rosh hashana

we reviewed sheni of vayetze. then shlishi the ones she did yesterday. then i wanted to do new pesukim. chana was arguing with me about how many (i ventured maybe 7) and i said i will put the timer on for 15 minutes. she began to argue that this is too much. i said it seems to me that 15 minutes is not too much for anything (though now that i'm thinking about it, perhaps 15 min of straight contractions or 15 min of bleeding copiously can be too much). and she said, i'm not used to that much. and i said, really, 15 minutes is not a large amount of time.

anyway, sach hakol she did 17 pesukim. after 7, she said she should have just done 7 pesukim. at that point we had over 8 or 9 minutes left and i reiterated that 15 min of chumash was not unreasonable.

most of the words were pretty simple. she got annoyed at me when i asked her to not just translate but to make sense of the pesukim. and she got annoyed at me when i asked her to translate the shoresh of the names of leah. she said, why do i have to? and i said, coz it's cool.
but i guess it's not that cool if i'm "forcing" her.

btw, her shoresh ability is improving. when she reviewed sheni, when she didn't know the word she was able to break down the shoresh and look at surrounding words to give her clues. it was nice.

now she's having a 20 min break before rashi. frankly, i would like a longer break. i may do that. i doubt she'll complain. i have to figure out which rashis to do.

on a rosh hashana note, i was thinking what i want for each of my children, and what i want in terms of my relationship with each one. ie where are my challenges and where do i need divine help. with chana, thankfully we are in a fairly amenable phase and not having too much conflict. i realized what i would like is for her to love and enjoy learning torah.

and that got me thinking about how this skill work is not so conducive to love of torah. or at least the way i'm doing it is not. as you know, i always go back and forth over this issue. do we push skills and figure it will not affect the love of learning, as long as learning is enjoyable in other venues (in which case i must make an effort to provide some of those other venues). or does every little drop affect the overall attitude? i guess these days i lean towards the first one.

i also was thinking about how what we daven for is both based on and also affects the future of our assessment of the situation. i assess my relationship with chana. i ask for things based on that understanding. and that act of standing before hashem and asking for that particular thing affects how i act in the future.

we did just sheni in the car on the way to ceramics. we did 4 new pesukim and fought about the last 3, even though they weren't that hard. chana has yet to do chazara (revi'i of toldos) and she says she'll do it later. i told her 7:30pm tonight is too late. i wonder if i should remind her or not. i'll ask her what she wants to do.

there are a lot of great, not too hard, pshat oriented rashis in vayetze, just as somebody on torch-d advised me. chana read through a couple with nekudos. i would like to do more, but she said it's not rashi day. apparently one day a week we do it more intensively.

google images

chana asked why the plishtim covered up avraham's wells if they could have used them. good q. r' hirsch does not address it. nor does a quick survey of mikraos gedolos.

google images are really valuable for showing pictures. we've used it for brimestone in sedom, fiery furnace and pillar of smoke in bris ben habesarim, dew in the brachos of eisav/yaakov, monument, and to show parsha ptucha and stuma.

chana zipped through shlishi of toldos. she resisted doing rishon of vayetze, since we are already up to sheni. but i think she needs more chazara. so we argued about that and i insisted, and her mood became dour. then we took a break before doing the 4 pesukim in rishon and the new pesukim, since she was getting bad-tempered. i put 10 min on the timer. then she got upset because for some reason she thought we were doing only 1 new pasuk. the one new pasuk had 3 new words, but the next 3 pesukim were easy so i wanted to do them. she fought that. i persisted again. she kind of cried a little but overall contained herself well. then i gave her another 10 min and we did rashi. she just read it and didn't translate it. even though i saw from the way she read that she needs a couple more sessions of translation, because she didn't pause at the right places which she would have done if she understood it. ("how do you know if she knows it if you don't give tests?")

all told i think chumash and rashi took about a half hour. but i didn't time it. calculating, i think it took about 45 min. when i asked chana, she said she felt like it took her 3 hrs.

today is parkour. chana had a choice to do chumash in the car, but she chose to do it in the house. we tried to do it before jack woke up, but til teethbrushing and breakfast occurred, jack was already awake. but for a change he was happy to sit and feed himself breakfast, which kept him happy through chumash. today we reviewed rishon of vayetze. i gave chana the option of to herself or out loud. she chose to herself. we started with 2 rashis, since it's "rashi day" from the summer. we reviewed "i don't know the day of my death" and we did the rock one w/o nekudos. chana had some trouble with it but not terrible for the first day of no nekudos. she suggested we change rashi day to a day w/o parkour. then we did one new pasuk, because it was long and had at my count 2 words she didn't know and 1 word she didn't remember. it turns out it was 1 new word and 2 words she didn't remember. as soon as i said "crouch" she remembered that the camels were crouched. she saw the big rock and asked if hashem was going to take it off the well. won't she get a thrill when she finds out it's her hero, yaakov. did i mention yesterday that chana was in conflict about doing more because she is so excited to be in the part where yaakov meets his wives?

oh, and at one point chana and i stopped chumash and pantomimed wild piano playing to this song that elazar was listening to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uh3sr6XDUc0&feature=related

chana negotiates

this morning chana was going out with bubby for a haircut. so i rushed through rashi (still doing w/ nekudos) and then i wanted to get done as much of chumash as we could. so she reviewed the pesukim and then did 3 more. then i wanted her to do chazara of rishon of toldos. but she asked if she could trade finishing up rishon of vayetze instead of doing rishon. i thought that was a fair trade; we'll chazer rishon of toldos tomorrow.

metaphor

so i chose to do the famous rashi about the stones arguing over who would be the pillow of the tzadik. little known is that rashi first gives the pshat that yaakov took the stones to build himself a fortress because he was concerned about wild animals.

chana was astonished by this rashi. she looked at me like the world had gone mad. i said, do you think this happened?

she was reluctant to say it didn't (hashem changed all the rocks into one rock; after all, He certainly can). but she did say, "rocks don't speak." and i agreed.

i told her that rashi and chazal speak in riddles, and it's a riddle.

she asked me if i knew what the riddle means.

i said i have maybe a little bit of an idea. she pressed me. i said that if i wanted to help a tzadik and she wanted to help a tzadik, maybe hashem would help us do it together.

she frowned and said, "yes, but we aren't rocks."

she has a little way to go before she grasps the concept of metaphor. actually, i had a sheet that i used to illustrate the idea that i used to use for classes. maybe i'll see if i can dig that up.

ah, friday. homeschool is always a bit tough on a friday, especially if i have to cook and especially if i'm having company and especially especially if i'm having company for both meals. and especially especially especially if it's someone i never had over before (though i am determined to keep the menu low key). anyway, jack is a late sleeper and aharon is napping and elazar is busy. so it's a perfect time. for me. but we all know that chana does not like to work first thing in the morning.

so a bit of back and forth. we started vayetze. and then she'll have a break and then do shishi to herself. but first i hope to chap in a rashi if i can find a good one.

chana asked 2 excellent questions. first of all, how can hashem be standing on the ladder? i said it's a dream. she said, yes, but how does hashem represent himself in the dream with no form (not in exactly those words). does he make a malach represent him? but a malach not like the other malachim in the dream? (because she remembered that other times malachim carried a nevua, i think to hagar for example, and said "i am hashem.")

the other good question was more of a statement. when chana makes an observation, i often say, "good question." and she says, "it wasn't a question." but it sort of is. as she translated "i am the Gd of your father avraham" she muttered "and the Gd of everybody else." which is an implied question: why say specifically the Gd of avraham when hashem is the Gd of everybody?

i'm off to find a rashi now and to coax her to do it.