Monthly Archives: September 2006

These People Crack Me Up

Murphy’s Law

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If you decide to hire a cleaning lady to do the floors and bathrooms during your last two weeks in the house, so that you may devote even more of your time to the joys of purging and packing, two things are bound to happen.

1) Five minutes after she departs, leaving a sparkling floor behind, a small child will spill a cup of juice upon it. (Juice sparkles too, you know.)

2) Five minutes after she finishes cleaning the bathroom, a small child will bump his nose (poor little guy) and get a nosebleed of the type that spatters all over the room with every sob. ALL OVER. The clean bathroom.

(But at least it wasn’t the carpet.)

(And he’s fine now, whew.)

Television

Because You Know You’ve Been Singing the Jingle Ever Since You Read My Last Post

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Now you can relive the joie de Pepper all over again. Courtesy of my husband, a YouTube link to that old Dr. Pepper commercial. Oh, the giddy exuberance! The feathered hair, the charming smile! The children agog with admiration over the soda and the dancing! The ripoff of homage to An American in Paris! This is possibly television’s finest achievement.

Except maybe for this.

(Okay, now I’m actually thinking about it. What IS television’s finest moment?)

Carnivals

Carnival with a Bonfire

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It’s time for another Carnival of Children’s Literature, hosted this time by Wands & Worlds. Drop by for a bountiful harvest of great posts! (And also one from me.) (Oh I just crack myself up.)

(Speaking of autumn themes, look at this beautiful craft at Bountiful Blessings: stained-glass autumn leaves. Gorgeous.)

(And speaking of carnivals, don’t miss this week’s Carnival of Education, hosted by The Median Sib.)

(And also! It’s almost time for another Field Day (a carnival of nature study posts) at By Sun and Candlelight! Submissions are due by Monday. Or maybe Tuesday, because Dawn is so very nice.)

The Cross-Country Move

T Minus a 12-Pack

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We have a move date. This is really happening. In less! than! two! weeks!

This week was a blur of packing, tossing, sorting, taping, head-shaking, nail-biting, laughing, crying, neighbor-thanking, baby-kissing, Dr.-Pepper-drinking, mover-interviewing, medical-records-getting, trash-hauling, and (no surprise here) chocolate-eating.

About the Dr. Pepper. See, officially? I don’t drink soda. Except in restaurants, because that’s different. Or at someone’s house if they offer, because that’s polite. Or if Scott opens a soda and doesn’t finish it, because that’s thrifty.

Conveniently, Scott just happens to open a soda at least once a day and then suddenly decide he doesn’t want it after all. Conveniently, this soda always happens to be a Dr. Pepper, which is my favorite, instead of Coke, which is his. Conveniently, he opens this soda (which he will suddenly decide not to drink) at EXACTLY the moment when I am sitting down to lunch every day.

At least, that’s how it was when he lived here.

Since he left for the new job in July, I’ve been forced to (horrors!) put my own sodas in the fridge, and take them out, and open them and everything. In short, I’ve had to admit that I really am a soda drinker. In fact, it seems I have quite the little Dr. Pepper addiction going on. I mean, only one a day, but still. Soda. Sugar, caffeine. Nursing mom and all that.

Hmm.

But okay, fine, I admit it. I drink Dr. Pepper. Wait. I mean: I drink Dr. Pepper and I’m proud!

But I’ll fall off my high horse only so far and no farther: the whole time Scott has been gone, I haven’t BOUGHT any sodas myself. Nor have I put them on the list for the nice neighbors who have helped me with my shopping. Somehow that has seemed to be a line I wouldn’t cross. Scott stocked up on DP before he left for California, and I told myself that when it was gone, it was gone. And then WHEW, he came back in August just in time to restock before I got the DP DTs.

But that supply ran out three days ago.

By yesterday, my craving for the bubbly goodness of Fizzy Pepper, M.D., was powerful strong. My body needed carbs, and by that I mean carbonation. As an official out-of-the-closet Pepper and Part of an Original Crowd, I am supposed to be PROUD, right? But I’m not too proud to admit that I actually called my neighbor, Jenn, to ask if she had any Dr. Pepper. (I would have settled for a Coke. Or an Orange Crush. Or, what the heck, Pop Rocks in cherry Kool-Aid. Anything for that fiiiiizzzz.)

(But preferably the Dr. Pepper. And not diet. Because I am HEALTHY! I do not consume aspartame! Only real sugar! And corn syrup and caramel coloring!)

Alas, Jenn had no soda, diet or otherwise. Because SHE is really healthy instead of just pretend healthy. But she offered to pick me up some when she ran to the grocery store. For a moment, I hesitated. But she offered, right? That’s different from my asking for it, right?

So I said yes, please. And then a little while later, a DIFFERENT friend, Sarah, appeared before me with a 12-pack of Dr. Pepper in her hands.

"How did you know?" I asked, restraining myself from lunging at the box and opening a can with my teeth.

"A little bird told me you were out," she said, her eyes twinkling.

"Jenn?"

"No—your husband. He emailed me."

(Pardon the delay while I give the Internet a great big hug. Oh, email! How I love you!)

And yes, yes, this means I am so pathetic that I actually lamented to Scott on the phone that I was out of Dr. Pepper but was stubbornly refusing to just go buy some, and it also means that I am totally clueless, because even after the chocolate thing IT NEVER OCCURRED TO ME that he would take matters into his own keyboarding fingers to solve my completely ridiculous non-problem. Because he is THAT sweet a guy.

And Sarah is that swell a friend. And when Jenn (also a swell friend) dropped by later with another 12-pack, I could only laugh in chagrin (between delirious gulps of fizzy, vaguely-cherry- flavored-or-do-I-only-think-that-because-I-read-somewhere- that-Dr.-Pepper-is-supposed-to-be-black-cherry-flavored-and-at- the-time-I-was-shocked-because-I-had-no-idea-I-just-thought- it-was-Dr.-Pepper-flavored goodness).

And now I have twenty-four whole sodas mine mine all mine. Except that I drank TWO today. Which leaves twenty-two. (See how good I am at math? Now you can rest easy that I am qualified to teach it to my children.)

Twenty-two. And it just hit me that I will only be here twelve more days.

I will be here for just one more package of Dr. Pepper.

It’s all happening very quickly now.

At least I know what to give as parting gifts to my ten best friends* in the neighborhood. Don’t you know? It’s the original taste that I love so.

*If you are one of my neighborhood friends and I leave without giving you one of my Dr. Peppers, don’t think I was dissing you. I am probably definitely going to keep them all for myself, for the trip.

Poetry

Poetry Friday: Moving

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I wish I could post this Randall Jarrell poem in its entirety, but it is of course under copyright, and I can’t find it anywhere online. If you want to see the rest, you’ll have to look it up at the library, I guess. It would be well worth your time. I’ve never read anything that more poignantly captures the emotional wrench of moving. In this case, we’re experiencing the move through the eyes of a very young girl who knows that nothing will ever be the same again.

Moving
by Randall Jarrell

Some of the sky is grey and some of it is white.
The leaves have lost their heads
And are dancing round the tree in circles, dead;
The cat is in it.
A smeared, banged, tow-headed
Girl in a flowered, flour-sack print
Sniffles and holds up her last bite
Of bread and butter and brown sugar to the wind.

Butter the cat’s paws
And bread the wind. We are moving.
I shall never again sing
Good morning, Dear Teacher, to my own dear teacher.
Never again
Will Augusta be the capital of Maine.
The dew has rusted the catch of the strap of my satchel
And the sun has fallen from the place where it was chained
With a blue construction-paper chain…

***

There is so much more. When the girl thinks about how someone else must draw the Thanksgiving decorations for her classroom, your heart might break.

Even more moving are the lines:

Never again will Orion
Fall on my speller through the star
Taped on the broken window by my cot.

This is what makes Jarrell a master, this ability to capture with perfect clarity the point of view of his speaker. The little girl obviously lives in poverty, and for all we know she is going to a better house, a better life. The poem doesn’t tell us whether this is an upward move or a downward one.

What the girl knows is that everything she knows is changing. A child, like a poet, clings to small pieces of beauty wherever she finds them, and this child has found a piece in the cracked glass of a window. The tape covering the glass makes a star, and stars shine through it.

She studies her speller by starlight, and her strongest attachments are to her school and her teacher. Wherever she is going, for better or worse, she is leaving those things behind, and we can only hope that the stars will continue to shine on her efforts.

Writing

Unearthed: My First Story

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While going through boxes in the basement, I found my baby book. My mother had tucked this piece of paper inside:

Babybook

I don’t know how old I was, but I had to have been pretty young. (Mom, do  you remember?)

If you click to enlarge, you can just barely make out that: 1) I had yet to master the lower-case a; 2) the spelling of the word "cousin" had me completely flummoxed; and 3) my understanding of story structure has come a long way. "Look! Look! A bird nest. We will have to take care of it. If we don’t it will die." "OK. Let’s go to the store and buy a big Ice-Cream." "OK. A big big big one!"

So much for the poor little bird. But, I mean, come on! Ice cream!

At the bottom of the page, my mom wrote: "She wrote this story completely by herself. Maybe we have a budding author on our hands."

Aw, Mom! Sniffle…

Charlotte Mason, Early Childhood Education, General Homeschooling, Methods of Home Education, Preschool

How Do You Defend Your Relaxed Approach?

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The other day I mentioned that I’m an advocate of a non-academic early childhood. In the comments, Betsy wrote:

I have a question about your relaxed approach. I have been relying
on this for years and every one has looked at me like I have three
heads. I got into quite the discussion after Mass on day when two moms
were playing the competition game of what they were going to home
school their soon to be 3 year olds. I chimed in talking about waiting
until the child is ready and being relaxed…you should have seen the
look of horror on their face!!! How do you handle the "neglectful"
response that people seem to give me all the time.

You know, I really love it when people give me an opening like those looks of horror, Betsy. I enthusiastically grab all opportunities to jump up on my soapbox!

In my experience, if you answer skepticism with an eager flood of information, people will nearly always reframe their initial response. Quite often, the are-you-crazy looks are a gut reaction, but when the skeptic hears that you have actually put some thought and research into the issue, her response changes. She may still disagree, but at least she acknowledges that your point of view is an informed one.

So, for example, if someone said, "Are you nuts? Everyone knows that you’ve got to give kids a strong start from an early age or they’ll be behind their peers and never catch up," I’d say, "Actually, there are many educators and scholars who believe just the opposite. Have you read the works of Charlotte Mason? No? John Holt? John Taylor Gatto? Montessori? No? Oh." (Brief pause to digest this astonishing fact.) "Well, if you’re interested in how children learn, you’d probably find them quite fascinating, especially Mason; I know I do."—And then I’d launch into a brief but fact-packed description of Charlotte Mason’s vision for children under seven, emphasizing the richness of a young life filled with storytelling, nature study, cheerful housework, and song.

I have never, ever presented that picture of early childhood to someone without having the person respond positively. "Oh, that sounds so nice!" is a typical response. I really think people—especially mothers of little ones—recognize the beauty of that vision, even if they remain in disagreement over the issue of early instruction in reading and math.

You know, that touches on an important point. In such conversations (and they occur with surprising frequency), I’m truly not out to convert anyone. I don’t initiate them; but if someone opens the door I will jump through it as if there were chocolate on the other side. My aim in this kind of discourse is simply to show that there is thought behind my opinion. It’s amazing how much that relaxes people and shifts the tone of the conversation from confrontation to exchange of ideas.

What happens is that people begin to ask questions—specific questions like, "But what about math?" or "So when do you start teaching reading?" Which means I can respond with specific answers, and suddenly, instead of being on opposite sides of an abyss, we’re two interested parties discussing learning strategies. It’s a whole different kind of conversation, because it naturally leads to book and idea recommendations. ("Oh, gosh, my kids have learned so much math just from playing store or cooking. You learn a ton about fractions from making cookies!")

And that kind of conversation is just FUN.

Math

I Guess the New York Times Doesn’t Know About Singapore Math

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An opinion piece in yesterday’s New York Times ("Teaching Math, Singapore Style") discusses the recent decision by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics to revert to the old-fashioned method of teaching math by drilling the basics.

…[I]n the late 1980’s…many schools moved away from traditional mathematics instruction, which
required drills and problem solving. The new system, sometimes derided
as “fuzzy math,’’ allowed children to wander through problems in a
random way without ever learning basic multiplication or division. As a
result, mastery of high-level math and science was unlikely. The new
math curriculum was a mile wide and an inch deep, as the saying goes,
touching on dozens of topics each year.

Many people trace this
unfortunate development to a 1989 report by an influential group, the
National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. School districts read its
recommendations as a call to reject rote learning. Last week the
council reversed itself, laying out new recommendations that will focus
on a few basic skills at each grade level.

Under the new (old)
plan, students will once again move through the basics — addition,
subtraction, multiplication, division and so on — building the skills
that are meant to prepare them for algebra by seventh grade. This new
approach is being seen as an attempt to emulate countries like
Singapore, which ranks at the top internationally in math.

Sounds like the NCTM is thinking along the same lines as many home educators. The Singapore Math curriculum—a series of math texts and workbooks originally used in Singapore primary schools—is quite popular with American homeschoolers. What’s funny is that I’ve always thought the Singapore math books jumped around a lot, which is the opposite of the approach Singapore-the-country is being lauded for in this article. That was actually something Jane enjoyed about the 2nd-grade Singapore Math workbooks: they included fractions, geometry, and graphs along with the multiple-digit addition and subtraction that was the main focus of that year’s material. (But they do include a lot of drill in the basic processes, especially if you use both the workbooks and the non-consumable texts.)

Jane loved the puzzles and riddles in the workbooks: in the early grades, Singapore Math feels more like a puzzle book than a math text, what with the games and the cartoon illustrations.

A little way into the third-grade book, Jane got bored with Singapore and asked if we could go back to Math-U-See. We switched, and she’s been cranking away with MUS ever since. It’s an approach that really works for her; she loves Steve Demme’s sense of humor, she enjoys his explanation of the concepts, and the DVD format really appeals to her. She likes to watch the DVDs with a markerboard in front of her, and she’ll pause every time Mr. Demme sets up a problem, solving it before he does, to see if she got the right answer.

She tends to watch three or four lessons in a gulp, and then she’ll go back to them later, one by one, doing two or three of the six workbook pages that make up each lesson. When we reached the fractions book (Epsilon, I think it is?), she watched that DVD like I watch the BBC’S Pride and Prejudice: in binges, over and over. Even now, she still sometimes asks for it, although she has moved on through the Zeta level (decimals and percents) and the Pre-Algebra, which she is just finishing up. I’ve been looking at the Algebra level, trying to decide whether to order it here in Virginia where the sales tax is lower but we’ll have to move it, or wait until we get to California. (You order through regional distributors so you wind up paying sales tax from just about every state, I think.)

Rose likes Math-U-See too, but she enjoys a bout of workbookery from time to time—at which point we whip out the Singapore books for a week or two.

But I digress. I’m intrigued by the NCMT decision; I’ve heard about the fuzzy math but graduated high school a few years before the 1989 report that introduced it.