First (full) day!

Three more days of game camp this week, so we're still easing in, but we did a full day today. I feel like the whole beginning of the year is lacking in ceremony this year. Maybe next week we'll get ice cream on Monday or something. Anyway. First full day! Was very, very...full. It was just this side of overwhelming, and I'm trying to decide if it will get better as we get more used to it or worse as we burn out. We'll see! Everyone practiced piano, even. Unprecedented! Now the dog has been walked (by the kids) and the floor has been vacuumed (by me), and we're all staring at screens for awhile to recover.

First thoughts:
*I have too many kids. And I only have three. I don't see how people with more kids do it. It's great when we're all together, but when I try to have each kid do something different, I feel like not enough people.
*Doing MCT is more fun with Milo than with Ari because Milo is not afraid to answer open ended questions.
*Milo suddenly loves math and does it for fun sometimes. Weird.

Planning out extracurricular stuff is consuming most of my time lately, it seems. I have finally talked Milo into picking something (other than homeschool soccer) to do, and he's picked...guitar! That works. He also does piano with Dave, so he'll be very musical now. I have three places in mind for guitar lessons. currently playing phone tag with the one I'm most interested in. It's the place where Gus will probably be taking tap either soon or after the new year, so I'm thinking that's a good way to streamline things. For some reason, guitar lessons around here all seem to cost either $80-90/month (for weekly half hour lessons) or $125/month. There is no in between. It's a little strange. So I'm checking out the places in the first category that sound good...

And, hey, said phone tag place just called me back! They sound very nice. Guitar lessons are only on Wednesdays, and tap is on Mondays, so it wouldn't actually streamline stuff much at all. Hmm....but complicating decision making further, they're waiving the registration fee if we sign up by next Monday. Decisions! They are hard!

Ready, set....

Wow; that was short. Summer. DH is back at work this week, pre-planning. Normally that would mean the kids and I starting up, but Ari and Milo have game design camp this week and next, so we're easing back in. We did a pretty full day of school today, albeit cut slightly short by a poorly scheduled audiologist appointment.

Summer! We went to Cape Cod, as always, and we drove up, which meant we could stop along the way to see educational stuff like Mount Vernon, The Oak Ridge Children's Museum, the Children's Garbage Museum, and, of course Six Flags. I love random acts of tourism. Two of the three kids brought home Lyme disease as a New England souvenir, which was no fun, but that's all behind us now; only one kid is still on antibiotics, and he's nearly finished. Other summer activities included cleaning out the basement (so that we can turn it into usable living space) and drama camp for Gus. Gus adored drama camp and declared immediately, as soon as it was over, that he now wants to take drama classes at the same place. I found his end of camp performance as City Mouse #5 so unbearably adorable that I could not say no. I am very excited about nurturing his musical theater career now. I have decided that "Little People" from Les Mis will be the perfect audition song for him. One guy on the internet suggests that "Consider Yourself" from Oliver! is a perfect audition song for kids, but I'm just not sure. So, you see, I get a little ahead of myself about things. We'll see how drama class goes. I can actually see a child of mine having some genuine talent for theater, though, which gives it a real leg up on, say, any kind of sport. And I don't find the idea of a successful career in math competitions--another potential option with our geek genes--nearly as exciting. We're supposed to get a DVD of the performance soon, and we can hardly wait. Because it was, really and truly, the cutest thing I've ever seen. I was practically sobbing through the whole thing.

Speaking of cute things, we, uhh...also got this:

Because, you see, we have mice. And our other kitten was lonely (or, at least, she wouldn't stop harassing our old, grumpy cat), and the shelter was so overrun that they were having a special on kitten adoptions, and....and...well, just LOOK at him! His name is Gavroche, and he's awesome. Cuddliest kitten ever!

So, back to homeschooling. We started today, sort of, and mostly this made me realize that I'm not quite as prepared as I thought I was. Like I don't have the next Singapore workbook for Milo, who'll finish his current one in about 1/2 a day. And I don't have a plan for Gus for Spanish. And I'm still not quite sure how history is going to go down. But I guess we'll get it all worked out eventually. Yep--that's all I've got for now: we'll get it worked out eventually.

We're finished!

Except for preview day. Dave has post-planning Tuesday and Wednesday this week, so we're going to do "preview day" on Tuesday, trying out our new schedule for the fall and taking a look at the new stuff we already have on hand. And then Wednesday we'll do some kind of low-key end of the year celebration. It might involve ice cream. And then the madness that is June begins, with two kid birthday parties and then our Cape Cod trip. This year's planned side trips include Six Flags in New Jersey, either the natural history museum or a walking tour of DC or maybe Mt. Vernon, the Oak Ridge Children's Museum (which we went to a few years ago--actually the year I was pregnant with Gus, I think--and were pleasantly surprised by), and a couple of days in Boston.

The year kind of petered out in a really non-dramatic way. We were finished with most stuff a few weeks ago, so lately we've been doing writing, math, and reading every day, and then just finishing little things up here and there. Ari took his end of the year Caesar's English test and got a 98 on it! He has requested more tests next year (yeah, I know. Shrug), so I'm going to order the tests that go along with Story of the World 2. I think there are tests with Plato science, too, so between those and his Caesar's English 2 tests, I hope he'll be satisfied.

I've spent much of the weekend cleaning out and organizing the school room, and now I have 4 boxes of books to take to Goodwill, a whole bunch of recycling, some stuff listed on the WTM for sale board, and...empty shelf space! Which is a very good thing, since I have a bunch of stuff on the way from Amazon and more that I need to order.

I never did my big April poetry post [hangs head in shame]. So I'm going to try to put the video of Gus doing Jabberwocky here, at least:

Next year stuff again!

I made a really pretty schedule in Word. It was prettier before I (and by I, I mean DH) turned it into an image. It got a little less pretty, but you get the idea. Tentative, of course. It's kind of....long. What will probably happen is that Ari's stuff will actually take this long, but his brothers' stuff won't, so they'll spend a lot of time playing with legos. This is fine, as long as they play with legos quietly. Also, this only works on the days we stay home all day. Which I'm hoping will be 3 days a week, except during soccer season. When we'll have to tweak. Isn't that always the way. So I still need to figure out how to abbreviate for the days when we're not here all day (Wednesdays for LEO classes and Fridays for park day, generally speaking). Also, I need to figure out how to wake up early enough to start school at 8. While I will put in a general disclaimer about how we aren't wedded to this schedule, and we're very flexible, and that's why we homeschool, dammit! we can do what we want and we don't let The Man tell us when to do math....the truth is we have tended to stick to a schedule more and more as time has gone on. It works for us. So here it is:

...I think you can click on it to make it bigger, if needed.

I was kind of worrying about history and making separate reading lists for read alouds, Ari's independent reading, Milo's independent reading, Gus' independent/not-independent but not with his brothers' reading...but I think I've pretty much decided to just have a big shelf of books and read them in whatever way makes sense as we go along. That's pretty much what we've done for the past two years, and it's resulted in kids who actually like history now, so I guess it's working out. I do need to order some more books, though. I spent much of the weekend making lists of documentaries/movies to go along with SOTW 2 and with earth and space science for....Documentary Night! We're the funnest family ever! Actually, I kind of think we are. I would have loved documentary night when I was a kid. I think a lot of my homeschooling mission is to create the kind of home life my nerdy little self would have loved as a kid. Documentary night! Musicals! Chess night! Poetry memorization in the car! And also Disney World.

Winding down: the last two weeks

We're two weeks away from the end of our school year now, so I thought I'd take a minute and see where we are with everything.

Ari:
Math: roaring through Singapore 6A. I don't think it's at all unrealistic to expect that he'll finish 6 either this summer or early in the fall. Lately I've been thinking he's better at math than he lets on...that he has more natural talent for it, like his Dad, rather than just the workmanlike competence that he lets us see. This past week he had this problem:

John had $50. He spent 60% of the money on clothes and 60% of the remainder on food. How much more did he spend on clothes than on food?

He got the right answer...without writing down any of his work. I would wonder if he was cheating if I had ever gotten around to buying the answer key and it was actually in our house somewhere. Which I really need to do, because I did the same problem, showing all my work, and, umm...came up with a different answer. Then scolded him for not showing his work. "I can see where you made your mistake, but a lot of times I would just think you'd gotten it completely wrong if I can't see what you were doing," I explained. Then Dave came home, checked it, and told me that I was the one who had gotten it wrong. Oops. Yeah. REALLY time for Dave to take over math for this kid.

So I'm feeling pretty good about trying out AOPS pre-algebra with him next. He needs to be challenged more. But I'm still gearing up for a fight; Mr. Perfectionism does not like it when he doesn't know the answer right away.

Reading: he's reading Moon Over Manifest right now, and that's going to be his last assigned book of the year. Then I need to start reading all of next year's books and making notes (and continue waiting, not so patiently, for MCT's new literature component to come out)

Language Arts: we're wrapping up all the MCT stuff. He has 2 more writing assignments for Paragraph Town, but they both seem kind of low pressure, so I'm not anticipating a big struggle. We've still been doing operation make Ari write a whole lot, so he's done journal entries and SOTW summaries and MCT assignments over the past few weeks. We're on the last chapter of Caesar's English, and then he'll take an end of the year test on Quizlet. And we just finished reading the poetry book, so I'll give him the post-test from that book soon, too. Practice Town we'll finish up over the summer; he's on sentence 76 or 77, I think.

Spanish: his class at LEO is over for the year. I've been really impressed with it; they've gotten into conjugating verbs and stuff--he's finally past learning the colors and how to ask someone's name over and over again! I surprised myself by picking up Spanish for Children again a few days ago and having him do some of it. He was doing Galore Park's, So You Really Want to Learn Spanish, but he wasn't loving it, and he needed too much help with it. I still don't super duper love SFC, but I think it might be our best bet for now, particularly since the second level is out. I'm considering having Milo do it, too, but I'll probably wait another year.

Milo:
Math: someone on the WTM posted a link to a page on Singapore's site that says that an "average" third grader will do 2B/3A, and this made me happy. Milo is average at math! I am average at math, too, so that works for me. I need another average at math person around here to keep me company. He's working on multiplication in 2A, and it's going really well. His mental math skills are pretty impressive these days, and are making me happy we've stuck with Singapore. He'll keep going over the summer, and I don't think he'll have any problem being ready for 2B in the fall. The only thing I'm a little sad about with math is that he spends so much time doing his regular work that we never seem to have time for any extra fun stuff like games. Next year I have a full 45 minutes scheduled for math for everyone, though, so I'm thinking we can probably spend 20-30 minutes on Singapore for the younger kids and use the rest of the time for games, et. al.

Reading: he can read just about anything now. It's still a little hard to believe it's only been a little over a year since I was sitting next to him while he read Frog and Toad to me, occasionally needing to help him with a word. Right now he's reading Detectives in Togas for school, which is what Ari read before his current book. For bedtime reading, he has something like 3 or 4 books going...last I checked they included The Magician's Nephew, the 5th Harry Potter, and Roald Dahl's The Witches.

Language Arts: he's on week 23 of WWE2. We never seem to be on schedule with WWE. It's going fairly well. Better than it did when Ari was doing it! I actually did drop spelling workout, even though I said I wouldn't, because his spelling is surprisingly good. He rarely needs help with the words in his dictation sentences. So next year we'll keep doing WWE and add in MCT. I am both excited and scared about doing MCT with two kids.

Gus:
Math: he's more than halfway finished with Singapore 1A and doesn't seem to have any trouble with it, so we'll keep moving along with that.

Reading: Gus can read just about anything, too, but he can't really read more than 3 pages before he gets bored and switches to a different book. Except for school reading, where I'm able to insist that we finish one book before switching. Lately he's read a couple of Magic Tree House books, The One in the Middle is the Green Kangaroo, and now he's reading a book about the Trojan Horse. Last night he started reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's The First Four Years, deceived by the title into thinking it was the first book in the series. When we explained that it was actually the last book, he was undeterred. "But I've already read the first page!" he insisted. But then he got distracted again somehow and wound up taking Little House in the Big Woods upstairs with him after all. For my big scheduling plans to work out, I need him reading to himself for relatively long periods next year. We'll see how that goes.

Language Arts: he's doing ETC still, because I can't decide whether to drop it or not. So we just do it half-heartedly rather than making an actual decision. And he is, at his insistence, doing WWE1 now. He's on week 3, and he's doing really well with it. WWE1 is pretty gentle, so I think it will be fine. I was going to start it in the fall, but he really, really wanted to go ahead, so we did. Hey--maybe by getting a head start, we'll actually stay on schedule with him! I need to order the second RFWP Aesop book for him; he really loves them, and we finished the first one a few weeks ago.

Everyone:
Greek Code Cracker: almost done! Two more weeks to finish up is pretty much perfect, I think. I have Greek for Children and Song School Greek all ready to go for next year

History: we finished SOTW this week! We still have plenty of other books to read for the rest of the year. Everyone's also working on Mary Pope Osborne's version of The Odyssey. Milo just finished it; Ari's on book 4 or 5; I'm reading book 3 to Gus.

Science: we're being fairly good about getting our Science in a Nutshell stuff done. Ari finished up his biology class at LEO a few weeks ago.

Read Alouds: Dave is reading Harry Potter to Gus. Somehow or other, I'm alternating The Two Towers with Watership Down with Ari and Milo. Ari doesn't like Watership Down. Milo does. So this is our compromise.

That's most of it. Homestretch! I'm excited about going into summer not feeling incredibly behind.

More books: quick takes

I feel like I haven't been reading much the past few weeks, but I guess I have managed to finish these three; all somehow associated with the kids and their reading, though one of them is not an actual kid book.

Book 21: The View from Saturday by E.L. Konigsburg: the story of 4 kids, their teacher, and their academic quiz bowl experience. As I think I mentioned earlier, the first few chapters were startling reminiscent of the plot of Slumdog Millionaire (or the other way around, I guess, since this book came first). The chapter intros describe part of the quiz bowl, ending with a particular question; then the rest of the chapter is a flashback, detailing some experience one of the four main characters had that explains why they know about the subject of the question. I found these first few chapters interesting and engaging--lots of neat little connections between the characters--but things got kind of...tedious as the book went on. So...it was enjoyable enough, I guess, overall, but it's no Basil E. Frankweiler. Oh, also: a major plot point involves one of kids saying that "posh" and "tip" entered the language as acronyms and then pushing the point until he's awarded credit after the judges initially tell him he's wrong. The problem is that posh and tip weren't ever acronyms; apocryphal stories, both (well, definitely posh; most likely tip). I remembered this vaguely when I read it, and looked it up to verify. This bothered me.

Book 22: The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien. We all know this one, right? A read aloud, with Ari and Milo. They LOVED it; I thought, "wow, this book seemed better when I was in high school!"

Book 23: No Passengers Beyond this Point by Gennifer Choldenko: I bought this for Ari for Easter, and I was so intrigued by the premise that I had to read it myself. A fun and thought-provoking little dystopian fantasy. India, Finn, and Mouse are siblings being sent off to live with their uncle after their house is foreclosed on, despite their widowed mother's best attempts to save it. She's a teacher and has to finish out the school year, so she can't join them until later (the youngest kid is six, and they barely know the uncle, so the premise requires a bit of suspension of disbelief, but you have to get the adults out of the picture somehow in this kind of book). When their plane lands, however, they're picked up by a driver with a feather covered taxi, and things get progressively odder from there. I can't say much more without giving away too much...it's a really interesting book, with a lot to recommend it, although the plot doesn't wrap up quite as tidily as one might like. The twist ending went over Ari's head a bit, leading to a big, "OH!" when I talked to him about it, but he liked it and tore through it really quickly.

Update-ish: the great writing experiment, et. al.

It's really starting to feel like the year is winding down, and this is making me happy.

Ari is doing an end of the year writing push, which was not his idea. We've had a lot of the "I'm a terrible writer!" "I hate writing!" "I CAN'T do it!" stuff going on again. Meanwhile the book he's writing on his own has just passed 60 pages (and he writes small). The writing he does do for me is adequate, but very cautious; he doesn't like to experiment with sentence structure or vocabulary or, you know, original thought when it comes to school assignments. If there is not a single right answer (that's he's at least 99.9% certain he knows), Ari would really rather throw himself on the floor and sob than give it a try. So. I've always pretty much thought the endless "journaling" that's popular in schools right now is fairly useless. My high minded ideal was all about quality over quantity. And it still is, generally speaking. But it finally occurred to me that some endless journaling might be exactly what we needed around here to get Ari past his perfectionism-induced writing block. So this past week I added in two half page journal entries on top of his usual SOTW summary and MCT assignment.

The first assignment (I just pulled up some prompts online with a quick google search) was to write about what his family does on the Fourth of July. Sounds like a pretty easy assignment for a kid who's writing a 60 page (and counting) novel in his spare time, right? That's not how he saw it. "I can't remember the Fourth of July!" he complained. "WHY do you want to me to do a whole bunch of terrible writing?!" he wailed. I was a wall; I did not waver in my cruelty. Finally, after a good 5 minutes of complaining followed by another 10 or 15 minutes of staring at a blank page, he wrote a perfectly lovely description of year before last's Fourth of July. He set it down in front of me with his usual disclaimer: "it's not any good." The next day the prompt was "I find a secret room in my house." Fun! He complained again and stared at the page again, then wrote a really cool story that was even longer than it was supposed to be! I asked, and he doesn't want me to put it here, so I won't. It involved a secret passageway under his bed that led to a room with a long-forgotten book of stories.

Ari's 4th of July assignment inspired Gus to write a poem about fireworks (specifically about watching the fireworks on Cape Cod, which we did last summer):

Fireworks high in the sky
Decorations
The fireworks are above the beach.
You can see the boats.

Math news:
Art of Problem Solving has a pre-algebra text coming out this summer! I'm thrilled about this, as it might just solve my "what are we going to do next for math!?" woes. Ari is already around a third of the way through Singapore 6A. He's loving it and not having any trouble. He is now officially better at the bar graph problems than I am (not that that's saying too much). AOPS describes the pre-algebra as being for students who enjoy math and have completed a math program through 5th grade. So he'll have finished through 6th grade, but I think that will actually be good, as I want him to be pretty confident going into it (see above for consequences of Ari lacking confidence).

Milo keeps surprising me with math lately. I will not say too much yet, but I'm hoping we're about to get a big leap in math ability like we did last year around this time with reading ability. Especially because he's starting to notice (with Ari's help. sigh) what level he's working at. He's still in 2A, and he told me the other day that he needed to finish all of 2 before he turned 8 (next month). I explained that he'd done two different 1st grade programs (owing to our Right Start diversion) and that the great thing about homeschooling is that we don't have to worry about grade levels; he can work "ahead" in stuff like reading and science, and he can spend more time on math if he needs to. He seemed satisfied with this for now, but I do worry that it might become more of an issue as he gets older if his relative (to his brothers) difficulty with math continues.

Hmm...my post turned out to be kind of filled with tales of my kids' emotional fragility. Despite the lack of anecdotes, Gus is plenty fragile, too. More on that another time, I'm sure!

Book 20: The Illumination by Kevin Brockmeier

The premise of The Illumination is intriguing and full of possibility: one night, for no reason that anyone can ever figure out, everyone on earth's pain suddenly becomes visible; they glow from the site of the sickness or injury. As if this weren't enough clever plot device for one novel, we also have a journal of love notes that becomes the common thread tying our characters together. Jason left a note on the refrigerator every morning for his wife, telling her something new that he loved about her. His wife, in turn, faithfully transcribes each note into a journal. But when his wife is killed the night the Illumination begins, the journal starts making the rounds of a series of sad, lonely, desperate characters. The writing is lovely and skillful here, and the central idea--of suffering as light, of pain as beauty--is tantalizing. I wanted to love it, but....I just couldn't. I couldn't quite connect with the beautiful suffering, and I couldn't connect with any of the characters, either. Which is a bit ironic, since the characters are crying out for connection and constantly, painfully, failing to find it. I was kind of waiting for it like the characters were; I kept thinking it would circle back around and the discrete plots would finally come together in some meaningful way...but it never happened. I guess that's the point--how fleeting and tenuous our connections to each other are, even as they're the most important things in life--but it just wasn't satisfying to me here. I can't put my finger on it, and I still wonder if I'll change my mind after I sit on it for awhile, but that's where I am right now. I was anxious for it be over as I was reading it. The love notes, which at first were endearing, started to seem tiresome and a bit gimmicky.

Homeschooling? Why yes, we're still doing that.

I know it's been pretty much all book reviews all the time around here lately. I haven't been able to work up the motivation to do a weekly report in awhile...I kind of feel like we're in that homestretchy, more of the same, trying to finish stuff up part of the year. We're actually not doing school this week, as it's Dave's spring break and so ours too. But I will say a few things about schoolish stuff:

*I have a big poetry post planned in honor of National Poetry Month. Unfortunately, it requires taking pictures, which means it's taking me awhile to sit down and do it. It might involve an adorable video of Gus reciting The Jabberwocky, though, so it's worth waiting for

*All three kids are reading different Narnia books right now (or being read to, in Gus' case).

*Ari and I are both reading The View from Saturday, and I was surprised to find that the plot somewhat resembles that of Slumdog Millionaire

*Ari is finished with Singapore 5, as of a couple of days ago. I was trying to come up with a rest of the year plan and entertaining all sorts of possibilities, when Ari said, "why don't I just start the next one?" Ahh, yes. That could work. So that's what he's going to do.

Now I have to go check on dinner.

Book 19: Endgame by Frank Brady

I'm not sure any biographer has ever had a less sympathetic subject than Frank Brady has in Bobby Fischer. And I'm including Hitler, because at least one can feel bad about his crappy childhood. It seems that Bobby Fischer was born an insufferable brat and only got worse from there. He spends the first half of the book crying when he loses chess games, and the second half engaged in bizarre, self-destructive behavior with frequent anti-Semitic rants. Then he moves to Iceland and dies. I think I have a particular impatience with men of Fischer's type--men who need to be saved, I call them. They always seem to be geniuses and Pisces. Like Townes Van Zandt and Kurt Cobain (okay, Kurt Cobain's on the cusp of Aquarius and Pisces, but the self-destructive streak is totally a Pisces thing). Perhaps I should avoid astrology in my book reviews, lest I seem stupid. But Brady mentions it himself: Bobby Fischer liked to swim, he tells us, like a true Pisces. But what Townes Van Zandt and Kurt Cobain had going for them is that they weren't assholes. Or if they were, they mostly kept it to themselves and didn't make frequent radio broadcasts advertising it. Also, Townes Van Zandt had a dog named Geraldine.

To keep up my "all Pisces men are just alike" theme: I remember watching a documentary about Townes Van Zandt and thinking, "how the hell can all these women stand him?" Even after they leave him, all the ex-wives speak fondly of him. Because apparently there is some sort of appeal that I cannot see in men who need to be saved. I kept wondering the same thing as I read Endgame: why do people put up with him? Why do they keep trying to get him to play chess for them? Brady recounts one experience, sitting in a restaurant with Fischer, listening to him talk about chess, and weeping because he realized he was in the presence of genius. There's a lot of talk like that; Brady is constantly comparing chess to music or to literature, and his intentions in doing so are clear: he wants the reader to think of chess as art and to think of Fischer as a Leni Riefenstahl or Ezra Pound. Personally, I found both Triumph of the Will and this book more tedious than anything else, though. I don't blame Brady; he did what he could to make the reader appreciate Fischer's genius without forgiving his actions...I just didn't find it particularly compelling.

Book 18: Why We Get Fat (And What to do About It) by Gary Taubes: My longest book review EVER!

A simple observation of the eating habits of my (skinny) husband and (not at all skinny) me will reveal two things: DH can eat whatever he wants and not gain weight,  and DH can eat whatever he wants, and his blood sugar will be perfect an hour a later. Neither of these things is true for me. So I was very pleased to read Gary Taubes' convincing, eloquent explanation of how these two things are linked.

I was diagnosed with gestational diabetes with my first pregnancy; I wasn't with the last two, but I still tested my blood sugar pretty regularly to make sure things were staying under control. As a result, I'm a lot more intimately familiar with my blood sugar than most non-diabetics. When I was diagnosed with GD 10 years ago, pretty much the only advice the nutritionist I met with gave me was to count carbs. And in my adventures with my blood sugar monitor it wasn't hard to see a relationship between eating carbs and my blood sugar levels: too many carbs of any type or pretty much any amount of pure simple carbs (i.e. fruit juice or coke) shot my levels up dramatically. So when I first started listening to Gary Taubes, I thought maybe he was exaggerating the "other side's" position for dramatic effect. Surely everyone recognizes that too many carbs are bad at the very least for a certain (large and rapidly growing) segment of the population that's especially sensitive to them, right? Then I started looking around, and realized that, in fact, there are people out there who say that diabetics need to cut their fat and that, other than pure sugar, they don't need to really worry about carbs. Fruit is fine, one site said, but if it makes you feel better you can cut down on it. Again, this is so counter my own experience with drinking 1/4 cup of orange juice when I was pregnant, that it seemed absurd.  This might explain, though, why my mother, who's been a diabetic for 10 years, eats a peanut butter and jelly sandwich almost every night for dinner. No one's ever told her she shouldn't.

I almost didn't read WWGF because I was already pretty well convinced that, at least for me, a low or moderate carb diet was what I ought to be doing. Then I actually started doing it, and that made me a little more interested in the science behind the whole thing. Taubes thesis is that obesity is the result of a hormonal disorder involving insulin regulation, and that overeating and sedentary behavior is not the cause of obesity but a side effect of it. It's very clear to me, again, from my own experiences, that eating a big dose of carbohydrates (particularly if unaccompanied by sufficient protein and fat) leads to a blood sugar crash a couple of hours later that makes me crave sugar like crazy (sugar being the fastest way to restore my blood sugar to a reasonable level). So it makes complete sense to me that the same thing might be happening, on a less dramatic level, with lower levels of carbohydrate eating. It's also very clear after just a few days on a lowish carb diet that eating fewer carbs is remarkably effective for getting rid of sugar cravings. I won't get into the science of it more than that, because I suck at explaining science-y things. WWGF is presented in the introduction as sort of Good Calories, Bad Calories (Taubes' earlier, much longer, book on the same topic) for Dummies. "People kept asking me for a version that they could share with their not very bright cousin Ed," says Taubes (okay; not in so many words). This was enough for me. I don't feel a need to read Good Calories, Bad Calories.

I am much more schooled in analyzing writing than in analyzing science, however, so I'll blather on for a bit about that. First off, let me say that I believe Taubes is entirely sincere. At one point he says he's willing to stake his reputation on his claims, and, in fact, he has. He's clearly a serious guy--an award winning science journalist--and I don't think he would be pushing so hard a view many still see as quackery if he weren't certain about it. But, as John Kerry once told George W. Bush, "you can be certain, and you can be wrong." And once you're certain, all the evidence can seem to support what you already believe to be true. Taubes himself admits as much; this, he says, is why the high carb/low fat thinking has prevailed for so long in the face of all contrary evidence, and this, he admits, is a phenomenon that he is subject to as well. Taubes is also nothing if not long-winded. And he's a bright guy and a good writer, which makes me read (listen) extra carefully, lest I fall prey to the smartest guy in the room syndrome. All of that said, I find Taubes pretty damn convincing. He throws study after study at you and tosses in a lot of historical information; there's prettty much nothing in the way of personal anecdotes, and he's not fond of sensationalism or hyperbole (his relentless use of the phrase "fattening carbohydrates" in a transparent attempt to change conventional wisdom by changing language gets a little annoying).

I read a lot of anti-Taubes stuff as well while I was listening to the book. Most Taubes criticism seems to fall into two categories: 1. people who parrot back the opinions of "experts" who disagree with Taubes and then announce triumphantly: "see! he's wrong!" Since Taubes' entire point is that the experts have gotten things wrong for the past 50 years, this line of criticism is a bit...misguided. 2. people who clearly haven't read the book and throw out gotcha, "but what about.....!" statements. Like, "what about in Asia?! With all the rice!" Turns out if you read the book, even the for Dummies version, there's not much that Taubes hasn't considered and addressed...including what about Asia with all the rice (I got a little distracted during that part, but it has something to do with how traditional Asian diets don't include many simple carbohydrates, so they haven't destroyed their bodies, and they can still eat rice...except for in the places where they have McDonald's and sugar now; those people are all getting diabetes. Also, Taubes never claims that no one can eat carbohydrates without getting fat. His analogy is this: not everyone who smokes cigarettes will get lung cancer, but most of the people who get lung cancer get it because they smoked).

But some of the criticism is thoughtful and deserves attention. I read one critique (not of this book, but of Taubes' 2002?(ish) piece in the NYT magazine that started to lay out some of these ideas) in Reason magazine, that seemed to raise some good points (except that that guy poo pooed the idea that eating carbs can set up a blood sugar crash that makes you crave carbs...and, as I've mentioned, that's something I experience regularly (and I don't think it's particularly uncommon)). Then I read Taubes' rebuttal, which addressed absolutely every critique the guy made and ran something like twice as long as the original critique. Again....does this mean he's right or just that he'll talk longer than anyone else? The most reasonable sounding critiques of Taubes are generally from people who have no particular agenda and who say things like, "Taubes makes some good points about x and y, but I disagree with him here." Michael Pollan seems to be one of these people (and the respect mingled with healthy skepticism seems mutual; both authors quote the other frequently, but sometimes have quibbles). A lot of people raise good questions about his POV on exercise (namely, that it's largely unhelpful for sustained weight loss). It's worth noting that there's plenty of overlap between Taubes' view and conventional wisdom these days, too. Taubes regularly stresses that refined carbohydrates, especially in liquid form, are the worst offenders, and that for a lot of people cutting these out may be all that's needed. Although Taubes pulls up some pretty outrageous quotes from nutrition experts in the 80's, at the height of the low fat craze, there's not really anyone TODAY who suggests that you're better off drinking Coke than eating eggs (I don't think there is, anyway).

I wondered if perhaps Taubes was cherry-picking studies (as he's been accused of) when he extols the amazing results of low carb diets,  so I checked out the Wikipedia article on the studies that have been done. I expected them to be somewhat inconclusive; the impression I've gotten from the media over the years is that some studies show low fat diets as better than low carb, and some show the opposite. I was surprised to learn that, assuming Wikipedia hasn't fallen prey to a low carb conspiracy, the results of recent research is pretty uniformly positive for low carb diets. Weight loss is generally better than on low fat or straight up calorie restricted diets--at worst it's roughly the same (and with, remember, no calorie restrictions), and heart health indicators almost always get better on low carb diets.

For me personally, if I had to name my own quibbles/questions about the book (which, to be clear, I am, by and large, a huge fan of)....I'd echo the questions about exercise. It's true that I don't find exercise particularly helpful with weight loss now, in my mid-thirties, but it definitely made a difference 10 or 15 years ago, when I could eat complete crap all the time (including copious amounts of liquid sugar) and stay pretty thin as long as I jogged 20 or 30 minutes a day. Taubes tends to talk mostly about "exercise" as if all of it is the same, without making any distinctions about type, duration, who's doing it, etc.  And, perhaps this falls under the category of criticizing the book the author didn't write, but Taubes himself brings up, briefly, in the introduction, the ethical considerations in adopting a diet composed largely of animal products. But then he never really addresses it. Unlike Pollan, he makes no argument, ethical or nutritional, for eating pastured meat and dairy. I do eat mostly pastured meat and eggs (dairy is a work in progress), but I recognize that this is a luxury, and I'm not sure there's any question that the world's carrying capacity is a lot higher when we mostly eat plants. But, again, that's a different book.

Ultimately, while Taubes himself is entirely convinced of his "alternate hypothesis" (as he calls it) he recognizes and emphasizes that that's what it is. His purpose here is partially to convince people that he's right, but also to convince the scientific community that more good research is needed...because if he is right then time's a-wasting.

Book 17: Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand

I.e. not Seabiscuit. It's important, I think, for people who read this book to realize going into it that it is not Seabiscuit. It turns out that being in a Japenese POW camp is a lot more...harrowing than horse racing. Unbroken tells the story of Louis Zamperini, one time Olympic runner turned WWII soldier. It recounts his early life as a runner, then his war experiences, notably the part about how his plane crashed and he spent nearly 2 months adrift on a life raft, surrounded by sharks, followed by a couple of years in a Japanese prison camp, then follows him home and details his life after the war as he attempts to come to terms with everything that happened to him. As I suggested, I was a little unprepared for how relentlessly grim much of this book is, although there's not really any reason why I should have been. Except for Seabiscuit. But I stuck with it because it is a hell of a good story, and very well told. My good luck streak with narrative non-fiction (AKA my new favorite genre) continues. I can't even begin to list the warning labels this book should come with. Though I do think Hillenbrand handles the gritty details as non-sensationally as possible without doing any sugarcoating.

Book 16: At Home by Bill Bryson

I'd never read any Bill Bryson before (although he seems to have written approximately 4000 books), so I wasn't precisely sure what to expect from At Home: A Short History of Private Life. Well, I mean, I guess the subtitle gave me something of a hint. Reading Bill Bryson is kind of like listening to a charming but eccentric professor who is delightfully easy to lead off track onto some fascinating tangent that lasts for the whole class period. I kept finding myself wondering--and utterly unable to remember--how, for example, the chapter on the bedroom wound up talking about the history of cremation. Bryson won me over in the introduction, when he started wondering why we have salt and pepper shakers on our kitchen tables instead of, say, cinnamon and basil shakers. Yes, why indeed? I couldn't wait to find out. As far as I can recall, though, Bryson never manages to actually explain why...at least not about pepper (salt seems fairly self explanatory anyway. duh--it's salt. yum). But no matter; At Home is a fascinating compendium of knowledge--some useful, some decidedly not. Laura Miller, in her review for Salon, writes that, " 'At Home' may ultimately be a bit pointless, but damn if it isn't a lot of fun all the same." I think that pretty well sums it up. Bryson does have a thesis, of sorts; it's directly stated in fact, and placed curiously a full third of the way through the book: "If you had to summarize it in a sentence, you could say that the history of private life is a history of getting comfortable slowly." And I guess in some way or another, most all of the topics Bryson touches on do lead back to this central idea. Smallpox, crop rotation, the staircases in Monticello, locusts, frozen cavemen, the invention of the telephone, wig fashions, the commercial history of ice....yep; they're all covered here.

February 28-March 4: Week 26

I guess I'm calling this week 26; things got a little fuzzy somewhere. Basically, though, I'm aiming to finish up most of our stuff by the time Dave finishes school, which gives us 11 1/2 more weeks, assuming we take spring break when he does (which we will; no sense pretending otherwise). So we have an extra week or so to play with. Milo will need to do some math over the summer, and I'll probably find some supplemental math for Ari (maybe one of the Duke TIP things), and I imagine Gus will want to keep doing math, too. I might intentionally leave some of Practice Town for Ari to do over the summer so that he stays in...umm, practice. And I'm hoping we'll find time for Ari and Milo to learn how to type over the summer. Milo's handwriting is perfectly good, but very, very SLOW. He doesn't really complain about it, but I'm having a hard time imagining him doing the writing assignments for MCT next year unless he types them (or dictates them; that may happen a lot). But this wasn't about what we did this week! I am easily distracted. By myself.

What DID we do? Many things. I will tell you about some of them.

Ari:
*officially hates Life of Fred again. I think at this point we've given it a good try, and we're calling it quits (at least for Ari; we may revisit it when Milo gets there). New plan: stop trying to slow down Singapore, and just let him go through it as fast as he wants to (or as fast as he happens to, working on it for 30 minutes or so a day). He'll probably finish 6B sometime midway through next year, and then we'll see where we are and where to go next.

*finished Math Olympiad for the year

*wrote a summary about gladiators

*had an off week from Paragraph Town writing assignments. The week I didn't write a weekly report, he did an assignment where he's supposed to use a key word (or two or three) throughout a five paragraph essay. He used "popular" and wrote about Diary of a Wimpy Kid. It was a pretty big leap, I thought, from other PT assignments, so I gave him a lot of help, but I think it was a good introduction to coming up with a thesis, finding support in the text, etc.

*did a couple of exercises in Killgallon, including the first one where he gets to make up his own sentences. I think it's growing on him now.

*says that his two favorite words are "amiable" and "participle"

*read more of The Hobbit and will probably finish this coming week. I'm not sure what he's been reading at night.

*maybe he hasn't been reading that much at night, actually, because he's been on a moviemaking kick. His latest masterpiece is "Feline Goddess," featuring several clips of Athena the kitten playing. I should send it to her former foster mother.

Milo:
*worked on adding three 2 and 3 digit numbers with renaming in Singapore. He did really well with it. He's getting MUCH faster adding in his head (7 + 8, etc.), and he has no trouble whatsoever with the concept of renaming. Speed continues to be the issue. But, on the bright side of that, he seems to be able to concentrate for a much longer period than he used to be able to, so he can work for 20 or 30 minutes without collapsing in a heap of tears and frustration (you know, as long as I'm sitting right there. If I send him to another room to work, he's nearly always staring into space when I check on him).  I'm flirting with the idea of giving him the ITBS this summer to get a better idea of where he is and what he needs to work on before he takes it "for real" (not that anyone sees those scores either. Our homeschool laws are kinda weird) next year. Maybe over the summer. More for summer!

*is still immersed in the worlds of Magic Treehouse, Harry Potter, and Percy Jackson. The Lightning Thief is missing right now, though. Milo loses things a lot.

*is doing very well with WWE. I think I'll have him read The Mouse and the Motorcycle next if ever finishes Chamber of Secrets, so he can find out all the other stuff that happens in it.

Gus:
*is tearing through Singapore 1A. He gets a little cocky and makes mistakes sometimes, because he thinks he knows more than he really does and goes too fast. He does the same thing in reading. He's the anti Milo.

*is reading MTH: Dinosaurs Before Dark to me, for a class he's taking at LEO. He and Dave are still reading The Hobbit at bedtime. They have big plans to read Harry Potter next.

*is ridiculously excited about starting Writing With Ease in the fall. I hope it lives up to his expectations. It's encouraging him to do his handwriting regularly, at least, since I told him he needs to finish Handwriting Without Tears before he starts.

*really loves Royal Fireworks Press' Aesop books.

Other stuff:
*I signed everyone up for homeschool soccer this week. It starts in 2 weeks. Milo insisted, right up until we were pulling into the park to register, that he didn't want to play. Then, at the last possible minute, he said grudgingly, "I guess I'll try it." So they're all signed up. Yay!

*Everyone LOVES Greek Code Cracker. As a consequence, everyone is very excited about starting Song School Greek (Milo and Gus) or Greek for Children (Ari) next year. Ari became a fan of Classical Academic Press on Facebook to help them get enough fans to give out a discount code. Must remember to order this week when discount code comes out.

*we did science! We learned about our eyes and how our pupils get bigger and smaller to let more or less light in. We inserted an (included!) battery into the (included!) flashlight and shined it into our eyes:

*We started Augustus Caesar's World for history. We read some of it while hanging out in the basement waiting out a tornado warning. That's the main reason we homeschool. I remember tornado warnings, lined up in the hallway, when I was in school, and we didn't get ANY work done.

*We still have a kitten:

 

Oh, speaking of that, I'm trying to set up a thing where we foster kittens for the local humane society, but the woman in charge of the program is proving to be a slow e-mail responder. I wanted some kind of volunteering project for the kids, and this seems like a very good one for shy kids who love animals and are currently kitten-obsessed. 

*We let IEW's poetry memorization program fall by the wayside awhile back. I didn't order the CD, and then I decided we needed it, only they don't sell just the CD, AND I didn't want to pay as much as they'd charge for it even if they did, so Dave tried to record the poems and make a CD, but that didn't work, for reasons we can't really figure out....so we've been doing our own poetry memorization program now. We're almost finished memorizing "Jabberwocky" (we have it on the CD that comes with A Child's Introduction to Poetry). Next up is Robert Frost's "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening." We read it and talked about it some this week. I might have sort of brought up the idea that it's about suicide. And then I might have started quoting Hamlet's "To be or not to to be" soliloquy. I am not sure how age appropriate all of this was. Particularly for my five year old.

Book 15: Crazy for God by Frank Schaeffer

I didn't do a weekly report last week, and we've mostly taken this week off (other than a little catch  up work, plus outside class stuff) because DH has been on vacation, so not much blog action lately...but I do need to catch up on book reviews. So. There's actually a WTM discussion going on right now about Frank Schaeffer and this book specifically....largely about what a bratty, ungrateful, ass of a son he is.  Here's what I posted there:

I finished Crazy for God earlier this week...I'm still not entirely sure what I think about it. I guess my impression was that Frank Schaeffer is kind of a jerk (a view of him that the book itself suggests that most people who know him share or have shared at some point). He's very hard on his parents and his tone is often bitter and sarcastic, but he's also hard on himself (and prints letters from his daughter in which she exhibits the same lack of tact and mercy about him that he shows towards his parents). In many places, he's also very sympathetic to his parents and seems to value his relationships with them.

The things he actually says (as opposed to the way he says them) are not, by and large, all that scathing. His parents had a sometimes rocky marriage and parented him largely through benign neglect. There's a lot of posturing for money and political power among some of the leaders in the religious right, and some people are in it more for that than out of sincere religious conviction. Honestly, I didn't feel like any of these things were hard to believe or shockers, especially. But I don't think I'd much care for the guy if I met him, either. 

...of course, a lot of the views on that thread are from people who know (the work of) and love Frank's father, Francis Schaeffer, and who are considerably more politically and religiously conservative than I am. As someone who came into the book with a pretty low opinion of the religious right, I'm sure I'm looking at it quite differently. I actually wouldn't have minded a little MORE gossip about how creepy Billy Graham is, to be honest. The book was a little more...impressionistic, maybe?...than I was expecting. More than half of it is taken up with memories of childhood; all told, the bashing of the religious right doesn't take up as much space as I expected, nor is it as concrete or, umm, chronological. Impressionistic. Episodic. Schaeffer is utterly uninterested (at least in this book) in issues of theology, which kind of disappointed me, I have to say. He thinks the Calvinism espoused by his parents is silly and deeply flawed (he later converts and becomes Orthodox), but he never really spells out why; he's more interested in the effect Calvinism has on the people who believe in it than in unraveling it intellectually. And there. There's my impressionistic review.

Book 14: The World is Bigger Now by Euna Lee

I read Laura Ling's book about her experiences as a captive in North Korea a few weeks ago, and, of course, I'm obsessed with North Korea, so giving Ling's co-worker Euna Lee's account a listen (as an audiobook) seemed like the thing to do. Lee is as fond of lengthy titles as her colleague is; the full title is The World is Bigger Now: An American Journalist's Release from Captivity in North Korea...A Remarkable Story of Faith, Family, and Forgiveness. Perhaps you'll recall that Ling's book left me feeling a little annoyed with all the trouble everyone in two countries had to go to to save Ling and Lee from their own stupidity. It is very hard to be annoyed with Lee, however, because she's so unbelievably guilt-stricken herself over ever decision she's ever made. She feels guilty for putting work ahead of her family. She feels guilty for having thought badly of North Koreans as a child growing up in South Korea. She feels guilty for going on the trip to make the documentary in the first place. She feels guilty because her North Korean interrogator successfully causes her to feel resentment toward Laura Ling. She feels guilty because she is angry with God during her captivity. Her guilt reaches particularly absurd levels at one point when she admits that she feels guilty for having put her North Korean interrogator through so much trouble...you know, having to interrogate her every day.

The actual experiences Ling and Lee go through are very similar (they're kept apart, but in the same building), but Ling's account reads like a trip report from a Carnival Cruise compared to Lee's. Ling just seems to have a personality better suited to months of mental and emotional stress and uncertainty, or perhaps she was just less willing to revisit the darker parts of her experience in her memoir. A couple of distinctions do stand out: Lee speaks Korean, so she can understand everything that's going on. On the other hand, she appears to have been given much less information about what was happening back in the US to secure her release than Ling. Ling was a somewhat active participant, communicating with her sister about what needed to happen (basically, Bill Clinton needed to come to North Korea; no one else was good enough) to get them released. Lee has nothing to do, on the other hand, but spiral downward into a mental breakdown and come close to a suicide attempt at one point. Lastly, Lee has a young daughter (4 at the time), which adds an extra level of pathos to her long, uncertain period of captivity.

Ultimately, I felt more sympathetic toward Lee than Ling after reading both accounts, but Lee's was often painful to listen to (and not in a good way).

February 7-11, 2011: Week 24

The problem with waiting until Sunday to write the weekly report is that I no longer have any memory of what we did all week. Especially when the weekend has involved a head cold (for me, Dave, Ari, and Gus), a basketball tournament, (for Ari) and a math tournament (for Dave). But I have some pictures, so I will do my best to reconstruct. Looking through the pictures, it appears that mostly we played with the kitten all week:

But there must have been more. Let me think.

Ari: started reading The Hobbit and did a few dictation sentences from it. We're reading Fellowship of the Ring as a read aloud at bedtime, so I hope it is not too confusing. He seems to be handling it okay. He is annoyed with J.K. Rowling right now and how much she borrowed from LOTR. It is a little startling, I have to say. We're reading the endless Council of Elrond chapter right now in FOTR, and I'm finding it so tedious (one of Ari's Caesar's English words!) myself that I can't believe Ari and Milo aren't complaining about it. They are generally very quick to complain when they're not into a book, though (especially Ari), so I can only assume they're actually enjoying it.

Ari hasn't gotten around to Life of Fred for a couple of weeks now; it's all Singapore all the time. He's working on percents right now. He had another competition for Math Olympiad this week; word is the test are getting a bit tougher as the year goes on. There's one more in March, and then he's finished with that for the year.

He did two writing assignments: a summary about Romulus and Remus and the founding of Rome, and a paragraph comparing and contrasting dwarves and hobbits. Oh, he also did a journal entry for Growing Up Heroic--he wrote a diary entry from the perspective of a kid in Ancient Greece.

I went ahead and ordered Killgallon's Sentence Composing for Elementary School, and he did the first two assignments from it. More on that after I've had a chance to see it action for awhile.

Wednesday was his last biology dissection class at LEO; he dissected a sheep's brain. I let him decide whether he wanted me to sign him up for the next session (on the human body) or not, thinking he definitely wouldn't want to do it, but he surprised me and said he did. I'm making him sign a paper saying it was his choice to take it, so I can pull it out and show him when he starts complaining about the homework.

Milo: did surprisingly well starting addition with renaming in Singapore. It takes him awhile, but he's not getting frustrated or complaining too much. I think at this rate he's going to finish up Singapore 2A when he's in 8th grade or so, but slow and steady wins the race, right? Really, I'm hoping to do math over the summer and get through at least some of 2B before the fall.

Still reading Chamber of Secrets for school. For free reading, he's still tearing through Magic Tree House, and he also read the first Diary of a Wimpy Kid book.

He did another week in WWE2; this week's book was The Borrowers.

Gus: did some more Singapore 1a, and also, on his own time, for fun, made a sheet with different ways to make 10. He wrote down all the pairs of numbers, plus a couple ways to add 3 numbers together to get 10, but got stuck when he got to -1. I drew a number line to help him out, and then he added -1+11 and -2+12.

He finished reading both "Frog and Toad are Friends" (to me) and "Frog and Toad All Year" (to Dave). He's starting on Little Bear now at bedtime, and I need to think about what he should read to me for school. He's at the point where he's reading Frog and Toad, et. al. fluently with no help, so I'd like to save those for independent bedtime reading and have him read something a little more challenging for school.

History: we read the chapter on the beginning of Rome in SOTW, which means we really need to wrap up that Alexander the Greek book. But it will probably be another week or two.

Science! Our kits came on Monday, so we did two activities on Tuesday, one from each kit. The first one was pretty simple--mostly just feeling our chests and throats to check out the respiratory system. The second one was really cool, though--we made little poking/measuring devices out of (included!) hair pins, making one with the tips .5 cm apart, then all the way up to 3 cm at half cm intervals. Then we blindfolded someone and touched various body parts (back of hand, palm, finger, back of neck, arm, leg) with the different hairpins to see which body parts have the most nerve receptors (for the less sensitive body parts, you can only feel one of the hairpin points when they're close together).

Incidentally, the blindfold is one we already had. The nutshell kit did come with one, but it was made of plastic and tore as soon as we put it on, and wasn't comfortable. Disappointment! Other than that, though, I'm very pleased so far.

On Thursday, we did the section on the digestive system from Discovery Education Science (I did the elementary one with Milo and Gus; Ari worked on the middle school one on his own). Then we read from Open Me Up, again about the digestive system.

Book 13: Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

There's a passage I have marked in J.D. Salinger's Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters. I read the book in high school, and I can no longer remember what it's about, but the passage has always stuck with me, and when I went to look for it just now, the book opened immediately to the page where I had underlined it:

He would disapprove of Muriel's mother, too. She's an irritating, opinionated woman, a type Buddy can't stand. I don't think he could see her for what she is. A person deprived, for life, of any understanding or taste for the main current of poetry that flows through things, all things. She might as well be dead, and yet she goes on living, stopping off at delicatessens, seeing her analyst, consuming a novel every night, putting on her girdle, plotting for Muriel's health and prosperity. I love her. I find her unimaginably brave.

I kept thinking  of this passage as I read Let the Great World Spin. I was initially attracted to the novel for two reasons: I adore the title. And Dave I and watched, a few months ago, a documentary called Man on  Wire, about Philippe Petit, the tightrope walker who strung a wire and walked between the World Trade Towers in 1974. Petit's walk is the frame story for Let the Great World Spin; the event that ties, sometimes very loosely, all the characters together. The story is told from the point of view of several different characters, and most of the action of the novel takes place on the day of or in the days immediately surrounding Petit's walk. There is Ciaran, recently arrived from Ireland and living with his brother, Corrigan, the monk who befriends prostitutes, Tillie, one of said prostitutes, Claire, the wife of Solomon, the judge in whose courtroom Petit ends up after his arrest. And on and on.

The "main current of poetry that flows through all things" is both literal and figurative here, and more democratic than in Salinger's story; no one escapes its touch; no one is forced to endure life without it. Fragments of poems are sprinkled through the novel. The title, McCann reveals in a note at the end, "comes from the Alfred, Lord Tennyson poem "Locksley Hall." That in turn was heavily influenced by the 'Mu'allaqat,' or the 'Suspended Poems,' seven long Arabic poems written in the sixth century." The prostitutes quote Rumi. Ciaran arrives in New York with a copy of "Howl" tucked into his bag. And aside from this literal current of poetry, uniting people through time and space, there are the constant attempts to find--or to assign--meaning to life, and, particularly, to life in a dark, chaotic time and place. Through painting, photography, filmmaking, technology, through, of course, the tightrope walk itself.

Is all this interconnectedness significant or coincidence? Is the meaning, the beauty we find in life real or imagined? And can it sustain us in the face of everything that goes wrong? These are the questions the book grapples with; after all "at a certain stage," muses one character, "every single thing can be a sign." Is that what's going on? Are the characters (and by extension the reader) grasping at straws, trying desperately to assign meaning to things that have none, in a world where nothing really makes sense? And, maybe McCann is also asking, does it really matter, ultimately, which it is? Let the Great World Spin is dark in places, certainly, and heartbreaking (another label request: "Warning: mothers with dead sons"), but it is never cynical and never hopeless. One character carries a photo of Petit on his wire: "It strikes her as an enduring moment, the man alone against scale, still capable of myth in the face of all other evidence."

January 31-February 4, 2011: Week 23

This week was a sharp contrast to last week, in that we had very few outside the house plans, so we were able to stay home most of the time and be alternately very productive and very lazy. The weather was awful for most of the week, so we also spent a lot of time inside and watched terrible things on the TV, like Home Alone 3. Well, I didn't watch Home Alone 3, but the kids did. Sometimes, when it's 38 and raining, you just have to let your kids eat popcorn and watch Home Alone 3. Also, you have to make a skillet cookie, so we did that after Home Alone 3 was over:

Ari is unwrapping butter while Gus makes a funny face. And the finished product:

This was all on Friday. We usually finish up school early on Friday and then go to park day with some friends. But said friends (two different families) were ALL going out of town to warm places, so no park day. We thought about going somewhere ourselves, but it seemed much cozier to stay home with Skillet Cookie (Skillet Cookie is like a friend at this point, so it's a proper noun). And THEN, Friday night,  my mom watched the kids while Dave and I went to the Waffle House and to see The King's Speech, so it was pretty much, like, the best Friday EVER.

So that's how the week ended. Now to back up.

We did a lot of history this week, but very little science, because we're waiting on a package from Delta Education--a couple of human body Science in a Nutshell kits. We did start reading from David Macaulay's The Way We Work, though, on Friday, in between bites of Skillet Cookie:

We read about cells and atoms (I'm not sure if you knew this, but people are MADE out of cells, which, in turn, are made out of atoms). Atoms, in case you've not heard, are very, very small. Macaulay includes a hard to follow if you are Gus analogy involving a tennis ball, a terrier, and Manhattan.

For history, we read the chapter (26, I think) on the ancient Americas in SOTW, but kept reading about Greece otherwise. It's all the same books as last week, so I'll post a picture of them instead of saying what they are again:

(and this is where the pictures dry up. But next week there will be science and, therefore, pictures!) Ari kept working on "Growing Up Heroic" which suggests he watch My Big Fat Greek Wedding and compare a modern Greek American family with ancient Greek families. It's been a long time since I watched MBFGW, and I'm trying to remember if it's something the kids would actually sit through or not.

Ari did two writing assignments again this week--a summary about the Nazca people from SOTW and a compare/contrast paragraph about Sparta and Athens for Paragraph Town. Next week he's going to do the same assignment again, but this time comparing and contrasting two characters from A Wrinkle in Time.  Speaking of which, he finished A Wrinkle in Time this week. He did several sentences from Practice Town, read some stuff about meter in his poetry book (I'm not having him do any of the poetry writing assignments unless he wants to, so much trauma did it cause last year. I had a sneaking suspicion that he secretly likes writing poetry, though, and this was confirmed by my discovery of a notebook in his room, entitled, "Poetry Inspired by Literature" with a series of poems based on A Series of Unfortunate Events), and did two dictation sentences from A Wrinkle in Time, which I used as a springboard for some brief discussion about setting and character.

Milo had a good week in math! He's doing 2 and 3 digit addition and subtraction without renaming, and he likes it So.Much.Better than the mental addition and subtraction he was doing before. I think with his focus issues, he just has a very hard time holding everything in his head long enough to do something like 24 + 33 mentally. But he's finally quick enough with his facts up to 10 that doing it in columns is no problem. So it was nice to a have a week without despair in math. He's still reading Chamber of Secrets, and I'm not sure he'll ever finish. In other reading, he finished up the first Lemony Snicket book, read a few more Magic Treehouses, and read some of the Ask Me Anything book he got for Christmas. He did narration and dictation from Pilgrim's Progress in WWE this week; that John Bunyon isn't very subtle with the whole allegory thing, is he?

Gus loves his RFWP Aesop books. He also loves math, and tells me so whenever Milo says that he hates math. He's still working on 1A; I pretty much just turn him loose on it while Milo's doing math, and let him do as much or as little as  he wants. He took a break from Frog and Toad this week to read to me from his animal encylopedia:

 We learned that there's a fish that can swim faster than a cheetah can run, and that the octopus has a really big brain.

Next year stuff

I haven't been reading as voraciously this week because I've been madly planning the buying spree for next year and going as far as mapping out schedules. Thoughts:

*I was looking over the Duke TIP King Arthur samples and feeling kind of overwhelmed about how much writing it involves and, thus, how much time it will take. Then I realized that I can actually change our plans and not do it next year. This was a big relief. It's geared toward 6th grade and up gifted kids, so it would probably be something of a stretch for my not-as-reluctant-as-before-but-still-sometimes-stubborn-rising-5th-grade-writer. I had it in my head that we needed to do it next year because we're doing the middle ages then, but really the world won't end if we either wait a year and do it as a literature study or even--gasp--don't EVER do it.

*I am considering doing some Killgallon stuff for English with Ari next year and taking two years to cover MCT's Voyage level. Still mulling it over but 1. I think more time with the writing assignments, really nailing them, would be a good thing for him and 2. slowing down means we won't finish all the MCT language arts by 8th grade. That might be good. Still thinking.

*I realized last night that I'm attempting to come up with four separate reading lists for history next year: read alouds for everyone, books to read to Gus/books for Gus to read independently, Ari's books, Milo's books. There might be some overlap, but still. But I have a rough draft of Ari's reading list. Ari's list is science, literature, and history (mostly historical fiction) combined; he'll do all of this during his reading time, then read/outline from (probably) History: The Definitive Visual Guide, while Milo and Gus do supplemental history reading. If I stick with this, Milo will have an hour and fifteen minutes of assigned reading some days, between literature and history. But reading is his favorite subject by far, so I don't think he'll mind.

*The (tentative) list:
Adam of the Road
The Door in the Wall
The Second Mrs. Giocanda
Catherine, Called Birdy
The Trumpeter of Krakow
The Omnivore's Dilemma (young reader's)
Archimedes and the Door of Science
The Mysteries of Beethoven's Hair
The Wind in the Willows
Tom Sawyer
The Westing Game
Haroun and the Sea of Stories

I have a bunch of others I can add in if we get through all of these. I'm also waiting on the MCT literature studies to see if they'll fit in for next year. Also, I had been thinking of some Dickens, Sherlock Holmes, Edgar Allan Poe, but they don't seem to be there, do they? Well, tentative. Input welcome, particularly as I haven't read most of these myself.