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Showing posts from March, 2022

Everything Went To Hell But It's Back Now I Guess

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Last week I got quite sick for a few days. Monday my kid woke up with extreme sensitivity to sound so I think she's been sick. Physical illness led to going way off schedule which indirectly increased our stress. I think physical illness also directly increases emotional stress.   I had been joking about the homeschool substitute teacher not showing up. Today I'm thinking about all the physical and habitual things public schools have for getting people back on track after being sick, comparing that with how at home the only thing keeping us on track is me, and wondering how long to expect us to be off kilter after I've been sick.   Today is going smoothly! My first Wordle guess only had one grey square, my kid woke up easily, a new registration and a re-registration for online classes went through instead of needing more steps.   What I've been reading lately: How we told our daughter we were switching to homeschooling  uses an analogy that uplifts both the student and

Tomatoes and Time

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  Photo by Katrin Gilger from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Salad_(4447935276).jpg For many students, challenges are the tomato slices in a salad whose lettuce is familiarity and whose cucumbers are support. When some students are judged as not being able to handle challenges well, often the unacknowledged context is that their salad is entirely tomato slices and blue cheese crumbles.  My kid is still unwinding habits and emotions from all the ways school didn't realize how many tomatoes she had every day. A lot of my homeschooling energy is going towards designing salads that are mostly lettuce and modeling being a very easy-going cucumber. (That analogy was brought to you by the fact that our local pizza delivery place hasn't had salads in like three weeks and I miss them.)   This morning that included working together on reading the instructions for seed starting mix, gathering implements, experimenting with dividing the brick, and planting a few old cat grass seed