School Update

 I'm supposed to be studying right now, but, well...

here we are.

Let's talk about school stuff.  I'm five-ish months into going back to university for a post-degree professional certificate in publishing.  Everything about this has been a challenge, and also completely different than it was the first time I did it - single, childless, and living in a dorm I did not have to clean or cook in.  In a lot of ways this time around has been easier.  Or, maybe easier is the wrong word.  It's more like getting onto a bike again after, say, 50 years of not riding a bike.  It was, and is, not smooth riding.  BUT it isn't like starting at square one, either.

The first thing I had to learn how to do, besides the weeks it took me to figure out how to register and pay for the actual course (this was...not intuitive) was to navigate an entirely on-line learning environment.  Not fun, do not recommend.

I wouldn't have previously said I was a Luddite but this Brightspace program was a p.i.t.a.  The first course I registered for was a sort of 'grammar refresher'.  Essentially you were supposed to take an online test to figure out how advanced your grammatical skills were, and if you got below a certain amount they 'highly recommended' that you take this refresher course first.  Friends, I couldn't even finish the test.  Assuming that that likely meant I was a moron and should begin with the remedial program, I registered there.  I was a little surprised; I mean, I do have a degree in English, and English is my mother tongue, and I do homeschool my children, and I have read thousands of books, and I did go through Khan Academy's grammar course Just To Make Sure.  But alright, online test!  You're the boss!

The first class was a disaster.

I can't even tell you what went wrong, frankly.  I did all the required readings, I posted all of the required postings, I studied and made notes, I asked lots of questions, and I was certain I understood what was going on, but every test score was mediocre.  It was very disheartening!  A few times in the course I emailed my prof to ask if there was something else I could be doing, maybe some key I was missing here, but there was nothing.  So, I just stumbled along and eventually finished it and took my Christmas break.

Which was like a month long!  Holy cow, were breaks always this long???  I was bored stiff.  Man, my last class was something like the 12th of December, and then my first class in the new term was the EIGHTEENTH of January.  I'm sorry, but that's insanity.  C'mon.  No one needs over a month off when you've only been going to school for three and a half months and there was a long weekend in there aaaaaaand a reading week.  

Anyway, after all that nonsense I went ahead and registered for class #2 - which is a sort of trade publishing market overview.  I'm starting week four of that, and so far I can't tell you if I'm doing any better than I did in my previous course because again...I thought I was doing okay there, too.  But I will tentatively say I appear to not have made any glaring public errors or, like, emailed anyone a picture of my toe, so things are good!  I'll know better how well I'm doing when I take my first quiz at the end of this week.

I told myself that if I was going to pay such gaspingly large amounts of money and spend such obscenely large amounts of time working, then I was going to squeeze this certificate for every last drop.  And that I think I've succeeded with.  There's an online job/internship posting board, and if I think there's any chance at all that I could apply for something that gets posted, then I do it.  I don't even care - I'm getting my name out.  The school was offering free career counselling, so fantastic, I signed up.  Yes, I DO want to get emails about continuing education students' associations!  Thanks!

But probably the most successful venture has been joining the school magazine.  In fact, I even have an article being published, which I will talk about in a later post.  It's all been very...eye-opening.  I feel very old a lot of the time, let me tell you.  Another student writer did an article about the fall of Youtube and I was like...Youtube is uncool?  What?  Also then I went on Youtube to look up TikTok videos because I'll be d*mned if I'm signing up for TikTok, and did you know that teenagers dye their hair half one colour and half another?  And I thought the peace sign whilst sticking your tongue out looked stupid.  Man I'm old.  

New Year's Day - 2021

 I know it's trite, but I love the fresh feeling of New Year's Resolutions. I love it. It's so cleansing and full of possibility and wonderful. But the resolutions of my earlier years aren't the type I tend to lean towards these days. Not that I don't WANT to do big, impressive things, but I don't need to anymore, and I don't feel obligated to impress people like I did when I was 25. I'm happy and content as I am, and big changes don't hold their former golden child status in my mind.

When I think about what I'd like to change this year, I'm struck by how little I care about the 'things' of resolutions right now. I'm not particularly interested in vowing to lose twenty pounds or finally figuring out eye makeup or radically overhauling my wardrobe or reading 100 books. This year has Quite Enough In It Already. I am still homeschooling three children, and doing my share of caring for two pets, one quite elderly with more and more challenging health concerns, and keeping house. With all that entails. That's two jobs in itself, but last year I decided to return to school as well, so I have that to think about. My first university course in a decade finished just before Christmas and my second starts mid-January, so I really don't need anything else 'to do'.

My mother's dementia is deteriorating briskly, my mother in law's eyesight is likewise and from our calls to her she appears increasingly unsteady on her feet and anxious in her mind, living alone and in the midst of this pandemic. My father's caregiver exhaustion is starting to show.

There have been personal stresses in my life that I haven't written about as well, things that weigh on me or make me rethink and rethink again how to proceed. And over it all, of course, hangs the cloud of Covid, slowly sucking the joy out of life, trapping us in our homes, taking away the things we love.

Which is all to say that another Thing To Do, much as my Type A heart yearns for it, is not the answer. It will feel good to Make A Plan for a few days, weeks, maybe months...but then it will drag on me and weigh me down - becoming a nice, big stone of expectations. No, I don't think I have it in me to do that this year. Not this year.

However, there is one thing I do wish I was better at, and I would be willing to work on a bit more over the next year. I wish I were....more conscious. More....present. Less scattered and flippity in my interests. I wish, when I walked into a bookstore, that I didn't buy all the books that appealed to me without thinking about whether I would ever read them or if I even already owned them! It is embarassing how many duplicates I own of books, just because I liked the book in the store, and bought it, and then thoughtlessly did exactly the same thing again a few weeks later. This should also give you a hint of how many books I own, that I can repeatedly lose copies in my house.

I wish I sat to eat my food, so that later in the day I could remember if I'd even eaten earlier. I wish I spent the money on things that really actually mattered to me, and took the time to fix the problems that truly annoyed me instead of always pushing those things aside as a 'someday' item that would never be done. I wish I didn't go to bed with wet hair simply because I was scrolling aggravating news feeds until too late in the evening to shower and dry my hair before sleep. I wish I didn't look at my tablet screen in bed and then toss and turn to sleep.

In short, I wish I was more conscious, less unconscious. I want to be more intentional, more focused, less flighty. I want to spend my time on things that actually matter, and to care for the things that I spend my time on. I don't want to have money in my wallet, and then suddenly not have money in my wallet, and be totally unable to remember what on earth I bought with it all.

That's my goal. My resolution for the year. To be present in my life. At least more than I am right now. I might blog about it, I don't know; I won't hold myself to that. But that's what I want to keep at the front of my mind this year - Live The Life I'm Living.

The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend

In a world filled with tension and violence and sickness it's encouraging to discover that fine storytelling is alive and well.  And boy is this ever fine storytelling.

I present to you The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend.

Don't be fooled by the named Broken Wheel, which could only ever be the moniker of a podunk little Idaho town, because this book is actually set in a podunk little Iowa town.  Our first indication that here, friends, we are dealing with an author who is not afraid to push boundaries!  Take her searing anti-racial prejudice in casting a solitary black dude who mutely cowers throughout 99% of the story as the grocery store attendent.

As a religious woman myself I was struck dumb by her firm, historically rooted understanding of Christianity.  She wrote not one, but two characters that essentially embodied the faith - Some Guy Who's A Minister In Some Church And Gets Bossed Around By A Bossy Church Lady (SGWAMISCAGBABABCL) was one of the most beautiful portrayals of a life devoted to others that I've ever come across, but the true brilliance has to go to Caroline, the Woman Who Contained Every Christian Stereotype and who, in the end, throws away everything she believes in, with absolutely no consequences in sight, in order to embrace Some Random Stunning 25yo Biosexual Fellow She Met On A Bench.  I cannot even imagine what sorts of depths it was necessary to plumb in order to find dialogue that reads: "I'm old".  I just...words fail me.

George, who turns into an alcoholic and then very successfully cures himself of the disease of alcoholism and then falls off the wagon with a bottle of illegally brewed hooch from under the counter of shotgun-toting Grace the hamburger attendent while walking all night in a cornfield but is cured again, this time with a shower, represents, of course, the Fall of Mankind.

But lest you think the masterpiece strays too far in the direction of the traditional, our author skillfully handles the topic of gay marriage by giving us two gay characters who do absolutely nothing in the whole book except crack jokes and make fancy drinks for everyone and, in one devastating moment, look at each other when the word 'marriage' is mentioned.

Which brings us, of course, to Sara and Tom, our Romeo and Juliet.  Tom is, like many of the men in this town of approximately 124 people, movie-star gorgeous, but has no interest in women because of a deep seated undefined hurt that can only truly be addressed by meeting Sara, an incredibly dull bookstore attendent from Sweden who comes to Broken Wheel in a very logical and believable series of events involving the spontaneous, unforseeable death of Amy, who was in love with John, the black grocery store attendent, who wouldn't marry her because of racial tensions he experienced in the South as a young boy.  Whew.

Tom loves Sara, but he cannot tell her this because reasons, and Sara loves Tom, but cannot tell him this because she's just a lowly Swedish bookstore clerk and could never be loved by a handsome man from Iowa, but with the quirky help of the town of misfits they manage, in the course of a week to entirely circumvent the US immigration authorities and arrange a sham marriage which, in a surprise ending no one could EVER foresee (spoiler, guys....)

...

...

...

was NOT illegal because they REALLY DID LOVE EACH OTHER.

If you aren't sobbing, I mean really truly in agony over the end of this book, then I don't know what to tell you except that there is also a bookstore stocked with people's leftover paperbacks and Sara both is and is not in charge of it, sort of, and somehow it is wildly successful and Sara always has the perfect book for someone even though the shelves should theoretically contain nothing but cookbooks and old Harlequin romances, and also she manages to get accounts with distributors and starts receiving boxes of new releases although she doesn't own the store and it is only stocking used books.

Also there's a dance.

Videos and a new app for us!

We've been using the YouTube Kids App recently as an addition to our homeschool and we're really liking it!  Here's how we've incorporated it into our days.

The app is loaded on only one device, so it's easier for me to keep track of who is doing school.  I have an account set up for the 6yo and 8yo, and a separate one for the 10yo.  I have gone into the parent settings and switched the app to not show any video suggestions for the children, and instead I individually add videos to their playlists.  The app also allows me to set a timer but so far I haven't used that function.  There are no ads and no in-app purchases that I've noticed.

Once that's set up I ask the children for 8-10 subjects that they are interested in, and I take some time to go through and add videos to their playlists for them to watch.

And with that intro - here's a bunch of stuff we've been watching recently!

The Wind and Mr. Ug - A cautionary tale about Mobius strips.

The Stringless Yo-Yo!

A Hamster Running a Minecraft Cube Maze

Slowly reducing the size of a hole to see if a cat will attempt to pass through it.

The 10 best squirrel feeders

Waking up, working and going to sleep in Zero G

A tour of the Russian segment of the International Space Station

The science behind the name Pokemon

Working on the Mars Rover

The ISS crew conducts a spacewalk

How to fold the world record paper airplane

How to feed wild birds the right way

The ISS bathroom tour

English Heritage teaches how to make a cardboard sword

The School Day - Thursday, October 1st, 2020

Students: 10yo (Grade 5-ish), 8yo (Grade 3-ish), 6yo (Grade 1-ish).

The first thing you'll likely notice is that our definition of 'school' is pretty vague and flexible.  Take heart; you're probably doing more than you realize.  All three of my students are fairly independent, and our house is a constant hive of activity so I'm going to attempt to tell what was happening during the day but keep in mind it was all swirled together and didn't happen in as linear a fashion as it appears.

The 10yo and I started the week 4 unit of Chemistry for the Logic Stage.  We're loving this program and it dovetails perfectly with the boy's interests.  Today was experiment day, so we gathered a variety of materials and tested to see if they held any of the four attributes of a metal - conductivity, malleability, magnetism and lustre.  After we'd hooked up our materials to a circuit, pounded them with a hammer, held a horseshoe magnet to them and looked at them against a lightbulb, he wrote our his experiment notes and read about metals, poor metals, semi-metals and non-metals in the Smithsonian Science Visual Encyclopedia.  I can't recommend it highly enough for little science lovers.  In the meantime the 6yo read a few Frog and Toad stories aloud to grandma, and the 8yo read chapter 6 of Anne of Green Gables, narrated the chapter to me, and then answered her two questions in her literature study guide.  I gave her the Oxford Can. Dictionary and she looked up her vocabulary words and copied them out.

I am taking an intensive university-level grammar course right now, so I spent time throughout this printing off work.  The 6yo finished her reading aloud and brought out art supplies and started crafting.  As the girls finished their work they helped Grandma fold and put away laundry and and then sat with her to watch tv.

The 8yo asked me a question about dinosaurs which led to me reading this article from BBC Earth to her and the 10yo.  The 10yo suggested that an efficient way to estimate dinosaur weight from footprints would be to measure the depth of the print.  The 8yo wondered if the length of the neck influenced the pitch of a vocalisation.  Everyone disappeared to watch the show Oh, Baby (all about baby animals) and we had to interrupt it to Google pictures of baby squid.

Which turned into watching youtube videos about metals.  Here's one on crushing tungsten steel, which we discovered today is the hardest metal.  And here is one on making a ball out of tinfoil. And another ball out of tinfoil.

I had to go to the store with my mother in law so my husband sat with the children while they read.  This is what the 10yo read...

  

When I got back we did history.  We wanted to learn about Samuel de Champlain, which was fascinating.  I read from several books about him, and we ended up taking down the globe to talk about latitude and longitude, astrolabes, astronomy, the Latin word 'astro', native peoples, etc.  We looked up astrolabes from the Canadian Museum of History to see what they looked like.

It was 3pm by this point, so the 6yo helped Grandma cut up butternut squash and the 8yo set the timer and did her free reading.  She's working through Owls in the Family by Farley Mowat.  The 10yo took apart and rebuilt a gear box from a solar powered robot that hadn't been working properly but stopped in order to get the lasagna in the oven and then went back to whatever he was doing with that gear.  When the 8yo finished I logged her into Prodigy math and she got to play while I went to my chiropractor appointment.

I got home and made some tea and played a few rounds of an addition/subtraction dice game with the two youngest.

And by then it was about 5pm and any 'formal' school, such as it is, was done.

Book Review - The Wilderking Series (Books 1-3)

The Wilderking series is a trilogy consisting of The Bark Of The Bog Owl, The Secret Of The Swamp King, and The Way Of The Wilderking.  It is much lauded in homeschool literature circles, which made me wary because...you remember Wingfeather, right?  Hmmm.

Reviews state that it is a retelling of the story of David and Goliath in the OT, but in a fantastical Southern Swamp style world.  I'm thinking moss hanging from trees and people poling dories around.  Possibly catfish.  But Christian catfish.  Sigh.  I don't know why I do this to myself.  Again, I ordered the whole blessed trilogy in one fell swoop just to ensure I would read it.  They came in and I was encouraged to see they aren't that thick - so if they're terrible, it won't last long.

Book one - first impressions are this is not cover art that will win anyone over.  It is pretty unattractive, actually.  My immediate worry was that this was going to be ridiculous, and honestly I was waiting for it to become that way.  Every new character, every time I heard a name, or a phrase, or anything at all, I internally cringed Just In Case.  But actually...we loved it!  We really did.  It was adventurous, exciting, fast-paced but not rushed, based on a story we all knew but with so many quirky, original changes that we still didn't know what would happen next.  The characters were engaging and thought-provoking, the bad guys were bad but not violent and horrific, the good guys were good but not perfect and one dimensional.  It was excellent.  It was an excellent, engaging read.

Marilyn

I’ve struggled with anxiety for my entire life, and it took me a long time to stop feeling a vague sense of shame about that, especially since discovering that there were still Christians in the world who believed that anxiety like mine was caused by a lack of faith.  I can’t think of a more misguided or hurtful thing than that to say to someone struggling against the waves of adrenaline in a panic attack, akin to telling an asthmatic that if they just prayed more, then they would breathe better.  The truth is that God is not ignorant of my anxiety any more than he is ignorant about anything else in his creation.  He knows me, He made me, and He doesn’t make mistakes. 

Shortly after a bad spell that lasted a few months, I got it into my mind that we should get a dog.  We already had three children, an elderly cat, a busy church to pastor and parents with various stages of failing health, but a dog seemed like a good idea to me all the same.  We must have gone to the shelter a dozen times but nothing ever worked out.  All around us people acquired pets, but I couldn’t seem to find the ‘right dog’.  I didn’t want a small dog, but I didn’t want a big dog, either.  I didn’t want one that shed everywhere.  I didn’t want one that barked or jumped or did anything dangerous like run into traffic and I definitely did not want a dog with health concerns or one that would chase the cat.  Also, two of my children were terrified of almost every dog they encountered.  Oh, and I got unreasonably frustrated when a dog pulled too much on a leash, and I didn’t want a puppy. 

In hindsight, I wouldn’t have pegged me for someone who should get a dog.   

When we did go see a possible pet, I always found something wrong with the animal.  This dog shed too much, and pulled when we walked.  That one had a fatty lump on its torso and even though it was completely harmless it felt weird.  I don’t know why I kept looking, since I seemed determined to find something wrong with every last creature. 

Fast forward to the summer of 2019.  I was helping out in the kitchen for vacation bible school when a friend of mine, who happens to breed dogs, mentioned one in conversation.  Her name was Marilyn, and she was a four-year-old purebred poodle.   She had had two litters, and now she was spayed and ready to find a forever home.  At first I was very excited that Marilyn could be THE dog, but my anxiety grew as I talked to my friend over the next few weeks.  How heavy was she?  Gosh, she seemed bigger than I wanted.  She was a poodle and I didn’t know if I really loved that breed.  She was four years old, was that too old?  Was it too young?  Indecisive anxiety swirled around me and when Marilyn eventually arrived at our house for a two week trial I was a nervous wreck.  I was afraid of everything you could be afraid of, but mostly I was afraid of disappointing my family if I said no another time. 

What I didn’t, and couldn’t, have anticipated was that Marilyn had feelings too.  She was happy to come over with her owner, but steadily more nervous as the visit progressed, and when the lady left without her, Marilyn was terrified. 

One of my main reasons for adding an animal to our family was that it might benefit ME – I would be forced to go outside and walk the dog even if I felt anxious, for example.  The dog would help me be brave.  But looking at Marilyn, who had no idea what was happening to her, made my heart swell in a strange way I hadn’t expected.  This dog needed me to be brave for HER.  She was lonely and afraid and confused and she needed me. 

That realization changed my heart.  Marilyn was afraid of what was happening to her, and I was afraid of what was happening to me, but maybe we could be afraid together, and the company might be nice.  She must have felt the same way because the second day she was here she decided that her mission in life was to be beside me at all times.  No matter what.  She waited for me to get out of the shower and she followed me from room to room and outside.  My children started to joke that if you ever needed to know where mom was you could listen for the ‘click, click, click’ of dog toenails on the floor. 

It’s been almost a year now.  Marilyn jumps when she gets excited and she did growl once at the cat before he sorted her out on the household hierarchy.  Sometimes she barks.  She’s too big.  Her hair grows at a phenomenal rate and when you cut it little bits get everywhere.  She hates having baths.  I’m not perfect either, though.  I get stressed at phone calls and I bite my nails and frankly I’m getting pretty exhausted with all this bathing required by polite society myself.  It turns out what I needed wasn’t the perfect dog, it was Marilyn, who needed me, too.  Because God made both of us, and He doesn’t make mistakes. 

In all my worries, I never expected that.