheet. Fail.

Problem: The leap from Kindergarten to first grade means MUCH MORE busywork. Esteban’s school went from being a cute little play session here and there that was easily made up to an all-day work session, one of us ending in tears. Fail.

Joy reads much better this year, and cheerfully dove into her school work without me. Problem: she still needs me to help her understand assignments and tests. We started the second week reviewing week one. Fail.

Problem: it was still hot out, and we still had another fruit-picking trip to plan, and everyday I was pushing and waiting for school to be done so I could get on with my life, the whole while screaming inside that I was not ready for this. . .

So, we did a week of school, then a Monday. And as I was a hysterical maniac, I decided to stop school until I could mentally and physically prepare for it. I thought that the little children wanted to start school because they were bored. I bought more crafts, and started the origami and needlepoint craft sessions.

I took a personal day last week. That was very restorative.

I’m looking forward to starting afresh on Tuesday. Are you ready for school?

This summer, I pulled out a bunch of kits my mother had bought years ago for the children. One of them was a house you could assemble using brick and mortar. She had bought the dollhouse kit for Xay, my second born, to design a castle. I was intimidated by the idea of designing a castle. I couldn’t figure out how to make a house like on the box, let alone wrap my mind around round towers, turrets, etc. So, though we may have measured out how to lay the foundation on the provided platform back when we got the kit, we never proceeded with the house.

I wanted to remedy that this summer, and so we set out to make the house. Talk about an exercise in cooperation and patience! We copied the diagram best we could, laying out the foundational bricks. We mixed the sand mortar mix with water, and figured out how to lay bricks. We called Xay in to help at one point, but for the most part it was a project for the babies and me. Bricklaying was addictive. I wanted to keep going, and I ended up laying bricks where I should have set windows. Our project became very mortar-covered, and slightly crooked.

We let the house dry before we proceeded. The next time we worked on the house, Yanni helped us. We agreed we needed to tear the house down and start over. Thankfully, the mortar is water soluble, so we wet the house to pull the bricks apart. This time we glued the house to the foundation. Yanni worked on one side of the house while I worked on the other side. Imani did the ornamental work–the archways for the front porch. Joy laid bricks across the back wall, while Esteban scraped excess mortar. Even Chanya could spread mortar on a brick so I could lay it.

We worked on the house whenever we had time. Now it is ready for a roof. We still need to tile the roof. If we work on it daily, the house project should be done in about a week. We may drag it out by taking our time.

Structurally, our building is solid, but we have too many bricks on the front of the house. We make up for gaps in other places by mortar. We would do things differently if we started over again. It is not perfect, but it has been a great learning experience. When we finish this house, I’ll display it on the breakfront next to the other house. I neither want to make it again nor do I want to let the children play with it.

We have a wooden dollhouse kit beckoning us from the laundry room shelves. We have only just begun our dollhouse making adventure.

I have a few childhood origami memories. I think we did a unit on Japan in first or second grade, and we learned to write a character or two, and we learned to make a simple origami shape–a dog, or something. Then, as a teenager, I spent the night at our (unitarian) church folding paper cranes for our sister church in Japan. Why they’d want butchered terrible cranes done by American first-timers, I don’t know, but our goal was to make 100 or so cranes to send.

Joy, my crafty kid, was obsessed with creating the perfect paper airplane, so I thought she might like origami. I got a book, Super Simple Origami at Hobby Lobby, along with a 100 sheets of origami paper.

Intimidated by the pretty paper, I was paralyzed. I left it to Yanni to see what she could do with it. She was able to figure out how to make a balloon from the paper package instructions, but got stuck trying to use the book. I carefully tucked away the paper and book for a later day. That was at least a year ago.

When Yanni’s friend Jasmine came over one day, she asked for the origami paper. (How did she know we had any? Is that a usual provision in one’s house?). Jasmine has spent the summer working at the art institute, and she learned a thing or two about origami. She made various boxes and cooty catchers, and used up enough paper to pique the little girls’ interest.

I pulled out the book again, and discovered that, while the directions were in English, they still needed decoding. Not that I made this discovery from a rational mind. I was flipping out, throwing book and paper across the table in frustration, wondering what in the world a valley fold and a mountain fold was. I turned the book back to the introduction and found an explanation for the different types of folds, and even how they look in directions. I muddled through some of the birds at the front of the book, but really parked myself at the flower. This was what Yanni had been trying to make from the beginning.

The directions actually looked like you were to pull the pedals in a rounded direction, over the back of the tiny folded square you’d just made. I pulled it carefully, rip! There was much discussion as to what the flowers really looked like. Imani had her own version, that was very pretty. Joy and I mudded through to the penguin before I put the book and the (now basically ugly) colored squares away.

I talked to friends about how hard origami was, and they wondered why I’d even attempt such lunacy. I decided to google origami, and I found this site. The site further broke down the reading origami patterns code, and reacquainted me with my old friend, the crane. I made some rather shaky and inaccurate cranes before making a box. I really liked making the box, and I made a few. Then I wandered away from the traditional designs and tried to make the site’s author’s original designs. Doomed, I tell you! Doomed!

I went back to google. I found this site. The title, Origami That’s Fun and Easy caught my attention. This site even had designs for kids. I made a ladybug right away. Then I followed their directions for a crane, and it was nice and neat. (this has nothing to do with all my folding practice, right?)

Joy and I watched a video for making a rose. Talk about intimidating! The video had no words at all, just a pair of hands creasing, and re-creasing, and then gently coaxing the paper to form the proper shape. When she was done, she indeed had a beautiful paper rose. I decided to go back to the children’s designs. I made a cup. Then all the kids made cups. We poured actual water in them. They were thrilled.

But the real strength of this site is what happened today. The little girls asked if they could go to the Origami That’s fun and Easy site by themselves, and they started making things! They started out with the ladybug, and then the dog face. A little later, they made more cups, and by the time Joy was finished, she’d made a horse that flipped when you pulled its tail. She’d even returned to the book and made a cat face. Esteban proudly showed me his creations, and he even had origami on the brain at bathtime, folding up every towel he could get his hands on into some sort of shape.

Although I felt like a raving lunatic at some point this weekend, this is one craft I’m glad I stuck with. The patience, persistence, ability to read a diagram, follow directions that origami breeds is worth the time and frustration of starting. I see beautiful greeting cards on the horizon.

Laura Ingraham called this bribing students to do well, and she disagreed with it. She wondered why parents didn’t expect their children to do well of their own volition. Dr. Alonso pointed out the percentage of his students in foster care or homeless.

Neither was able to articulate that they were talking apples and oranges. The students Ingraham was talking about were children that had homes and loving, involved parents. Dr. Alonso was talking about children that were growing up essentially wild, having to raise themselves. These students could and do take advantage of everything Dr. Alonso and the Baltimore schools throw at them, including money for improved test scores.

He has had remarkable success.

I was troubled with the word, “bribe.” We have a system of positive and negative rewards in our home. If a child does well, they earn a positive reward. If they don’t do well, they earn a negative reward, which looks like a punishment. Everything in society is based on these kinds of rewards–why not prepare them for it at home?

What do you think? Do you consider it bribery or incentive to succeed?

So we had our carpets cleaned yesterday during a power outage. Hey, the guy had the power he needed in his truck, so we were like, go ahead and do this. The power came back on a half hour after he left, and the puzzle piece was left on the couch cushion.

Growing up like I did, it is nothing short of miraculous that the puzzle piece was found.

But, sometimes, you just get a feeling. Like everybody there thinks that all the black children there are yours. And I’m not just talking about people you don’t know–this is people I do know, that know what my children look like. . .

And the subtle snubbing the children receive from others–kids telling my very polite, well-mannered four year old to ‘cut that out!’ just because she was going down the slide.

Or telling my timid, friendly 5 year old not to cut. She didn’t even know what cutting was! And would never dream of jumping in front of some other child in line!

This is definitely why I started my own group. Thank God for my peeps!

That’s in the Bible too: Joshua 1: v.8: This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth; but thou shalt meditate therein day and night, that thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written therein: for then thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success.

So, we set out to get that WORD in their hearts. We have gone on read through the Bible campaigns with the children, starting over once. The last time we started reading at Genesis was in the fall of 1999. We are now in 1 Samuel. I don’t know when we’ll get through at this pace, but we are trying to read the Bible to the children on most weekdays. Now we have the NIV version of the Bible on CD, so we can go through a chapter at a time, rather than just a few verses.

At first, the children would just listen. Now Yanni and Xay take notes, while the little children draw in their own notebooks. Sometimes, Imani will ask a question about what she’s heard. Joy and Esteban seem oblvious just yet,

but then there’s the Bible reading I do with the little children at night. We started in Genesis a few months ago, and now we’re in Exodus. I said to Joy, “let’s read about the ephod.” And Joy started singing, “ephod, ephod, ephod, ephod.”

I think something’s getting in there. The other day, Joy asked a question about Jesus. So I know, at 4 years old, she is asking questions.

Another tool we use for teaching the children about God is praise and worship.

We get up in the 7 o’clock hour to praise, now. Yanni and Curtis have to be at work by 9, and my old worship time was 9:30, so the change was necessary. It does my heart good to see everyone up bright and early making a joyful noise. And to have my bass (Curtis) back! I know it must be pleasing to God, as much as it lifts my spirits.

Joy is usually pretty quiet during praise, but then she’s singing praise songs all day long by herself. And Esteban will chime in from time to time, even singing songs that Mani and Joy have learned at church: “David, David, show me the way to go. . .”

I think that’s the little bit of encouragement I need to carry on.

We also pray. We pray with and for the children. I have a fuel book, an idea I got from Terri Camp, a homeschooling mother of 7 I discovered on the Internet. She suggests keeping a notebook for each child and ask God what to do with/for the child daily. I’m not good about asking daily. I ask when I think about it. And sometimes, the assignment takes a long time to finish. But I do try to touch base with God about the children often. I also hand them over to Him, and pray for their salvation.

Yanni and Xay have confessed Jesus as Lord. Imani asked Jesus into her heart a few years ago. I would like her to grow in faith, and make sure she has salvation. Joyous doesn’t have a clue, but we’re praying for her salvation, and it is gratifying to see her starting to ask questions. Esteban and whoever follows him will also be prayed over and encouraged to get their own salvation. It is daunting, but it is also exciting to watch God work in the children’s lives.

We also encourage the children to read the Bible on their own. As soon as Xay learned to read fluently, we bought him his own Bible. His Bibleman paperback Bible was worn out when he eventually lost it at church. Now he reads one of the good leather Bibles! Yanni has her own feminine leather Bible, and I am encouraging them to read it through chronologically. Each read the New Testament first, then started over reading the whole Bible chronologically. Xay just finished reading the NT. Now he’s in Genesis. Yanni is in Numbers. I hope they both have finished reading the Bible all the way through at least once before they leave home.

I just signed them both up for the Teen Bible challenge. This is a quiz bowl type competition that will encourage them to memorize scripture. They will be going through various passages in the Old Testament this year, starting in the fall. I’ll keep you posted on how that goes.

Many days in homeschool, all we get accomplished is Praise and Worship and Bible study. That’s a worthy pursuit.

Curtis suggested I put her in preschool. I thought Yanni was a tad young for preschool, but then I found out that indeed, schools accepted children as young as 2 1/2. First, we had to get over the potty hurdle.

A good nine months after I started potty training Yanni, she had her first day at Sara Swickard preschool. I had liked this school, because they encouraged Yanni to play immediately, even during our tour of the facilities. It was part of WMU (Western Michigan University), so I figured they had all the latest research on child development, etc.

Really, I just liked how well Yanni clicked with the school. I knew it was a good fit.

She peed on herself the first day. “The kids asked me why I played with my yellow,” she told me. She didn’t have any more accidents after that.

Since I wasn’t working, I just dropped her off at the school two days a week. Yanni loved her teachers, Miss Nancy and Miss Anne, as well as the many college student volunteers at the school.

She learned how to read her name the first day. I showed her what her name looked like–it was hanging on the wall with all the other children’s names–and she never forgot it.

Sara Swickard was really a play school. The children were encouraged to play outside quite a bit, as well as the many make-believe rooms in the old house converted into a school.

When I got work as a substitute teacher, Yanni was already in school, so I could add days to her schedule if I needed to. When I took over Daddy’s classes for one semester in 1996, I put Yanni in for more hours, this time with the faculty discount!

I became an active parent at the preschool; I even became co-president of the parent board. I split the presidency with another woman, so that she was the president for the fall term, and I was the president for the winter term.

That’s the term the University decided to shut Sara Swickard down. First, the old house failed the inspection. Lead paint was found in the building. It would cost more than the University cared to spend to fix it, including hiring painters to work after hours. Ultimately, they decided that the land would be more useful as a parking lot than as a school. WMU wanted to outsource its preschool to a commerical daycare, Child Development Center (CDC).

As president, I created an emergency committee to address these issues, and we studied CDCs. We decided that this behavioral psychology mode of school was not what we wanted to expose our children to. Many of the student parents of Sara Swickard children complained about the price of CDC as well.

We called in the big guns. Don Cooney, School of Social Work faculty member, and activist at large decided to join our cause. We fought CDC tooth and nail, and we got the administration’s attention. They decided against CDC. . . but they still shut Sara Swickard down, in favor of a new daycare facility at a different location. The daycare was for student and faculty children only, so I, as a community member couldn’t even take advantage of it if I had wanted to. They decided on a daycare rather than a preschool, because then they wouldn’t have to pay teacher’s salaries for the workers, even though they insisted that the staff would be certified teachers. I don’t know how they managed that. . .

So, before Xay was old enough to attend, Sara Swickard was shut down, and I looked for a new place for Yanni. I hadn’t liked the Montessori schools I’d researched before Sara Swickard, even though the one at the Y was certified. The teacher there didn’t seem to like children, and the atmosphere was too quiet for Yanni.

We looked at the other Young Children certified preschool at the Croyden School. They were growing butterflies in the classroom, and they had water tables and other fun looking things. I wasn’t sure. . .

Then we found a place called The Looking Glass. It most reminded me of Sara Swickard, as it was also in a house looking building. They had so many things to play with that it was nearly impossible to pry Xay away after we dropped Yanni off there. I was impressed by their ‘big motor room’–a large garage like room with climbing structures and it was big enough to ride bikes, etc. in there–in case bad weather forbid them from playing outside.

We chose the Looking Glass, and Yanni had one blissful month there. Then we got the tuition bill. Curtis questioned whether Yanni needed preschool. I was surprised, considering that preschool was his idea in the first place. “I just wanted her to get away from watching TV with you all day,” he quipped.

By this point, I had given up soap operas entirely. Bringing Yanni home meant I had to do all her school myself. I was intimidated, but came up with a ‘curriculum,’ and I called our little experiment Yanischool.

Yanischool involved walks down the hill to look at the seasons. We collected nuts in the fall, made suncatchers and snowflakes in the winter, and taped little flowers all over the house in the spring. Xay went to storytime at the library regularly, and I tried to organize our days in themes. Monday was art day, Tuesday was puzzle day, etc.

Yanni played Reader Rabbit on the kids’ computer in the living room, and she taught Xay how to use the computer before he was 2. This was Yanni’s pre-Kindergarten year, and I was determined that she would learn to read. We had one learn-to-read book, called Tunafish Sandwiches (a gift from Zo).

Yanni didn’t like it, but I made her read that like everyday. The next year, she started Kindergarten. I put a note in her lunchbox everyday, and I expected her to read it. She was reading fluently in a couple of weeks. She tested at a 2nd grade reading level, and we skipped her to 1st grade after a month in Kindergarten.

I still don’t know when or how she learned to read.

When Xay was 3, we put him in Nature’s Way preschool two days a week. I thought he’d like the log cabin setting and the emphasis on science and nature. Xay did well in school, playing with the mostly boy class, learning the cute little nature songs, participating in the art projects. ..

but when I went in for parent student conferences, there was a bunch of academic stuff on the report. It said that he didn’t know his letters, didn’t recognize his name in print, etc. I asked if they were teaching that material, and they admitted that, no, they didn’t teach that to Xay’s age group. Then the teacher went on to suggest I get his hearing tested. Xay could sing in perfect pitch. There was nothing wrong with his hearing. “He doesn’t have a hearing problem,” I told her, “he has a listening problem.” She looked at me like I’d just spanked my child in front of the whole room. A week before his fourth birthday, Curtis and I snatched Xay out of Nature’s Way.

I started up Xayschool at home. We played a lot of math games we’d gotten from Yanni’s school. We did snack store. We went to storytime, and we spent a lot of time volunteering at Yanni’s school. When we moved into our house, Xay and I took long walks together everyday to get to learn the neighborhood. We also rode bikes. Trying to replicate Yanni’s amazing results, I made Xay play ReaderRabbit and Jumpstart Preschool every other day. We did letter hunts, which he hated, but to my dismay, by the end of this year, Xay still could not recognize all his letters.

By the fall, we’d started homeschooling, and Xay miraculously knew all his letters and their sounds. They must learn in their sleep!

I have since read a lot of homeschool literature among other things, and have come to the conclusion that children don’t need preschool. They don’t need curriculum either, especially little children. They learn quite a bit trying to copy you. Esteban comes running whenever I’m doing the laundry. I’m sure he’ll learn his colors that way. Yanni was quizzed near to death on her colors. She developed a tick, I’m sure, from all the incessant quizzing.

Now we’re getting on Xay for constantly telling Esteban to say something. Esteban talks freely without prompting. You can hear him copying sounds all the time. The other day I heard him singing this Spanish song from a game we play called pass the flower.

I have read about how children learn by playing–shoot I even took a grad level course on play for young children, so I know intellectually that it’s true. But durned if I know how it works, or when it works. I’m telling you, they must learn in their sleep.

I signed Yanni up for storytime once when she was a toddler. She jumped up and tried to grab Clifford the big red dog out of the center of the room. The librarian rebuked her for this, but said nothing to the next child that just grabbed Clifford and refused to let go.

At least, that’s how I remembered it. I decided Yanni and I didn’t need to return to storytime.

When Xay was a toddler, they were rennovating the downtown branch of the Kalamazoo Public Library. The had a special annex set up around the corner, and Xay and I found ourselves there often when Yanni was in preschool.

Xay was 20 months old when I signed him up for his first storytime. It was wonderful! Anne, the librarian was such a warm, grandmotherly type. She was delighted with Xay, who jumped on the computer at the library like an old pro and played the Curious George CD rom game. He also learned how to sit still and listen, which was very hard for him at the time.

We learned a bunch of cute little fingerplays and rhymes at Xay’s storytimes, like:

Xay would squeal with delight as he tried to keep his fingers out of his mouth. The librarians would sometimes hand out little dittos espousing the importance of rhymes for young children.

They were preaching to the choir. We were already convinced.

Xay went to storytime until he was 5.

His last preschool storytime session was over maybe a month before Imani was born. I took baby Imani to the library at 2 weeks old and introduced her to Anne. Newborn Imani took part in the summer reading game, and by the time she was 4 months old, I signed her up for the new program at the library, Mother Goose Storytime.

Here, we were introduced to delightful fingerplays for infants from birth to walking. One of our favorites was this British one:

I found myself studying the little handouts with all the rhymes we’d do. Otherwise, I couldn’t keep up. By this point, the other branches of the Kalamazoo Public Library wanted a chance to do storytime, so they started rotating to the different branches.

I met a few women in the Imani story group that I’m still friendly with if I bump into them. Two of them, Alice and Carrie, are neighbors. Alice came over with a meal for me just a few days before Joyous was born. Another mother, Debra, had been in the group since I joined. Our children had been in storytime together for two years when she brought over a baby gift for Joyous.

After Joy was born, it became harder to take Imani to storytime; they expect you to make other arrangements for your younger children during storytime. Imani took a break.

Joyous went to her own Mother Goose storytime sporadically. Again, I had to find something to do with Imani during Joy’s storytime, so it didn’t work as well for us. Thankfully, I knew most of the rhymes, so I could do them with Mani and Joy together at home.

Whenever we have to wait in line somewhere, I can trot out so many little songs and games and dances that the time just flies by.

This fall, I had Esteban and Joyous in different storytimes. I found myself at the library twice a week, usually at different branches. They just loved it! Joyous is old enough for preschool storytime now, so she doesn’t need her mommy in the room. Esteban has a great male librarian who plays guitar. We learned the Grand Old Duke of York:

This is a very active game, where I have to stand up in order to pick Esteban up and put him down, and flip him upside-down, etc. He loves it.

The Kalamazoo library also has a program for slightly older children, called M’nMs. That’s short for music and make-believe. This program, for 4-5 year olds, is a storytime with a musical twist. A string quartet from the Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra plays along with a story. First the children hear the story in the special storytime room, and then they go upstairs to the auditorium to hear the story again with the musical accompaniment. The last time we went to M’nMs, Esteban and Joyous also participated, despite their young age. That session was supposedly recorded for the local PBS station. I wonder how that taping turned out?

I got tired running to the library twice a week for both Joyous and Esteban and started alternating them this winter. We were in the middle of Esteban’s storytime session when Mommy died. We haven’t been back since. Maybe I can sign them up again in the fall. The libraries are wrapping up their school year programs and gearing up for the summer reading games. I will probably take the whole crew down and sign them up. Yanni is on the teen advisory board that helps design the youth summer reading game, so I know she’ll want to keep tabs on that.

Lately, I’ve been taking the three little ones to the Portage Public Library once a week. This library has a great enclosed children’s room full of toys. The children love the toy food and the phone booth. We never stay as long as they’d like, but going there once a week makes up for that, I guess. You can check toys out, if you want to, but I don’t think I could keep up with them so well at home.

During one of our many trips to the library, we discovered these cute little Beatrix Potter books. They are on the shelf right by the puppet stage at the Kalamazoo Public Library, so some pair of little hands naturally gravitated towards them. Aunt Florence had sent us a video of the original Peter Rabbit story, so we knew that one, but Beatrix Potter wrote many stories featuring cute little animals.

Her artwork is beautiful, and her stories are so witty. We found ourselves checking out The Fierce Bad Rabbit several times. That is more geared toward younger children, with several pictures per page, and few words. Mani and Joy really liked that one especially. We liked these little stories so much that we went to Amazon.com and bought the complete Beatrix Potter collection. Now, Mani, Joy, and Xavier can be found reading the stories and looking at the pictures whenver they want. Xay got up this morning and started reading to Esteban from this book.

We also found some more videos and DVDs of the Beatrix Potter stories at the Portage Library. So, for a week at a time, we can get immersed in the world of Peter Rabbit, Mrs. Tittlemouse, Pigling Bland, and so on.

When Yanni and Xay were younger, I took them to local bookstores for storytimes occasionally. We found out about the stinky cheese man at one of these. The story is in a book by John Sciezca, and illustrated by Lane Smith, called The Stinky Cheese Man and other Fairly Stupid Tales. The author, who is from Michigan, (I found out at the library), takes and butchers a bunch of familiar fairy tales, and the illustrations are pretty creepy. At the storytime, we thought the story was hilarious, and the children were given a chance to taste some stinky cheese. I think Yanni was 5, and Xay 2, and they both tried the blue cheese and they got a certificate of bravery.

Xay has since discovered The Time Warp Trioseries by Sciezca/Smith, and they were really the first chapter books that he blew through. Their books all kind of follow the twist on a classic theme, and are very funny.

It is hard to get out of the bookstore storytimes without buying something; I’m sure that’s the purpose. But, you can usually find whatever you like at the library, and then buy it later on. We didn’t buy The Stinky Cheese Man on that day that we first heard it, but eventually we did buy it. Probably at a book fair or something.

Esteban is just getting old enough to listen to stories. I have to hold him down, and he doesn’t quite have the patience for chapter books, but he loves anything with Winnie the Pooh. The original series, by A.A. Milne is another of my favorite children’s classics. The Disney versions have pretty pictures, but the stories are cheap imitations. I think I sense another trip to Amazon. . .

It started at the dinner table with a discussion about Fellah. My uncle has been in Denmark many years now, and is just hitting his stride. He turns 65 this year, and is wondering if and when he has to retire. He would like to do so in about 5 years, but may have to retire in 2 or 3 years.

The thing is, Fellah just graduated a few years ago, having been in graduate school since at least the 70s. He has blamed learning the Danish language for his delays, but Curtis suspects it is being in hard sciences to blame.

Daddy and Curtis started talking about how people in Asian cultures grasp onto the mathematic and scientific subjects and run with them, language barriers or not. How the parents ride the children, pushing them through the thinking required. How it just doesn’t seem to be a priority in our culture.

I wondered if it was thing Kwame was talking about. Kwame, from our small group, is from Ghana. He says that in Africa, they have a concept of one, of two, but anything more than two is ‘many.’ Kwame is a programmer, and well educated. He is struggling with complex number concepts to this day.

Daddy mentioned Rune, Fellah’s son. Rune, at 36, is a PhD with several papers and books to his name. He went into philosophy–that complicated math kind of philosophy. Curtis pointed out that in philosophy you don’t have to be precise, exact. In math and science, there is a right answer.

The conversation was on to something. I was beginning to see something. I asked if philosophy was then like IOE, Industrial Organizational Engineering–the field many of my engineering major friends in college ended up in. It was kind of like the psychology of the engineering field; kind of a cop out. Curtis said, yes, it was like that.

Then, Daddy changed the subject, and Curtis left the room.

I was left feeling inadequate as an educator. Curtis has laid down some direction that he wants the children to go. He wants them to be critical thinkers. He has told me what to do with them to develop that. They also need good old fashioned boring rote math skills. Herein lies a problem.

Xay knows money like nobody I know. I remember playing Monopoly with him as a young boy, 6 or 7, and he found out how much money he needed to buy a hotel, and was quietly adding it up until his turn. Xay didn’t even have a house yet. But he understood that he needed four houses in order to get a hotel, and he counted out the price for all that to the dollar.

Xay gets bored with traditional textbooks. He can do most simple calculations in his head, and doesn’t get the point of having to work anything out on paper. I have been working with him on long division, a weakness of his, lately. He just doesn’t get the whole operation of division–the sequence, the steps, the point, really. So I told him to find some math websites and play division games yesterday.

Xay found some multiplication games, and some sites that told you to work out the long division problem on paper, and then come back and check your answer with the computer. That was the dumbest thing he’d ever heard. So, today, I went and looked up division games myself. Most of what I found was times table drills, which I went through with him. He thought they were mildly interesting. Then, I found a tic tac toe game, which on the hardest level had long division problems. He really balked at that. He would have to do all that work, which would take ’5 HOURS!’ to play tic tac toe, where he could end up losing or tying after all that work! I told him that he could choose between playing one game on that level and doing one sheet of problems that I wrote for him. He thought about it, and chose the game.

He had finished the game before I had finished the laundry. That was more like one hour, if that.

Yanni is a tougher nut to crack. She never had Xay’s knack for numbers. I remember it took me a long time to teach her how to use the phone or the remote control, whereas Xay picked those up instantly. Then, we put Yanni in school, which totally broke something in her, math-wise. Having her skip Kindergarten just really sealed her confusion with math. In homeschool, I had her spend two years doing Saxon Math, which I’d hoped would shore her up, and redress any problems she’d had ingrained in school. No such luck, and it was taking her several hours to do her math every day.

When we got rid of the curriculum, I tried to write problems that would be meaningful to her, to teach her fractions and multiplication and division. I noticed that Yanni was completely at sea when her swim coach yelled out her times. In an effort to erase that embarrassment, I started giving her swimming math, which dealt with swim times and their averages. Slowly, over the course of a few years, Yanni was able to do swimming math, and cooking math, which involved doubling and halving fractions.

Last year, we slowly started algebra. Yanni has a couple of behind the textbook algebra books, Algebra Unplugged, and an Algebra Survivor’s Guide for the Thoroughly Befuddled. I was reading the Algebra Unplugged to both Yanni and Xay, and then assigning tiny sections of her huge beginning algebra textbook. Yanni is still in chapter one of that book, learning about number systems.

Today, I told her to break up her problem section to spread it over the course of this week, so she could finish it this week. There were 76 problems in the section, and she’d already done 5. I was trying to figure out where she should go if she did 15 questions a day. Yanni was able to figure that out immediately. She told me she learned that in swimming. They have to go on the 15, or whatever. Yeah for swimming! I’d heard for years that swimming was good for math.

Yanni took a while to do her problems, but came up periodically, saying that she felt smart working on math. She asked me something about a number line, and I went back in the book to see the example, and got confused myself. I asked Curtis for help, and he made himself a number line, with his head zero. Yanni was able to grasp this right away, and could finish her problems with confidence.

Curtis remembered how hard it was to do math, when you can’t find the relevance in it. These are the skills they’re going to need in order to solve complex problems, and invent complicated objects.

Somehow, it all fits in with knowing how they think so you can throw the right tool at them. Xay has struggled for years with spelling. I just found a system that breaks spelling down into patterns. It looks more like math. For example, his current spelling list starts with the word, ‘rain.’ The next word is ‘train.’ Then ‘strain, restrain, restraint.’ This makes sense to him. I expect him to spell all these words correctly at the end of the week. He has done well for the past two weeks with lists like these.

You run smack dab into their ‘want to.’ I have been doing this long enough now to not get gummed up with their not wanting to do it. The so-called ‘mom factor.’ I’ve heard many people say they couldn’t teach their children anything because the children wouldn’t listen to them; because they are the mommy.

So, discipline, getting people to do what you say when you say it, becomes the first order of the day. Ignoring resistance, and learning how to insist they do something they don’t want to do becomes the second order.

Frankly, they don’t know what they want yet. It’s up to us to put something in there. Yanni likes drawing, and she likes doing graphics on the computer. Curtis gave her a set of icons to copy on paint shop pro. She thought it was hard. She resisted him. I told her to work on it until she’d gotten it. She likes making those things now. She took the initiative to recreate the CarverLab corporate trademark. Then, she innovated on it. I gave her an assignment to make me an icon yesterday.

Then, I did something I tend to do, which is pile a whole bunch of other responsibilities on top of that one. She’s gotten some of those out of the way, so I think it’s time to gently nudge her back to finishing the icon. It’s challenging, but that’s a good thing.

More like extreme parenting than schooling, I think.