CatchyNameHomeschooling

From Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Heart!.jpg In an attempt to commemorate a holiday and introduce art curriculum more complex than "Draw something!" I found a simple-looking exercise on Pinterest of drawing a heart, drawing a grid around and through the heart, with bending the grid lines in the heart, then coloring them in a checkerboard pattern to make the heart look dimensional.    Getting this to work is harder than it looks. It's clear the creator paid attention to exactly where lines intersected each other in ways that weren't explained in the short instructions. On my third try I got kind of close. My kid expressed mild annoyance that mine looked better than theirs, which gave me a chance to point out that I am old and have looked at more optical illusions than they have.  But drawing good checkerboard hearts was never my main goal. There was a bunch of other stuff going on that tells me homeschooling is an improvement over public ...

Erlenmeyer flasks behind a wok in a kitchen cabinet I said in my last post that my kid's "understanding of concepts and facts in multiple areas of science is excellent." Already knowing nearly every fact and concept presented in our district's gifted science classes made those classes boring. The lack of intellectual stimulation meant there was no "hook" to make graphing or writing engaging. When people talk about 2e kids having "spiky" profiles or asynchronous skills, this is the disconnect they're talking about. If plotting points on a graph results in a surprising curve that furthers your understanding of a concept, then it feels worthwhile. Someone who already knows that curve and the concepts behind it will find plotting those points tedious. Practice is more effective when it feels worthwhile.  Our family is knowledgeable and science-minded so the kid learned some stuff from casual conversation. The rest, the bulk of it, came from YouTub...

  When I was a kid back in the 1980s I occasionally heard about stores having grand openings or grand re-openings. It wasn't until well into adulthood that I heard of soft openings where a store quietly lets a few people in to test their systems and processes. And Lo! Eighth grade homeschooling began today, the first Monday in September! And it is not a big deal. For one thing, no schooling is starting before 2:00 PM so the teenager can sleep in and get moving slowly.   For another thing I have changed my (unspoken, emotional, subliminal) goal from what public school optimally should do for a 2e student in every subject to doing better than public school was doing in some subjects. And by "better" I mean prioritizing and supporting my kid's mental health over academic achievements while encouraging some intellectual growth. Language Arts: Critical analysis of media and journalism is already very good. Familiarity with some literature classics is good. Grammar is good....

A lamp with nifty facets for when I don't have a photo that matches the blog topic I usually have dozens, maybe a hundred, things I ought to get done in the near future. Some of them are so routine and easy that they almost don't count, like making myself museli for breakfast every morning. Some of them are rare and have few consequences, like hiring a chimney sweep for the fireplace we haven't used (and haven't missed) for three years.    Theoretically, there are people who would find this target rich environment a goad to productivity that would give them joy every time they completed a task.    But I have trouble starting things. I have always had trouble starting things. Until my 40s I had almost no ability to elucidate why I couldn't start a task. Now that I can, I shall! Am I doing it now to procrastinate on other things? Of course! It's too soon so all the factors that need to be considered might not be knowable yet. For instance it doesn't make sense...

  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.