Last year I tried to do the book a week thing, and I made it...a few weeks. I am not going to try it again, for many reasons, (one of them is that I think it discourages the reading of long or difficult books. Another is that I don't enjoy failure), but I do want to read a lot and to write a little about the books I read. I am feeling especially inspired about this project right now because of two things: 1. I discovered that I can check out audiobooks online through my library and listen to them on my iphone while I walk the dog. This will cut into my This American Life, Fresh Air, and DisUnplugged podcast listening time, but I think that will be okay. I'm hoping it will encourage longer walks, which will be good for both me and the dog. and 2. I convinced myself that I really DO want one of those fancy machines that turns into a book after all and ordered a Nook with some Christmas money. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was very sure that I did not need any such thing. I was contemplating putting several new hardcovers in my Amazon cart the other day, though, and I think that's what changed my mind. That and that my grandmother gave me more money than I was expecting for xmas. And that they had refurbished Nooks on Overstock.com. So it's on its way. In fact, my tracking info tells me it's been in Georgia since yesterday afternoon, so I'm a little annoyed that it's not here yet. But it's okay, because I spent all morning trying to figure out how to get those audiobooks from the library, and now I have two of them loaded on my phone. My library does not have e-books, but the library system in county south of me does, and I'm considering paying the $40/year non-resident fee to get a card there (I've considered it in the past anyway for access to a better selection of actual books, so that wouldn't be the only reason, but maybe the thing that tips it over the edge).
I think I'm including books I pre-read for the kids here, too, because I also like writing about them. And that's it. Those are the rules. Read books and write about them. Oh, obviously I'm counting audiobooks. I have a relatively extensive Amazon wish list to work with. I've been scouring best books of 2010 lists. I check NPR's website periodically to see what books they're talking about. I have plenty of things to check off on the "books I should have already read" list. And I have a short mental list of books I've been meaning to read forever and haven't gotten around to (Shelby Foote's 3 volume Civil War history and Middlemarch are the ones that spring immediately to mind). My first audiobook is Alice McDermott's After This--because I like Alice McDermott and because pickings are relatively slim in the library's audiobook collection. But there are at least a dozen or so that I'm interested in, so that's a start. Next up for real reading is Franklin and Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage, which the kids gave me for Christmas. I might go start it right after I finish this entry!
Because I am such a go-getter, I have already started on my book reading project and finished book #1! Some might think declaring a book I read this week to be book #1 is cheating instead of go-getting, but I disagree, and it's my blog. Anyway....BOOK #1(!) is Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories by Mike Birbiglia. Another Christmas present. I love Mike Birbiglia. I am not sure exactly what to make of his book. I enjoyed it...but 90% of it is material I've heard him do, pretty much word for word in many cases, in other formats, so it's kind of hard for me to judge it as a book. I could kind of hear his voice saying it all as I read it. This did not make it unpleasant or boring to read; it's all stuff I could listen to him do over and over again, so reading through it was fun, too. But I'm not sure how much value there is, for me, someone already familiar with most of the stories, in having them in book form. The parts I enjoyed the most were, predictably, the parts I hadn't heard before--largely some stories about the early years of his stand-up career. The book is based on his recent off Broadway show of the same name, and some of it is about his experiences dealing with a sleep disorder that causes him to sleepwalk and act out his dreams, often in dangerous ways. Stand-up comedians very often annoy the crap out of me, and I'm always kind of delighted to find one who doesn't, because I enjoy being made to laugh. I first heard Mike Birbiglia on This American Life (where he's a frequent contributor) and immediately became a fan. So I guess to sum up...I highly recommend Mike Birbiglia as a performer; I really have no idea whether or not to recommend this book to non-fans. I have a hard time figuring out how it would read to someone not at all familiar with his work. But there you have it anyway....BOOK #1!
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Tuesday, December 07, 2010
Next year
Everyone is about to fail math for the semester, so Dave is tutoring non-stop lately, which means we keep finishing school when there are still hours and hours left before he gets home. And it's cold, so the kids don't want to play outside anymore (I already sent them out once today, but I think the window where I feel comfortable forcing them to play outside is something like between 45 and 87ish. It's 38 with a windchill of 30 right now). Anyway, so I thought I'd blog some more instead of trying to figure out what we can have for dinner. Inspired by Kash's recent post, I'm going to blather on for awhile about what the heck we might or might not be doing next year. Mostly for Ari, as the others are comparatively easy to plan for. Milo will be starting MCT Island, and I'm excited to see how he does with that.
Math: he'll be doing Singapore 6a/b. That's the only thing I know for sure at this point. I'm thinking I probably don't want Life of Fred's pre-algebra with economics to be his first introduction to economics; I haven't really gotten a full summary of the economics parts of it, but as far as I can tell it leans toward the libertarian side of things. Perhaps if Paul Krugman had written a kids' intro to economics to balance things out...
At any rate, this leaves me at a bit of a loss...if Singapore 6 is anything like 5, we're going to need something to supplement with. I'm thinking we'll backtrack and do LOF Decimals and Percents, since he never did that. Then I may find some more "fun math" to add in...maybe an online Duke TIP course.
Grammar, Writing, and Literature: MCT Voyage level. That part's easy enough. We're getting to the point in Town level right now where I can tie his assignments there in with his other subjects, so I'm hoping things will be the same in Voyage...he can do lots of writing about history (and maybe science and literature) with his MCT assignments, and he'll be ready to drop the summaries he's been doing in history.
For literature, I'm hoping MCT's promised literature studies--at least a couple of them--will be ready by then. Even better would be if one was ready by summer, so I could read through it and then crib from it as I pre-read some of Ari's other books for the year. Aside from that, I'm relatively happy with how things have gone this year--a mix of books that tie in with history and books that don't, some informal discussion, plus dictation and some close reading. So I hope to continue that, perhaps with a bit more intentionally and planning. Of course, what aspect of my life wouldn't benefit from more intentionality and planning?
History: we'll be doing Story of the World 2 together, so for Ari I just need to find stuff to supplement with. I just finally put History: The Definitive Visual Guide in my Amazon cart, so there! [and now it's the next day; I bored myself with all my planning yesterday and couldn't finish). So my very tentative plan is that he will follow along with us for SOTW and then do extra reading from the DVG (and extra writing). After Christmas I'm going to have him do Duke TIP's "Growing Up Heroic." If this goes reasonably well, I'll have him do their King Arthur course next year--so that will be a history/literature thing. And then I'm looking at Ellen McHenry's Mapping the World With Art. I think he will like that a lot. I think that will be sufficient to overwhelm us both.
Languages: Assuming Spanish is still offered at LEO, he'll continue taking it there. I'm hoping to start Galore Park Spanish with him after xmas, so he'll keep going with that. And then if I stay brave, I might have him start Greek, too (probably Classical Academic Press' Greek for Children; both of us sort of hated their Spanish program, but I hear good things about the Greek. And I think perhaps a lot of the trouble with their Spanish was that they treated it like a classical language instead of a modern language. Chanting verb tenses in Spanish made no sense to me).
Science: oh, yeah. Still no idea. Honestly, I really like outsourcing science, as we've done this year, so if there's a good opportunity to do that again, that may well be what happens. I may add in an online class, too, though, as the science this year has been relatively light for him. And having him do science somewhere else frees me up to put more effort into doing a good job with it for Milo and Gus (I'd like to keep working through the Nebel's with them).
Other: as always, I want him to focus more on piano. He's actually doing well with it now, but he's resistant to organized lessons (from Dave). He's teaching himself to play "Deck the Halls" and "Ode to Joy," and Dave helps him out and makes suggestions when he's open to it. He was picking out parts of "Little Drummer Boy" by ear the other day, which means he has about 100 times more musical talent than I have, so I definitely want him to keep it up.
One of the goals for the rest of this year is to get critical thinking stuff done more consistently. He's got Logic Liftoff and Building Thinking Skills to do; I just need to have him spend a few minutes on it at least a few times a week. And then I need to look into something or other for next year. Yes, something.
For other extra-curriculars...he really enjoyed homeschool soccer in the fall, so we'll plan on doing that indefinitely (Gus also wants to do it again, but I can't talk Milo into it. He's not so sporty). And he's doing basketball at the Y...he just started a couple of weeks ago, but so far he's really into it. I'm good with continuing that next year, too, if he wants to. Maybe Gus and Milo will want to try it, too. They're tall children, after all.
And there we have it. There's really not that much more to figure out, which is nice.
Math: he'll be doing Singapore 6a/b. That's the only thing I know for sure at this point. I'm thinking I probably don't want Life of Fred's pre-algebra with economics to be his first introduction to economics; I haven't really gotten a full summary of the economics parts of it, but as far as I can tell it leans toward the libertarian side of things. Perhaps if Paul Krugman had written a kids' intro to economics to balance things out...
At any rate, this leaves me at a bit of a loss...if Singapore 6 is anything like 5, we're going to need something to supplement with. I'm thinking we'll backtrack and do LOF Decimals and Percents, since he never did that. Then I may find some more "fun math" to add in...maybe an online Duke TIP course.
Grammar, Writing, and Literature: MCT Voyage level. That part's easy enough. We're getting to the point in Town level right now where I can tie his assignments there in with his other subjects, so I'm hoping things will be the same in Voyage...he can do lots of writing about history (and maybe science and literature) with his MCT assignments, and he'll be ready to drop the summaries he's been doing in history.
For literature, I'm hoping MCT's promised literature studies--at least a couple of them--will be ready by then. Even better would be if one was ready by summer, so I could read through it and then crib from it as I pre-read some of Ari's other books for the year. Aside from that, I'm relatively happy with how things have gone this year--a mix of books that tie in with history and books that don't, some informal discussion, plus dictation and some close reading. So I hope to continue that, perhaps with a bit more intentionally and planning. Of course, what aspect of my life wouldn't benefit from more intentionality and planning?
History: we'll be doing Story of the World 2 together, so for Ari I just need to find stuff to supplement with. I just finally put History: The Definitive Visual Guide in my Amazon cart, so there! [and now it's the next day; I bored myself with all my planning yesterday and couldn't finish). So my very tentative plan is that he will follow along with us for SOTW and then do extra reading from the DVG (and extra writing). After Christmas I'm going to have him do Duke TIP's "Growing Up Heroic." If this goes reasonably well, I'll have him do their King Arthur course next year--so that will be a history/literature thing. And then I'm looking at Ellen McHenry's Mapping the World With Art. I think he will like that a lot. I think that will be sufficient to overwhelm us both.
Languages: Assuming Spanish is still offered at LEO, he'll continue taking it there. I'm hoping to start Galore Park Spanish with him after xmas, so he'll keep going with that. And then if I stay brave, I might have him start Greek, too (probably Classical Academic Press' Greek for Children; both of us sort of hated their Spanish program, but I hear good things about the Greek. And I think perhaps a lot of the trouble with their Spanish was that they treated it like a classical language instead of a modern language. Chanting verb tenses in Spanish made no sense to me).
Science: oh, yeah. Still no idea. Honestly, I really like outsourcing science, as we've done this year, so if there's a good opportunity to do that again, that may well be what happens. I may add in an online class, too, though, as the science this year has been relatively light for him. And having him do science somewhere else frees me up to put more effort into doing a good job with it for Milo and Gus (I'd like to keep working through the Nebel's with them).
Other: as always, I want him to focus more on piano. He's actually doing well with it now, but he's resistant to organized lessons (from Dave). He's teaching himself to play "Deck the Halls" and "Ode to Joy," and Dave helps him out and makes suggestions when he's open to it. He was picking out parts of "Little Drummer Boy" by ear the other day, which means he has about 100 times more musical talent than I have, so I definitely want him to keep it up.
One of the goals for the rest of this year is to get critical thinking stuff done more consistently. He's got Logic Liftoff and Building Thinking Skills to do; I just need to have him spend a few minutes on it at least a few times a week. And then I need to look into something or other for next year. Yes, something.
For other extra-curriculars...he really enjoyed homeschool soccer in the fall, so we'll plan on doing that indefinitely (Gus also wants to do it again, but I can't talk Milo into it. He's not so sporty). And he's doing basketball at the Y...he just started a couple of weeks ago, but so far he's really into it. I'm good with continuing that next year, too, if he wants to. Maybe Gus and Milo will want to try it, too. They're tall children, after all.
And there we have it. There's really not that much more to figure out, which is nice.
Sunday, December 05, 2010
November 29-December 3, 2010: Week 17
The weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas are sort of weird...three weeks between breaks, so the first week feels off because we're just coming back from a break, then there's the second week where (perhaps) we'll finally get back into a groove, and then the next week is the last week before a two week break, so who can get anything done then? Plus, of course, it's almost Christmas and your husband is tutoring kids who are about to fail math every night of the week and there's too.much.to.do. You know how it is. Fortunately, we're pretty much on track with everything, so I don't feel too much of a need to panic over these three weeks being less productive than they might be.
My weekly review will also, at least this week, be less thorough than in other weeks. This is not everything we did this week; it's what I can remember/motivate myself to write about with the nasty head cold I woke up with this morning.
Milo: still working on Matilda; he should definitely finish it up before Christmas break, maybe with enough time to get in a couple of Usborne readers about Greek mythology that I have waiting for him. He's reading Harry Potter at bedtime, and probably will be for awhile. He has one more review in Singapore 1B, which he'll finish this week. Then I think we'll spend the rest of the time doing a lot of addition and subtraction practice.
Ari: still reading I, Robot; I need to go read it, too, as I'm pretty sure he's ahead of me now. He did a narration from it this week. He was supposed to do a history summary, but that was one of the things that didn't happen. But he did tackle the most ambitious writing assignment thus far in Paragraph Town; he had to pick and research a topic, then write an essay of at least 2 paragraphs about it. He chose....Mario. I turned him loose on Wikipedia. I'm not thrilled about Wikipedia being the source for one of his first research papers, but, at the same time, I'm not sure there's a better source of Mario history out there (and he was so freaked out about doing the assignment at all that I wasn't about to steer him away from a topic he was excited about). There is, in fact, a lot, of information about Mario on Wikipedia, so I talked him through whittling his topic down to something manageable. The final essay is passable, but it veers a bit too close to summary (something the assignment specifically instructed he not do). It's a little tricky for him, since most of his formal writing up until now has actually asked for a summary.
Gus: I think I'm not going to order Earlybird B for him. I pulled out the textbook from 1A this week and went through the first few lessons of that with him, and it went well. I think we're going to stick with that (and the workbook, which I need to order) and just go really slowly through the number bonds, and make sure he has them down before we move on. At least that's what I'm going to try.
And Gus turned 5 on Saturday. Five! I discovered a great new cake-decorating trick, whereby I can make a cake for absolutely any theme imaginable. All I need is a color printer, cardstock, and popsicle sticks!
....and the birthday boy with the cake (with flammable Mario figures removed for safety):
My weekly review will also, at least this week, be less thorough than in other weeks. This is not everything we did this week; it's what I can remember/motivate myself to write about with the nasty head cold I woke up with this morning.
Milo: still working on Matilda; he should definitely finish it up before Christmas break, maybe with enough time to get in a couple of Usborne readers about Greek mythology that I have waiting for him. He's reading Harry Potter at bedtime, and probably will be for awhile. He has one more review in Singapore 1B, which he'll finish this week. Then I think we'll spend the rest of the time doing a lot of addition and subtraction practice.
Ari: still reading I, Robot; I need to go read it, too, as I'm pretty sure he's ahead of me now. He did a narration from it this week. He was supposed to do a history summary, but that was one of the things that didn't happen. But he did tackle the most ambitious writing assignment thus far in Paragraph Town; he had to pick and research a topic, then write an essay of at least 2 paragraphs about it. He chose....Mario. I turned him loose on Wikipedia. I'm not thrilled about Wikipedia being the source for one of his first research papers, but, at the same time, I'm not sure there's a better source of Mario history out there (and he was so freaked out about doing the assignment at all that I wasn't about to steer him away from a topic he was excited about). There is, in fact, a lot, of information about Mario on Wikipedia, so I talked him through whittling his topic down to something manageable. The final essay is passable, but it veers a bit too close to summary (something the assignment specifically instructed he not do). It's a little tricky for him, since most of his formal writing up until now has actually asked for a summary.
Gus: I think I'm not going to order Earlybird B for him. I pulled out the textbook from 1A this week and went through the first few lessons of that with him, and it went well. I think we're going to stick with that (and the workbook, which I need to order) and just go really slowly through the number bonds, and make sure he has them down before we move on. At least that's what I'm going to try.
And Gus turned 5 on Saturday. Five! I discovered a great new cake-decorating trick, whereby I can make a cake for absolutely any theme imaginable. All I need is a color printer, cardstock, and popsicle sticks!
....and the birthday boy with the cake (with flammable Mario figures removed for safety):
Wednesday, December 01, 2010
What's the opposite of mathy?
This post was supposed to be titled, "Mathy kids vs. ______ kids," only I couldn't think of what to put in the blank. Wordy? Literary? Language artsy? Anyway. When my husband, Dave, was in elementary school, they had to create a special math class for him and one other kid, so uber mathy was he. He spent the summer after his sophomore year teaching himself trig so that he could take Calculus his junior year (which he now remembers as something of a misstep since that meant there was no math for him to take his senior year). He majored in math. He is now a math teacher, after a few years' sojourn into the equally geeky world of web programming. We have an enormous "mathlete" trophy in our basement, reminder of his glory days on the math team. He went to math camp at BU the summer he was 16. What I'm getting at is that my husband is undeniably mathy. His father is a number theorist at Dartmouth, so one might reasonably surmise that there is some kind of genetic component to this mathiness of his.
I put "English" down as my intended major on my college application and never wavered (okay, there was that brief period when I flirted with switching to journalism...until I wrote for the college paper for a couple of months and realized that my crippling fear of chatting with strangers might get in the way of a journalism career). After college, I started an English ph.D. program because, well, what else was I going to do? I never won any trophies for literary analysis, but I did win the feminist colloquium prize one year for a paper I wrote on elements of masquerade in the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montague. The prize was $100, which didn't last nearly as long as Dave's trophy has.
To sum up, there's really no getting around it: Dave is mathy, and I am...the opposite. No one could try to claim otherwise. Our SAT and GRE verbal and quantitative scores are nearly mirror images of each other. I was not terrible at math in school (I somehow managed to win the physics prize my senior year of high school, in fact. I think this was largely because I was one of the only people who bothered to study for the tests), but my ill-conceived attempt at Calculus in college lasted only a week before I fled to statistics. Dave took and did reasonably well in AP English. But it's pretty clear where our respective strengths lie.
When we had kids, I sort of assumed that things would be equally clear cut for them. Some of our kids would ask for slide rules for their fourth birthdays; others would toddle off to bed snuggling up with a copy of The Collected Poems of WB Yeats (okay, neither Dave nor I did these things when we were little; but perhaps the mathy/wordy genes would intensify in subsequent generations). But then we got Ari, and one of the things Ari is best at is keeping people guessing.
When Ari was 4 and 5, we'd find elaborate sheets of numbers all over the house, playing with all sorts of patterns, experimenting with negative numbers. He liked to take a calculator to the bathroom with him to entertain himself. "Ah ha!" we thought, "he's just like his Dad!" But then he learned to read early. He memorized nursery rhymed easily and eagerly. Maybe he was more like me after all. I figured time would tell, but, so far, it hasn't. Some years Ari will tell you his favorite subject is math; other years it's reading. It's never been writing, but only because he doesn't like doing assigned writing. He already has an impressive library of original stories and novels filed away in his room. I just started to write a sentence about how if I absolutely had to guess, I'd say Ari would end up leaning more toward....and then I realized I couldn't finish the sentence. I absolutely have no idea.
The other kids are not much easier to categorize. Right now Milo's toughest area is math, but last year he was struggling with reading. This year his reading has progressed to the point where I don't think I could tell the difference between 7 year old Ari's reading ability and 7 year old Milo's, even though Ari got a 2 year or so head start. Maybe next year the same leap will happen with math? And Gus is not quite 5, so I won't even try to stuff him into any boxes at this point. He's determined to do absolutely everything as well as his big brothers do, and I'm pretty sure there's not anything he can't be good at.
So then, here's the question: is it that my kids simply aren't as easy to categorize as Dave and I were? Are their interests and talents broader? Instead of getting some mathy and some languagy kids, did we get a messy soup of both when we mixed our genes together?
Or is it that mathy and....not-mathy are not quite the neat categories that they might seem to be? Maybe there is something in the human or societal need to categorize that makes parents/teachers/etc. subconsciously push kids toward math/science or language/humanities. I remember as I was going into 8th grade, that kids were discouraged from taking all honors classes. We were supposed to pick either social studies and English or math and science. I had a high enough score on my math placement test to take algebra, but my teacher didn't recommend me for it, so I didn't take it.
Maybe what I'm seeing with my kids is in some ways a by-product of homeschooling and of the kind of ultra-flexibility that homeschooling offers. Maybe is has to do with my kids being the product of one math focused parent and one language focused parent: we didn't know which way they might turn out and weren't assuming anything (although we both come from families with "one of each"...my brother is a computer engineer, and Dave's sister majored in comparative lit), so our sub consciences couldn't steer them in a particular direction, because they didn't know which way to steer.
Separated from a need to pick a major or choose which honors track to take, mathy and languagy don't look quite so far apart. I took an online quiz awhile back (long after I'd graduated from college) telling me what my major should be. I got math. This might be a sign that one should not make big life decisions based on online quiz results, but it might also be that my approach to literature is, actually, a little more mathy than most. My personal statement for my grad school application actually, somewhat clumsily, made an analogy between computer repair and literary analysis: "we take books apart to see how they work," I wrote. So if Ari's mind appears, on the surface, to have a mathematical bent, and if it's clear that he's drawn to concrete answers and finding patterns in things, I'm hesitant to assume that this way of thinking must necessarily be channeled into engineering or computer programming or medicine. Nor that Milo's waaayyy out of the box perspective on things dooms him to a future as an unemployable philosophy major.
On the other hand, two of my three kids are Geminis. So maybe that's all it is.
And you? Could you tell from the cradle that your kid was going to be a mathlete or a precocious young novelist? Or do you have a Gemini, too?
I put "English" down as my intended major on my college application and never wavered (okay, there was that brief period when I flirted with switching to journalism...until I wrote for the college paper for a couple of months and realized that my crippling fear of chatting with strangers might get in the way of a journalism career). After college, I started an English ph.D. program because, well, what else was I going to do? I never won any trophies for literary analysis, but I did win the feminist colloquium prize one year for a paper I wrote on elements of masquerade in the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montague. The prize was $100, which didn't last nearly as long as Dave's trophy has.
To sum up, there's really no getting around it: Dave is mathy, and I am...the opposite. No one could try to claim otherwise. Our SAT and GRE verbal and quantitative scores are nearly mirror images of each other. I was not terrible at math in school (I somehow managed to win the physics prize my senior year of high school, in fact. I think this was largely because I was one of the only people who bothered to study for the tests), but my ill-conceived attempt at Calculus in college lasted only a week before I fled to statistics. Dave took and did reasonably well in AP English. But it's pretty clear where our respective strengths lie.
When we had kids, I sort of assumed that things would be equally clear cut for them. Some of our kids would ask for slide rules for their fourth birthdays; others would toddle off to bed snuggling up with a copy of The Collected Poems of WB Yeats (okay, neither Dave nor I did these things when we were little; but perhaps the mathy/wordy genes would intensify in subsequent generations). But then we got Ari, and one of the things Ari is best at is keeping people guessing.
When Ari was 4 and 5, we'd find elaborate sheets of numbers all over the house, playing with all sorts of patterns, experimenting with negative numbers. He liked to take a calculator to the bathroom with him to entertain himself. "Ah ha!" we thought, "he's just like his Dad!" But then he learned to read early. He memorized nursery rhymed easily and eagerly. Maybe he was more like me after all. I figured time would tell, but, so far, it hasn't. Some years Ari will tell you his favorite subject is math; other years it's reading. It's never been writing, but only because he doesn't like doing assigned writing. He already has an impressive library of original stories and novels filed away in his room. I just started to write a sentence about how if I absolutely had to guess, I'd say Ari would end up leaning more toward....and then I realized I couldn't finish the sentence. I absolutely have no idea.
The other kids are not much easier to categorize. Right now Milo's toughest area is math, but last year he was struggling with reading. This year his reading has progressed to the point where I don't think I could tell the difference between 7 year old Ari's reading ability and 7 year old Milo's, even though Ari got a 2 year or so head start. Maybe next year the same leap will happen with math? And Gus is not quite 5, so I won't even try to stuff him into any boxes at this point. He's determined to do absolutely everything as well as his big brothers do, and I'm pretty sure there's not anything he can't be good at.
So then, here's the question: is it that my kids simply aren't as easy to categorize as Dave and I were? Are their interests and talents broader? Instead of getting some mathy and some languagy kids, did we get a messy soup of both when we mixed our genes together?
Or is it that mathy and....not-mathy are not quite the neat categories that they might seem to be? Maybe there is something in the human or societal need to categorize that makes parents/teachers/etc. subconsciously push kids toward math/science or language/humanities. I remember as I was going into 8th grade, that kids were discouraged from taking all honors classes. We were supposed to pick either social studies and English or math and science. I had a high enough score on my math placement test to take algebra, but my teacher didn't recommend me for it, so I didn't take it.
Maybe what I'm seeing with my kids is in some ways a by-product of homeschooling and of the kind of ultra-flexibility that homeschooling offers. Maybe is has to do with my kids being the product of one math focused parent and one language focused parent: we didn't know which way they might turn out and weren't assuming anything (although we both come from families with "one of each"...my brother is a computer engineer, and Dave's sister majored in comparative lit), so our sub consciences couldn't steer them in a particular direction, because they didn't know which way to steer.
Separated from a need to pick a major or choose which honors track to take, mathy and languagy don't look quite so far apart. I took an online quiz awhile back (long after I'd graduated from college) telling me what my major should be. I got math. This might be a sign that one should not make big life decisions based on online quiz results, but it might also be that my approach to literature is, actually, a little more mathy than most. My personal statement for my grad school application actually, somewhat clumsily, made an analogy between computer repair and literary analysis: "we take books apart to see how they work," I wrote. So if Ari's mind appears, on the surface, to have a mathematical bent, and if it's clear that he's drawn to concrete answers and finding patterns in things, I'm hesitant to assume that this way of thinking must necessarily be channeled into engineering or computer programming or medicine. Nor that Milo's waaayyy out of the box perspective on things dooms him to a future as an unemployable philosophy major.
On the other hand, two of my three kids are Geminis. So maybe that's all it is.
And you? Could you tell from the cradle that your kid was going to be a mathlete or a precocious young novelist? Or do you have a Gemini, too?
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