Teenage learning

Today's learning was uneventful, which I really appreciate, since yesterday was a doozie.  Aside from very brief and practical interactions, my teenager and I usually only spend time together twice a day.  Once for algebra, and once for Chumash.

This results, on occasion, of her emotions coming to the surface during our Chumash sessions.  Sometimes I wonder if my girls have negative associations with Chumash because it's the only time of the day when they have my (mostly) undivided attention and so all the feelings that they avoid or keep at bay end up coming up in the safe time with their mommy.  Sometimes Chana (and Sarah back in the day) will just start talking about things on her mind.  Sometimes she will share feelings of anger, sadness, doubt, or fear.  Sometimes, she gets more and more agitated and ends up crying ("I don't even know why I'm crying!").

In the middle of all that, we started Yona.  I wanted to do Rashi, too.  We argued about that.  Chana felt Rashi is part of Chumash.  I said I wanted to do it.  She said but it's not part of Yona.  I didn't answer.  She said, "Why aren't you answering me?"  I said that I can't think of anything to say that will be convincing to her.  She said, "Why do you want me to do Rashi, anyway?"  I said that I want her to work on her Rashi skills.  She said but she knows Rashi.  (Which I disagree with).  Same old.

She didn't think Yona really happened, she thought that the sailors were very superstitious, she felt that if there was a storm and they cast lots and someone's name came up more than once, she would think it was just a very big coincidence.  She thought that Hashem's approach was bossy and an abuse of His power.
We talked about the fact that Yona, a navi, disagreed with Hashem and even though Hashem is clearly more powerful, Yona stood his ground and didn't agree.  We talked about the concept of "conquering your nevua" i.e. not telling a prophecy a navi is told.

We started off with her translating.  In the middle, she said, "I just really can't stand Chumash."
I said that translation is difficult and not so much fun.  She said she doesn't need to get good at it; she has the English right there or google translate.  (I rolled my eyes a little because does she really think that's as good as being able to translate herself from the original?).  I said I am sorry it's not so enjoyable to work on translation skills, but I think it's important for her to be able to translate.  She said maybe I make her translate too much.

I ended up taking over the translation.  She had been complaining about how even when she knows the words, since everything is switched around, it's confusing.  And the tenses are confusing.  And the ways of expressing things is confusing.  So I translated the rest, which was good because we got into Yona's tefila which is a poem and I was assuming I'd translate, anyway (and I peeked at the English).

Today, we opened Yona and she started translating herself.

skills

A big part of my thus-far largely untested unschooling philosophy revolves around teaching content to an interested youngster, and waiting to teach skills until he asks.  One hopes that as he gets older, particularly as his bar mitzva approaches, he will become interested.  A motivated adolescent should be able to learn the aleph beis in a few weeks, and from there, reading is pretty easy.  In a couple of months he'll be able to read fairly fluently, if he's interested in practicing.  Hopefully, he'll be familiar with the content of whatever he's been interested in until now (Elazar, age 6, likes learning about mitzvos, halacha, navi stories, and chumash stories), so some of the phrases and words will be familiar to him.  (Additionally, I speak very American Hebrew to my kids, which gives them some familiarity and some vocabulary.)

But clearly he will not be knocking back pesukim translation, mishna translation, rashi translation.  I hope he will get to it, but it seems to me entirely possible that I would have a 14 year old who isn't translating very much.

This morning I read a paper by Martin Lockshin: Teaching Judaica without Teaching Hebrew.  The gist is that he is opposed to it.

It might then be possible, admittedly, to inspire our students to love some Torah classics even if they do not really follow the Hebrew well. But our students will not be able to participate in the enterprise of interpretation, they will fail to appreciate what is at stake in half the disputes between ibn Ezra and Rashi, if they don’t have strong Hebrew skills. And the problem is particularly acute in Jewish classical texts where so many texts represent arguments about interpretation. So much of tannaitic literature centers around the true meaning of words of the Torah, so much of amoraic literature concerns the true meaning of the words of the tannaim, and so much of rishonim literature consists of disputes about the true meaning of the words of the previous classics. Our students who have weak Hebrew are shut out of all of these discussions, which constitute a significant percentage of Torah study.

I don't disagree with him.  Sometimes I wonder if I'm doing my children a disservice.  I, personally, have very strong skills.  It's true I went to schools that developed these skills (and I'm not sure if elementary schools today are up to par) and that I was in a very high pressured academic environment that I'm not sure I want for my children.   

I do think that not being able to learn in the original language is limiting.  I do think that a lot of nuance will be lost.  There is a lot of deliberate ambiguity in the Torah to leave open the possibility of different interpretations, and reading a translation closes that off.  The commentators are not usually deliberately ambiguous, but you often lose something in translation.  

Unschooling does not mean that your children automatically won't have good skills.  It does mean that they will very likely acquire them much later than is standard for kids in yeshiva.  My goal is not for my kids to lack skills.  However, it feels like unschooling is a risk in the area of skills, and I'd be foolish to not consider what my child's life will look like if he fails to acquire them, and to take that possibility into consideration when deciding how to educate him.

(I must add that if you look at the statistics of students coming out of our day schools, you will find a high percentage of their skills being pretty dismal these days, so perhaps I can argue that sending a kid to day school yeshiva also runs a risk of poor skills.)

I think this really comes down to my educational goals and also has to do with whether or not immersing a child in learning for hours a day at a young age is a value.  Post on that pending, hopefully.

ivrit fail

I had been planning for Chana to write a short story in Ivrit, where she looks up words that she wants to use and I go over it afterwards, edit the grammar, she does a rewrite, does more than one draft, and at the end, has a polished story.

We never got around to it.

We are in the middle of shemona esrei translation, and that kind of fizzled out.

Chana told me that she was davening from a siddur at my parents' house, and the instructions were in Hebrew and she didn't understand them.  She's going into 7th grade, and apparently either she can't read without nekudos or she is intimidated to try.

Time to take a look at Ivrit and see if we need to do some work.

This morning (it's always a challenge to bring up work to Chana in the morning--I've mentioned many times that she prefers to work at night) I reminded her that she agreed to do the story.  She agreed that she had agreed.  I also said over the weekend, when we are back at my parents, I'd like to go through the shemona esrei and look at the instructions with her and help her read and understand them.  She scowled, but agreed.  After all, she herself was not happy that she didn't understand them.

A few minutes later when I brought up that we hadn't finished translating shemona esrei, she had enough.

As it is, we have to agree on when to do Chumash today.  I think I will wait a half an hour (unfortunate, since it's pretty quiet now, as Jack and Elazar are playing outside with the neighbors), then ask her when she would like to schedule 3 activities today: beginning her story, chumash, and translation of another bracha of shemona esrei (or a quick review of the ones we already did).

And I just realized it's been over a week of no sfasenu.  Yeesh.

translation

The translations are choking me!  This made no sense in English to me:

24 And they shall be double beneath, and in like manner they shall be complete unto the top thereof unto the first ring; thus shall it be for them both; they shall be for the two corners.

That's from mechon-mamre.  I just read it and read it and I just don't get it.

It's talking about the planks of the mishkan.  I finally cracked open the Stone Chumash, which also has nice pictures, as well as commentary that makes some sense out of these pesukim.  I didn't really like Stone for Mishpatim, but it's decent for Mishkan.

24 They shall be even at the bottom, and together shall they match at its top, for a single ring, so shall it be for them both, for the two corners shall they be.

I'm still having trouble.  The planks should be "twins" or even from the bottom, and together they should be complete on top (or match on top) to fit into one ring (Stone has an illustration to clarify).  It will be that way for both of them (what will be what way for both of that?  The ring and evenness for both planks of the pair?).  For the 2 corners they will be.  (but aren't there 4 corners??)

I may need to do some more research on some different sites that talk about how the planks are held together.  These pesukim are really difficult to translate!!

rashi and translation

how is it possible that 15 min can feel soooooo long? chana kept saying she didn't want to do it. so even though it was short, it was agonizing. but she got through it pretty quickly. i think the issue is that she doesn't remember it fluently yet. she likes to know it fluently.

anyway, after sheni, i asked her to do rishon with ari. she really wanted to do it with me, but i didn't want to sit through the whining. she did it w/ ari very quickly and with a lot less whining. and we decided not to do rashi. there is only that one rashi, and she's pretty good at it. i haven't found another rashi that strikes me yet.

tomorrow i'm going to try to finish sheni. chana already predicted the next point will be 30, then 20, then 10. then she figured 5. i said, nope, no five. so she figured the answer was that he would kill the city if only 10 people. i'm looking forward to her reading what actually happens.

while chana was reviewing rishon, she looked, of her own accord, at rashi to help translate "ha-af umnom eled" which rashi translates as "hagam emet eled" will i also really give birth. glad she remembered to make recourse to that! in the word "ho-alti" i had her find the pasuk and the rashi and the dibur hamatchil and she again had a little fit (though not nearly as intense as last time) and i asked her why i make her do it and she muttered "so i can understand it when i grow up but i really don't want to." and she read that "ho-alti" means "ratziti" (i wanted). so i'm glad she's finding that it helps in translation.

part II

chana came down herself. i offered a hug and she refused. i gestured for her to sit down, and we sat close, and i put my arm around her. i said i really don't think this one pasuk is a big deal. she said why do i always make her do sooooo much. i make her do too much work all the time. (which reminds me, when sarah finally went to high school, she said she couldn't believe how little work she had been doing all these years. and we laughed about how she screamed and complained about this. the truth is, though, in homeschool, you can't mentally check out when you need a break and start daydreaming. the teacher notices immediately :-P so in some ways homeschool is way more intense and focused, even though it's for shorter time). she did the pasuk in about 3 seconds. i wanted her to do the 2 others, but said should we do one today and one tomorrow, or both tomorrow. she opted, of course, for both tomorrow. hopefully it shouldn't be an argument since she agreed. and now a 7 minute break before rashi.

i don't know if anyone reads this, but i often wish people would suggest approaches or methods when i wonder how to approach teaching something.
for example, memorizing the vocabulary or suggestions to get something into long term memory.
another thing i'd like a suggestion on is that after we finish noach (and i think we have about 4.5 pages left, so it's coming up) i really wanted to do a review. i want chana to be able to fairly smoothly translate the pesukim. all of them. BUT. i know this will be an exercise in frustration. although she definitely learned a lot of vocab throughout, there is i would estimate at least 1/3 of the new words that she forgot (it will be interesting to see how many of them she actually remembers compared to my estimation). i don't want to start her translating and have her get frustrated and then furious.
so should i spend a week or 2 reviewing the vocab? should i read the pesukim and translate them first, and then have her do it? what's a good way to do this so that she is reviewing before she does the official chazara on her own, where she translates it?

on memory

it's been a bit tough to sit down to do chumash, especially with everyone home from school and chana having so many ppl to play with. so it's about 1.5 hr before yontif, and she wants to get on the computer. i chapped her to do chazara. she remembered a lot of the words, and she's going crazy as to what k'naan did that noach cursed him. i said the pasuk doesn't say anything. she said, yeah, he could be playing with toys, picking fruit for noach in his vineyard, anything!

then she said, please, please, what did he do that noach cursed him. then she looked up to shamayim like she was asking hashem to tell her.

so i said that rashi says that he hurt noach. she said where did he hurt him? i said, well, he was naked in the tent.. she didn't deduce. (which is interesting because she's been a bit shy about translating "nakedness"). so i said he hurt him in his private parts. she frowned a bit, thinking. and asked how? now i'm wondering if this was the best thing. and i'm thinking of the rashi with 2 opinions, he castrated him or raped him. so i said cut. and she said, that's weird.

she verbally chazered what noach said, remembering about k'naan being a slave and good about shem, but not the part about yefet dwelling in shem's tent. she wanted a break and started flopping, but i told her if she finished it she was done done for the day and she pressed through.

in an interesting association, she always thinks the word "avi" (my father) is bring ('l'havi'), and then she forgot and thought it was "between." because between is "beyn" ie son with a yud in the middle, and she was confusing "son" and "father." cool how memory works.

i wish wish wish it didn't take so many repetitions for a human being to remember a word translation! sigh. i guess reality is reality and we can but work with it.

hmm, i guess this never published. it was supposed to be erev 2nd days yontif.

and so it goes

went through 2 pretty big pesukim today with minimal fanfare. chazara of words went well. had to take a 10 minute break before rashi. we are slooooowly working our way through the rashi.

chana has been working really hard at reigning in her temper.

we did find an oddity in today's pasuk. it says the animals left the ark "l'mishp'choteyhem" according to family. first chana surmised that meant all animals were one family. then she figured it was with their babies. i said the midrashim say they didn't have babies on the ark. (though now that i think about it, some animals whose lifespans are shorter than the time of the flood would need to if they were going to survive the flood. the more you think about this, the more complicated it seems. noach had quite a task).
chana suggested i daven and ask hashem for the answer.

there is a veeeerrrry long and complicated new pasuk for tomorrow.

i wonder if when we finish the parsha, if it would be worthwhile to take a few weeks and review the whole thing. we aren't even halfway done, so maybe it's premature to think about this.

so for rashi, i wanted to do 1 1/2 lines which chana thought was an outrageous affront. and she always attempts to negotiate. i told her i would translate it for her, and i said it to her in english. she screamed that she had no idea what i just said. i said i would say it again, and again, and again until she understood what i was saying. it was at this point we decided a break was in order. when i came back, she was used to the idea. she read it pretty smoothly (again, i try to choose rashis specifically that are pshat oriented and that have easy words in them). she got stuck, believe it or not, on ששאל. she insisted she didn't remember the shin prefix. i had to use it in a sentence before she sullenly figured it out. then sha'al was no problem. and ro'eh gave her trouble. she wanted me to translate it for her. i wanted her to read it and then i thought she'd be able to figure it out. she didn't want to read it. (this is one of those things where i wonder if maybe i should just tell her because she is SO adamant, but i feel like she ought to know it and i don't mind waiting while she figures it out and i think it's important for her to push through the frustration and through the feeling that she can't do it and see that she can. who says in homeschool there is no training of this sort?). she begged me to tell her. i kept saying that i know she knows it. (in the past we have had blowouts where she INSISTED that she doesn't know it and i am positive that she does. finally, it happened enough times that she saw i was right and i pointed it out afterwards and told her that she yelled at me but she really did know it, and i finally built up some credibility that when i say she knows it, she doesn't stubbornly dig her heels in that she doesn't know it). she kept saying, "i can't read it, mommy, i can't read it. please tell me." and i asked her to tell me letter by letter. which she finally did, and then realized she knew it. whew. this is her personality.

review

so we reviewed the 4 rashis. she pretty much remembered most of the words and a lot of translations. so good for her. i wish we weren't going so slowly, but it is a process.

also, although she got through the new pasuk pretty easily today, it seems like every few days there are just more and more words piling on that we need to review. and it seems like i leave the ones behind that she is familiar with, but she doesn't know them cold. i wonder if i am doing her a disservice by not making her learn them more fluently.

rashi

so here's an example of a lesson that was great in theory, but didn't quite pan out in practice. i chose the rashi on "b'etzem hayom haze." that noach entered the ark in the main part of the day. rashi says that people had in mind that when they saw him enter the ark, they would break the ark and kill him. and hashem said that noach would enter in front of everybody, and we'll see whose words stand.

i thought chana would really enjoy the conflict and how hashem "got one over" the people who wanted to kill noach for claiming they needed to do teshuva.

but.

it has taken us so long to get through the pshat of the words. i can't remember how long we've been doing this rashi. weeks? the nice thing is that the words aren't too difficult, it has a lot of familiar words and the conjugations of verbs are different enough that she has to work and easy enough that she recognizes them. it's a great rashi for teaching skills. and she's not finding it tough. we've been doing it phrase by phrase, adding on 4-6 words each time as soon as she masters the previous phrase in terms of reading pronunciation and translation. we still have the last 4 words left but it's been smooth.
but by the time we get to the end, having spent all this time on translation, she doesn't appreciate the concept. i tried to discuss it a bit with her, but she didn't really get it. if i would have just told it to her like a story, she probably would have enjoyed it. it does seem like day to day, a lot of the enjoyment of the story aspect gets lost in the drudgery of the translating.

overall, though, her skills are improving. today's pasuk was easy and she did it without fanfare. what i'd like to do now is have a day where we just review all the rashis we've done since we started rashi. i think there are only 4 or so. but it would be nice if she reads them all fluently and knows their translations. i was going to do it today but she's playing with her cousin. perhaps tomorrow.

follow up

well, that was not thoroughly uneventful (surprise, surprise :-P)

the word by word translation went fairly smoothly, because she knows most of the words. we had a bit of a tussle on the word "ha-ba'im." i wanted her to write down the shoresh and she didn't want to. and it was tricky, because it's a noun, not a verb. "the comers."

'asher bo ruach chayim' posed some challenges as well. firstly, chana has a tendency to translate "bo" as 'come' even though it means 'in him/it.' secondly, the literal translation lines up as "that in him wind life." and let me tell you, a cranky chana has no patience for that. i wanted to show her in the pasuk how it means that (has) in it (a) spirit (of) life. but no patience.

chana tends to translate the words she knows without reading the hebrew. as i mentioned a few times, i don't like this because it breeds no familiarity with the hebrew. but she is quite resistant to reading it. since doing it how i prefer (hebrew phrase, english translation) was becoming a bit of a who-will-win-this tussle, i gave in to her expressed preference that she do english, then hebrew. but now that is sliding and she doesn't do the hebrew unless she doesn't know the word. so then i ask her to read the pasuk afterwards, and that's not getting any happy points.

at a certain point, i stood up and told her that i'm waiting for her to be mature and stop behaving bratty. she requested that i not use the word "mature;" she is not an adult. i said she can behave mature like a 9 yr old maturity. she said the word mature sounds funny and please don't use it. i said tell me when you are ready to stop behaving in a bratty way. she said she was ready. and we went on.

i believe this whole thing took under 5 minutes. maybe 7.

these are pesukim that she doesn't really understand the translation of, but she knows the word by word translation very easily. i wonder if it is worth doing chazara for these or if i leave it alone, these kinds of things will eventually click.
hey, i know how to check that. i'm going to ask sarah to translate them. brb.
good news. no need to hock.

ps

i forgot to mention that a lot of the phrases were difficult from literal meaning to anything that made sense:

6:1
started the adam to a lot on the face of the ground
6:2 gave her particular difficulty:
and they saw sons of the elohim the daughters (of) the adam that good they were and they took for them women
(that's not terrible to untangle but chana really doesn't have the experience yet)

another day

i took a lot on today. first, i wanted to review the 2 phrases from yesterday that chana had difficulty with. she translated them literally again easily, and again had trouble figuring out what they meant. i told her, and she remembered from yesterday. then i decided to do 6 pesukim, since 5 were fairly easy.

chana looked at all the pages she had covered and was impressed with how much she had done. but she still fought me on the 6 pesukim. the first pasuk was a bit unwieldy and we went through it and then took a break. (also, i gave her a white board and a marker and although she scowled, she has been writing the shorashim and that's been going well). then after the second pasuk, she wanted a break even though i thought it was quick. i denied her a break, and after the third pasuk pasuk she was squirmy so she's off having a break now. i hope the next 3 will be quick and easy. (i wanted to work without break because jack is asleep and elazar is playing with his cousin; but chana prefers to spread the work out more).

3 words came up that i feel are worthy of review, so i'm going to drill chana on them:

אות sign
בלתי not
לכן therefore

i think chana got squirmy after one pasuk thinking about all the ones she was going to have to do. i don't think that one pasuk in and of itself was enough to make her antsy; it's the thought of all of them that got her antsy. as an adult, i also feel overwhelmed not by the inherent activity, but by the thought of doing more than i feel capable of, even if what i'm doing at the moment is doable.

more thinking about the process

so today we didn't get to chumash until evening. i looked at the pesukim and they seemed challenging, so i decided to do 4. chana tried negotiating a few times, then finally settled into it. it turns out i was confused as to which was the last one we had done yesterday, so we did it halfway and realized that she had done it yesterday. so she only had 3 for today.

she actually didn't translate them with as much difficulty as i thought she would. however, the transition from the literal english to the meaning was beyond her (partly, i think, because it was late in the day and she wasn't sitting down fresh). phrases like: big my sin from carry/ and it will be all find me he will kill me

looking at them, i can see how they are confusing.

also, i perhaps need to make it a practice to have chana write down the shoresh. usually she reads it w/ all 3 letters and i write it down. and if there is a word where not all the letters are there, (today at least) she tantrums that i should tell her. i'd better get her used to writing the shoresh. theoretically, with her own white board and marker, it should be fun.

shout out to sarah for watching elazar and preventing him from jumping on top of jack and/or trashing the house while chana and i worked.

i'm currently grappling again with the question of whether or not to work on the translation to the point where chana knows it fluently before going further. it calls me like a siren, the idea that if i review enough chana will know the translation of any pasuk we've already done. but realistically, how much chazara will that take? and how long will she retain it? if i spend time reviewing until she knows it, and then come back to it a few months later, will she know it? and if you say i have to keep on doing chazara, then we have to review and review and then it takes longer and longer. it ends up that the time i would spend on it doesn't seem worth the result, and i may as well continue for now as i'm going.

i feel like maybe if i could get a handle on trope, it would be easier to sing the pesukim and translation a bunch of times?? who knows.. i'll continue to think.

any input would be helpful. i seem to remember the last time i asked for feedback on this question i got zero. thinking of calling the rav and asking his opinion one of these days...

bet you never thought after a week like this there would be a day like this

today was one of those magical days that makes a person love homeschooling and marvel at her good fortune to have the privilege of seeing her child learn.

well. ok. not all was perfect in eden. but it was overall glorious. first chana asked how much we were doing. i ambitiously said 3.5 pesukim, which was almost 9 lines. the pesukim overall seemed pretty easy. she started tantruming and refusing, and i gave her a warning. (then elazar deliberately started throwing raw macaroni and we took a break so i could enforce him cleaning it up. then we needed to make popcorn for breakfast).

there was some haggling over unfamiliar words. chana cannot understand why i don't just tell her the word. why do i have her guess. why do i have her try to figure from context or give her hints or draw it. why n0t just tell her. i have a suspicion that the more mediums a person uses, it attaches into the memory by more hangers, so to speak. it follows diff neural paths. or some scientific thing that it helps her remember better. as i was trying to discuss this, elazar was rolling jack around and around and jack wasn't so happy and i was a bit distracted (these details i usually leave out because i was sticking to educational theory and practice, and not all the attendant practical things that go on during homeschooling). i told chana we'll see.

anyway, back to the magical part. chana remembered שוב when i used it in a sentence, whereas yesterday it was like i was speaking greek (or some other foreign language ;-P). her breakdown of the various grammar prefixes and suffixes was masterful. she didn't remember all the suffixes, but found them easily in r' winder and plugged them in expertly.

when she got to the word חי, she immediately said: "chai, מת" and perked up and drooped like i always do and then said "life." in other words, her neural pathways were grooved in the path i had paved and she remembered the word using the little trick i always do :) :) success.

we talked about the word פן and i told her how i always told sarah it means "lest" but sarah had no idea what that meant. and i said it meant to be scared something will happen. like don't go into the street, פן you will get killed by a car.

chana made a fabulous cognitive leap why would hashem be worried something will happen if a) he knows everything that will happen and b) he can control everything. a delightful question. i wrote it down and did tell her that hashem doesn't control people and he lets us choose our behavior. she said, though, that He can stop the car from hitting. she thought that hashem would certainly do such a thing for moshe rabbenu.
i did mention that moshe ran away from a snake, being worried it would bite him. she said, the nachash was still around then?! i said, no, a regular snake. poisonous? yes.

we also had a fun time physically enacting "he will send his hand." at first, chana didn't know what that means. to detach your hand and send it somewhere? i showed her how it means the brain sends the hand with will. seeeeeeend the hand (and i stretched it out) and we did it a few times, and she had jack do it (though technically she sent his hand, not him, since his will doesn't do that at our command). she said jack was "he" so it fit into the pasuk better.

tomorrow we will see how hashem will handle is "fear lest."

and chana did not need a single break for all this.

the neverending battle

sometimes i think every homeschooling teacher must ask herself at one point: what am i doing wrong? she would NEVER carry on like this at school in front of a bunch of her peers and a different adult.

so as per plan, i was doing one pasuk today. with 5 new words. so we started off amiably enough. i told her i wanted to do a pasuk, she picked a time, we started. i got out the dictionary because there were a couple of nouns i had the gist of, but didn't know specifically, and figured i'd see what would happen if i had the dictionary out and i didn't know the word either.

so we hit the first new word. i wrote it in hebrew and left a blank. she wanted me to tell her. i said, let's do the rest of the pasuk and then you should be able to guess from context. she started whining that she wanted me to tell her. i said i want her to guess. she started crying that she never guesses right (which is not true). i said let's wait and see and then i'll tell you if you don't guess right. then we got to the first verb i didn't know. i said there are 2 i don't know, so you do one and i'll do one. she agreed. she decided to do the first word (ably remembering the prefix "i will"). so i wrote down שית on the white board. she asked me to open the dictionary. i said nope. she opened it to shin. interestingly, she didn't look for shin yud, but turned to the end of the shins. i scanned the page and saw that שת was there, and had the right definition. great. i said, oh, there it is! this was a mistake. she then wanted me to point out the column. i said no, which was perhaps another mistake coz why the heck do i need her to be able to use the dictionary? i thought i decided a month or more ago that all adults can pretty much use a dictionary, so why torture her now?

anyway, she went into full blown tantrum. literally lying on the floor and rolling around crying. seriously. she's going to be 9 in a few weeks.
the new me, confident that asking her to do this amount of work is reasonable, said, "here's the white board and the marker. when you find the word, write it on the board." and i left the room.

do all homeschoolers tantrum? coz i have taught in school. they don't do this.

soon i hear her calling me, that it's all shins and no sins. then i realize that she misread the yud that i put for the shoresh as a dot on the left side. i called back that it's a shin; check the pasuk. she does, and begins berating me for writing a sin. i told her it's a shin and a yud in the shoresh, and show her in the dictionary how the shoresh is written with a yud. she says she thought that one was it. and how come i wrote a sin. and how come i wrote a yud looking like a dot. ya know what? next time i'll have her write the shoresh.

she did nicely on the rest of the prefixes and suffixes, but the whole thing was a nonstop whinefest. i could tell she was strongly controlling herself, because she was softly whining instead of screaming, like she wanted to. so i didn't call her on it. because from experience i know that if i told her she's whining, she'd start crying harder about how upset she is. so i let it go but it was pretty unpleasant.

the pasuk says "between you and between the woman, and between your seed and between her seed." chana felt all those betweens were annoying. i felt happy that it was repeated so much and maybe she'll learn the word.

she found confusing the translation "he will crush you head" meaning "he will crush you (on the) head."

after translating the pasuk, she didn't want to read the whole thing to see if she could get that first word from context. again she cried.

(and she was away for shabbos and surely did not get enough sleep, but again, if i would wait for the perfect storm conditions she'd be grown w/ no education).

i was planning to walk away again until she calmed down but she grabbed onto me, so i asked if she wanted to read it while i sat next to her. she did. she read it, and it was tricky enough to follow everything and figure it out so i did tell her the word.

the end.

i'm wiped. why is this so hard? why so much energy? why so much unhappiness? what am i doing wrong? i am NOT doing things beyond her capability.

maybe i'm doing nothing wrong. maybe translating is hard work. maybe i'm guiding her through the frustration of putting in hard effort for a valuable goal.

there were a lot of days like this with sarah, too. and we survived. and she can translate chumash.

easy pesukim

so today i decided on 4 pesukim. chana balked at the thought. i said she can take as many breaks as she wants. she said but she'll need like 5 breaks! i said sure. she said she'd rather do 2 pesukim. i said yup.

she did the first pasuk easily. (all 4 were pretty easy today). i'm happy to report that ממני comes easily to her now. we noted that adam ran away because he was scared because he was naked, not scared because he ate from the tree! then she did the first half of the next pasuk, and needed a break.

then we did the second half of the second pasuk and she needed a break. i asked her to guess what adam would answer to the question of if he ate from the tree.

after she read the next pasuk (after her break), i asked her if adam said he did eat or did he deny it. and she said yes and no. because he blamed the woman, but also said he ate.

then she needed another break.

then she did the pasuk about the woman.

then she did a little dance and sang, "graduaaaaation!"

ps today were words like צויתיך which need a shoresh breakdown, and the 2 suffixes. the white board makes these a dream.

צ.ו.

then she adds a ה for צוה

and we isolate תי and ך

then she just has to figure out i commanded you or you commanded me.

back from vacation

you know, it takes longer to write this than it does to do it.

so i've been trying to get to chumash all evening. finally things calmed down enough and i noticed that chana wasn't even in the house. she popped over to a friend. so i started cooking for shabbos, and eventually she mosied on back home at 8:40. i mixed up the kneidlach and put the water to boil, and that's when we sat down to chumash. how long does it take for a pot to boil? about 6 minutes? we finished before that.

so it has been a while, and i had no recollection of what we had left off with. i opened the chumash, and there was the post-it. so surely chana will not remember the new words from last time (vayechulu and tz'va'am). i am not so thrilled with the fact that i'm not reviewing, and therefore chana is not really picking up new vocabulary. but i am going to remind myself of why i made that decision: chana does not enjoy review. the goal i have chosen is to teach her to find the shoresh and use the dictionary, and to learn to translate. with those tools she will be independent should she choose to learn later in life. it is not necessary to torture her with review.
oh, yeah.

so i racked my brain for a review question that would be short and to the point, and at the same time review and lead into our current pasuk. so i said, "what happened to the sky and the land?" and she totally remembered that they were finished. nice :-)

now the challenge of how we were going to work this next bit. there was one new word in the half she was doing, and we had decided we were no longer going (OMG I FORGOT THE KNEIDLACH!!! excuse me while i go turn them off) (whew, they didn't burn) to read the pasuk on its own night, but rather read a phrase and then translate it.
so there were a few difficult elements. first, just to look up a word saps chana's energy. she usually can't do that AND translate. second, although she knew all the other words in the pasuk half, it is long enough that she wouldn't be able to piece it together. i knew she would lose the thread of what it is saying.
so we were trying to figure out how much to do and how to do it, and i said let's just start and see how it goes. i figured i'd read her cues and see when (hopefully before) it was getting too much.

so she read v'yechal elokim. she guessed the 3rd shoresh letter was "hey." (boy i wish i could figure out how to do hebrew font on this blog). she didn't remember what it meant, even when i pointed to the previous pasuk (vayechulu), but when i said gamar she got it. (also, she thought it was like "kol," to which i intelligently did NOT point out the connection coz that would bore her).
bayom hashvi'i she translated. she did not want to look up melacha and said she'll do it tomorrow. she remembered that the vav at the end (melachto) was he (or more correctly, him/his, but i'll take "he"). asher still needs a prompt from me ("th..."). and asa she translated correctly. all of this is way too much for her to put together. and she still doesn't know what melachto means. i said "v'hashem gamar bayom shevi'i" and she translated that. we'll see how tomorrow goes.

also, as per alfie (though i didn't get a chance to read his book this chag and i had thought i would), i told chana that i'm no longer giving her a reward chart for doing chumash since i didn't think it was particularly motivating her. naturally, taking away this chart felt like a punishment... (a pitfall of rewards that he discusses) so i upped her allowance. so now she has a way of accruing the money she would like for her weekly ice cream or soda or whatever small toy she is saving up for, and it's not related to doing chumash.