Weird, annoying homeschooled kids

Well, I was ready to be really irritated when I read an article with the title, "Why are homeschooled kids so annoying?"
And then I read the article, and they're right.
I spend a lot of time trying to "sell" homeschooling to my family and some skeptical friends.
I emphasize the freedom, the opportunity to explore passions, the ability to go deeper into learning with each child, and how much my kids are thriving.
And I play up how wonderful my kids are. And they *are* wonderful: Bright, funny, well-behaved (most of the time,) cheerful, helpful, kind. My 11-year-old son changes diapers, empties the dishwasher, cooks dinner, does laundry and begs for more history lessons.
My 7-year-old son loves to play with his sister, is charming, engaging, crazy about his pets and can be reluctantly talked into doing occasional chores.
But you know what?
Homeschooled kids, including my own, can also be annoying. And weird.
And instead of denying it and saying, "But homeschoolers aren't weird! They're normal!," I might as well embrace it.
We've been homeschooling since Sawyer was born; we've never done a single day of "regular" school.
And, despite the fact that people worry about "socialization," we know a ton of kids. And many, if not all of them, are either weird, annoying, or both.
There are kids who never, every shut up. Mine is one of them. Sawyer wants to talk to you. About Dr. Who, about Minecraft, about World of Warcraft, about the Peloponnesian War and why it was important. He wants to discuss politics, science fiction, and Calvin and Hobbes. Mostly, though, he just wants to talk.
Which is why I'm glad there are other, equally weird kids, sprinkled throughout our homeschool group. He can go to Park Day and find someone who will listen, and they can chatter away, non-stop, about which one of them is Sparta.
That's how he describes a girl in one of his classes: "She's Sparta, and I'm Athens, and that's why we don't get along."
As if I'm supposed to know what that means; I'm not the one who just studied the Greeks, and I have no idea what the hell he's talking about.
But the kids he's friends with do. They have games that involve vampires, Dr. Who, the Greeks and Spiderman all rolled into one. His friends are just as quirky, just as passionate. Some about skating, some about math, some about game playing. But if you ask any of them what they're interested in, what their hobbies and likes are, you'll never, ever get a shrug or an "I dunno." You'll get a torrent of information that you have to back away from slowly.
Then, of course, we have Platypus Boy.
Sander's been obsessed with platypuses since he was three. I know that the plural of platypus is either platypus or platypuses because I've looked them up so often. I know that they make Vitamin C in their liver, not in their kidneys, unlike other mammals, or maybe it's the other way around. In fact, that's all I hear about. That and poop. That's his other favorite word.
And Sander can go hang out with his friends and talk and play and he's not "the weird kid." He's just Sander. And everyone knows that if you want to find Sander, you have to look up. He's in the tallest tree, barefoot, hanging out, talking to people about animals.
And Scout, our almost-two-year-old, now says, "poop," and "platypus," and fits right in.
My kids are not the only weird homeschoolers.
They have friends who are obsessed with Legos, or Minecraft, or dragons, and some who have no manners at all, and some who obviously have a screw slightly loose and might be more than just a little bit weird.
But you know what? Good for them.
Good for them for following their passions, exploring what interests them and finding people who have similar interests.
Because you know what my kids don't talk about? Justin Bieber.
Kim Kardashian.
Keisha.
What they wear.
What's "cool."
What "everybody else does."
What "they have to have, right now, because otherwise everyone will think they can't afford it."
And I'm good with that.
They don't know what the cool haircuts are, and neither do I, though I ask the lady at the haircutting place to give them a "normal kid's" haircut.
They have no idea what their "style" is. They have never read a fashion magazine, seen a show about Snooki or listened to pop music.
I just looked up the top ten songs this week.
I think I've heard the first one, "Somebody That I Used to Know," and so my kids might have heard it. I don't know any of the others, though I've heard of Justin Bieber and Kelly Clarkson, and I read about someone making fun of Niki Minaj.
My kids have no clue who any of them are. They will soon, I'm sure; Sawyer's turning 12 this summer and in the next year or so he'll discover music and I'll be an old person who doesn't know anything.
I hope he discovers some great bands, some new, and some old. I hope he loves Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin and at least gives the Beatles a chance. And I hope for my own sake that he hates hip-hop, so I don't have to hear it.
But Sawyer will choose his own style, and if his friends don't like his music, and he doesn't like theirs, it won't be a big deal -- they've all grown up knowing that they have different interests and different taste.
I'm sure if Sawyer had to walk into a sixth-grade classroom tomorrow and start school, he'd be considered a weird kid.
He thinks he knows everything. He likes to tell you you're wrong, and that he knows more about it than you do. He likes to use the word, "expert" about himself, no matter how many times I tell him that he's not, really, an expert, not even a little (although I'd say Sander is close to being a platypus expert among 7-year-olds.)
And yeah, it's kind of annoying.
But I will take annoying and weird over mainstream and dumbed-down any day.
Sawyer will learn to temper his tongue. He will. He will learn that no matter how exciting it is to share his thoughts with other people, it's exciting to hear what others think, too.
But you can't learn enthusiasm, eagerness, and passion by following the crowd.
And a kid who thinks the platypus represents everything about him isn't ever going to blend in with the crowd anyway. He's going to be a little weird, no matter what.
I might as well embrace it and go along for the ride.
Sure, my kids are weird and annoying. But that's the least of their traits. And honestly, if that's the worst thing you can say about my kids? I'll take it as a compliment.

The middle ages. And history co-ops

All right, people, it's that time year again. 

The time where I write in a panic, not sure what we're going to do next year, and I over think everything, obsess and re-work everything in my head until it's all a complete muddle and I scream for help.

So, here I am, screaming for help.

Background: Sawyer will be 12 in the fall. I'm going to call him 7th grade, but he could be 6th or 7th according to his birthday.

He's a verbal, story-oriented, history-oriented kid and always has been. We both like school years structured around a history theme with literature, writing, hands-on stuff and field trips woven in around that theme. This year has been ancient history/mythology and we've just kind of been winging it; I've been in baby mode for two years and haven't gotten back to a full stride with school. He's doing "enough" but it's not fun, tied-together and as cool as it could be. And really, if we're homeschooling, why not make it as cool as we can?

So next year, we're going all in on the middle ages.

I'd like to do the middle ages in the fall and the renaissance/Elizabethan England/Shakespeare in the spring.

That sets him up for American History in eighth grade, and then in high school I'm betting he's not going to want to do as many hands-on projects and cool stuff and he's going to want to more on his own, so I'd like to do a lot of fun stuff these next two years.

Sander will be along for the ride. He's NOT a history kid. He wants to learn about animals, and that's all he wants to learn about. History is not interesting unless it's mammoths and dinosaurs, and while knights might hold his interest for a while, Henry VIII's six wives are not going to be something he's into. Though Anne Boleyn's headless ghost might be OK.

So for my Sander, I've been obsessed since a friend mentioned Winter Promise, and I ordered this:

http://www.winterpromise.com/animals_and_their_worlds.html

It's a year-long themed study of animals and their habitats, with a different animal each week to focus on, a study of woods, deserts, swamps and oceans, anatomy and structure and how to observe nature. So Sander's set. We'll do a little on that every day while Sawyer does math, typing and violin, and then Sander can sit in on the middle ages stuff with us and maybe some will rub off.

So, here's the stuff I want to know for middle ages.

There are two amazing, fabulous, wonderful resources to study the middle ages: 

http://www.tapestryofgrace.com/year2/ScopeAndSequence2.pdf

http://www.winterpromise.com/pdfs/QuestfortheMiddleAges-Experience2009.pdf

They're both also so Christian and Bible-centered it hurts. And the Tapestry of Grace has such a political agenda that's SO different than mine that I hate to even think about how hard it will be to secularize it. Honestly, they invite you to have a "Tea Party" with your friends to discuss their curriculum and how wonderful it is and how it fits in with God's plan for your children.

Um, no. I'm not going to have a tea party with all of you. I'm going to write to you, instead, and ask how I take these great resources and use them and make sense of them.

My plan, I guess, is to take the weekly planners, throw out the weeks I'm not interested in, re-work it to use the books and resources I have, and schedule it.

Should I do a co-op with this?

Here's my experience with co-ops: Someone, very gung-ho, starts one. Everyone else gloms on, full of great ideas. There's a great plan, full of great parents and great kids.

The first month is awesome.

The second month, three kids drop out because they didn't realize how far it was, and soccer started, and one of the kids doesn't like all the writing and another doesn't like the playground where you're having the co-op.

So the other moms now have double the work and instead of planning one or two great lesson each semester, they're having to throw together a lesson every two or three weeks, which they didn't plan on.

So one or two of them get overwhelmed and quit.

By January, it's three moms and four or five kids, struggling along, and the moms are throwing coloring pads and crayons at the kids while saying, "Did you read the book this week? Let's just read out loud." And by May everyone is completely over it and vows to never do another co-op.

This has happened every single year. So yeah, I'd love to do a history co-op making sundials, exploring alchemy, going to a Shakespeare play, watching videos on the black plague.

But half the kids don't do the reading/set-up required to understand the lesson plan, and the other half are annoyed that they put in the work and the other kids are just sitting there and can't discuss what's going on!

So how do I implement this great lesson plan I'm working on? It seems like such a waste to have all these resources and materials and use them on one kid, and honestly, half the stuff we won't do unless we have three or four kids at least to work on it.

So, I guess the ultimate question is: How do I run a co-op where people are involved, engaged, stay active and are make sure their kid is prepared for the group and interested in the activities?

If I open up a co-op like this to all of the homeschooling lists, I end up getting a lot of parents who don't want to teach history and see this as an easy way to get a history "check" for the semester. Or worse, parents who know their kids don't like history and who think this will be the way to get them to like it.

I'm looking for the opposite: Kids who love history, parents who are engaged and who want to teach and who know that this is the "spine" of the whole year, not a throwaway "arty" class.

Ideas?

What I really want to do is charge everyone $100 a semester to make sure they're committed. Or hire a teacher/facilitator to run to the thing, so they can be mean about making sure the material's covered.

Has anyone run a successful co-op with older kids that actually lasted the entire 36 weeks?

My latest project

My super-quick, easy project of creating a library out of a laundry room is finally complete, and guess what? It wasn't super-quick, and it wasn't easy.But I'm beginning to see that it was worth it, in at least a dozen different ways.
We took our laundry room, moved our washer and dryer to the garage, and took out the sink, cabinets and shelves.
Then I hired Tex, the slowest, most pitiful carpenter on the planet, and waited endlessly while he sprained his ankle, wrecked his truck, had two episodes where he thought he was having a heart attack, got stung by a bee and finally, slowly, shelves were put up in the space.
And then I took all of my bins of books, which I've been accumulating for years, sorted them by category, labeled them, re-sorted them, re-labeled them, and let the kids at it.
To answer questions: The reason books are in bins and not on shelves is because it saves space, is much less messy and is 3,000 times more kid-friendly.
Bins mean that all books are facing forward. A small child who can't read, or even a bigger kid who could never read the spine of a book, can flip through a bin of books and look at the cover and choose the one she wants.
In one bin, 12 inches wide, I can fit 30-60 books, depending on whether they're softcover or hardcover. In that same 12-inch space, if I put books on the shelf, I could fit about 12-15 books standing on edge.
Also, kids have a hard time putting books back on a shelf if they're on edge. Frankly, I do, too.
It's much easier to replace a book into a bin than it is to find the spot on a shelf where it belongs, shove other books out of the way and replace it. And if it's hard, little kids won't do it.
So they'll take out 20 books looking for the one they want and leave them in a pile on the floor.
This way, they flip through the bin, grab the book they want, and sit down to read.
We have them sorted into categories that make sense to us, and each bin has a label with a picture on it, so even non-readers or beginning readers can see what's in the bins.
We have two huge bins of books on the floor, labeled "Kid's readers."
These are our favorite books that kids like to look at and read to themselves -- everything from "Red Fish, Blue Fish," to "Goodnight Moon," "Sylvester and the Magic Pebble" and "The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig."
One of my kids is a beginning reader, and he likes to sit and read these to himself. My little one is not yet two, and she likes to beg anyone within grabbing reach to read them to her. She also has a huge box of board books just for her, but she's almost at the point where she's ready to move on from those -- she knows she gets more story time from the "real" books.
For homeschooling, we have all sorts of bins. "Romans and Greeks," "Mythology,""Pirates, Knights, Vikings, King Arthur and Robin Hood," "Middle Ages," "Egyptians," "General History, reference," "General History, readers," "Science readers," "American history, non-fiction," "American History, readers and fiction," "General History that's not Egyptian or Greek or Romans or Pirates or King Arthur," "Shakespeare," and others.
Then I have bins for curriculum, workbooks and planning materials -- math, science, writing and grammar, phonics, reading, and a bin for parenting/homeschooling/planning books.
The next part of the plan, and this is going to be a lot longer process than I anticipated, too, is to catalog all of the books.
There's a great website called Librarything.com. The whole purpose of it is to catalog your books online, whether to sell them, keep track of what you have, use it as a lending library or just to count your books.
They have a scanner they sell for $5 that lets you import each book by scanning the ISBN code. It's not as quick and easy as it sounds -- you still have to scan each book, label it with which bin it's in, add tags so you can search for it, etc.
However: The upside of this is that when Sawyer's studying the Romans, as he's doing now, I know what we have. When I go to a curriculum sale or hit Half-Price Books and I see a bunch of stuff about the middle ages, which we're doing next year, I can look to see if we already have the books. I can have friends log in and see if they need to borrow anything for their year, and I can mark books checked out if they're gone.
I've entered in about 500 books so far, and I'm sure I have about 2,000 more to go. I'm doing one bin a day, and there are 48 bins. It's going to be a while.
However: I've been homeschooling for ten years. When I first started, my nephew was 11, I'd never taught anyone to do anything except blow a bubble or ride a bike, and I was terrified. I went and bought a textbook, handed it to him, and said, "Read this and answer questions."
I would have been so much better off if I'd told him to go read some of the books I had on the shelf!
I've been collecting books about things we love or things my kids should know about since then, and my youngest daughter will be two in June, and if all goes well, I have another 16 years homeschooling her.
So I figured I'd get organized now and save myself the trouble later!
And the best part about the library, and a complete unforeseen benefit? The kids, on their own, went and got pillows and blankets, lined the floor, and made a reading nook. They go in, grab a book, and settle in for hours. I'm going to have to put a light in there and make it permanent, I think.
What a great place to read -- I wish I had something like that when I was little! 

A sloth mom's version of career day...

April 11, 2011

Saturday, Mark took Sawyer, Sander and my niece Emily to Aggieland for their open house -- they show off their veterinary school once a year, free, to anyone who wants to come. 

For those of you not from the South, Texas A&M University is known far and wide for its fabulous veterinary school, great programs in agriculture and farming, a town that includes The Dixie Chicken as one of the more upscale bars, Aggie jokes and an unstoppable rivalry with the University of Texas in Austin.

I lived in College Station, home of A&M, and was the chief copy editor of the newspaper there a million years ago. People might make fun of Aggies, but no one questions their expertise with animals.

Sander has wanted to be an animal worker since he was born. He’s not sure whether he’s going to be a biologist or a veterinarian or work with exotic zoo animals, but he’s going to work with animals.

So, we’ve been to every zoo within 1,000 miles of Austin. We’ve done whale watches, explored nature centers, done behind the scenes tours, taken classes, read books, and he’s still hungry for more.

So off they went, each with a stuffed animal with an ailment that needed fixing.

The top draw was the fistulated cow. Really.

It’s a cow with a healed hole in its side, and you can reach in and pull digested grass out of its stomach. Or, as Sander likes to say, you can also put grass in and “feed the cow.”

He’s been laughing at that for three days.

Then, off to surgery. Emily’s bear had a broken arm that the surgeons helped her set. Both Sander and Sawyer wanted a pregnant bear, so the surgeons cut open the bears along the belly and inserted a button in each, and then sewed it up.

I’m not sure what message that teaches, at all, about genetics or anatomy, but since they’re going back next year to have the button removed via c-section turned into cubs, we can answer more questions then...

All three kids had fun. All three kids learned a great deal. And they all had the opportunity to ask questions, learn about the career and find out if this was something they were willing to work for.

All in all, a cool thing for A&M to do, and a good day for everyone.

A long story about the name Eva

Published June 1, 2010

This is a story. I have no idea if it’s true. I doubt anyone does at this point, because it happened 98 years ago and everyone involved is dead.

My mother told me this story when I was little, and I loved it. 

I love family history, family heritage and family lore. My mother couldn’t stand her actual life in the present tense, and so she told stories about the past, where everything was happy and wonderful.

I listened to a lot of stories about people I’d never met and would never know, but over the years, as I visited cemeteries and heard more pieces of stories, and got to know cousins who were so-and-so’s grandchildren, I was hooked.

At one point, my mother could name all 11 (or 12?) of Aunt Hazel’s siblings, and what happened to each of them. It made it much more interesting to visit Aunt Hazel, who was in her late 80s when I was a teenager. Visiting Aunt Polly was a lot more fun when I realized she was the one who stole the blueberries, or swam across Lake Champlain because she didn’t want to pay the dollar for the toll bridge.

 So my mother and aunts might quibble with this version. It’s all sort of jumbled together in my head. I never met my great-grandparents, and I don’t know if I spelled their names right. I don’t know if they met here, or in Poland. I don’t know if my great-grandmother was born here or in Poland. I guess I’ll have to start asking questions and actually writing it down -- I used to know some of this, but it’s been forgotten.

And so, since this a story, there might be poetic license involved. And it might be 100 percent true.

My grandmother's name was Eva Golembesky, daughter of Waclawa and Wladyslaw Golembiewski, who were of course known as Nellie and Walter.

Nellie and Walter lived in Mineville, New York, deep in the heart of the Adirondack Mountains, across Lake Champlain from Vermont. They call it the North Country, or God's Country. They still hunt bear up there. It's one of the most beautiful places I've ever been, in the summer and fall. In the winter, the average high temperature is 26 degrees. The average low is 7.

And Walter went to work for the Witherbee iron mine.

I don't know how they got from Poland to Mineville, and I don't know if they met in New York or in Poland.

But by 1912, they were married and lived in a tiny house in Mineville, rented from Mr. Witherbee, who owned everything. 

He owned the mine, and the houses in town, and the mining equipment you needed to go get ore. If you wanted to be a miner, you had to buy your equipment at the company store, and then they'd take the cost out of your paycheck.

Next door to Walter and Nellie lived Margaret and Victor Smith. Victor Smith was also a miner. Everyone was. But they were born and raised in the Adirondacks. 

By 1912, their families had been here 200 years and had fought in the American Revolution, and the Civil War. It must have been interesting living and working next to newly immigrated Poles.

It's 1912. Victor and Maggie have settled in to mining life, and they have a bunch of children. Next door, Nellie and Walter settle in, too, and have a baby. Within a month, the baby has died.

And then another baby is born, less than a year later. And two weeks later, she, too, is dead.

At Victor and Maggie's house, they end up with four living children, and three more who die young, but they can't feel anything but sorry for the Polish couple next door. No living children yet. They try again, and this time the baby lives three months.

Meanwhile, Maggie takes in boarders. They have a tiny house, just three bedrooms and less than 900 sq. feet, but they pack the miners in like sardines. Every night before she goes to bed, Maggie makes the dough for 20 or 30 pot pies for the miners to take for their lunch. She bakes them in the morning, wraps each one tightly to keep them warm until lunch, then makes breakfast for at least ten men. Pancakes, sausage, biscuits. She sends them off with two or three pies each, then spends the rest of the day making beds, cleaning and making dinner for ten very hungry men.

 Victor goes to the mines every day with them. He asks every few months if Mr. Witherbee will let him buy his house instead of rent, but is turned down.

The Polish couple have another baby, their fourth. Within a month, this baby is gone, too.

Desperate, they finally consult with a doctor. It takes all of their savings, but this is what savings are for. The doctor does an examination and tells Nellie to come back when she's pregnant again.

She does, and he says, "There is a reason for this, and God has given us a way to make sure that you will have a baby that lives, as long as you honor him and the Bible. When this baby is born, if it's a boy, name him Adam. If it's a girl, name her Eve. This will please God, and the baby will live."

And so Nellie had a girl, and they named her Eva, and they waited. She made it to the six-month mark, and they started to breathe a little easier. And then, for the first time, they had a baby make it to one year old. And then two. And then another baby came along, and she lived, too.

And they had four babies in a row who lived and thrived.

When Eva was 12, her father, Walter, went into the mines one day with his pies wrapped up warmly. Finally, Mr. Witherbee was putting electricity into the mines, so there would light, and clean air would be pumped into the shafts. This was an exciting time for the mine.

Walter reached back behind him into his sack to get his pie and touched a live wire. He was dead when they brought him to the surface. Eva went to work cleaning houses. Now they had no income, but four children to feed.

Less than a year later, Mr. Witherbee offered to sell all of the houses to the miners. He'd give them a mortgage himself, and offered to take the payments right out of their checks. About half the miners in town took him up on it, and were amazed at the possibly of owning a home on a miner's salary. They figured that perhaps Mr. Witherbee had finally made enough money that he would make some changes to safety in the mine, and wanted to build the town up by having everyone own their own home.

This is where Mr. Witherbee lived:

http://www.century21adirondacks.net/listings/13100-sq-ft-Mansion-on-over-5-Acres.html

My grandfather, Bernard Smith, Maggie and Victor's oldest son, was 14, and had grown up next to Nellie and Walter and was already in love with Eva. He knew he'd have to support her, fatherless as she was, but he had a bout of polio which crippled and deformed his foot. He tried to work in the mine, but he lasted two days and had enough.  

He knew someone who knew someone who'd gone to sea, and that was good enough for him. He went and became a Merchant Marine, and shipped out by the time he was 18, taking his new bride, Eva, with him, away from mining, away from the Adirondacks.  

His parents and her mother, though, stayed in Mineville.

They'd bought their houses, you see. And three months after Mr. Witherbee sold everyone their new homes, he closed the mine and put everyone out of work, and the homes were now worthless. 

So Eva and Bernie sent money home, and their parents lived out their lives in the tiny red wooden houses in Mineville.

My grandparents did come back, though, to visit, and every summer my mother played in the yards of the tiny red houses where her parents had grown up.

I have stories in my head of Tongue Mountain, and of wild blueberries, and grandma’s house where you took a bath in the living room once a week in an iron tub because there was no plumbing. And of dogs living under the front porch, and a train trip that came to an end when the conductor yelled, “Next stop, TI-CON-DER-OGA!”

There are stories about Leo’s wife, Larry, who was beautiful, and stories of the Smith brothers and the trouble they got into, and a story about Uncle Hank getting hit by a train when he was a baby and living through it. Those days are very real to me, stories or not.

The houses are still there, more than 100 years old, and still have families living in them.

And while all of Eva's siblings left the Adirondacks for warmer climates, most ending up in San Diego, Bernie's family still lives there, running hotels, working in restaurants, hunting and trapping and getting by as they have for the past 300 years.

And that, in a very long-winded way, is why my grandmother was named Eva. And why, in some fashion or form, I’m going to give my daughter that name.

When she’s born, it will be 98 years since her great-granmother was born, and 72 years since her grandmother was born. But in some way, she’ll be connected to those memories, and to those people, and will know where she came from, this little Eve or Evie or Eva or Evangeline. And I’ll feel good about having a daughter who knows the stories.