A Work in Progress: Schooling, Teaching, figuring this thing out.

We're already a whole month into the new year and I haven't told you all the things I want to tell you.

So I'm going to dive right in, and keep it short.

They warned me that homeschooling would leave little time for housework. I didn't believe them at first. As difficult as I have always found the housework, I was sure I would be able to do both. After all, I'm only teaching one child at the moment.

More than a semester in, I still haven't figured out how to include the four year old in what the six year old and I are doing. I haven't figure out how to decide when to take a day off, and when not to. Schooling, like parenting, is a work in progress.

This particular morning, I know I'm not ready for our math lesson. But it's a tremendous thing for me to know that in advance, rather than finding it out at the last minute with lesson immanent. It's also a tremendous thing for me to know that I have twenty minutes between my first and second sessions to get math ready.

Because I've divided our work day into sessions.

• Michael has his own assignments for session one while I continue to prepare for my day.
• My first session involves CC materials, i.e., timeline, science, English, and history sentence.
• Second session includes a lesson from Saxon math; reading and dictation from Story of the World, Volume One: Ancient Times; and reading and dictation from another, child-selected story or book. Parker, being six, dictates something he remembers from the story to me, not the other way around, and I record it for him, then have him read it back to me.
• Third session has a lesson from First Language Lessons, and anything else I think we need to cover at that time.

There are other books and workbooks we use, such as for spelling and phonics, but I've started alternating those with Story of the World, since I only read from it two to three times a week. I keep it simple because this is our first year and he's not ready to settle down for long stretches at a time. Parker gets three breaks between sessions, and each one is limited to twenty minutes.

So far this is working better than anything else I have tried. There is structure, but it is not a confining structure.

It's time for me to teach.

It Works, but Not Immediately--and this is what so often keeps me from thoroughly enjoying poetry (and philosophy too, for that matter)

I am astonished this morning. I plan to respond more to James Sires book, How to Read Slowly, more later, but this morning I cannot hold back and wait to say this.

I read a poem this morning, a poem by Gerard Manly Hopkins this morning, and got it, at least a little bit, understood it in some sense. I read it twice last night, and it was nothing to me but a jumble of words and sounds, but this morning, even though I had forgotten all about it in the night, this morning it suddenly and unexpectedly made sense to me. I knew how to read it this time, even though I didn't know how to read it before.

Can I reprint it here, or must I satisfy myself with providing a link?

Hurrahing in Harvest

I don't do a lot of poetic analysis if I can help it, so I cannot tell you what I got from the poem, and don't really wish to, but what astounds me is that I read these words last night and didn't understand the rhythm of them, and when I read them again this morning, all of a sudden I did.

I want to understand and appreciate poetry, I really do, but I do tend to be like the tourist that Sire describes in his book, moving too quickly to really see what I am looking at. We do this in life too, you know.

And what I realize just now is that part of the Hopkins poem is the gazing, not any kind of sleazy voyeurism, but the taking time to see what's there. The Carolyn Weber book, Surprised by Oxford, is about this in some sense too.

I am one who wants to see. There is enough of the mystic in me for that. But I don't always see. I don't always see.

Read the poem, if you wish to, and if you don't understand it, read it again. And then read it again. And then don't read it for a while, and then read it again. This is one of the ways that poetry works. How easily I forget that.

Seasons...perhaps we anticipate a season of travel without quite realizing we are doing so...

This is a blog post, not a Facebook update. I realized it three sentences in. I don't always catch it.

I always said that Tuscaloosa was a nice place to live so long as you didn't have to stay here all the time. My family used to go away for whole summers at a time, and Daddy always took his sabbatical year in another place. I've been in Tuscaloosa far too long.

It's been what? Twenty years since I lived anywhere else? I had no idea it had been so long. I've never taken the time to tote it up before. The rest of the family spent a year in New York while I was in college, New York which is beautiful when the snow falls, but can also be bleak when the leaves are off the trees. They were at West Point. I visited them twice.

Since then it has been nothing but Tuscaloosa all the time, except for the occasional week-long excursion. A family took me with them to Gatlinburg once. Daddy took me with him to Mexico City on a trip with the Evangelicals to the Universidad there. We drove as a family cross-country to attend a campus ministry training seminar in Colorado once. We've been to Alabama's beaches more than once, and my husband's family lives in Huntsville.

But now I'm getting the traveling bug. He (my husband) prefers not to travel merely for the sake of traveling, but I begin to think we need the experience now of being forced to interact with unfamiliar people, unfamiliar cultures even within our own citizenship, though I lack the skill. I feel we need to scope out this country we live in, trying on new geography until we find the place that fits. But I'm not sure how we'd do it, and we'd miss our beds back home.

And with the University here, of course, the world comes to us.

But I hope perhaps this is a preparing. Maybe we are to be called away soon, and this longing to move (move freely, I mean, not necessarily in terms of a moving van-type move) comes on full-force so that we will be ready to answer the call. Maybe. Maybe we were tied here before in ways I could not perceive, but maybe change is coming and God is protecting me, preparing me for change. Maybe. Sometimes I think speculation is vain, and other times I think the speculation is the Holy Spirit sending messages to God's children. I couldn't tell you which this one is. It's certainly hard to distinguish between the two.

All I know is that all of this, this discomfort, this emerging need, must be building trust and faith. I think these past two years must be important, as hard as they've been, though others may say, "Aw, you've had it easy." Though sometimes I accuse God of torturing me, I also know anything He does is good, and for our good because He is Good.

This is where I metaphorically stand, watching the bamboo of my yard sway in the breeze.

I wonder if Christmas is about newness in a different way than the New Year is about newness, or Spring is about newness. I wonder.

The Problem with Memoir is...

You know what the problem with reading spiritual memoirs is, don't you? By the time you reach the end of the book you feel like you know the author, but you really don't. You can't pick up the phone and call them, say hey, I know we haven't talked in a while, but remember me? How's your week been?

Well, I suppose you could, maybe, but you'd probably come across as a lunatic.

And yet, I really do like the genre. I'm reminded of a quotation from Wayne Boothe that I used to use as the tag line under my email signature: "In life we never know anyone but ourselves by thoroughly reliable internal signs, and most of us achieve an all too partial view even of ourselves (The Rhetoric of Fiction, 3). Even though we know that the author has used their creative and selective vision to tie their personal story together, we still come away knowing something about them that we otherwise wouldn't discover from reading their profile off a fly leaf. I like knowing something about what another person, different from me, has experienced, mediated though it is, and must be.

My favorite memoirs:

• Most any nonfiction written by Madeleine L'Engle, as her writing style is largely memoir-esque, even outside of her published journals.
• Girl Meets God by Lauren Winner
• An American Childhood by Annie Dillard
• Surprised by Joy by C.S. Lewis
• most recently, Surprised by Oxford by Carolyn Weber

There's a whole world of memoir I have yet to discover. Name your favorites?

"The worst is my being alone...," Don Chaffer, album: "You were at the Time for Love"

I feel comfortable coming out of nowhere with an idea on Facebook, but somehow blogging seems so much more formal, as though anything published here ought to be finished and complete, properly set, and ended. Publishing here is different from publishing there, and it trips me.

So now for the set-up.

I'm reading this book my Carolyn Weber, Surprised by Oxford. I saw it on the new releases shelf in the library at least half a year ago, and was drawn by the title, but didn't pick it up then. Later, through Goodreads perhaps, it emerged into my consciousness again, as the reviews led me to believe that despite my caution at approaching another spiritual memoir, one evoking my favorite author, no less, it would be a book worth reading.

It's a good book, but something about it scares me.

It isn't an alarming book, by any means, and it doesn't bring up any entirely new ideas that I have not considered before, but I am unsettled by it, unsettled being quite the appropriate word.

Is Oxford really like what she describes? Are there people in the world like what she describes, not just at Oxford?

I take back what I said about being unsettled by Weber's book. I was already unsettled before reading it.

And now I'm probably going to cry. Self-pity, you know. Or maybe you don't. Or maybe it isn't even self-pity.

What I came on here to say was this:

She makes me wonder if this part of the South, the part I live in, is a particularly uncomfortable place to be an introvert.

Among other, weightier things, and this is only a minor detail in a book about something else entirely, she mentions this man, this man who became so important in her life, his discomfort with small talk, and how he entered into deep conversation with her sister upon first meeting. It's like they recognized one another immediately.

For you this comes out of nowhere. For me it comes after many a conversation that has made me wonder about my geographical place in the world.

What scares me about this book is that Weber makes me want to escape to a place like Oxford, England. Not because it is a perfect place. No place is perfect. No people are perfect. There must be harshness and cruelty there just as there is here, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. There must be apathy there, just as there is here. There really is no reason to think that I might be nurtured there anymore than I am here in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

What scares me about this book is that it makes me want to hope for something I must be completely naive to hope for. Of course the problem I have must be me and not my surroundings, right? Community is there for the joining, is it not? If I'm lacking in community, in intellectual nurturing here, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, it must be my own fault, right, because I haven't adapted properly, wanted it enough, etc. Because I'm too intimidated by those I must approach.

If I feel isolated it is because of me, not you. At least that's what I've believed for a long, long time. Or else not believed it, and therein lies the problem.

Does any of this make sense?

My internal dialog says, "Buck up, girl. Your geographical location has nothing to do with it. There's something wrong with you, not the topography." I don't trust that internal dialog, any more than I trust in some kind of utopian, pie-in-the-sky dream.

This is raw and exposed and it's the only way I know to write. Someday I hope to grow up out of it.

I think I need some British friends.

By the way, Carolyn Weber's book isn't about this, but it is making me think new thoughts.

Things I am Grateful for...

It hasn't been working, this whole blogging thing, and that's okay. Things I am happy about this morning:

• That my sister-in-law collects handkerchiefs, carries one, and gave me some to bring home with me.
• A fire in the firepit on a cold day; candles in the house.
• Shopping at Publix, where the staff is usually friendly, they give your children free cookies so that they want to shop with you, and the customer is not treated like an inconvenience. They don't shame you for using WIC either.
• The discovery that long nightgowns can be warm without also being frumpy.
• Using handmade soap in my bathroom.
• My friend Amy, who puts table cloths on her table at meal time everyday, to signal to her children that something important is happening.
• Changing the way I think about groceries.
• Books like chocolates, even the difficult ones.

A bit of Metablogging

You know, I keep getting these random trash messages in my email inbox--these "comments," so-called, on this one particular post, "A Little Metablogging to Jumpstart the Process." This is probably the first post I ever wrote, and I always naturally seem to circle back to this one idea. Blogging is hard. I want to blog. I see people all over the place who seem--emphasis on "seem"--to have no trouble generating a post a day. Some of them are simply prolific. Some of them, if you look closely, have worked up a nice production schedule, and aren't afraid to repost old material. I don't know. Is this supposed to be really hard, or really easy? Are these others simply more serious about what they are doing? Are they really just more disciplined than I am?

I actually know the answers to most of these questions. My friend, Jim, has been very generous in his advice to me on blogging. Damon is the same. My husband is supportive, because if I want to be a writer, he certainly wants me to write.

We've each of us had to put certain dreams of ours on hold for a variety of reasons. I have been encouraged recently that this is not an unusual scenario. It's natural that I have trouble writing when I have so many discrete jobs. It makes me sad that my musically talented husband has had to set the saxophone largely aside while he focuses on his other creative endeavors to feed the family.

Isn't it funny, how people told me years ago that we were in an intense period in our lives, and that we would be able to pick these things up again when our children were older, and I took no comfort in it? I was sleep deprived, and order deprived, and I just didn't believe them. Today I find the very same statement comforting--though, to tell you the truth, I am still sleep deprived, and order deprived.

I'm still working on that discipline thing. And on balancing expectations.

The One Thing I Lack; Or rather, the one thing I lacking seek of the moment

I picked up a book yesterday to consider whether or not it was a good time to start reading it. The book is Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin. This was a book provided for us at the Classical Conversations Practicum several weeks ago. I started with the foreword, written by someone who saw fit to add his endorsement to a text he had reviewed, and read these words:

I was attracted immediately by the lucidity of his writing style and by the generosity of his mind.

I would very much like to know how I might obtain a generous mind, for I fear I do not possess one. Maybe if I read Climbing Parnassus someday, I may find out what the preface writer meant when he said that Tracy Lee Simmons has a generous mind .

An Incident. A filler? Good times with my son.

When my three year old woke up this morning, I was sitting in the living room reading a book, several of them, a pencil, and my coffee, piled up beside me. He came and nestled in next to me, then grabbed my Bible and started reading out the numbers of the chapters in Genesis. This time he recognized every one of the twenties, something we had gone over a week or two ago, but had not revisited since.

Amazing.

He had trouble once we entered the thirties, but in a little more than a week he has gained an entire section of numbers he didn't know before. The three-year-old mind is a fantastical thing.

And how do you like those sentence structures? I've been reading Stanley Fish, How to Read a Sentence. I suppose I've absorbed a little something in the past week myself, as difficult as that week had been. Whether they are good or not, or anything different from what I was accustomed to do already, I cannot tell.

Another Tune for Friday

My boys started watching Phineas and Ferb last night. They had seen it before at my sister's house. We had Phineas and Ferb gummies earlier in the week, so it was on their minds. They're watching an episode right now that reminds me of this song from The Jetson's, recorded by the Violent Femmes:



 And to think, we were at the table discussing our childhood cartoon viewing habits only yesterday.

A Sombre Song for a Gray Friday

I just learned something. I didn't realize before that I could share Levi Weaver's music directly from his website. So that's pretty cool. I don't have to go through grooveshark anymore, at least not when it comes to Levi.



It's just that kind of day today. I kinda want to hide away, but I can't. There are things to do, people to see. Old saw. Yesterday I got really stressed for a time and did some wallowing. Today I'll probably do some hiding. Tomorrow will be a better day.

Having to Work When I'd Rather Be Reading

I've had a hard time keeping up with the household this week. Laundry, the one thing I think I'm really good about, has piled up. Letting the laundry get behind adds up to too many loads to fold on the same day. Often this means that one load gets left in the dryer to wrinkle for a day or two. We don't even generate that much laundry at this point. I don't know how you ladies manage who have to do three loads every day. Hopefully you've figured out how to get your kids to help. I haven't managed that one yet.

Okay, so here's my thing for today: I've told you how I'm supposed to have a few hours free in the mornings to get some work done, that's reading, studying, writing, bookkeeping, editing, etc. I'm glad to have it. But it turns out that I can't use that time any old way I want.

For some reason, if I don't start in on the housework during my "study time," what my five year old refers to as my "quiet play time," the day probably ain't going to go very well. Somehow I have to jumpstart the dishes and the laundry before 9:00 a.m if anything at all is to be accomplished house-wise that day.

It's annoying. In fact I'm feeling rather irritable about it. But it must be done.

The good news is it's library day, and the reference desk has a book I've requested through Interlibrary loan. And it's a short one.

And this morning, even though I am irritable, I have managed to start the day off right, so there.

Reading: Sometimes I Think It Must Be Done Even When It Proves Frustrating

I'm unprepared to do a lot of writing today, but I have already done a good bit of talking this morning. I don't want to mention names of books or names of authors, so I'll designate one author A, and the other author B.

I was reading a book this morning, one that I have been wrestling with, and I was just beginning to settle in, thinking that the author's analysis was incomplete, but tolerable, when author A hit me with something that really set me off. I repressed the urge to fling the book across the room, and instead took the problem to my kind and brilliant husband. I'm not being sarcastic here; He really is both kind and brilliant.

I read it to him, we discussed it, and I was able to calm down just a bit.

Here's something we noticed: your response to a particular book is often a result of the expectation you bring to your reading of it.

My husband posited that if I reacted so strongly to author A, shouldn't I have responded with equal vehemence to author B.

"No, and here's the difference...." I realized it as I explained.

When I read the book by author B, I went in knowing that I was unlikely to agree with his position. I expected some insight, which he did in fact display, but my trust was never violated by author B because I hadn't invested a significant amount of trust in him in the first place.

Not so with author A. I went into author A's book expecting an agreeable reading experience. I didn't expect to agree with everything she said, but I did expect to find arguments and ideas that I could appreciate. Almost immediately my trust was violated.

Was it violated violently? No. It's just that there seemed to be a certain element missing from her assertions beginning on page one. I'm still not entirely sure what it is that is missing, I just know that I don't trust this person. I still expect her to somehow be able turn it around on me, to redeem this reading experience, but as I said, every time I start to think, hey, this is getting better, she implies something that blows up the entire thing.

Ursula LeGuin in fact first alerted me to this idea of an author violating the reader's trust. It makes sense to me. When you know what to expect from an author and you get that very thing, even if it is a problematic thing, it is acceptable. In fact there are some authors who I find to be a lot of fun to argue with. Though it is perhaps a one-sided exchange, it is a rewarding one. There are others who I don't enjoy arguing with at all. Neither do I enjoy reading them, and author A, it seems, is falling into that category.

I haven't made up my mind about author A. I'm still willing to wait and see if things will change. Maybe I'll find her analysis better on some issues than on others. We all have our strengths and weaknesses. We all have our peculiar emphases and blind spots.

But now I've gotten to a part of author A's book I don't even understand. When Michael becomes available again, we'll talk through it and he'll be able to help me understand.

Unfortunately, based on my analysis above, I may be setting myself up for more frustration, that is, by continuing to hope for an improved reading experience, but it's a chance I'll have to take.

There isn't a lot you can learn by refusing to engage ideas that challenge your thinking.

Thoughts on Teaching My Child to find Shizuoka on a Map

I'm thinking about my children's education a lot these days, trying to learn all I can about learning and teaching, trying to figure out what's what and how to do this Home Education thing. As much as I resisted the idea in the past, I'm starting to see that teaching my boys might be kinda fun, and is totally appropriate for us considering we, my husband and I, are life-long learners ourselves.

Me, I'm curious about just about every subject, from particle physics to spelling, which isn't to say that I understand anything about particle physics, or expect my five year old son to.

We'll be able to model for them how and why to learn. We'll be able to provide ample rime for review so that new information can move easily from short-term memory into long term memory, etc.

Anyway, I was thinking the other night about geography. I bought this awesome DK World Atlas at the Classical Conversations Parent Practicum last week. I fell in love with this thing the very first day of the practicum and I couldn't pass it up. I'd show you a picture of the book, only I don't know how.

The CC people believe a knowledge of geography is important because it makes you more alert to things that are going on in the world. You'll hear the name of a small city in Japan, and think, hey, I know something about that place; I wonder what is going on there. You'll be more alert to the interests and concerns of people you'll never meet. In my own experience, it makes me happy that my five year old son can look at a map of the world, point to Japan, and say, "hey, my uncle David lives there."

This was my brain wave the other night.

What if Parker and I look at a map and I ask him to find Brazil for me. And then Estonia. And then Nepal. Or what if we start out even more simply. We look at a labeled map and I ask him to point to Australia, or Oceania, or whatever it is we're calling that particular continent these day. (The name of the continent has changed recently, or hadn't you heard? I only know about the change by chance.) And then we look for Europe and Asia and Antarctica and all of the seven continents and four oceans. He learned the names of the continents and oceans at VBS last year, so this isn't entirely new information for him. What if we do that regularly over an extended period of time? After a while, he will no longer need to look at the words on the map in order to find the continents or oceans. He'll have memorized their location on the map. And we'll find a map that has a different perspective from time to time, and then he'll see that the locational relationship between the continents stays the same even when their place on the map doesn't. In this way he will no longer be tied to using only one map, but will be able to find Asia on any map.

It all seems so natural, and in the process he and I will learn together what I had already forgotten. I remember memorizing maps in elementary school, but I don't remember what was on them. When someone mentioned North Carolina the other day I realized that even though I know it has a coast, and that it is to the North of the state I live in, which is Alabama, all this time I had been thinking that it was West of us. My mental U.S. map had us traveling through Georgia on the right instead of on the left.

The Last Load of Laundry that Broke the Camel's Back

I had one of those moments Friday night.

It had been a long week. I was behind on almost every aspect of family and household care. There was a week's worth of laundry, dishes to be washed, etc.

You know the song. I've shared it with you before: "He Will Come," recorded by Waterdeep.



"She can handle any tragedy that happens but not little things like this."

I was on the last load of laundry, having congratulated myself on removing three chocolate bars from my son's pants before starting the dryer cycle, as well as the fact that they were still in their wrappers and the clothing remained unstreaked. It was already late by the way that I measure time. Back to the kitchen for more dish washing. Yeah.

And I was so tired.

But what do you know, I didn't get all of the chocolate bars out of my son's pants after all. There was one more. It came out of the dryer, after two dryer cycles, in a ball, having left small chocolate streaks on the clothes and on the walls of the dryer.

I thought the entire load was ruined. You knew that heat tends to set-in stains, didn't you?

I put the load through the washing machine again thinking that every item of clothing in that load had been ruined, and I was devastated. Believe me when I tell you I was devastated over a single load of laundry.

When our car was totaled two years ago, right before our anniversary, I was fine. When my husband lost his job a few weeks later and decided to pursue his own project rather than interview for a new one, I was fine. Two years later, in the present, while still waiting for our income to start covering our expenses, I'm not exactly fine, but I am trusting God to keep us going debt-free as He has all this time. But the laundry? That was it.

You'll tell me that I didn't really come through all those bigger things without paying a high price, and you're right. But when I tell you I was fine, I tell you the truth. The big things, I can trust God for. The little things make me want to quit.

And that's what I was thinking while the laundry ran a second time that night. I'm done. I cannot be in charge of the housework. I cannot do it, Lord. You have given me a job I cannot do.

You have let me down.

We have that kind of relationship, God and I do. I yell at Him sometimes. He lets me rant and rave, and still He knows my heart, and I figure better that I yell at Him than yell at my husband, because He is big and strong, He knows me, and He knows the truth, and honey, He can take it. Besides, He knows exactly what I'm thinking whether I tell Him or not.

The Bible tells me that this is right. David did it. So did Job. And God answered both of them.

I hope you don't think I say this flippantly; it is a serious matter.

And after I've ranted and raved against Him for a while, this is what He says to me.

God says, "Baby, I'm here with you, and you can trust Me." Not in those words, of course. There are no floating voices, as my friend Damon sometimes reminds me. Maybe sometimes God does speak in an audible voice, but never to me.

And you know what? Even if the situation hadn't ultimately worked out it would have been okay. I scrubbed down the inside of the dryer with an SOS pad. I used stain stick on most of the clothes, and when I washed them that second time they came out clean.

And, hey, I got a blog post out of it.