School-ish Thoughts

Before I dive in, let me just say that the give away comments are the greatest! I have laughed and snickered and giggled and nodded sagely. You all made my day and the give away is open all week if you haven’t entered yet.

Recently I sewed a dark rose-colored twill into a dress for this winter. I thought it was a fun color and the fabric is heavy and warm. It is also scratchy, but tough, like denim. When Gabe saw it, he said, “Hey, that is exactly like your schoolmarm dress, only it is missing the wooden buttons! You’re even wearing the same sweater!” And I was. Friends, I have had this sweater for 14 years. Is that some sort of record?

I wasn’t sure if that makes me like the dress, or hate it. The one he was referring to was homespun fabric and I wore it with tweedy boots the winter we were blissfully unaware that we were falling for each other. He remembered that dress?!! Probably this is a little like the cologne he still wears that always gives me the sensation of standing in the office beside the copier, knowing that he must have been copying fact forms earlier that morning. Hey, it was a small room and the scent lingered. 🙂 🙂

I started thinking about school, both my teaching and the years I attended our small church school. I don’t know how I was so fortunate to have teachers with 10, 15, even 20 years of experience. My third grade year was a first time teacher whom we all adored. (Anyway, the girls did. I never saw the boys clamoring to hold her hand.) All the other years I had veterans for teachers, the kinds of teachers who saw trouble coming while it was still in thought form in small children’s heads. I had teachers who pulled out my strengths (English) and helped me not to feel too humiliated by my weaknesses. (Think geometry.)

Small church schools cannot afford to be very picky about training and qualifications when they hire because they operate on tight budgets, for one, and the pool of interested candidates is usually quite small. Generally, if you like children and you like teaching, you have a job.

That is how it was in the days when I had a classroom with 16 students in 3 grades. One of my students was dyslexic and I had absolutely no idea how to help him connect what the class was learning with how he processed life, even with all the library books I read on the subject. I was as green as they come, but I gave it everything I had and I did love teaching. My siblings rolled their eyes when I went to bed early instead of socializing. (I missed the rollover from 1999 to Y2K because I was too tired to stay awake, even though there was a rook game in progress right outside my bedroom door.) I got up early and made lesson plans, and I learned to enjoy coffee. I wore teacherly clothes with wooden buttons. I scoured book sales and libraries for fresh reading materials. And when I added up my hours and divided my paycheck by them I found I wasn’t being paid minimum wage. I had fun though, and I think the children learned despite my obvious greenness.

There was a day when a third grader confided in me that she wants to be a teacher when she grows up and I thought she probably would be a good one. This year she has a classroom of her own.

I had a student who wrote his philosophy on life like this: I am not smart. I am not dom. I am just regler.

There was a little boy who broke his glasses on average once a month, and now I think of him when my son’s glasses last one week.

It was endlessly challenging and enlightening. You wanna study human nature? Try it in a classroom with a bunch of uninhibited small people. This is making me feel old, because a lot of those students are married with children of their own.

I only taught two years because I did the predictable and fell in love with my co-teacher and married him. Then I had babies and they grew bigger so that now we are in our 7th year of homeschool. There are things about school life that you simply cannot replicate at home, and vice versa. Some days I wouldn’t recommend homeschool at all. But it works for our family and we walk on, one day at a time, same old sweater in another world.

Want to hear my philosophy on education in a nutshell? Books. Okay, that is a bit simplistic. Here is the longer version.

Education is the process of finding the gifts of a child and equipping him to use his gifts for the good of others.

How this happens is pretty much open to interpretation. I am not die-hard bricks and mortar school, home-school, cyber-school, whatever. I do insist, however, that everyone is gifted in some way, and no matter how “regler” they feel they are, the world is richer for them using their talents. I have seen people that are afraid to try new things because they feel they lack the training to do them well. That is what education is for, in another nutshell.

Sometimes it takes a long time for the gift to become evident. I admire my husband immensely for his tenacity in going back to school and pursuing the dream that had stirred in him quietly for years. But it doesn’t have to look like that at all. Learning to weave baskets, researching the habits of the greater kudu with a small boy who wants to know, trying to understand the workings of a yeast dough, these are all education.

If I can teach my children to be unafraid of the learning process, I will feel that I have succeeded in educating them. What is your philosophy on education?

If you want to read an article about a great teacher, go here and read what my husband’s former student wrote about him. 🙂

Teacher’s Left the Monkeys Out…

I have been scrambling to find creative channels for all the energy running around here now that the books are done for the term. The new books came before we were quite finished, but we hustled them off to storage. This year instead of allowing myself to sink lethargically for a week after those last lessons were done, I decided to be super productive and repaint our bedroom. It was a good time to do it, since Gabe had a five day stretch off work. It is feast or famine in this line of work. :O

I spent my birthday painting trim in our room. It was fun, although careful painting always leaves me muttering after a few too many hours of strained concentration. But that day I didn’t cook because my friend Ellen paid for our pizza supper. Wasn’t that the kindest thing anyone could have done? We ate on the dock down by the pond… Meat lover’s with stuffed crust for the small people and roasted veggie with parmesan for Gabe and me. The boys had gone out earlier and picked huge bunches of wildflowers and forsythias to put in jars down there so that it would be festive. They even stripped a bunch of blossoms to float on the water. 🙂

Gabe and I took off the entire next day, with my blessed parents doing babysitter duty. It was a spectacular May day. We loaded our bikes on the back of the Suburban, but the first business was picking out a carpet piece for our room. Then we went to a tea room and had teeny cookies and tall glasses of iced tea. The vehicle needed a top-up at the lube place and then we thought we should have some protein before biking, so it was convenient to grab some roast beef sandwiches.

We rode 16 miles of Rails to Trails. It is hard to describe the joy for this Quality Time/Outdoors Lover. There were violets blooming so thickly along the trail that you could actually smell them as you breezed past. The redbuds were in their heyday and all the birds were happy. Let’s just say Gabe hit on the perfect birthday gift, the two of us tooling along, stopping occasionally to look at the river, to eat Toblerone, to pick flowers, and maybe to rest our legs. 😉 Even with the stops, we got to the end in two hours. The end of the trail was quite close to Gabe’s sister’s house, so they picked us up, sparing us a 16 mile return trip. Chipper as we may think we are, those bike seats can come to feel a bit “gnarly” as Gabe so aptly described it.

We had supper with my sister-in-law Ruby and her husband, lingering long over dessert before we headed home. It was just a delightful day all round, and my mom and dad were exhausted instead of us. 🙂

The next day we finished painting the bedroom and replaced the carpet. Thirteen years ago we painted our bedroom a pale grey. It needed freshened, but I wanted to keep it grey since that lends itself to any other accent color. When I went to pick out paint, I bought Reflection for three walls and- wait for it- Earl Grey for the accent wall. 🙂 🙂 I suppose it could just as well be called Iron Filings, in which case I would not have bought it. (Please don’t tell me I am the only one who is swayed by the names on the paint sample chips.) I love the end result! We have teal and orange throw pillows and a glittery new curtain, but all the rest is same old, rearranged. (Oh, and I am in the process of gluing hundreds of muslin “flowers” on the lamp shade, but I ran out of glue.) That night as I cleaned up the brushes and paints, my friend Michelle stopped in with two gorgeous boxes of cupcakes. Or that could be two boxes of gorgeous cupcakes. Either way, it was so sweet. You can see why I cannot ever be really cynical. I know too many nice people.

As for the children’s activities those painting days… I think they pretty much ran loose in the outdoors and hung around wherever Gabe was working. One project we started them on is blazing a switch back trail up to the top of the ridge. Every time we want to go on a walk in the woods, I end up hauling a chunky child or two straight up the side of the ridge and carrying them back down when we come home because the grade is so precipitous that they just slide. We don’t go on as many expeditions as we would like because of this fact. So now they have a trail up half way and the little tots can climb up easily on their own. Until the trail stops, of course. One of these days they will manage to get it all the way to the top. I think they are starting to catch on that this is busywork. Gregory said today, “This could become sort of a chore.” And Alex thought that the trail could require a lot of maintenance. Tee-hee.

Oh, and it is So Hot already. Please, please, please, may we go swimming? The first time I finally caved and let them go into the water it was still April. They lasted about 20 seconds. I thought, good, now they won’t beg for a long time. But it really has been warm lately, so they have been puddling around in life jackets around the dock. I just sit and watch. It is a little muddy yet for my taste.

Alex has graduated to driving our little tractor slowly along in our garden/orchard plot, stopping every now and then to pick up the piles of rocks the children gather. Some days they do that in the space left vacant by math. 🙂 We are building a fence around it before we do planting, hopefully rabbit-groundhog-deer-proof fence.

This morning we zoned little garden plots for the three middles. Alex has plans for popcorn and gourds later in the season and Addy is sharing my garden. 🙂 It was so funny how different they felt about what they wanted to grow. Rita was all enthused about veggies: broccoli, peas, beans, lettuce. Olivia wanted lots of flowers. Gregory has a mixture of flowers, ornamental corn and one melon plant that we hope doesn’t get frost bitten. In the end he deigned to plant some lettuce for my sake.

The boys started a little cottage industry of making cross bows out of craft sticks, hot glue and rubber bands. They ended up with about 10 orders from friends and just like that a thousand craft sticks and the new pack of glue sticks was gone. Also most of my bamboo skewers became arrows. They are learning things, like paying for supplies and being kind to nonpaying customers. And I found out exactly how far one can get on a lampshade project with one glue stick.

We are about to enter a period of feast-time, with Gabe finishing up a seven day stretch of work tonight with an entire long weekend off. Oh, glory! And a church picnic to boot!

Tell me, how are you occupying the busy little people who are done with school?

Some Good Medicine and Other Stuff

Last night Gregory heaved a gusty sigh as it sank in that he had really, truly done the last lessons in third grade: “I cannot believe tomorrow I will be a free man!”

At five this morning Gabe kissed me good bye and went to work. I sighed, rolled over and promptly fell asleep again. At 6:30 the piping little voices started up in the girls’ room, and then a loud screeching disagreement, apparently over who would be the mom and who would be the children. I sighed, got up, sneezed violently four times and made coffee.

It is gonna be a fine day! The boys really did finish the 170th lesson in their books yesterday. All that remains is logging in their field trips and finishing up their portfolios. I should really do that today, but probably I won’t. They have never gotten done this early in the year before. This success is due to very few vacation days and a lot of Saturdays. I think the motivation comes primarily from the uncle who always beats them by starting early and doing Saturdays. 🙂 He still got done first this year, but not by such a big margin.

I have been scratching my perennial borders this past week, moving stuff around, trimming bushes. It makes me so happy! Gabe thinks one should plan the plantings with research and care, then step aside and let them grow, but I am incapable of doing that. This year I moved two bittersweet vines from the shed to the fence where they can climb all they want and not damage any roof shingles. I moved a rose bush and a hydrangea from the shady side of the house to more sunny locations then put hostas into the shady places. The peony plant that I have been babying in an obscure location is now big enough to bloom by the picket fence, and some of the Dutch irises took a fast wheelbarrow ride down to the pond where they grace the bank. So it goes; I really cannot help myself. Nearly all of my flowering plants are gifts or swaps from friends or family. One cannot plan that and must simply move with it.

Last summer my husband spent almost all of his spare days working at trenching and draining our swampy land into the pond. This spring we have a new spot for a garden patch/orchard. The soil is hard clay, so we have a lot of work to do before we plant trees, but I am so happy for this space! The men around here have been building a fence to keep out the critters. We will finally have a garden big enough for vining things like melons and squash! Actually, it is huge, like a field. 🙂 I am quailing a bit at the thought of all the maintenance, but Gabe is the one who does all the fruit growing around here, and that will be the bigger part of the work. Unlike perennials, fruit does take a lot of research and knowledge, and he is the right one for the job.

I have been living life in my red rubber boots, only taking brief breaks in the kitchen to cook up double batches of food so that we can eat leftovers the next day. If I were to hire domestic help, it would be a cook or a maid, but definitely not a gardener. 🙂

On the rainy days I have been working on the book I bought for myself as an end-of-school treat: The Father’s Tale by Michael O’Brien. I haven’t given the children their books yet, but I couldn’t wait, and with over a 1000 pages, it will take me a while. What I should have done is wait to crack the book until the portfolios are finished and ready to be evaluated, but I have discipline issues.

Olivia mourned, “I never win anything,” after dropping her name into a door prize drawing. And then she won a doll, which is now the Favorite Child in her little doll family. “Mama, what color are your eyes?” to which I say, “Blue.” She concludes, “Well, since mine are brown and this doll’s eyes are blue, she must have gotten a gene from her grandma.”

And lastly there is Addy, capering around in a towel after her bath: “I am a fancy little Egyptian! A fancy little Egyptian!” I ask, “Whatever do you mean?” and she explains matter-of-factly, “Egyptians dance in just towels.”

So there you have the funnies that had me laughing in the last 24. Why don’t more mothers draw comic strips?

Here We Go Again

Little Girls and Kittens-
Is there any better picture of carefree childhood? These are the offspring of the pregnant stray that we took pity on and fed Kit and Caboodle. We only found five babies. What a relief. One for each kid, they say, and they are as delighted as can be.

Empty Bowls, a Book List, and a Lot of Links

This winter I tried to find different ways to make my children aware of the hungry, homeless, less fortunate, even beggars. Sometimes it is hard to know how much information about the sadness and brokenness of the world I should share with my little guys. Yet I believe that they need to learn compassion and thankfulness, and one of the best way to learn this is to help them see how hard life is for many others.

We read A Single Shard, the story of a homeless orphan in 12th century Korea. The main character spends his days scrounging for scraps of food and longingly watching the master potters in the village. Eventually he persuades one of them to take him on as an apprentice, receiving for his wages a bowl of food every day.

The Family Under the Bridge is another book I highly recommend for children. It is the story of a crusty old hobo who has his own favorite spot to live under the bridge. He has chosen his lifestyle because he likes it, but one day a desperate mother with her little children invades his space. Slowly he starts to thaw and become more kindly to the people around him. Almost against his will, he learns to care about them and does his best to help the mother keep her little family intact. It is a book with humor and grace mixed into the sad bits.

Another book we really like is Star of Light, a story of little beggars shamefully misused by their stepfather. It is a beautiful tale of how they find the love of a Heavenly Father.

I also have a photojournalist’s collection of portraits of titled Precious in His Sight. It is a powerful visual aid… What if I were the little girl selling bananas in the middle of that crush of cars at the intersection? Suppose I was the little farmer boy in Malawi who spends days and days alone, herding the family’s cows so they don’t wander off or get stolen.

A percentage of the sale of this book goes to Compassion.

And there is yet one more photo journey that I suggest for little children. It is titled Where Children Sleep. It is an expensive book, but I am glad I bought it. We have discussed why it is that some of the poorest little children with only one little car to play with and a bed of filthy blankets on the floor look just as happy in their photos as the children with everything their hearts desire. You can find a lot of the images from the book here.

So, how did this post turn into a book list? I suppose it may be because they are my main tools for instructing my children. 🙂 But aside from books, how do we do something that makes a difference? That is the real question. The boys helped me cut patches out of fabric scraps and sew them into comfort tops for the ladies at church to turn into warm blankets for somebody cold.

I hoped to find a soup kitchen that needs volunteers, but the only local thing I could come up with was a fund raiser called Empty Bowls. This is a grassroots movement to help feed the hungry. Local potters hold workshops where volunteers get to make soup bowls to sell at the supper they host. That immediately caught my attention because of my pottery making dreams. We made pinch pots, starting with a ball of clay that became the base of our soup bowl, then adding coils of clay and smoothing them out to form the sides and rim. It was a lot of fun. We decided we wanted our own bowls back, so we went to the supper and claimed them.

All the food was donated by local restaurants and businesses, the proceeds benefitting our local food pantry. It was a lot of fun, an event I hope to make an annual thing for us. Here are the girls with our bowls.

So far I don’t feel like I have accomplished much except helping my crew to notice inequity and to want to help. I need more practical ideas. 🙂

March

The sun is nervous

As a kite

That can’t quite keep

Its own string tight.

Some days are fair,

And some are raw.

The timid earth

Decides to thaw.

Shy budlets peep

From twigs on trees,

And robins join

The chickadees.

Pale crocuses

Poke through the ground

Like noses come

To sniff around.

The mud smells happy

On our shoes.

We still wear mittens,

Which we lose.

-John Updike in The 20th Century Children’s Poetry Treasury

I like this, because when I look out the window, I can see an abandoned coat under the monkey tree, a pair of cast away mittens on the neighbor lady’s lawn, a broken toboggan by the garden’s edge and a bike cart with assorted bikes in the lean-to of the garden shed.

I see bits of fly away pampas grass, dead lavender stalks, detritus that the snowplows threw into our lawn, and daffodils shooting up in the sheltered spots.

Some days I step out the door and rush back inside for my insulated coat, and other days the sun really is as benevolent as it looks, and that is just how it is in March.

In March we rake the gravels back out of the lawn onto the lane and severely prune the grapevine and sweep out the accumulation of junk in the playhouse because you never know. We put the skates back into the attic and order seeds and clean up the game closet from the winter’s depredations. In March we feel as though we may need therapy. But in March there is always the possibility that Tomorrow May Be Fine!

The Short Month is Over

Who woulda’ thunk it? I left the last day until the last minute, but I can’t give up now, seeing as I almost made my goal. I will leave you to imagine how many times I rather scraped bottom in this challenge I put up for myself. I am well aware that sometimes what oozed up from the bottom was sub-par filler, but I actually enjoyed the discipline. However, it is as Journey Mama says, “Being a writer means being away, dreaming of another place. And mothering requires absolute presence.” I probably can’t afford to do this too often. Eyes rolled at times when Mama needed to write. Nobody was actually bodily neglected, but still…

As for the scrapbooking challenge? I did do Rita’s book, from birth to age 4. May I mention that RIta absolutely loves her book. She pores over it, asking me to read the journaling again and again. “And that was the time I picked all your roses, wasn’t it?” It amuses me that they “remember” their babyhood through these albums, which is the whole point. I did not do all 295 photos, though. I put the rest into a drawer and cleared up all the paraphernalia in my reading room, and now I can sit and dawdle March away. Or not.

This morning I told the children we are going to take a day off the textbooks. Instead, we did one hour of work, then one hour of reading, then another hour of work, etc. It was really fun and we got a lot done. It is Gabe’s weekend to work in the ER, so we will do school tomorrow instead of today. I have to keep a firm grip on myself, or I completely lose track of what day it is. Since our schedule no longer revolves around the weekend, our “Saturday” will be on Tuesday when he next has a day off. See what I mean?

Tonight was our church’s annual couple’s night. As always, the ambiance and the food were amazing. It was an oasis, dropping off the children at the schoolhouse and having a leisurely meal and grown-up conversations with friends in a candlelit room.

All week my little guys were anticipating it, “Couple’s night is so much fun!” They were referring to the babysitters’ efforts to keep a large herd of little people occupied and happy. To the youth who invested in them tonight: God bless you, every one! Someday my children will babysit yours. :O

That pretty much concludes my stream of consciousness for the last evening in February. Thank you for being such loyal friends to me and encouraging me along the way.

On the Mountaintop

Did I need my pep talk? Yes, I did. I had a mountain of laundry to climb today, probably due to having never caught up last week. And I scaled it, all the way to the top. Well, it isn’t folded yet, but that is downhill work. I did get to the summit and planted my victory flag.

When I went downstairs to start the boys on school, I had to fight the impulse to turn tail and run from the chaos in the basement. Their school stations are inside the door where all winter activity comes and goes. Booted, mittened, snow-panted, muffled, coated, hatted activity flows through that area, and they were sure that they put their stuff on the register to dry, but there it was, muddled on the floor in the worst melee ever. There is no way one could do math in that atmosphere, so we spent a good half hour cleaning up and sorting out. I was exasperated, and I didn’t scale that challenge so well.

Then. Time for school. And I find that the boys had done the last DVD lesson that we had. Apparently the company only sends 2/3 of the lessons at the beginning of the school term, then doesn’t send the last 50 lessons until they receive the first 1/3 back. As the teacher, I should have known this, but I completely forgot. So today I taught the lessons, and I remembered how much I really like to teach. I also realized again that it is quite the dance, looking after tots and teaching. And doing laundry.

Gabe was putting in a ski patrol shift and called to say the snow was fine. Patrollers get paid with passes. Did I want to bring the three oldest children and join him? I had known that he might call, so I had lined up a babysitter for the little girls just in case. I made them eat lunch fast, left all the washing and dishes and leftover school lessons, stuffed everybody into extra layers-hats-gloves-pants-coats-mufflers-boots, sent the little girls to the neighbors, and hauled the crew up the mountain.

I really like adventure. Oh, the thrills I experience at a used book sale! I like finding painted turtles on nature walks and I like wading in shallow creeks. An adrenaline junkie I am not. Today I decided that I am still just like the little girl who used to climb up the hay bales in the barn for a long, thrilling swing ride on a rope hung high on the beams of the hayloft. I would stand there, daring myself to let go, then when the other children got too impatient to wait, I would just get off and let them take turns. After a while I couldn’t stand them having so much fun and would fling caution to the wind and after that I wouldn’t give up my place in the line.

I feel that way about skiing. I stand at the top of the slope, mildly terrified. But there is only one way down, and that is to push off and try. The first run is the worst, trying to get the feel of this thing that I only do once a year. There is a great deal more flailing than finesse for a while, but then I start to feel like I can handle these skis and make them go where I want them to go. Slowly, I have very careful fun. I only fell three times on that first run down.

There was hardly anyone on the slopes for the first two hours. Gabe put Olivia on a tether and showed her the moves. She zipped off like nobody’s business, and I was grateful she was tethered! I was always the last in the line. Then the school busses came and emptied their loads of cocky young snowboarders onto the mountain. I know exactly what they think of the cautious lady V plowing down the steep spots as they flash past in a kaleidoscope of colors. Boarders tend to run in herds so that they can show their stuff to everybody on the jumps and more technical places. And they swoosh past with terrible swiftness. All I can think is, “If their mothers would see them! And where are their helmets? And who goes up to the top of a mountain in 20* weather in only a hoodie?” I wonder if they can guess what I think?

That is the slope that I am happy to stay on. I have nothing to prove more than staying upright and having fun. The sun went down and the mountain got blitzing cold. Livvy and I took two runs down the easiest slope without the tether. As we were creaking slowly up on the lift, suspended 40 feet in the air with the mountain chuffing and puffing frigid blasts at us, we decided that we had enough.

We left the guys up there, still going strong, and came home for hot drinks and baths. Apparently the water heater isn’t working. So we are really down in the valley again. But at least there is heat even if the views aren’t so grand.

A Little Something

I have nothing interesting to say, so I will just be kind and post a link to an author who has lots of interesting things to say. I stumbled across Rachel Devenish Ford’s writings a while ago. Our lives are lived on different continents, but she has a string of children and I have a string of children, so it’s not so different. I really enjoy her descriptive writing. And her first book is free for download on Amazon. Happy day!

A Little Linky Love

When we took our long trip out west last fall, we made sure to have a goodly supply of audiobooks along. We have been collecting them for quite a while, and if you watch what you are doing, you can actually get a lot of them free. We have been favorably impressed with the quality of the recordings on Audible. You get a free month trial right now, which would put you right into March and springtime. How is that for a deal? My highest recommendation from Audible is God’s Smuggler, by Brother Andrew. It is almost 9 hours long, and all of them are worthwhile hours.

We also like Christian audio, which has a free book featured every month. Sometimes they feature biographies, like Corrie ten Boom’s The Hiding Place. We have bought books at both of these places, and have no complaints. Some of the books are on both sites, but this is two ways of getting free ones and deciding whether you want to buy more. 😉

And finally, I have a link for episodes of Adventures in Odyssey. The ones on this site are free samples from their CDs. (Thank-you so much, P.D. and Leeny, for telling us about this. 🙂 ) Our children have listened for hours this winter, and they never tire of them. I want to buy them some of the CDs in time, but for now they are happy with the partial stories.

The time to listen to audios is… anytime. We do it while we cook or while we fold clothes or even while we pick up the stuff around the living room. If the work slows down too much because of how absorbing the story is, I just pause it and everybody jolts right back to reality quickly so that Mama starts the story again. Happy listening!