CatchyNameHomeschooling

  Apparently, intending to write a blog post once a week on the same broad topic is enough of an expectation to trigger PDA/ODD type responses in myself.   (Digression, I think PDA and ODD are bad diagnoses and whoever invented the phrases behind those acronyms should feel bad. The behavior and the pattern is real, but the diagnostic terms are victim blame-y and function to rule out helpful changes. I should probably write a whole blog post about that someday.) Through our last day of homeschooling (around Memorial Day in May) I drafted the beginning of multiple blog posts but didn't have the [gestures vaguely around] to finish and post them. It is hard  to write about the interesting details without denting my teenager's privacy. While I often enjoy the middle of hard tasks, at any given time I would rather play Minecraft than start  a hard task. (This includes new hard tasks in modded Minecraft which is hilariously circular.) I am still using the  chart of how...

  Some kids are described as having a "spiky" profile where their testable attributes alternate between high and low. My kid has always had a prodigious vocabulary, but read at or below grade level for a chunk of elementary school*. Teachers would hear her speak and assume she had good handwriting and could read quickly.    Expectations based on her tallest spikes meant that grownups often talked to her as though she was behind or not working hard enough. This made school more stressful for her than for kids with a flatter profile. We assume that kids in the same room doing the same activity are all having the same experience. That assumption can keep us from noticing that some kids are actually very stressed. It keeps us from noticing that only some kids are getting positive feedback on their work ethic and results. It keeps us from noticing who is getting the satisfaction of finishing a task and meeting expectations.   Some Special Ed professionals had expectations...

  Two thirds of the way through a task I saw my kid was starting to struggle so I asked "Do you want to stop here?" and she said, "I am determined to continue!"    This is an excellent sign for multiple reasons. It means her general background stress level has gotten low enough that she has the capacity to handle brief new stress as a challenge instead of as one more difficult thing to handle when she's already barely hanging on.     It means the homeschooling stuff I've set up is engaging to this particular student.     And it means she trusts me to let her take breaks when she needs them so she doesn't need to take a break every time she's allowed in case the next stretch of academic-ish stuff is long.

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 a...

  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 ol...

  What I've been reading: The Stress Continuum  might be the best thing I've read about how continual stress, all by itself, can lead to anxiety, depression, and thoughts of suicide. It was written to help assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on health care workers.  Multitudinous book synopses. My 13-year-old is extremely discriminating in what she's willing to read. I created a spreadsheet to start tracking which ones I've read, whether and why my kid might like them. (video) What Does It Mean to Have "Burnout"?  also relates to continual stress. Emphasis on speed or competition engages some students and stresses others.  It’s time to stop using Kahoot as a whole class review tool. Since I don't spend all my time parenting and thinking about parenting, here is a blog post about sewing from 2013 which, believe it or not, was nine years ago!  Tutorial: Altering Sleeves That Bug You This video has excellent, very solid examples of learning and coachin...

 What went well: Wordle, spelling (!), looking at code, drawing, D&D, stress level, eating. What went badly: Cutting cardstock, Mom's sinuses.  What I've been reading: Load Bearing Habits  Related to this, my kid asked to do more bike riding but I have not yet checked tire pressure Autism Checklist of Doom   Recipe Books and Learning  This post and some weekend fire pit use got me thinking that we don't learn in an orderly way, we follow instructions, we ignore instructions, we experiment, and all these things help us understand the concepts more deeply. People almost never go directly from learning concepts to successful implementation.