The following is my probably inaccurate memory summarizing our conversation

This morning we had a little parent teacher conference about some aspects of bar mitzva readiness.  Ari was considering buying siddurim for each kid.  Notwithstanding that we already have 2 children's siddurs on the shelf (and boy #3 is often still asleep when I do tefila in the morning) that the boys already don't use, I didn't think it was a good idea to have the kids follow along while I daven.

Right now, I daven out loud.  They play video games and sing along when they feel like it.  I feel that having them follow along (or I even considered Elazar just standing next to me for shemona esrei and me being motzi him that way) would be excruciatingly boring for them and not confer any actual benefit.  I suggested that during Avos U'Banim, when Ari has the kids for learning, he work on reading Shema, Shemona Esrei, bentching and other brachos achronos. (And Asher Yatzer, which I forgot to mention.) 

The question is, will E be able to daven 3x a day with a minyan and a full davening?  If not, what is the bare halachic minimum?  Ari asked what about birchas Kriyas Shema.  I am singing them out loud to Elazar every day. (Not maariv, but shacharis.)  So he is becoming familiar with them.  I don't know that making him sit with an open siddur would help, and it can definitely pain him and make him miserable.  And if, at bar mitzva age, E finds he cannot focus on the whole thing and have kavana, and he hates it, then what do we recommend for him?  Just Shema and Shemona Esrei 2x a day.  Mincha just Shemona Esrei.  Bare minimum halachic requirements. 

Ari wants to make sure that E can count at a minyan.  To that end, he will need to know how to respond (amens, kedusha, kaddish, etc).  I suggested Ari go through that with him.  Is it better to do that at the minyan or outside the minyan?  (As I don't know, I leave that to Ari's discretion.)

Ari also felt that he had pushed E too much during Avos U'Banim.  I told him that I had discovered from my learning with E that he enjoys learning trope outside the context of reading and translating.  And he enjoys translating when he doesn't have to read (meaning you read the word to him and he translates) and he enjoys understanding the pesukim when you tell him the general translation but it loses enjoyment for him when he has to sit and decode a lot.  He'd rather each word or phrase in the pasuk be read to him, ask him what the words mean and have him answer/guess, then tell him generally as a whole what the pasuk means. 

I said that I think that not pushing reading and translating makes sense.  Because he enjoys other aspects of learning Torah.

• If you read it to him, he likes translating some of the words if he knows them
• If you sing him the trope, he likes learning and repeating the trope
• If you tell him what the pasuk means, he enjoys thinking about it

He does NOT like reading.  He does not like going slowly and translating it.  Will having him do that increase the likelihood that he will learn Torah in the future?

Will having him read and decode increase his future ability to learn Torah because he will have the skills?

These are important questions.  (Wish I knew the answers!)  It seems to me that focusing on the parts he enjoys and not pushing the parts that pain him will keep his learning positive and enjoyable.  This will increase the probability that he will learn Torah as an adult.

But what about his lacking skills?  Either he will be motivated to gain skills, or he will learn using translations.  My sense is that pushing the skills will more likely end up (in E's particular case) with him avoiding future Torah learning.

I said to Ari that I think focusing on the 3 types of learning that he enjoys above and avoiding what he dislikes will make him more likely to learn Torah by himself at age 25.  Ari said, "Really?"  

It's kind of scary to not do the "classic" educational stuff.  Will we be providing him with the education necessary to be a ben Torah?  

On the other hand, traditional education would be a disaster for this particular child.  We are already out of the box.  It's a tough line to figure out what is "pushing too hard" and what is "avoiding our responsibility to make sure he is capable of fulfilling his responsibilities."  What is he capable of and what is he truly not capable of?  What will foster a joy and love of Torah and what will push him away?  What can he really handle and what is a good idea for him to handle?

With so many kids who have gone through the school system being disinterested, not halachically observant, not having a strong emotional and spiritual relationship to Torah, and lacking skills, at least I feel I can't do worse than that with alternative education.  That's not a very high bar, though.

chazara IV

chana did about 1.5 pages of shlishi before hitting total meltdown. she was just fine until she hit things she didn't remember. it's a bit sad to me. i remember reviewing and reviewing and reviewing these pesukim, and yet she just doesnt' remember.

and if it's sad to me, it's infuriating to chana. she gets very angry when she doesn't remember words immediately. i am not sure if she gets upset because she feels i am pressuring her to remember, or if she has an idea that she should just know everything, right away. i think that's a bit her personality. i don't remember sarah getting so furious when she didn't know a word or couldn't remember words. but chana has plenty of stamina to keep going as long as she knows the translation. if she knows the words, she'll translate and translate and translate. but as soon as we hit a few in a row that she doesn't remember, the shrieking starts. then she went on about not wanting to do chazara, sarah never did chazara, why can't we move on to the next parsha, she's never going to finish, it will take 5 yrs to finish, etc doomsdaying all over the place.

in the meantime, i'm not sure what to do. so now we have a bunch of pesukim, phrases and words that chana doesn't remember. is there a point to me reviewing them again? do i move on? do i drill her some more? the sheer unpleasantness is making me want to just move forward. but maybe that's not fair. because there has been plenty of unpleasantness until now involved in reviewing those pesukim over and over, and drilling words, and i think she has made really nice progress. i guess i want perfection, which is maybe crazy. (maybe?). i want it to come easy. i want to ignore my daughter's nature. i want it to come without shrieking and without pain.

לפם צערא אגרא
according to the pain is the reward (benefit).

how much i put in, is how much she gets out. (assuming, of course, that i'm not pushing too hard. but there is no way i'm pushing too hard).

although many of the words she doesn't remember, there are an at least equal amount of words that she now knows smoothly enough that they seem to be (halleluja) part of her long term memory base. i see her easily translating some words that i remember her shrieking over, and that keeps me going.

almost done...

i haven't posted in a few days. we have been doing chumash. we are up to names (oh happy joy) and avram was born today. we are still having some trouble with a whole bunch of new words in the last few pesukim of the tower of babel. chana decided to write a graphic novel depicting the mixing up of the languages, with a few humorous scenarios that she keeps envisioning in her head.

i wanted to make flash cards, but chana requested forcefully that we learn the words the way she is most comfortable--verbal drill throughout the day. sigh. we aren't really done with the last batch. and now add on another 10? 15? i'll make a list this evening. the truth is, she does find this way the least painful and she is willing to do it at random points throughout the day. so who am i to say no?

and i have to figure out how we are going to review noach. i guess i'll ask her how she wants to handle it...

the last couple of days there wasn't much to say, just the usual. today, too. chana came in after parkour and was ready to work. we did the 2 pesukim easily, and discussed why bricks have a shoresh of "lavan" even though they are red. we looked up making bricks online, and apparently they use sun to dry, not libun. i suppose we could have kept looking for oven roasted bricks. then we checked out rashi who talks about bricks being made in a furnace and he said it's called something-or-other in french. chana got a big kick out of rashi being french and when we do the rashi, instead of reading it as whatever word he uses, she says "bonjour."

she did run out of steam during the rashis. she is sick of the ones we are doing, and she remembers the translation as a whole, but she is still having trouble with 1. the pronunciation and 2. the translation of specific words or phrases. i would really like her to get that down, but it seems like no matter how much review we do, unless i specifically force her to do it that way (which invariably sparks some tantrumming), it doesn't register in her brain. advice from anyone is welcome.

it just seems like every way i turn, acquiring skills is boring drilling and review, review, review.

that didn't set the stage so great for chazara. i did a bunch of the words orally and outside (which she doesn't mind). i actually find that orally promotes more versatility. because when she reads a word, she searches her brain and knows it if she has learned it orally. but if she is asked it orally and she has only seen it, she doesn't know it. i think i've mentioned that before. perhaps it's only in her, and in more visual students it would be reversed. but she is not nearly as auditory as sarah is. sarah is an extremely auditory learner.

anyway, we limped through chazara. chana is finding the new batch to be wearying and challenging. i wish i could think of a way to make it less so. i think maybe because i didn't give her enough break. she had been active all morning, so we did it in one sitting, and maybe she would have been more mentally able to do it if she would have had more breaks or if we did it in different sessions.

oh, and i forgot to mention. my rabbi had sent me pictures of this fundamentalist christian who actually built a life sized replica of the teiva in real life. so i showed chana pictures of it. and that was pretty darn cool. (by the way, if i were teaching in a school, that is exactly the kind of thing i'd be using the smartboards for).

the ants go marching 2 by 2 hurrah, hurrah

today went quite nicely. i still don't have an answer as to how to get chana to remember these vocabulary words long term. with sarah, i always just figured the ones that show up the most are the ones that get remembered, along with whatever quirks make the brain remember some words and not others.

but at any rate, chana has become quite amenable to me drilling her at random points during the day. plus it has the benefit of accessing more modalities. when we do it in the chumash, she recognizes it by sight, but not by sound. yet if she knows it by sound, when she reads it in the chumash she knows it. (kind of like comprehension of a foreign language is easier than speech, i guess in the mind things go one way but not the other. so if she knows it verbally, then she knows it visually, but if she knows it by seeing it she doesn't necessarily know it by hearing it).

we were pretty busy today, doing a science class and parkour (which is incredibly cool, if i can digress off of chumash for a minute) and then we went to pay a shiva call and then visited my fil after he had eye surgery yesterday. so not much time for chumash.

but chana did 7 pesukim today, with no new words, though she kept getting annoyed that only the majority of them were names and there was still some simple translation to be done. she zipped through her rashis, though she still doesn't pronounce them perfectly and still cannot translate certain random phrases. she does know the translation as a whole, which is a good step. and we are currently working on 3 rashis. which she can do in under 5 min when she's in a good mood.

then i futzed around a lot and forgot to do chazara, coz i don't like it and it's a little depressing sometimes. but chana asked me to please drill her on the words. and then eventually we did it and i picked a random pasuk from a while back and she remembered it after a closer look. and the pasuk that's been soooo slow she's gotten almost 100%. and so we continue to make progress.

she asked me when the tower of babel is coming up. pretty soon!

how to open the long term memory vault?

things went better today. we are being much more careful with each other. she only yelled once, and that was at the very end, when we were doing rashi, and i asked her to translate it by phrase instead of as a whole. she got furious, but i asked her if she knows the phrase. no she doesn't. which is why i asked her.

pasuk 23 is slaying us. she knows it all together, but cannot remember each word. so we keep practicing and practicing. and this bunch of words is not sticking. but happily, her idea of testing her outside the chumash is working. we are up to 5 words that i drill her randomly through the day.

and we are finally up to the names. the next 6 pesukim are just names. so that should give us some time to work on these vocabulary words.

sadly, i flipped open to a page today and i'm pretty sure she would not know what the words that caught my eye mean. even though we reviewed them plenty. how to get these words from short term memory into long term memory? i feel like i had an education class that may have discussed this...

definitely some things are becoming part of her skills and knowledge, like riding a bike. but a lot of these words are just like studying for a test, and then you forget it. all that time drilling and how much is retained? is this the best way to do this?

anyway, i am just relieved that we got over that little hump of misery and are back to our usual interactions.

this is one of the things i love about homeschool. sure, we can work on how we interact with each other if she were in school. but we have so much opportunity this way. and so many moments where i can shore up the loving to help provide background for the more difficult moments. and i really see how we are practicing our relationship. working on it. dealing with things that aren't working. trying new things. taking into account both our positions. what nicer backdrop to learn about relationships and how they work than our Torah? והגית בו יומם ולילה