CatchyNameHomeschooling

Part of why homeschooling is starting so slowly is the difference between “routine decisions” and “novel decisions”. I have four pairs of shoes by the back door and solid reasons and habits for which I choose when I'm leaving the house. That's a routine decision.   Should I decide to take up vegetable gardening I would have novel decisions to make: container, raised bed, or in ground? start from seed or tiny plants (with hidden task learning jargon for "tiny baby plants") which vegetables to grow to start with?  how many vegetables to grow?  where to buy them? use start dates listed in the catalog or look up Texas-specific dates? how often to water? Those decisions impact each other and have consequences. If I put a lot of resources into a fancy stone border for an in-ground garden I don't have to buy a lot of dirt, but it'll be hard to expand if I want more room in a year. How often I'm willing to water probably impacts which vegetables I should grow, but...

Migraines, the slow realization that accessibility is not the online norm, and a surprisingly stressful appointment kept us from getting much done last week. And that's okay. One of the benefits of homeschooling is that we can do less during a bad week instead of getting behind. Ableism can hurt people by acting like they have no disability or by acting like their disability is the most important thing about them. Autistic people generally have communication problems.  Khan Academy has a solid looking intro to JavaScript class. One of their pedagogical goals is to make every student type every semicolon to help students remember syntax details so they disabled pasting into their exercises and only accept direct keyboard input. That's reasonable for those students who type easily.   Speech-to-text or dictation tools are very useful for people who have trouble typing but can speak sufficiently well. When one uses an application that doesn't natively take input from one's ...

 One motivation for homeschooling is to take time to set up, test, and get used to appropriate supports *** BEFORE *** giving expectations, assignments and challenges. That means that starting slowly at something new is a GOOD thing.    We made a (very light) schedule and stuck to it for a few days and will start with it again on Monday. We reviewed a bunch of online learn-to-code resources and I was glad to see that that investigation and conversation didn't stress out my kid. We talked about how actually coding has two parts: - doing the coding - setting up the environment in which to both code and run the code and how paid-for classes often do that second part for the students. She is not emotionally prepared to set up her own environment which makes Khan Academy a good choice. She started and hit an accessibility hurdle so I spent a long time trying to contact someone about it and couldn't so next time we get to it we'll do Plan B which is mom transcribes what she dic...

 I'm likely to write posts more often than I can come up with witty titles, so I might as well make the first weekly update title terrible and get it over with so "State Of The Onion". My husband and I decided to withdraw our 13-year-old from public school December 19, 2021 but we hadn't decided exactly when would be her last day and we didn't want to talk much about it until we'd notified her school. We're basically hermits so keeping quiet wasn't hard. Initial goals: - Mental health - Emotional resilience - Sleep schedule - Appetite - Computer programming (because the kid wants to) - Start a blog to publish weekly summaries of what we did (done!) - Find something (probably a bought curriculum) to use as a framework Stuff I've read recently: - A delightful, meme-inspired essay comparing practical accommodations with unneeded changes.  Buttering The Cat Is Bad -  Why some teachers homeschool their own kids.      -  A friend's essay on the impor...

 Beginnings are important so we started with cake.

 This is a test post, devoid of interesting content. Probably I will delete it later, to test what happens when a post is deleted.