Single Parent Homeschool

I like to consider myself a sane person, as much as one can be sane in this crazy, mixed-up world. I can honestly say that I think I’m free from any mental illnesses, major hang-ups, consternating quirks, except one. I am severely, worst-case scenario blattodephobic.

This is not a real word. It’s a made-up word that people who have this phobia have put together from the Latin nomenclature of the species. In fact, though it’s a phobia that’s at least as common as arachnophobia (an irrational fear of spiders), it doesn’t have its own name, and usually just gets lumped under “entomophobia,” the fear of bugs. But I am not entomophobic. I rather like bugs. I like spiders, even; scorpions, worms, butterflies, crickets, grasshoppers, moths, wasps, mosquitoes - none of these bother me… except cockroaches.

I am deathly, irrationally, extremely terrified of cockroaches. I don’t mean I just dislike them, mind. Nobody really likes cockroaches, except a few wacky people like people who study bugs. I think human beings are just hard-wired to be repelled by them. There is no culture where they aren’t universally loathed, and where it isn’t an insult to be called a cockroach.

But I am bona fide TERRIFIED of them. The ones we have down here in South Florida are truly monstrous. They can grow up to 4″ in length and some of them fly. They aren’t afraid of people. In fact, they sometimes attack, and they’re impossible to kill. I think they are totally horrifying in the literal sense of the word. I can’t even stand to look at them. I can’t even be in the same room as a dead one - and in fact, I can’t remove a dead one myself. If I find a dead one in my house - they are everywhere here in South Florida even if your house is immaculate - i have to call my grandmother to come dispose of the carcass. If, God forbid, I find a live one, which is too often because I live in an old building and they come up through my bathroom fixtures, I have to call her to come kill it. I can’t even point a spray can at one and kill it. Once I was in my bathroom taking out my contacts and one crawled across my foot, and I cried and panicked for hours even after my grandma killed it. I close all my drains and spray the bathtub faucet with Raid every single night out of fear that I’ll flip on the light and find one trying to scramble out of my bathtub as I have before. I shuddered just typing that.

My fear of cockroaches is so bad that I can’t even look at pictures of them because they totally fill me with panic. It’s embarrassing to talk about how extreme it is. Y’all know how sometimes when you do a Google search, it pops up with google images at the top of your search results? I just now did a Google search to see if there were sites about this that I could link to, and I had to look at the search results through my fingers to make sure there were no pictures. And then i didn’t click on any of the links because those might have pictures, too. Gah. And when we did a unit on the forest this year and we had to read the page on the animal encyclopedia about cockroaches… yeah… giant close-ups… didn’t work so well for me there. Shorty read the whole thing out loud himself. He doesn’t like them either, and I think, sadly, that I’ve taught him to hate them, but he isn’t phobic like I am.

I’ve been phobic since i was a little kid. It’s so dumb, I even know where it comes from. When I was little, maybe 3 or so, while I was in daycare a giant palmetto bug crawled up my pants leg. I had overalls on, and the woman who was watching over me totally freaked out and started screaming and shaking me, I guess to try to get it to fall out, and I think she actually succeeded, but I had nooo idea what she was doing and it freaked me out. I can’t say I blame her, I’d probably do the same thing. LOL But I’m pretty sure that’s where my little neurosis can be traced back to. I have always lived in the South, where these things are everywhere, so out of fear that one might crawl on me while asleep, I learned to sleep totally covered up with a sheet. To this day I can’t sleep if I don’t at least have a sheet over me. It is so bad that it was a major deterrent for my moving from New England (where, in 7 years of living, I saw a grand total of 2 cockroaches, both times on the subway) back to Miami, and is, in fact, a major selling point for my moving back. I am not even kidding.

This is all a long way of saying WHY ON EARTH DID PIXAR DECIDE TO GIVE WALL*E A PET COCKROACH? WHY, GOD, WHY? It would’ve been such a wonderful, enjoyable movie, had I not had to avoid looking at the screen for a good half of it. They even made it squeak and talk and whatnot. The little kid sitting in front of me is darn lucky I didn’t lose my nachos all over him. And what is up with Disney making movies about vermin? First Enchanted had a whole song and dance number about roaches, rats and other assorted creepy-crawlies helping the princess with her housework (the audience where I saw it groaned and cringed through the whole thing), then came Ratatouille, an ill-conceived film about a rat preparing people’s food (ewwwwww!!) and now WALL*e with its squeaky disgusting little pet roach. What’s the next Pixar film going to be about? Flesh-eating bacteria? I mean, for Pete’s sake, you know?

There. I feel better now.

One of the by-line perks of homeschooling is that my kid never, ever gets sick, and unlike all his schooled friends at judo and Scouts, we don’t get every disease that is going around because, as the CDC has said, nearly 60% of all communicable diseases are spread through daycares and schools. We have allergies, but I can count on one hand how many times we’ve had the flu or real colds in the last few years.

(Side note: this has actually been held against me as a reason to not homeschool. For some reason a lot of people are under the strange and unscientific misconception that being exposed to a lot of illnesses makes a small child’s immune system stronger, but this is a total old wives’ tale - in reality, there is no proof that repeated exposure to a wide variety of illnesses makes a child any more illness-resistant, and lots of proof to the contrary.)

Unfortunately, that means that when we do get sick, it catches us COMPLETELY by surprise. Like we forget we can’t get sick. I don’t know what to tell you. My kid had his first ear infection in ten years and despite being severe, it went away in a week with weak antibiotics. We’re just used to being healthy. So when we do come down with stuff, we’re like, What, we’re not Lex Luthor and don’t have magical healing powers of immunity? Why did no one think to tell us? LIFE IS DERAILED!

This is a long way of saying I have a cold. This is not normally newsworthy, except that I haven’t had a real cold in 2 years and I AM FLUMMOXED. Shorty had one and gave it to me, but his immune system is crazy-strong and he bounced back within 2 days. I am, however, officially miserable and just want to hide under my new fluffy down covers for a while, so if I disappear from my usual online shenanigans for a few days, y’all know why.

The upside is, I have my very own round the clock volunteer “nurse”. Okay, so he’s 10 and only weighs 90 lbs, and he spills half the stuff he tries to get me, and his idea of keeping me comfortable is watching a marathon of his favorite Mythbusters episodes and reading me Sonic the Hedgehog comics, and he totally has no idea how to work the digital ear thermometer, really, but the effort (and the hugs, and the cute little worried expression) go a long way towards morale.

First, two things that made me laugh today: What the Buck’s review of the Disney Channel’s Camp Rock (he has many more highly accurate and equally funny take-downs of films and TV shows here) and this temporary to-do list tattoo, for those of us who have ever written things to remember on our palms. Which is all of us, am I right?

I have been giving a lot of thought this year to letting go of the concept of school in me and Shorty’s homeschool and aiming, instead, for just an “educational environment.” How very unschooling of me, I know, even though I am not an unschooler and in fact have strong critiques of many common unschooler claims ((a post for another day, I’m afraid). But I digress.

For the first couple of years of homeschooling, I would say the first 3, I did “school at home” because it was all I knew, and having had formal training in early childhood pedagogy, it was all I could conceive as a model for small children learning. Teacher at the front, children sitting primly at a desk with open textbooks whose material matched whatever was being written on the board. It was familiar. From my many lengthy discussions with my dear friends at my local park group, this is a common starting point, ESPECIALLY if you have a formal background in education. It’s all you know.

Around Shorty’s first grade, I discovered The Well-Trained Mind. I devoured it and, being a compulsive list-maker, I promptly and proudly mapped out the next, oh, eight or nine years of my kid’s education. This was partly because a classical education such as is outlined in the WTM is the ULTIMATE school-at-home experience, with the loftiest ideaIs and the most robust scope. It is a very popular text and academic outline for homeschoolers, probably for the same reason that school-at-home is the first thing we all try. I think for a new homeschooling parent looking for validation and structure and the promise of an excellent education for their children, the WTM is very impressive.

Unfortunately, I had not yet grasped the full scope of Shorty’s learning difficulties, or the fact that most little boys and many little girls at age 6 (or 7… or 8… or…) do not have the capacity or attention span to sit still and quietly learn Latin and recite poetry for 5 hours a day. Shorty found The Story of the World, the WTM’s history text for that grade level, mystifying and bizarre and totally inaccessible, and thanks to his auditory processing issues, asking him to narrate anything was an exercise in total frustration. He can EASILY do all those things now at age 10, but it was just too mature for him four years ago, frankly. Honestly, I don’t know ANY six-year-old with the attention span to sit through a four-page, pictureless chapter about ancient Mesopotamia so I don’t even know how realistic the WTM’s educational goals are, but the point is, Shorty was a square peg being shoved into the WTM’s triangle hole. So while I still like some of their ideals and reading lists and still use some of their recommended materials, I, shall we say, aimed to loosen up.

Yet third grade was our most disastrous, I think. I wanted Shorty to do something more fun and more structured than our previous three years, which had been kind of a mish-mash free-for-all of workbooks and library books and half-abandoned curriculum. To me, Alpha Omega’s Switched-On Schoolhouse looked perfect. It was relatively cheap (we got all five subjects off eBay for something like $150), it kept records and “grades” for me, and it was computer-based, which meant it HAD to be fun (right? right??? umm…) so it seemed ideal and for a few months, it was. But it was also extremely dry and repetitive and sucked all the fun out of learning. One subject, “history,” which was not history at all, but more like a lame, surreal overview of American agricultural social studies, was abandoned within weeks and replaced by Story of the World Vol 2, which by then Shorty was mature enough to both understand and read on his own.

And it was still SCHOOL AT HOME, except the computer was the teacher and the screen was the chalkboard. It also indulged Shorty’s “producer personality,” which he definitely got from his mom. He likes to COMPLETE CHECKLISTS. It doesn’t matter how much he actually retains from the tasks, so long as they are done and can be CHECKED OFF. I call this our “Ta-da! tendency,” as in, “Ta-da, I am done, end of story!” Ergo, I am pretty sure he didn’t learn a single thing the whole year. Learning to tailor an educational environment to a specific individual’s strengths and weaknesses will involve a great many instances of trial and error, so I try to forgive myself by telling myself that we still had another 10 years to make up for it, and he definitely has made great strides this year.

This year I discovered Charlotte Mason’s child-friendly , gentle, Montessori-like, yet comprehensive ideas and fell in love. To me, it seems to be the best of both worlds of a broad, classical education and interest-led learning and I read everything I could on the subject. Shortly thereafter, I discovered WinterPromise, an AWESOME Charlotte Mason style curriculum, which is what we used for science, nature studies, narration, literature, history, poetry, art and lots and lots of hands-on stuff this year.

BOY HOWDY, has it been a hit. Shorty’s attitude toward learning has done a radical about-face. Shorty no longer considers any of the WinterPromise stuff “school” - he will say things like “When we get done with school [meaning math and penmanship] can we do more WinterPromise stuff?” and it amazes me how much he has retained. We look forward to doing more of the same for next year and if it goes as well as it went this year, we’ll stick with this curriculum through at least junior high.

We are also happy with our language arts choice (the WTM’s rec, actually) and it would take us a bit longer to finally find a math level and program that Shorty could work with which ended up being the math curriculum from the same publisher, only he is a year behind, thanks to not having learned anything with Switched-On Schoolhouse. (Ugh). Rod and Staff is a Mennonite (read: Amish) publishing company, and their texts are very quaint, and definitely Christian, but so generic as to only be offensive if you are completely secular (i.e., if you cannot deal with “Math is the language of the universe… because God made the universe and God is a god of order and loveliness.”) The Amish angle is annoying to more cosmopolitan homeschoolers, but Shorty and I find it entertaining when the word problems are like, “Prudence and her 11 brothers and sisters each milked 6 cows…” Hee! They are actually very Charlotte Mason-ish too. More review for kids who need it, less review for kids who don’t, gentle approach, etc. His rote math skills have lept forward by leaps and bounds. He is already a strong speller and studies grammar and vocabulary on his own (word geekery… it is genetic, aye) so their light language arts curriculum with an emphasis on composition skills is perfect for him. Again with the “tailoring the educational experience to the individual” thing.

We plan to keep going with this same combo next year, adding in some formal health studies, typing, and French. Maybe more art and music appreciation.

And yet, our homeschool doesn’t look very much like a classroom anymore. We don’t do anything that Shorty doesn’t enjoy. We have academics whenever we have a few hours to spare in the day, whether that be in the morning, after lunch, right before judo/scouts/ whatever, right before bed. Any and all attempts to create a structured daily schedule for me, a work-at-home single parent, and Shorty, a fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants budding artist and visionary have failed utterly. We “do school” on the floor, on the couch, walking around outside, driving around in the car, whatever. Though I think this has been the most educationally rich year for Shorty, I am no longer even comfortable calling it “doing school.” I just say “Let’s do some book stuff!” and let him pick the order. He is older now and he has a lot more say in what he does now, and since I want to encourage independent learning, a lot of it consists of giving him a to-read list, with the expectation that everything he has read will be narrated back to me either in writing or orally, to make sure he has read and understood the material.

The homeschooling community has a fond saying that “the world is our classroom!” I understand the sentiment behind it. We can use the whole world as a resource for learning. But this has sat poorer and poorer with me the longer I homeschool. I don’t want the world to be my child’s classroom. I don’t like classrooms anymore! For many kids, classrooms delineate where the learning starts AND stops. I will never forget my friend C’s anecdote about the time when, for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, her kids and her spent a weekend reading about MLK,Jr. and watching his “I have a dream” speech on YouTube and just generally getting all caught up in the excitement about learning about this amazing man’s life. Then the traditionally-schooled neighbor children came over to play, and when C’s kids excitedly rushed them over to the computer to watch the YouTube stuff, the neighbor kids were all “UGH, NO, that’s SCHOOL STUFF, and today is our DAY OFF.” Sad but understandable, all around.

Or to name a less tragic example, the time when my kid saw all the neighbor kids coming home on the last day of school 2 years ago, and they were all whooping and leaping for joy. “What are you so happy about?” he asked one child, who exclaimed, “We don’t have any more school until AUGUST!” Shorty solemnly turned to me and whispered, “Boy, going to school must be HORRIBLE.” Heeeeeee.

To me, that is the difference between my educational goals and institutional school. I do not want my child to just think of learning as a chore he has to endure ten months out of the year 8 hours a day. I want him to feel like he has the capacity to learn anything he wants, to indulge any curiosity that strikes his fancy. I don’t want him to feel like the world is a classroom. But I guess “The world is our encyclopedia or possibly library or like a living Google or something!” doesn’t have quite the same ring.
And so it is that this year, we have finally bid adieu to what I hope is the last remaining remnant of a school background. We have agreed that since we don’t get any schoolwork done from Thanksgiving through New Year’s Day anyway, we are going to continue to do “book stuff” all through the summer (this is not drudgery if your kid thinks this is FUN, e.g., Shorty has already gleefully filled my Netflix queue with History Channel documentaries we previously thought we wouldn’t have time to watch) and our “summer vacation” will be late November through January, so our “school year” will be January through October. We’ll see how this works out with us intending to move across the country next summer.

I guess we’ll do what we always do - learn to cross that bridge when we get to it.

• A Book Rec: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. It starts out as a murder-mystery and the discovery of a neighbor’s murdered dog, but the narrator turns out to be a lovable but totally humanly characterized 15-year-old young man with autism, and it slowly unravels into a poignant, ironic and nuanced family drama. Each chapter has a prime number and the narrator’s little illustrations to better explain his points. I’ve never read anything like it - at 220 pages, it was a short read, but it’s stayed with me for days.

• A Movie Rec: If you’ve seen The Happening and, like me, have wondered what high-octane quality of crack people are smoking when they greenlight another one of M. Night Shyamalan’s ridiculous clunkers, go cleanse your palate with The Strangers. It is a horror film in the Alfred Hitchcock sense of the word - leaves much to the imagination and is profoundly disturbing and thought-provoking.
• A Music Rec: The Mission District is a quartet of cutie-pie Canadians with some of the most energetic, melodic pop-rock I’ve heard in a long time. And they’re really nice guys. And MySpace friends of mine. Check out their new single and music video - they’re really a breath of fresh air and quite anti-emo.
• A Software Rec: At least once a week, some fool posts crying on Miami’s FreeCycle list that, woe, begone, they have somehow lost/ scratched/ mutilated their MS Office installation disk and would someone be kind enough to give them theirs? And to each one, I say, you don’t need MS Office. Go and download the FREE open-source version, OpenOffice, which does everything that MS Office Professional does and then some - including saving in formats native to MS Office so that people who are still using it can open your documents. And free. Did I mention free? I’ve been using it for two years in my own business and require it of all my sub-contractors, and intend to never pay for MS Office again.
• A TV Rec: Forget The Office or Scrubs or My Name is Earl or that Charlie Sheen mess on NBC. If you haven’t seen the USA Network’s Psych, you are missing the funniest show on TV, period. The third season starts on July 18 at 10/9CST and you can order the first and second seasons on DVD from Amazon or Netflix. I don’t even like comedies, you guys. I mean, I like funny things, I just don’t like being told ahead of time that they’re supposed to be funny, or worse yet, if they have a laugh track. THAT’S JUST TOO MUCH PRESSURE FOR ME. Yet somehow, the wacky adventures of lifelong BFFs Shawn and Gus have totally won me over.
• A Service Rec: Speaking of Netflix, I have coupons for a month’s trial instead of their usual 2 week trial, and I get a month of service free, too. Shorty and I are kind of insane about Netflix. We have our queue obsessively ordered for our four-at-a-time service so that at any given time we have: One disc of Stargate: Atlantis (we are almost done with S1 and hope to have watched all 4 seasons by its July 25 S5 premiere), one disc of Stargate: SG-1 (halfway through S3), one disc of something I want (currently Brothers and Sisters season 1) and one disc he wants (we’re on a Power Rangers kick, my friends). So if you’ve always wanted to join Netflix, let me know and I’ll give you my coupon codes for the free month-long trial and I get my month of free service too
• A Useful Site Rec: Courtesy of one of my bfflz, Heather (thanks, girl!): BookAdventure, a free reading program and motivator for children in grades K through 8, where kids can create their own booklists and reading goals by choosing from over 7,000 titles. Loves it.
• A Useless Site Rec: FridgeWatcher. It is a blog of pictures of the insides of people’s fridges from all over the world, on six out of seven continents. How could that possibly be interesting, you ask? I DON’T KNOW, IT JUST IS. Click and be amazed. You are what you eat, after all.

What are some things making you guys happy right now, friendslists? Rec me some goodies.

In the summer of 2009, Shorty and I are moving to New Hampshire.

These are my reasons for moving to New Hampshire, in rough order of importance.

• I feel - have always felt - as though I desperately don’t fit in here in Miami and have been missing New England since the day I left.

• Miami’s crime rate is ridiculous and I live in the ghetto where this is especially true;
• I live in the ghetto because Miami has gotten prohibitively expensive without justification - I know people whose rent on a 3BR house is equivalent to my crummy 1BR rent, but I can’t afford to move anywhere else here.
• I also can’t afford to live in Boston proper because it’s roughly as expensive as Manhattan and while my business is doing well enough to possibly afford that, I don’t really want to and also
• Massachusetts’ homeschooling laws are horrifically draconian and some of the mos stringent in the nation and
• I want Shorty to be near his Dad. As he fast approaches puberty (eeeek) he will need a man around, and Dad may have his shortcomings (like the rest of us) but he really wants to be a bigger part of Shorty’s life. There’s no better man to have around than a Dad who loves you.
• I hate Miami. It bears repeating. Between the insane drivers, unbearable traffic, sky-high crime (NH has the third lowest crime rate in the nation by comparison) and the general permanent vacation I-got-mine attitude of everyone you meet, this is easily one of the most miserable, hateful, overpopulated cities in existence IMHO.
• I miss being around a thriving, visible arts community. People in Miami are totally acultural and aren’t into live theater or music (except Latin jazz) down here. There are no art houses, no literary communities, no real art museums, no cafes or clubs to hear live music, and is a single community theater in all of South Florida (and it blows). I am not even kidding. It’s pathetic.

Shorty is ambivalent about moving. On the one hand, he has pointed out we would be far from SOMEBODY no matter where we moved to. On the other hand, he has been “giving moving some thought” and has come up with the following compelling reasons why we should not move:

• All our homeschooling friends are down here (even though half of them are moving within a year too).

• Nashua sounds like Nashvillle and he doesn’t want to live in Nashville either.
• He is fairly confident his beloved judo instructor wouldn’t move with us and he doesn’t want to take judo with anyone else;
• New England is considerably farther away from DisneyWorld than Miami is;
• Our apartment really could be worse, you know;
• There is no point in moving to New England and being a whole 25 minutes away from Boston - either we move to Boston or we STAY IN MIAMI FOREVER;
• He wouldn’t get as many video games because I don’t buy them for him and being in New England would make it harder for his one video game supplier i.e., my mom, to come visit.
• He failed hard at ice skating the last time he tried (he was 4) and he understands that’s a very common pasttime in small-town New England - that and related activities such as hockey;
• He doesn’t want to have to think about moving for a whole year and we can’t move right now, ergo logic dictates we shouldn’t move at all.

Aspie rationale at work, ladies and gentlemen. I am not worried. I am persuasive and have my maternal wiles to win him over to the idea.

Shorty’s dad is basically dying for us to move closer to him (largely so he doesn’t have to spend $600 every 2 or 3 months to fly down here to see him, I’m guessing) so he has offered to pay for the first month’s rent and help us look for a new place when the time comes, as well as helping us move in and co-sign the lease, if necessary. I think that’s very generous of him.

I am not 100% dead set on any particular city just yet - the seaboard of NH seems really gorgeous, if a bit more expensive, and I still have to do more research about where the bigger homeschooling communities are (NH has a huge, huge homeschooling population) but so far I am leaning to Nashua, which is just 20 minutes away from the last stop on Boston’s commuter rail and has a major airport.

The really cool thing is that this really is completely doable. Finances, everything, it all works out. I’m very psyched, needless to say.

Anyone ever been to NH? I’ve visited briefly but I don’t remember too many details. We are already planning to spend the holidays in Boston so Shorty can spend it with his dad’s side of the family, so I think we’ll visit this winter and take a look around in various places. ROADTRIP!