91

Ziad is experimenting with joke writing. It's been a while since his debut effort, the fairly predictable

Q: What does a wizard say when he falls of a cliff?
A: Abracadabraaaaaaaaaaa!

He kept with it, though, and a recent electronics class inspired

Q: What is a volmeter for?
A: You use it when you're parking your volts.

I think that one's my personal favorite -- it still makes me laugh.

I guess he's been reading more Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys than I realized, because recently he tried out

Q: What do you call a short mystery?
A: A briefcase.

Leading up to a recent breakfast table conversation.

Ziad: What's black and red all over?

Maya: A zebra with a sunburn.

Ziad: No, that's black and WHITE and red all over.

Maya: Well, the sunburn covered the white part.

Ziad: Well, anyway, that's not right.

Maya: OK, what?

Ziad: A burned newspaper.

Maya: But you can't READ a burned newspaper.

Ziad: Well, they read it before it was burned.

Maya: Then what they read is not what you asked.

Score one for Maya, I think.

But Ziad never gives up. Just the other day, when his guitar teacher mentioned something about a general rule in music, Ziad asked him, "Well, then what's a soldier rule?" Sometimes it's hard to get anything done with a boy who views any spoken utterance as setup for a pun. I think he gets it from his grandfather.

92

Have you seen the failblog?

93 (I'm counting down)

I have a document somewhere with lots of reasons on it, and I'm definitely going to look it up and start working on it again, but in the meantime, I've been thinking a lot about how homeschooling affects children's perception of themselves.

This is my thinking on the matter: it is vastly more healthy for a child to develop their own identity without having to constantly deal with other children's preconceptions.

Clearly, I am thinking of Ziad's nature studies experience here. There was a group of kids, he somehow got on the outs with a few of them, and the next thing you know, everyone thinks they know who he is. That he's just a pest, not someone to deal with face-to-face. Not important.

That's their opinion (and their loss, when it comes to that). The thing is, when a kid runs afoul of that kind of thing in a school setting, those perceptions start to get hammered in, until the kid is also buying into and even perpetuating the situation. The scars from those experiences can take decades to heal.

I remember when my older daughter was in high school I came across a note one of her friends had written. "I'm a loser, nobody likes me, I'll never have any friends," was more or less the theme of the note. This from a smart, cute, funny kid who in grade school had had ambitions to be President. I wished then that I could tell him how soon his life would change, how he could leave behind the people who couldn't appreciate him and go find ones that did. And in fact my daughter herself, when we were talking things over one time, said, "Yeah, well, I always had a few cool friends, even when most of the people around me were kind of mean. Then after high school I made lots of cool friends and now that's who I spend my time with." The point being that the enforced proximity to jerks that most schools provide with such unfailing regularity is a) artificial and b) damaging and c) unnecessary.

I'm not really advocating a situation where children are constantly shielded from conflict, or even from people who don't like them. I'm just saying that it doesn't have to be their daily lot in life. Unless, of course, they're enrolled in school.

Dusting off my hundred reasons

A long, long time ago (or so it seems), I started a list of a hundred reasons why I personally prefer to homeschool my children. I should say right now that I never pretended I was going to come up with one hundred completely unique, totally freestanding, and non interrelated reasons. Many of my reasons, in fact, are things like anecdotes or pieces of art or writing that my children have made on their own, without help or prompting, that illustrate to me the joy they find in learning and creation. Or, in other words, "here is more evidence that they have not had all creativity stomped out of them by the public school system."

Then I began to realize how popular homeschool blogging is, and I was all, "Oh, well, if everybody's doing it ....." What homeschooler wants to be part of a crowd? I also felt frustrated that something I wanted to post was a picture, and I didn't have that whole posting pictures thing figured out. But now I can post pictures! And I still have a lot of thoughts about homeschooling in my head (and feelings in my heart). So I am going to dust off my list and try to post at least one reason a week for a while (barring further computer difficulties that make it just too much trouble). Stay tuned ...

Reason 94: Breakfast in San Francisco

Why do I homeschool my kids? An anecdote, that is also a reason:

While we were having breakfast one day, Maya started asking me about Queen Elizabeth I, her sister Queen Mary, etc. Why? I’m not sure. We had been watching a DVD of the old BBC series with Glenda Jackson (excellent, by the way) but that was ages ago. She probably had been reminded of it by seeing the cover of After Elizabeth that was reading – a portrait, naturally, of Queen Elizabeth, even though the book is supposed to be about the aftermath of her reign. Anyway, all of a sudden we were having a fairly detailed discussion about the Tudor family, and how Henry VIII wanted so badly to have a son, and why, and what happened instead, and so on and so forth. When abruptly Ziad weighed in with some scientific question that I don’t remember now, and we started thinking about how to figure out the answer.

The couple at the table next to us left to start their day of tourism in the city, and as they passed our table the husband leaned over and said “I love the way you’re teaching your children, Mom.”

Not to say that doesn’t happen to other families, but to me that is a real homeschooling moment. (And I don’t mean that my children are gifted or special because they happened to be asking me these questions over the breakfast table.)


Nurturing their love of learning is one of the most joyous endeavours a parent can undertake.

95

Compliments of a mom I know:

I'm sorry that the group of boys in this class are trouble for Ziad. It's such a great strength of homeschooling that you aren't forced to put your children in unhappy environments as happens in the public schools (I speak from experience).

I never would have thought of this, because it's been so long since I had a child in a public (or any kind of) school.

97 & 96: Monet in San Francisco, Breakfast in Big Sur

Our itinerary on Thursday:

The Monet exhibit at the Palace of the Legion of Honor
Lark in the Morning to buy a recorder for Ziad
Lunch at the Ferry Plaza
The Asian Art Museum (passport stamped(!))
The park outside the Asian Art Museum
Home

Our itinerary on Friday:
Breakfast in Big Sur
Big Sur Station Multi Agency Facility (passport stamp - excellent!)
Point Lobos (another passport stamp -- all right!)
Lunch at the Barnyard in Carmel
Birthday shopping at the Barnyard for two friends both celebrating their 40th
San Juan Bautista State Historic Park (three passport stamps in one day!)
Dad's work
Drive home through the back country

I'll put either of those days up against sitting in a classroom for hours on end. Hell, I'll put them up against a field trip with 30 other rowdy kids. We had a great time, we drove for hours, we talked, we argued, we saw places we'd never seen and visited places we already loved. The best two days EVER.

99

This is actually more of a why I'm glad I homeschool than a real reason for homeschooling, but still: my children will never, ever have to ride in a school bus. Not to get to school, not for a field trip, not ever. Although safety standards have improved (I can remember standing up on the bus as a child, trying to hold on to my school books with one hand while clutching the back of a seat for balance with the other -- seatbelts? Are you kidding?) I still don't like the idea of some underpaid anonymous person driving my kids around. Or anyone else's either for that matter. I personally also have memories of some really unpleasant kids on the bus, making life hard for all and sundry. There was one girl in particular who suffered at the hands of bullies on the bus when I was in grade school, and I remember it to this day. I bet she does, too -- why did she have to go through all that just to get to school? Summary: I think school busses are a bad idea and I'm glad my kids don't have to deal with them.

100

I'll start off with an anecdote -- this happened this afternoon.

We were at a park day with lots of kids from the homeschooling coop. Unfortunately, we got there late, so there were groups of kids doing group things, and Ziad had trouble blending in. There were better and worse moments, but by the end of the afternoon, when the kids he had been playing with left, he found himself odd man out in a group of boys. Things went from bad to worse, and finally he was in a real state.

So one of the other moms called a meeting. We all sat down together, her two sons, another boy, that boy's mom, me and Ziad. They talked. Ziad was acting very angry and savage, but everyone bore with him -- moms, boys, and me. They hung in there with him when he was very difficult. The immediate problem was resolved, life went on, and even though it still took a while, before we left all the kids were really genuinely playing together.

I like that I didn't have to ask for special consideration for my son. I like that the values of those moms were such that they wanted their kids to work on a solution. Not necessarily be "nice" or "polite" but to acknowledge a problem and try to solve it together, not just laugh it off or hold one kid or another to blame.

I'm not saying you have to homeschool to find moms like this. I just know that that's how I found them.