Successful experiment for dinner!

Ever since we were newlyweds, my husband and I have often had funny and/or disappointing culinary experiences due to my tendency to dispense with the straitjacket of a recipe in favor of experimentation. The first time he really suffered from it was when I cooked one of his favorite dishes from his mother's recipe collection: Turkey Tetrazzini. Except I altered it to use olive oil instead of butter. For health reasons, you know. He was not amused.

But tonight I went complete recipe-less and made up a new dish that borrowed a little from chicken adobo (the Philippine national dish). I used the crockpot, so it required minimal labor. And my husband really liked it! He happily served himself seconds. He complimented the dish without my having to ask him how he liked it! Whew! After the avocado shakes last week that no one liked and which I had to turn into avocado chocolate cake (not too bad, actually, thanks to numerous chocolate chips and chocolate frosting), it was great to have a culinary success. :)

Here's my recipe if you want to try it -

Put the following in a crockpot:

• A big bunch of bok choy, cleaned and sliced into bite size pieces
• 1-2 lbs uncooked chicken (I used three chicken thighs)
• 1 can water chestnuts (drained)
• approx. 1/3 cup soy sauce
• approx. 2 tsps minced garlic
• 2 cups water
• 2 cubes chicken bouillon
• 2 ginger tea bags (I've had ginger herbal tea bags floating around in my spice drawer since I tried them for nausea relief during my last pregnancy)

Cook on high for 4-5 hours.

Serve over cooked rice.

Super simple, very tasty. And that's according to a guy from the Midwest who doesn't generally appreciate spicy food or untested food combinations involving exotic ingredients.

A new blog in town

Dd6 has decided that she wants a blog, too, so she started Space Facts. Feel free to comment here on anything you think she would find good fodder for her blog!

Well, that explains something...

With respect to the issue of my last post, why has nearly every news network (besides Fox) been giving the Obama administration a pass on its lies with respect to the attack on our consulate in Libya last year? Would you believe the presidents of ABC and CBS news have siblings working in the White House? And the CNN Washington bureau chief is married to one of Clinton's deputies. No wonder most of the national press has been doing such a terrible job of publishing certain news stories and providing objective analysis for the past few years.

Thoughts on Benghazi

Background: I left the Foreign Service in 2007 to take care of my growing family and because I'd been told my career would be harmed if I didn't do a dangerous, unaccompanied tour in Baghdad or Kabul. I was told this while a breastfeeding, working mother doing all I could to meet both family and work obligations. In joining the State Department, I signed up for a civilian job, not to work in a war zone. I accepted "worldwide availability" and served with a good will in two polluted, high-crime cities during my time with the State Department. In my resignation letter to Secretary Condoleezza Rice, I noted that Foreign Service career requirements were no longer within the bounds of what one expects in a civilian job. State's bureaucracy chose to categorize my resignation as "for family reasons" and not deal with my complaint about sending diplomats to overly dangerous areas.

Forward to six months ago: We had State Department personnel in an under-protected consulate in Benghazi, Libya who were attacked, and we lost some dedicated people. For some unknown but likely political reason, administration spokespeople (specifically Susan Rice from State) tried to blame the attack on a spontaneous crowd protesting a video on YouTube rather than telling the truth about it having been terrorism (on September 11th...imagine that...). The previously unknown maker of that video was quickly arrested and is still sitting in jail in the USA for a probation violation.

Few in the mainstream media have kept talking about what happened in Benghazi because it is clear that the Obama administration doesn't want to talk about it. A White House spokesperson recently said "it happened a long time ago" (six months), and Hillary Clinton in January passionately said in a Congressional hearing, "What difference at this point does it make?" (right after again downplaying the terrorism aspect of the attack by trying to make the Benghazi attack sound as though it could have been spontaneous). I admit to having started to think that maybe those still talking about Benghazi were just doing it for political reasons. I was wrong. Benghazi is a big deal in that it reveals 1) ineptitude and dishonesty at the highest levels of the current administration, and 2) a lack of courage at the highest levels of the current administration when faced with an urgent need and then a failure to protect individual Americans at our diplomatic posts abroad.

My change of mind on Benghazi came from reading this CBS article from November 1, 2012. No, this isn't Fox news or Glenn Beck. Yes, somehow, I missed it back in November. Apparently, we had an interagency task force designed to deal with events like the attack on our Benghazi consulate. But it wasn't convened. Apparently, we had an ability to send a rescue team to the consulate within four hours, but we didn't use it. Instead, the administration dithered. Apparently, counterterrorism officials knew almost immediately that the attack was a terrorist attack, but Susan Rice fed the nation a lie about it being a spontaneous crowd reaction to a video.

I have many former colleagues whose service in dangerous areas I respect and honor. I fear that our President and his highest officials do/did not similarly honor them. They have shown they cannot make tough decisions quickly to protect State Department civilians under attack. They have shown that they will lie about the circumstances of such attacks to the nation. The State Department definitely leans left and Democrat, but that didn't get its employees treated right by Obama or H. Clinton when it really counted. Of course, our executive branch should meet its responsibilities to all its employees, no matter their political leanings, but if even a supportive department like State gets its employees abandoned during a terrorist attack and then is used to disseminate lies domestically for political reasons, the current Presidential administration deserves to be the recipient of greatly diminished trust in its integrity and abilities.

Science Fair Time

Dd8 seemed to need guidance on picking a subject, so I asked her (for my own culinary purposes) to see what effect soaking whole wheat grains in different liquids would have on their subsequent sprouting. She made observations over the course of several days (including weighing, which wasn't very informative due to the water involved in sprouting), and we found out that vinegar and salt water will pretty much kill off the sprouts. Tap water yielded good sprouts, and Brita-filtered tap water was even more productive.

Dd6 had to be dissuaded from mashing a variety of kitchen items (flour, sugar, bananas, etc.) together and "seeing what happens". She eventually came up with (on her own, bless her stubborn little heart) a project where she blew a whistle at a flag with various objects placed in front of the whistle. She learned that air flow can be hard to predict. :)

I like science fair projects. Now that we have computers, making the displays is a cinch. I type in what they tell me, and they glue the printed words and other eye-catching materials on a posterboard. Sure, sometimes my kids need more adult assistance with their projects than teachers think (or hope?) they will.* However, this annual ritual gives my children a chance to plan their own experiments and make their own observations at home where there is no "right answer". (Not that I'm above telling them if their conclusions are nonsensical....) Proper experiments can be quite difficult to plan and carry out. Just making sure that observations are accurate requires some knowledge about what can be measured and how best to do it. I think that my children's beginning efforts in doing science experiments will give them a greater knowledge of both the power and limits of scientific experiments.

* No worries, my children won't be getting awards they don't deserve due to my assistance. Their projects and posterboards aren't really competitive, based on what I've seen at their school in the past. And surely a project where Mom helped is better than a project that didn't get done at all because of a child's fears and indecision. This is just elementary school! Still, I look forward to when they can go solo on these projects.

Standardized Testing Done!

And we don't have to do it again for two more years. I finally mailed it off yesterday, and I look forward to seeing the results. I know it won't all be great news--she got 0% on one section of the CogAT because she didn't understand the directions, but we weren't required to do that test anyway--but based on what I saw, I think she probably did well on the reading and science sections of the ITBS. Both of her parents are avid readers who keep her well stocked with science books from the library, so that's not unexpected.

I'm glad I had the experience of seeing dd8 take a standardized test. I now understand better why teachers complain about high-stakes accountability tests. Kids can "have a bad day", react poorly to the pressure of being timed, or just not care how they do on a test that has little relation to their interests. That doesn't mean I'm an advocate of abolishing testing now, just that I sympathize with them about some of their concerns. In my ideal world, every child would regularly receive short, periodic assessments that would be used to tailor instruction to the child as well as to measure his/her progress. Such testing can be a useful tool for parents, teachers, and administrators, as well as give the child an incentive to do his/her best on the test so as not to be placed at an instructional level that is too low and thus "boring".

Ouch!

I'm almost done administering the ITBS to my third-grader. Once she got used to the pacing, she did fairly well. I was apprehensive about the math segments, though, because she has been very resistant about doing arithmetic. Math concepts, she gets and likes. Arithmetic invites sighs, attitude, and massive resistance. However, because she can tell she understands the math and performs well in other subjects, we've had years of her acting as though Mom's admonitions to learn her math facts fast are not all that important.

Thank you, ITBS, for forcing her to see how behind she is on developing her calculation skills. I just reviewed her math concepts test, and she only missed one out of 22 questions. But she only did half the problems in all the other math sections (which caused her to need a crying break in her room after the first time it happened), and on the last one, math computation, she filled in the bubbles for less than half of the problems and got a third of those wrong (some quite simple, which brought me to tears).

It seems to me that she has literally wired her brain to temporarily shut down and then move like cold molasses on basic addition and subtraction questions because they are not interesting or fun to her. She's only eight, and I am trying not to despair. I feel like I have already tried every math fact resource, but to be honest, I've avoided math fact family triangles. They seemed hokey to me. But I'll do it for her. This hurdle must be cleared somehow.

Homeschool Carnival

The Carnival of Homeschooling is up for this week at momSCHOOL. I really appreciate the work of those who put together the carnival each week so that I can learn from other homeschooling families.

Thoughts on Home Birth

Some people, unbelievably, still seem to think that homeschoolers are either like the "quiverful" Duggars or hippies living off the grid and eating/wearing organic whenever possible. We're religious, but my girls go to public school part-time and wear pants most of the time. We try to eat and live healthily, but I vaccinate my children, give birth in the hospital, and buy whatever produce I can afford without worrying about whether it's organic.

When I embarked on the adventure of childbearing back in 2004, my husband and I took a Bradley childbirth class in the Philippines. We read books by Dr. Sears and Ina May Gaskin. We determined to do everything possible to avoid a C-section, partly because of what we were learning and partly because of the fact that I had decided to opt out of returning to the USA to give birth and didn't want to undergo major surgery in the Philippines (among other concerns, my blood is Rh-negative, which is uncommon in Asia). Since I have low blood pressure and pass out easily from needles (good-bye, epidural, not going to mess with you...), information on giving birth without pain medication was quite welcome. 

However, despite having a sister and good friends who homebirth, I have never felt like that was a good choice for me personally. I know of too many things (like eclampsia, postpartum hemorrhage, shoulder dystocia, cord prolapse, placental abruption, cord wrapping issues, maternal heart attack, fourth-degree tears, obstructed labor, uterine rupture, life-threatening but previously unknown physical abnormalities in the infant that require life support measures followed by surgery as soon as possible--this happened to my nephew--and infant respiratory issues--meconium aspiration contributed to the death of an infant cousin of mine--just to name a few) that can unexpectedly go wrong and need the prompt medical attention available in hospitals.

A year ago, I found out that an acquaintance of mine, who had been due to deliver her baby a month before mine, lost the baby after a home birth attempt. There is no doubt that this was a previously healthy baby who died as a result of birth complications that could not have been dealt with outside a hospital. The experienced midwife had reason to think that the baby was in an oblique breech position but decided to go ahead with the home birth; she even brought student midwives so they could see the birth. After an excruciating labor that went on too long and during which their midwife discouraged them from going to the hospital, my friend and her husband finally went to a hospital where their baby, who was most likely the victim of a cord prolapse, was born by C-section. However, because he had been deprived of oxygen for an hour during labor, he suffered extensive brain damage and passed away after being taken off life-sustaining machines. The heartbreak that she and her family did and do suffer is immense. The midwife, who I assume was also greatly saddened by the baby's death, had an official complaint lodged against her and no longer practices midwifery here in Colorado.

While I once praised home birth, I now hold a negative opinion about both the practice of home birth and the legislative choice of many states to permit minimally-qualified (i.e., neither nurses nor doctors) midwives to attend out-of-hospital births. Even experienced, highly-knowledgeable midwives sometimes face unanticipated situations that require immediate remedies which they cannot provide, and those who practice a healing art outside hospitals should attain a high level of education and supervised training, such as occurs in nursing and medical schools. As I've been following this issue for the past year, I've learned that Colorado has a high (compared to hospitals) death rate for home birth attempts with non-CNM midwives. Today I found out that out-of-hospital birth attempts in Oregon result in a 6-8-fold increase in the rate of intrapartum and neonatal demise of full-term babies. Here is part of the testimony about this, the entirety of which is online at https://olis.leg.state.or.us/liz/2013R1/Downloads/CommitteeMeetingDocument/8585:

Oregon now has the most complete, accurate data of any US state on outcomes of births planned to occur in the mother’s home or an out of-hospital birth center.
***
On the 1st row, you can see that nine babies died during or soon after labor in homes or birth centers.
The total mortality rate for planned out of hospital births was 4.5 per thousand, as seen in the last column of that row.
I have included the number of neonatal deaths both with and without the death of one baby who died of congenital abnormalities. That death cannot be attributed to the care given by the DEM attendant.
The 2nd row shows data on deaths associated with planned OOH births with direct-entry midwives as the planned birth attendants.
The total mortality rate associated with those births – excluding the one involving congenital abnormalities – is 4.8 per 1000.
For comparison, data on births planned to occur in hospitals is provided in the bottom row of the table. [The 2012 mortality rate in Oregon for term births planned to be in the hospital is 0.6/1000.]
Note that the total mortality rate for births planned to be attended by direct-entry midwives is 6-8 times higher than the rate for births planned to be attended in hospitals. The data for hospitals does not exclude deaths caused by congenital abnormalities.
Many women have been told that OOH births are as safe or safer than births in hospitals. This is true in some places, including British Columbia.
But out-of-hospital births are not as safe as births in hospitals in Oregon, where many of them are attended by birth attendants who have not completed an educational curriculum designed to provide all the knowledge, skills and judgment needed by midwives who practice in any setting.

I'm not an OB/GYN, nor do I work for one. Sure, my dad was a family doctor who delivered some babies in his day, but there are no surgeons in my immediate family. To make four TMI stories short, I have experienced four non-medicated births in hospitals in three different countries. I am a natural childbirth success story. (I'm not sure I can really take credit for that, for I come from "childbearing stock"; my mom had ten children vaginally--the first one was breech--and all six of my sisters have had multiple children with nary a section required.) I'm all for supporting women who want to move while giving birth, eschew epidurals, engage in natural methods of relaxation during labor, breastfeed, room-in, etc. I have no financial motive to make midwifery look bad. The mortality statistics sadly speak for themselves. Midwife-attended home birth, at least as practiced currently in my state and Oregon, unnecessarily and significantly increases the risk of a helpless baby dying. To me, the life of a precious child weighs far more heavily in the balance than the short-term comforts of giving birth in one's own home.

Do I persuade or do I offend in writing this post? And if the latter, what has happened to the natural childbirth culture if someone expressing concern about practices that contribute to avoidable infant loss is considered offensive?

Dorothy Sayers and TLTOL (part fifteen)

The next segment of Sayers' essay, "The Lost Tools of Learning", is about science and mathematics:

Science, in the Poll-Parrot period, arranges itself naturally and easily around collections--the identifying and naming of specimens and, in general, the kind of thing that used to be called "natural philosophy." To know the name and properties of things is, at this age, a satisfaction in itself; to recognize a devil's coach-horse at sight, and assure one's foolish elders, that, in spite of its appearance, it does not sting; to be able to pick out Cassiopeia and the Pleiades, and perhaps even to know who Cassiopeia and the Pleiades were; to be aware that a whale is not a fish, and a bat not a bird--all these things give a pleasant sensation of superiority; while to know a ring snake from an adder or a poisonous from an edible toadstool is a kind of knowledge that also has practical value.
The grammar of Mathematics begins, of course, with the multiplication table, which, if not learnt now, will never be learnt with pleasure; and with the recognition of geometrical shapes and the grouping of numbers. These exercises lead naturally to the doing of simple sums in arithmetic. More complicated mathematical processes may, and perhaps should, be postponed, for the reasons which will presently appear.

I have four children now, and because I don't want big messes, I rather discourage physical collections. Blame the four months I spent as an au pair/housekeeper in Germany back in my college years, but clutter depresses me. However, I think my science practices are basically in line with Sayers' educational philosophy because I encourage my children to read nonfiction books about science all the time. Do they really need to have pinned butterflies on cards to learn about the natural world? I think it's adequate to have a supply of engaging science books ready at hand and read them to my children on occasion. They get hooked and before you know it, they are reading DK's Big Book of Knowledge in bed at night instead of fairy tales. Besides providing science books, I also show my children science videos (they love Bill Nye and the National Geographic videos starring Dustin Hoffman as a globe named "Spin"), and when the weather is nice we go to the zoo and nature centers.

Math. Amen, Dorothy. Help them memorize those math facts as young as possible. Dd8 is still struggling to get to automaticity with her addition facts, while dd6 consistently outdoes her in addition drills on their daily Xtra Math practice sessions. Dd8 can memorize poems, no problem, but I think I waited too long to get serious about requiring her to memorize the addition facts and contributed to her developing a math facts mental block.

I wish I could buy a Barney or Dora DVD that helped children sing and memorize the basic addition facts. Computer math games haven't worked because my children want to have fun when they play on the computer, and math fact recall is not yet easy enough to be "fun" for them. Besides games and flashcards, I could find only lame math fact song collections or number "appreciation" cartoon DVDs.  I'm positive my children would appreciate numbers more if they could use them with greater facility! If someone from Nick Jr. is reading this, I beg you to produce a good addition fact memorization DVD using Diego and exotic animals; the same goes for PBS and the Dinosaur Train characters. 

Some random fun

Even when there are holidays and snow days for the local schools, I have my children do their home school work. That meant that last week they had five days of learning while their friends had just three. Dd8 was starting to give off a "put-upon" vibe, and I was getting weary of the taskmaster role, so yesterday afternoon, I made them a little "clue-chase" for no reason except to show them I love them and I'm not "all work and no play". These were the clues:

Clue #1:

To find where Number 2 is hid

Look under a bear that is pallid.   

[This led to dd6's favorite teddy bear.]

Clue #2:

Tigers have stripes just like the wall

By the drawer in which Clue 3 did fall.

Clue #3:

Number 4 is not in the land down under,

But Sydney says it is resting beside her.   

[Sydney is dd6's betta fish that she got for her birthday recently.]

Clue #4:

The globe downstairs points to the hiding place

Of the next-to-last clue in this clever word race.

Clue #5:

Now up, up stairs to your parents’ closet

Is a teeny-weeny present for you red-headed set.  

[Oops, should have double-checked that one for grammar....]

Treasure:

[A little travel chess game that I'd been keeping for them when they got bigger. I guess they're "bigger" now.]

On a side note, I made sure that my clues rhyme. I don't think much of poetry that doesn't even try to rhyme.  Rhymes simply flow better and are easier to remember, while "modern", non-rhymed poetry (esp. that created in school) seems the product of wanna-be visionaries seeking shortcuts to the imagination via awkwardly disjointed prose.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Because we all just love math, here's an update on the math portion of our home education endeavor:

Dd8 is finally starting multiplication and division in earnest. She finds it conceptually easy. We haven't started drilling multiplication and division facts yet because she is still doing the addition practices on the Xtra Math website. Xtra Math is a great resource for kids who need daily repetition and practice of math facts but balk at long sessions. It costs nothing, keeps track of individual children's progress, and makes math drills relatively pleasant without a lot of screen clutter.

Yesterday dd8 surprised me by asking whether I would give her a test of only word problems. It turns out she likes word problems because she feels as though she's actually doing something. I'm a little gobsmacked to hear a child request more word problems, for I don't recall that being a common occurrence in elementary school. Or else maybe she just really, really dislikes plain calculation exercises.

Dd5 finished her kindergarten math book a while back (we use the Bob Jones worktexts because they cover the basics in a fun, convenient way), and I've been putting off ordering her the first grade book while we do Xtra Math and some Singapore math. Yesterday I looked over the first grade worktext table of contents and tested dd5 on some of the more advanced concepts listed, and she grasped them immediately. So now I'll be ordering the second grade worktext for her. That saved us $22, and our little girl is pleased with herself for being able to skip a grade in math.

Dd3 is starting to learn to recognize numbers. We finally taught her how to show her age with her fingers. She loves to play on Starfall.com.

Dd1 is just cute. She turned one this week. Her life is still quite binary. She's either allowed to do something, or Mommy says "no, no, no" and takes her off the table, chair, high chair tray, or bathtub edge. Oh, rats, she was just tearing the curtain liner. Time to finish this post and get on with other things.

Just because they live in the boonies...

...doesn't mean that they are going to be nice to you. I just saw this account of a horrid experience that three North American tourist underwent at the hands of around 30 villagers in Peru.

Jennifer Wolfrom, her brother Jed and her sister-in-law Meghan Doherty were hiking in a village close to the southern Peruvian city of Cuzco when they were attacked by around 30 angry villagers.
The group were reportedly bound, beaten and robbed by the villagers during a two-day ordeal, beginning on New Year’s Day, which left the group physically and mentally traumatised.
But Ms Wolfrom alleges that staff at the US embassy failed to help the family until media began covering their story.

As a former consular officer, I have a reaction to their statement that they felt the U.S. Consulate didn't help them. The U.S. Consulate in Cuzco apparently didn't know about their ordeal until they had already escaped from it. Having been in the situation of dealing with U.S. citizens after they've suffered some sort of injury abroad, I can only say that there is often almost nothing that U.S. consular officers can do in situations where the host country police won't take action. Consular officers work to ensure that the host country--in this case Peru--gives U.S. citizens the same treatment that citizens of the host country would get; if at possible, they typically do try to cajole the host country into providing even better treatment, but there's no law that forces the host country to give it. Where the host country suffers from deep-rooted corruption and habits of indolence in the local police force, the police "service" rendered its citizens is often far below what we expect coming from the USA.

Getting their story out to the media was probably the most effective thing Ms. Wolfrom could have done in order to have their attackers suffer some sort of punishment. The villagers' action have embarrassed their country internationally and probably hurt tourism in a tourism-dependent area. I don't imagine their neighbors will thank them for it.

If you're planning a trip abroad, please read the consular travel information for your destination(s) and pay attention to the warnings.

Dorothy Sayers and TLTOL (part fourteen)

Time for another installment from "The Lost Tools of Learning" by Dorothy Sayers:

The grammar of History should consist, I think, of dates, events, anecdotes, and personalities. A set of dates to which one can peg all later historical knowledge is of enormous help later on in establishing the perspective of history. It does not greatly matter which dates: those of the Kings of England will do very nicely, provided that they are accompanied by pictures of costumes, architecture, and other everyday things, so that the mere mention of a date calls up a very strong visual presentment of the whole period.
Geography will similarly be presented in its factual aspect, with maps, natural features, and visual presentment of customs, costumes, flora, fauna, and so on; and I believe myself that the discredited and old-fashioned memorizing of a few capitol cities, rivers, mountain ranges, etc., does no harm. Stamp collecting may be encouraged.

I want a world history timeline. I really do. I just can't decide where in our new house to put it. Also, I can't decide how exactly I want to do it. I'm leaning towards stringing up multiple colors of yarn to signify different parts of the world. Maybe Pinterest can help me in the quest for an aesthetically acceptable (but doable for a mom who doesn't do crafts well) timeline. Whatever we end up doing, it needs to be where the children frequently see it yet out of reach of the destructive fingers of the smaller ones.

My mother bought my children a great flannel world map for Christmas. It has country names, labels for major rivers and geographical features, and flannel animals such as camels and polar bears for them to put in the proper regions. We already put it up in one of the bedrooms on a prominent wall, so hopefully the children will learn all the information on it over the product's lifetime.

Thoughts on Humility

Yesterday evening a phone conversation with an emotionally-volatile family member turned into a fight. Even staying home at Christmas doesn't mean that one escapes these conflicts completely. My peace-loving husband helped me step away from the argument (because, of course, I was in the right, and the other person was bound to recognize it eventually!) and end the call (rather abruptly, it must be told).

My husband later mentioned to me that when he was younger, he and his family had obtained some family counseling. He said that it didn't seem to have made any difference. But his parents, particularly his father, really do seem to have changed over the years; they are kind, loving, and supportive of their children, even while not agreeing with everything done by said children. My in-laws can also calmly discuss parenting mistakes they made in the past. My father and mother, on the other hand, would never have taken us for family counseling; to my mother, counseling was something other people (especially my dad) needed, and to my father, counseling was a waste of time and money. Time has not made it easier to be my parents' child. (Although distance certainly has.)

Is it the counseling that made the difference? I doubt it. I think this is one of those correlation-causation confusions. Rather than counseling helping many parents, I think it is likely that those who are humble enough to seek help from outsiders are the same parents who eventually listen to their children as though they are people with their own valid thoughts and experiences and allow themselves to learn from their children.

Not that I'm against counseling per se. But it might be a tad oversold. How much good can a counselor do someone who is not teachable? Someone who thinks that they know best and no other viewpoint can be admitted as more correct?

I value humility. Great accomplishments require a certain balance of confidence and humility, else one will never start a task nor change direction when falling into error.

The greatest responsiblity of my life is to raise my children well. In undertaking to teach them, I am fairly confident that I am doing the best thing for them, given our situation, talents, and temperaments. However, I must also constantly re-evaluate whether what we are doing is optimal or a mistake. That's not easy. Pessimistic second-guessing can be debilitating, but arrogant mulishness on a given path might lead to even worse consequences. What to do?

At present, I read. A lot. Education books, blogs, and news. Fortunately, I like to read. :) I regularly ask for divine help to be a good mother and teacher to my children. I run my ideas by my husband and others who know my children. I put them in a public charter school setting part-time, which allows me to get feedback from professional teachers. And this year, as required by Colorado law, I will have dd8 take a "nationally standardized achievement test". (I know some homeschoolers are vocal in their dislike for testing, but I see such testing as necessary to know whether I'm doing as good a job as I think I am relative to public schools. If my teaching methods are better for my child than full-time public education, then the results of the test should be gratifying.)

By striving to always exercise humility in my parenting, I hope to give my children the best start in life that I can. If, in turn, I manage to teach some humility to them through a good example, perhaps in twenty years we'll all be able to enjoy holiday phone calls that don't end in harsh words and an abrupt disconnection.

"True humility is not an abject, groveling, self-despising spirit; it is but a right estimate of ourselves as God sees us."

— Tryon Edwards

Middle things

I love homeschooling. I love being able to efficiently teach the basics and have time for Latin, German, scripture study, and music lessons. But I also love that my children get to go to a charter school part-time and involve our family in fun things like the medieval feast that my dd8 had yesterday afternoon. Her three-year-old sister dressed up like a princess and banged on a drum as accompaniment to my amateur renditions of old English and French tunes on the recorder and violin for her schoolmates. I simply can't recreate that sort of event at home because a) I am not particularly good at party logistics, and b) where would I find 60 children wanting to dress up for a private event that didn't include generous (i.e., costly) goody bags at the end?

So we continue in the middle, with one foot in homeschooling and the other in public school. Rather than feeling like a conflicted fence-sitter who is torn between two pastures, I feel like I have a great view of both pastures' green and brown spots and freedom to visit either pasture at will. I am very grateful for the supportive teachers and staff at my children's charter school, and I wish that more parents had the option of part-time enrollment at a school like theirs.

Thanksgiving

Local schools were off all last week, so it was a bit of a struggle doing schoolwork. But the distractions were worth it: my children have good friends, and I enjoy seeing them play happily with them.

We had relatives over for the holiday. They are relatives with whom we get along well, so we had a great time. However, at this time of year, I am reminded that not everyone is fortunate enough to enjoy occasions where they are forced to spend time with their relatives. This last week was horrible for a family member of mine; from what I hear, it included suicide threats and public criticisms of a spouse in connection with recent serious threats to divorce.

Families need kindness all year round. Holidays aren't a magic fix for long-running problems, contrary to Hollywood portrayals.

Almost done moving in

Just one box left to unpack in the house! It's so nice to be mostly moved in. I love being able to spend more time thinking about my family and its needs than about stuff that's in the way. Sometimes I watch the show "Hoarders", and it makes me so sad to see how the people on the show have let papers and things become obstacles in their relationships with their loved ones. I hope that never happens to me.

Moving

It turns out that even an in-town move is a big project. With four growing children (their clothes take up more room as they grow, especially the jeans!), it was time to consider moving out of our easy-to-clean 1000 sq. foot home. A house in a desirable location became available, and it was in our price range, provided we purchase it via lawyers (it never got listed, so we were able to take 6% in real estate agent commissions off the price) and accept it "as is".

Well, the "as is" part has been challenging (no bathing facilities are functional at present), but the location really is worth the hassle of moving all our stuff. Stuff. To quote Helen Parr, "Why do we have so much junk?" We don't like having had to move all these things that we haven't used for years. Why spend time cleaning around and storing things we never use and don't enjoy? Maybe someone else will want them. Now that we actually have a garage, we are seriously thinking of having a garage sale.

Dorothy Sayers and TLTOL (part thirteen)

Although I very much like the classical philosophy of education, I have been scared of requiring memorization from my daughter (age 8) because I didn't want her to fail at it or hate me for making her do it. I recall having been good at memorization myself when I was younger, but now I think of memorization as a difficult, unpleasant chore. I regularly slaughter song lyrics unless I'm singing along with someone else who knows the correct words, and I am not interested enough in memorizing anything to do the necessary repetition work. Frankly, I've been lazy about memorizing anything in English for the past 20 years. Yet I'm always grateful when a long-ago memorized quote or poetry snippet comes to mind at an opportune moment. I think I deny my daughter a blessing when I don't require her to learn anything by heart.

Dorothy Sayers is clear on the need to do some memorization during the Grammar stage. Here is the next excerpt from her essay, "The Lost Tools of Learning":

During this age we must, of course, exercise the mind on other things besides Latin grammar. Observation and memory are the faculties most lively at this period; and if we are to learn a contemporary foreign language we should begin now, before the facial and mental muscles become rebellious to strange intonations. Spoken French or German can be practiced alongside the grammatical discipline of the Latin.
In English, meanwhile, verse and prose can be learned by heart, and the pupil's memory should be stored with stories of every kind--classical myth, European legend, and so forth. I do not think that the classical stories and masterpieces of ancient literature should be made the vile bodies on which to practice the techniques of Grammar--that was a fault of mediaeval education which we need not perpetuate. The stories can be enjoyed and remembered in English, and related to their origin at a subsequent stage. Recitation aloud should be practiced, individually or in chorus; for we must not forget that we are laying the groundwork for Disputation and Rhetoric.

Thanks to Susan Wise Bauer's First Language Lessons curriculum, I finally started doing serious memorization work with my daughter. She has memorized two poems so far and seems to enjoy the process of memorizing almost as much as her feeling of accomplishment from having successfully learned the poems. Bauer makes memorizing almost easy in her First Language Lessons. She introduces the poem, does a little dictation exercise from it, and has the teacher read it aloud 3 times a day or so for a couple of weeks, eventually having the student recite longer and longer portions of the poem together with the teacher. My daughter does well with this method, and my fears about imposing detested memorization work on my daughter have been put to rest. Clearly I am the one with the issues about memorization, not she.

As to the other things mentioned in this excerpt, we are raising our children to be bilingual in English and German, and we surround them with all sorts of enticing library books full of "stories of every kind". One of the best parts of homeschooling for us is that the children have so much time to read and love those books.

Media Bias this Election Year

Never in my adult life has the media been more obvious in choosing the outcome of a presidential election. How did our country get to a point where a centrist who has spent much of his life doing unpaid service in his church and community (e.g., he donated his entire fee from managing the Salt Lake City Olympics to charity and donated $1 million of his own money to the Olympics), when not working hard at his own job and raising five children, gets successfully portrayed as out-of-touch elitist? How did we get to a point where voting against the sitting president is "racist" even though his policies are not perfect, he has little experience in running anything, and he displays more enthusiasm for candidacy than for actually performing the jobs he's elected to? US media is clearly heavily biased towards the Democratic presidential candidate. See this from the New York Times:

All the major media companies, driven largely by their Hollywood film and television businesses, have made larger contributions to President Obama than to his rival, former Gov. Mitt Romney, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit, nonpartisan Washington-based research group that publishes the Open Secrets Web site.
The center’s numbers represent donations by a company’s PAC and any employees who listed that company as their employer.
Even companies whose news outlets are often perceived as having a conservative bias have given significantly more money to Mr. Obama. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, for example, has contributed $58,825 to Mr. Obama’s campaign, compared with $2,750 to Mr. Romney. The conglomerate, which owns Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and the 20th Century Fox studios, gave roughly the same amount to Mr. Romney’s Republican primary competitors Rick Perry and Ron Paul as it did to Mr. Romney.

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/22/donations-by-media-companies-tilt-heavily-to-obama/

In the runup to this election, Obama has seen very little criticism despite a struggling economy and very high gas prices. Remember the brouhaha over these issues four years ago? The media is giving very little attention to things that could cause people to think, "Hmmm, maybe huge bailouts to political cronies, massive debt, class warfare, and increased government regulation aren't getting the economy going again...."

I don't watch FOX (I don't even have a TV), I'm not a "dittohead", and I don't expect perfect neutrality from anyone. BUT THIS????? We're supposed to ignore that on 9/11's anniversary, the first Tweet from President Obama was something about getting him re-elected. We're supposed to think that President Romney is some sort of Bush-esque cowboy for criticizing our U.S. Embassy in Cairo's statement deploring a private citizen's YouTube video for being disrespectful of a religion? (As a member of the LDS church who has been reading way too much foul criticism of my religious clothing and values on the internet this year, I can only cry at the double standards our media and political class exhibit towards harmless Mormons and murdering Islamists.) A statement which the Obama administration ended up disavowing later anyway? We're supposed to ignore $3.60 gasoline? We're supposed to ignore rising food prices, high un- and under-employment, and hardworking friends losing their homes and just give the current President's policies "more time"? We're supposed to be OK with restrictions on religious freedom just so women don't have to buy their own contraception (as if they're not paying for it anyway via higher premiums)? We're supposed to be OK with expanding the perverse incentives of our social security net, the ones that give little credit to the efforts of hard workers and business creators yet force them to pay for programs that deal with situations too often brought on by the bad choices made by others (food stamps, prisons, TANF, health care needs brought on by our neighbor's private vices, etc.)?

The current President is probably a nice enough guy to those he likes, but his policies stink. The results stink. If he weren't a Democrat, we'd hear more about that and less in the way of excuses; our vaunted "fourth estate" is mostly a public relations firm for the Democratic party right now. If journalists are going to cover for their own party members in place of covering the real world, they deserve little revenue and even less respect.

Speaking of Latin...

My kids crack me up! A while back I joked in a family newsletter that I'd taught them enough Latin to not get shanghaied in Vatican City ("Non sum nauta." = "I'm not a sailor."). Just now, I was explaining how languages change over time and pointed out that Latin is a dead language which is only learned in school but not spoken by any groups of people. Dd5 piped up that Latin is spoken in that place where they kidnap people to work on ships. Ah, the cute misunderstandings of a kindergartner.

Dorothy Sayers and TLTOL (part twelve)

Today I examine this segment of Dorothy Sayer's essay, "The Lost Tools of Learning":

Let us begin, then, with Grammar. This, in practice, means the grammar of some language in particular; and it must be an inflected language. The grammatical structure of an uninflected language is far too analytical to be tackled by any one without previous practice in Dialectic. Moreover, the inflected languages interpret the uninflected, whereas the uninflected are of little use in interpreting the inflected. I will say at once, quite firmly, that the best grounding for education is the Latin grammar. I say this, not because Latin is traditional and mediaeval, but simply because even a rudimentary knowledge of Latin cuts down the labor and pains of learning almost any other subject by at least fifty percent. It is the key to the vocabulary and structure of all the Teutonic languages, as well as to the technical vocabulary of all the sciences and to the literature of the entire Mediterranean civilization, together with all its historical documents.
Those whose pedantic preference for a living language persuades them to deprive their pupils of all these advantages might substitute Russian, whose grammar is still more primitive. Russian is, of course, helpful with the other Slav dialects. There is something also to be said for Classical Greek. But my own choice is Latin. Having thus pleased the Classicists among you, I will proceed to horrify them by adding that I do not think it either wise or necessary to cramp the ordinary pupil upon the Procrustean bed of the Augustan Age, with its highly elaborate and artificial verse forms and oratory. Post-classical and mediaeval Latin, which was a living language right down to the end of the Renaissance, is easier and in some ways livelier; a study of it helps to dispel the widespread notion that learning and literature came to a full stop when Christ was born and only woke up again at the Dissolution of the Monasteries.
Latin should be begun as early as possible--at a time when inflected speech seems no more astonishing than any other phenomenon in an astonishing world; and when the chanting of "Amo, amas, amat" is as ritually agreeable to the feelings as the chanting of "eeny, meeny, miney, moe." 

Hurrah! We have actually started doing Latin in our home school. We are approaching it with a very beginner-oriented text, William Linney's Getting Started with Latin. It's made up of tiny, sequential lessons, but after just three weeks of occasional Latin study, we can now say sum (I am), es (you are), est (he/she is), et (and), non (not), nauta (sailor), agricola (farmer), and poeta (poet). We throw in other words that we think are Latin (or not necessarily Latin) when we want to say something outside of what those few words allow. It's great fun. For example, thanks to the film O Brother, Where Art Thou, we can all say to Daddy, "Es pater familias." This morning, we were telling each other we were dinosaurs like this: "Es dee-no-sore-us." I'm sure there's a good Latin word for dinosaur; in fact, isn't the word dinosaur from the Latin for "terrible lizard" or something? Time to go Google.

Update: Silly me. Dinosaur comes from the Greek words for terrible ("deino") lizard ("sauros"). Dead Latin doesn't have a term for dinosaur, but apparently we can use the word "dinosaurum" if we must, according to Google Translate.

In which I understand the Tiger Mother

A year or two ago, I read The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and participated in a great discussion of it with a book club. I remember being fairly appalled at her description of the time she forced her daughter to practice a difficult piano piece until she got it right, making her stay at the piano and threatening to do all sorts of things if the child didn't get the piece down, including burning her stuffed animals. Thought I, that would never happen in our home, for I don't value musical achievement that highly. Ah, foolish woman, thought the universe...there is something that you value quite a bit: mathematics.

Yesterday was one of the those days that make a mother wonder if she's entered an alternate reality. The day started with the usual happenings, and then we began our math page for the day. Horrors! This one had sixty-four subtraction facts to accomplish. Never mind that they were all simple ones where the highest minuend was ten. No, the whole assignment page was numbers. Not a story problem about candy on the entire page! Dd7 (almost 8 years old now) hit a mental roadblock at the sight of that appalling exercise page. And I, tormented by visions of a daughter unable to subtract 2 from another number and sentenced to a life of English editing (not that there's anything wrong with that, but dd7 absolutely loves science), proceeded to force her to do it, making her start the page over every time she got a glazed look indicating that she was no longer doing math in her head and had instead turned her thoughts to her mother's meanness, the difficulty of the task, and the weave of her pants. Meltdowns, drama, tears, pouts, and occasional voice raising ensued--I think I was only guilty of the last, but I can't be sure. I found myself thinking of Amy Chua's threats to burn stuffed animals and understood where the threats came from. I'm happy to say my thoughts about threatening destruction to stuffed animals were never uttered aloud to dd7...but it could have easily come to that. What seemed to snap her out her stubbornness about the math page, after nearly two hours of Theater (a useful German word describing interpersonal drama, especially from tantrum-throwing children), was asking dd5 to do the subtraction facts aloud in front of dd7, which dd5 did in about five minutes.

After a lunch break, dd7 finally did her math facts in just a few minutes and her face wore a relieved smile. I was too exhausted to smile normally for hours afterward.

Back to School

We were slowed down in our start of the new school year by an unpleasant respiratory illness (which hit this nursing mom hard enough that she got prescribed antibiotics for possible pneumonia), but today we finally did a regular, whole day of school!

Dd5 did a 15-minute block of reading (using an old Lippincott I got from my mother's textbook collection), writing (Handwriting Without Tears), and math (BJU's Math K5 worktext). Then she played and overheard dd7's academic instruction for the rest of the morning. In the afternoon, she went to a charter school for recess, playtime, and music with her kindergarten class. She is delighted to be in a formal school setting for part of the day.

Dd7 has a lot more academic work now that she is in third grade. We do schoolwork for about 2.5 hours each morning: reading (from both scriptures and a secular textbook), spelling (an Evan-Moor workbook), math (an old A Beka grade 3 book until I get the BJU grade 3 math worktext), First Language Lessons (for grade 3), Latin (using Linney's Getting Started With Latin), music (piano and recorder on alternating days), history (Story of the World, in which we are still finishing up volume 2), and German/science (reading short segments of a German book about the earth). I often put on videos relating to anything we've been studying in any of the subjects; today it was a DVD on Portugese explorers. Dd7 loves her time at the charter school in the afternoon, where she is making new friends in a new class.

Dd2 likes being the "oldest kid" at home in the afternoons when her older sisters are at school. She seems to really enjoy getting to have the computer to herself to play on www.starfall.com.