Sick Day

It's bound to happen occasionally...somebody is sick and you have to cancel plans. Nobody here is very sick, but there are enough symptoms to stay home. I appreciate participating in a community where people take this seriously. This is a major bummer because Thursdays are the one day we have in person classes for everybody and we meet at a lovely park outside of the city and then go for a horse riding lesson after. It's been a wonderful routine this fall. M is out of town on a business trip right now, but normally he would be baking pizza from scratch so that it is ready when we get home from our day out. 

I'm taking the opportunity to do some fall deep cleaning around the house, and letting the kids relax and read and watch tv and play video games. We have finished a lot of our goals for the month...wrapping up the Dart and Arrow guides and choosing our next novels. Laurel is working her way through the history textbooks...currently responding with a fair amount of outrage at the child labor practices of the Industrial Revolution. Max is reading so fluently! We have a habit of five books a day for him. He listens to a story, article or poem from each member of the family and then chooses one person to read out loud to. Once in a while I pull out my Wilson Reading System cards to do a little phonics/spelling, but he is mostly just picking it up naturally. Sometimes I despair over Marko's reluctance to write anything by hand, but he is working on an extensive Google Doc that he shared with his Minecraft buddies, so when push comes to shove, he actually can produce something. 

I've been listening to a lot of Sue Patterson podcasts and thinking about how experts can and should be used in learning...and whether or not an elementary teacher, or even a secondary teacher in a school would fall into this category. I certainly have known lots of teachers who were experts in pedagogy, because that's the majority of what they teach to early childhood or elementary teachers. Back before NCLB, teachers had more freedom to do units on topics of their choosing and that's where you would see their expert knowledge or interest. Secondary teachers were more likely to have a passionate interest in a subject. I will never forget Mr. Brown and his collection of bones. I only had him for homeroom, but I learned so much about the skeletons of local woodland creatures in those 15 minutes. Not that he was teaching a lesson, he was just boiling and assembling skeletons and we would ask questions because holy-crap-teachers-were-weird-in-the-90s. He had a definite passion for anthropology. But on the other end, I was hired to be a math teacher purely because I was the most qualified candidate, having taken Calculus in community college 10 years earlier. I just had to take a test and BAM I was certified. So in this century, you never know what sort of "expert" your kid's teachers are, and unschoolers love to point that out. 

I hesitate to climb aboard that train, though because there are a lot of Americans running around saying they did their research and basically ignoring or disputing what actual professional and life-long researchers are putting out there. Twitter is a place where I often see people very convincingly write about a topic but sometimes it turns out they are missing some important nuances. Still it gets shared 1.1million times and becomes part of the American canon.

Somewhere there are facts, right?

Confront Your Fears

We went to Titusville over the weekend to volunteer at the Oil Creek 100. I thought it would be a really good thing for us to 1) see some friends we haven't seen in a while and 2) get back to an ultra to clear the bad mojo from our last experience. I'm not sure when/if M will run one of these events again, and I didn't want Western States to be our last experience at an ultra as a family.

Back in 2015 (which now feels like a million years ago), OC was the first hundred that M attempted. I have really fond memories of that weekend. The weather was gorgeous, my parents watched Laurel and Marko (I was pregnant with Max) and I was free to wander (waddle) around and enjoy the scenery, weather and general good vibes of this race. Some of our friends came up to to keep me company and cheer for M. This is when I first met Paul and Jeff, who came to pace M. Being new to ultras, I was blown away by the efforts of the volunteers, who were cooking up a storm and keeping up a festive vibe. The forest was a magical, technicolor rainbow. M ran well. We slept blissfully in the back of our 4Runner in the parking lot. 

M was thrilled to get his first belt buckle. For some people that might have satisfied their urge...you want to see if you can do something hard, so you do it, and then that's it. But M genuinely enjoyed the experience, and went on to run a lot of races over the next few years. Like, a LOT. I think he did ten hundreds in about 3 years, plus many more 50K/100K/50mi races. Ultra/trail running became a part of our family culture. I started a weekly running club for kids in our local park. Evening walks/runs with our next door neighbors helped the kids sleep better. Our travel became very oriented towards finding trails to explore or races to run. We developed real friendships with M's running buddies. The seasonal rhythm of our years were marked by certain events. Always Hyner in the spring. Oil Creek in the fall. Volunteering at an aid station at the Rachel Carson in June. The pandemic pretty much killed races for a year, but they were starting up again and I think all of us were happy about that.

The weather was terrible at OC this year.  Pretty much the complete opposite of Western States....cold, rainy, epic mud. We weren't too bothered by the conditions, as we had a cozy tent to sleep in and were volunteering in the aid station, under cover. It was definitely a slogfest for the runners, though. It was great to see some friends, and I also had a chance to talk in person to a lot of people who messaged me on Facebook over the summer.  It's really different to go to a race when you aren't waiting for a runner. When the boys got tired, I just took them to the tent and put them to bed. So many people dropped out of the race, that there wasn't a lot to do at our aid station. But it definitely still had that ultra vibe. People huddled around the fire all night, the kids made signs, somebody had a cow bell. 

I was worried that a runner would get hurt or sick, and how that would feel if the kids saw it. I was worried we would feel like we didn't have a place there anymore. But that wasn't how it was at all. It just felt like we were home. 

Got the car back....again

Shortly after returning from Reno the second time, the transmission in our Yukon broke. For reasons related to an internet misunderstanding over the location of a horse riding lesson, I was with the kids way out in the country at the time and after failing to get AAA to send a tow truck, and also failing at getting an Uber to drive us to Pittsburgh (basically expected, as I only have one review and it's from Reno), I limped the car into a dealership in the town of Washington, PA. 

There is a classic children's book called That's Good! That's Bad! (Rabbit hole alert, I got a kick out of the reviews on Good Reads, people really have strong negative opinions of this book! But I remember my students loving it.) The story shows a ridiculous series of events, many of which seem bad on the surface, but then turn out to be good, and vice versa. 

I find this to be extremely relatable.

Anyway, I rolled in there just before they closed for the day and at the exact moment I was describing my transmission woes to the service tech, another customer came in to return the keys to the dealer loaner car. My children were being extremely well behaved while simultaneously looking a bit weary, which made them all the more charming. Before I knew it, we were back on the road back to Pittsburgh in a brand new Buick. (That's Good) M had some homemade pizza and a cold beer waiting for me when I got home. (Also Good)

It took 3 weeks for them to get the transmission in (That's Bad), but it was covered by the warranty (That's Freaking Fantastic, actually). And now we are left to wonder if we somehow toasted the transmission by towing, although it is well within the weight parameters and we never experienced any problems while actually towing. The mechanics said sometimes they just fail at this mileage and there is some sort of advisory issued by GMC on this particular transmission. We could sell it while it's in good shape and get a truck, but I would definitely miss the 8 seats, and the fact the Yukon fits in our garage. To tow, or not to tow, that is the question. 

I try to make good decisions and exercise reasonable caution. But life happens and something will happen. It might be bad, but also good. Or it might be good, but also bad. 

Refining It

I am enjoying this third year of homeschool since I feel like we have a good general framework and I can focus on refining habits and routines to make it work better for us. 

"Closing out" a month of homeschool, for us, means finishing filling out a reading log and a checklist of subjects covered, choosing work to save for the portfolio, adding photos to a digital album, and shredding all of the work we are done with and don't want to save. (Some of my children find it very satisfying to shred their work.) This has made compiling portfolios at the end of year a breeze. I look at the things we planned to cover but didn't, and decide if they should be bumped ahead to some future time or abandoned altogether. Over the past two and a half years I have drastically reduced my expectations for the quantity of work I plan for the children to do, but I still sometimes over plan. Writing the intended plans on paper has been very useful for keeping to reasonable amounts of work. Quality over quantity every time. If I am running out of space on my planning calendar, I know I'm planning too much. I am actually on my last sheet of blank monthly calendars, so I need to decide if I want to stick with the wall version, or buy a book with monthly spreads. The wall calendar is nice to have posted when we are home, but it's too bulky to take in the camper. 

A lot of our textbooks are digital at this point and I struggle with the amount of screen time this requires, although I love that I have access to literally everything on my phone through the Google Classroom app, and never have to print stuff out. The downside is that whenever you open a computer or iPad, the temptation is strong to check email, chat with grandparents, mess around with the Google Doodle....it's a real struggle for ALL of us. A few months ago we turned off pretty much all the filters, because they blocked out a lot of useful content, and I found myself spending half the day fiddling with settings. Now there is more work in paying attention to what the kids are doing on the computers, but this is time well spent in my opinion. 

I continue to love, love, love Brave Writer. There is a companion website to the products called Brave Learner and it is basically professional development for people homeschooling kids in their care. Last month the topic of video games really made me reconsider some of my long-held beliefs. I also like that, through using Brave Writer, I have come to understand home education/homeschooling as something the whole family participates in and not something I am doing to the kids. One thing that often floats into my mind is how different a teacher I would be with this current mindset, and also wondering how much of the pleasure of education is incompatible with the mechanics of school.