In which Chana gets annoyed that there is Math in Chumash

algebra: teaching to the test

I'm happy to report that Chana is no longer completely not comprehending the questions.  The first test was emotionally upsetting, because she felt she didn't know the math (a lot of it had Common Core subjects that are not algebra) or because she didn't understand what the questions are asking.  We are now in the middle of the second test and there is a clear improvement in her comprehension of the questions and in her mental state.  (We're still getting a few of them wrong here and there, because I simply don't know the answers, which is one of the things I dislike about homeschooling--I'm teaching algebra and I'm a somewhat incompetent math teacher.  This is not a reason not to homeschool--it's fairly easy to outsource a tutor or a math program or a curriculum that will tell me exactly how to teach.  I just didn't because I'm fairly proficient at algebra.  But we're paying the price here.)  My plan is (as per the suggestion of a fellow homeschooler) to purchase the Barron's review book because they actually explain how they get to the answers, and I'm feeling like we need that.  But it's nice to see some clear progress.

sleeping late

A feature of radical unschooling, aside from allowing children to choose what they learn and when, is that the children are allowed to choose what and when they eat, and what time they go to sleep.

I started off my parenting life being extremely strict about sugar and sweets.  Eventually this began to backfire and I felt I was policing too much.  A friend of mine suggested a book that revolutionized how I thought about food, and I began "unschooling" food.  (This was before I ever even heard of unschooling.)  

When my oldest was a toddler, a newlywed friend who had no children suggested that it made sense to let the children go to bed whenever they wanted.  He theorized that eventually they would work out their own rhythms.  I scoffed.  In my experience, children didn't peacefully go to sleep.  They got cranky, cried, didn't settle down if you missed the window, and were horribly tantrummy the next day.

But now I find myself in the odd situation of somewhat unschooling sleep.  My 7yo asked earlier in the year if he could go to sleep "when he's tired."  Up until this year, he had the habit of beginning to destroy things and literally jump off the walls if 8pm came and he wasn't put to bed.  But he seemed to have outgrown that, so we tried it out.  He fell asleep a lot more quickly and also began sleeping later.  My 5yo has always preferred to be on a 9:30pm-9:30am schedule, but since he shares a room with his brother, he was being woken up earlier and needed to go to sleep earlier.  I do still put him to bed most nights, but his bedtime has evolved to 9:30.  I found that my 3yo hasn't gotten wild or tantrummy either, and usually comes to request that I put him to bed most nights.  (Sometimes he does melt down, but it's less frequent than I would have thought when I scoffed at my friend.)

A study of why homeschoolers love being homeschooled listed being able to get enough sleep as the number one thing they like about being homeschooled.

Last night was Friday night.  After dinner we did family snuggle (minus my 13yo who decided to read Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People*) and it was about 10pm when everyone went to sleep.  I began to fret a little that the boys would have to be woken up to go to shul in the morning.  And if they would be crabby and function less than optimally.

And then it struck me.  It is normal in our society for children to be woken up every. single. day.  Swathes of children aren't getting enough sleep.  (Especially teenagers.)

I went through years of not enough sleep.  My youngest is 3 and it's only been a few months where I could count on sleeping past 7am.  There were years when I had nursing infants and years and years when our children thought that 5am was morning.  It's actually incredible how much lack of sleep people can still function with.  I can function on three hours of interrupted sleep.  (Too many of those in a row, though, and I start screaming and crying.  Melt down, if you will.)

I also recall years of me waking up at 6am to catch the bus to school.  I still remember the physical pain of waking up tired to face a full day of school and then homework and studying.

Some things about unschooling have crept up on me so slowly I have forgotten what life used to be like.  I didn't really understand what homeschooling was before I started it.  I didn't really understand that it's a different lifestyle, a different way of looking at the world, a different way of functioning.  It's not just about education and how we learn.  It's also about eating and sleeping and the rhythms of life.

I remember once we were interviewed for an article about homeschooling.  "What do you do for lunch?" he asked my daughter.
"Huh?  We go to the kitchen when I'm hungry and we make lunch," she replied.  What a funny question.


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*I don't know if she'll actually end up reading the whole thing.  She found the first chapter boring.

On saying "Yes" instead of "No"

I wrote this post about why I began practicing saying "Yes" to children's ideas instead of saying "No."

People often lament that kids these days only want to be involved in multimedia and nobody is creative.  I think if we would pay more attention to the grandiose ideas that children have and get out of their way when they attempt them, then we would have a generation of creative people who have ideas and follow through on them.

Here are some issues that I encounter when trying to say "Yes" instead of "Are you nuts?!" "No":

cleaning up mess

• I have to be careful with this one.  Sometimes an idea is going to make a mess and I'm too emotionally fragile to have that much mess.  So then I try to give a specific time when they can.  And I try to follow through on that.  But sometimes the answer is just "I'm not up for it."
• I try to train them to clean up after themselves as much as possible.  I want to imbue them with the idea that part of the activity is the cleanup. e.g. "clean as you go" when cooking, or you're not finished with the easy bake oven until all of the batter is cleaned off the table and the pans are rinsed.  Painting means water is spilled out, brushes are rinsed, and the cloth is folded up.  Using duct tape or the stapler means it is put back.  
• When they are young, I clean up with them and give directions as they clean up.  When they are older, I expect the majority of cleanup to be done without me (though they always have a right to request my help cleaning up).  I use "Love and Logic" techniques if things are not cleaned up.  If the paint is left on the porch or I have to gather children and supervise a cleanup, then that affects how I feel the next time they ask.  
• I read up and implement techniques to make cleanup more manageable for myself. If I'm not overwhelmed and if I know how to give clear guidelines and expectations for their clean ups, then we can do more things.  Decluttering, organizing, and learning to clean up an area in 20 minutes are valuable skills that make me more able to say "yes" when they want to do something.

destruction of property
I like to say yes, but I want to teach them to respect other people's property and to respect the concept of not breaking things that other people might find useful.  Using Love and Logic techniques, when they break something serious or beloved, they have to save up and pay for it.
That aside, when I discovered that the DS was eventually broken and they asked if they could smash it and take it apart, I said yes.  They spent a half hour doing so (with a hammer), investigated the inside, used the parts to try to build other things, and, of course, cleaned up all the pieces when they were finished.
When they asked to take apart a broken bike so that they could build a rocketship, I thought it was unlikely that they would be able to make a working rocketship, but I said yes.  As of this writing, they have not made a working rocketship.

appropriate public social behavior

• This was probably something I struggled with the most in the beginning.  It helps if you can access the rebellious part of your personality that might actually enjoy going against society.  But mostly it's pretty uncomfortable.  
• It's a strong value in our home to be respectful of other people's property and, to some degree, people's sensitivities.  I am absolutely firm that they must have appropriate boundaries regarding other people's property.  The question of other people's discomfort is a more complex issue.  ("Can I eat what I picked out of my nose?" "Um..It's not poison but some people will probably feel uncomfortable if you do." "So that's a yes?" "Um, I guess so." "Hey, Jack, did you know you can eat your booger?")
• A lot of requests trigger my own discomfort. To work on this, I went through a process: 
• If I want to say no, then I ask myself why.  
• Then I ask what about it makes me feel uncomfortable.  
• Then I try to evaluate whether that feeling is reason enough to prevent this exploration of the world or this experience 

• I found that I frequently preferred to get over my discomfort and give them this opportunity.  Thinking about the long term benefits of being able to explore things or being able to follow through on ideas compared to what message I am teaching them by saying No gave me perspective.

What they want to do is impossible
I already discussed that.  So what if it's impossible?  What if it is actually possible and you are imposing your warped and restricted view of the word onto them?  If they won't destroy anything and they will (mostly) clean up after themselves why oh why are you sucking the fun out of everything and delivering the message that they should stop being creative and stop looking for interesting ways to interact with the world.  (I hope that wasn't too harsh.  That's just what I say to myself ;)

On shifting from saying "No" to saying "I can't see why not"

Something I've been practicing since Sarah was a toddler was biting back my natural inclination to say No to everything.  Children naturally have lots of ideas.  Lots of impractical, annoying, messy, impossible ideas.  And my gut reaction is almost always, "No."

When I first became a parent and I was youthful and idealistic, I wondered why parents were always discouraging their children.  Children are so enthusiastic.  They want to do so many things.  And the adults in their lives are always telling them no.  Sometimes because it's an inconvenience to the adult.  But about half the time it's not a tremendous inconvenience; the adult just feels that it's not something "done" or it's not "appropriate" or it just seems extremely impractical.

I began to experiment.  I would only say No if I could think of a good reason to say No.  I began to question whether or not my reasons for refusing were "good" reasons.  I found, upon investigation, that the majority of my refusals were because of social discomfort, or because I was choosing laziness over my child's exploration of the world.

I began to try: "I guess so."  Or perhaps a more enthusiastic, "Go for it."  Or, if I was really reluctant: "How do you plan to do that?"  or "Here's what my concern is.  What is your plan for that?"

I also tried to get into the habit of saying, "Sounds great" when they said anything that seemed fantastical to me.

I was thinking yesterday about the time they captured a bird.  If you would have asked me if a 2nd grader could capture a bird, I would have said, "How absurd! Capture a bird!?"  But since I have mainly broken myself of the habit of being negative about their ideas, back when he was in kindergarten and he asked for a piece of bread or a bag of popcorn so he could set a trap for a bird, I pointed to the closet and asked him why he wanted to capture a bird.  It turns out he had plans to eat it, so we discussed shechita and kosher birds.  Three years later, he came running into the house that they had caught a bird.  It was incredibly exciting.  I was incredibly excited.  They put a box over it.  I wondered if it was sick or injured (since everyone knows you can't capture a bird, darn it!) and discussed the diseases and transfer of diseases.  I think the boys made plans to call animal control or a vet.  But the bird somehow escaped and flew away.  And that was the adventure of the time the idea of capturing a bird came to fruition, with three years of perseverance.

Imagine if I had not practiced saying yes.

Another time I came upon the boys.  They had a huge pile of papers.  And lots of tape.  And scissors.  And a big mess.  I walked in.  They looked up and smiled.  I had a flash of a thought that what I was unconsciously expecting from them was to freeze in fear and wait for me to yell at them.  I asked them what they were doing, they happily shared, and I asked them if they would clean up when they were done and to please call me if they needed help cleaning it up.  I have no recollection of whether they cleaned it themselves or if I helped, but the lack of freezing in fear remains with me.

Imagine if I had not practiced saying yes.

In my next post I will go through some categories of reasons I want to say no but why I (mostly try to) ultimately say yes.

algebra regents--teaching to the test

So Chana finished learning algebra.  We used math TV which I got by posting on various homeschool groups that I wanted free algebra programs, and people suggested different ones, and Chana and I finally settled on liking this one.  I liked that it organized the material in a way that what came next built on what came previously.  I liked that it gave examples.  I liked that every example had a video answer to show how to do it if we got stuck.  Mostly I would teach Chana how to do it (either using the first example of its kind and showing her, or using a whiteboard, or using another site like purplemath or math is fun). Chana would do the problems and check them by looking at the very end of the video.

Now we are done.  Would I say Chana "knows" algebra?  Eh.  I think some of it she internalized and can do (like factoring quadratics.  I think she'll be able to do that for the rest of her life).  But definitely some things would need some more review.

So it is January now.  The Algebra Regents (common core) are in June.  So we have over 5 months for her to review, to get a little more fluent in the problems, and to learn how to take tests.

To that end, I spoke to the algebra teacher at the school I work for and he told me to get the topical review booklet which has 5 tests to practice.

What I have discovered is

1) Knowing algebra is not the same as knowing what is on common core.   There are things like quartiles, box and whisker plots, and all sorts of things that are not algebra.

2) Knowing algebra is not the same thing as knowing how to decode the language of the regents.  Chana often has no idea what the questions are asking.  I say to her, "You know how to do this."  And she says, "I have no idea what this means!"

So we are hacking through.  At each problem, I have to stop to actually teach her something new, or I have to walk her through what it means.  Hopefully this will become more natural as she goes through more problems.

v'hagita bo yomam v'layla

For once it's before 9pm and Chana finished her work earlier in the day.  I am upstairs with Jack because he's afraid to fall asleep himself.  He asked for sock Torah (I said "Can you daven in socks and no shoes") and mattress Torah (I talked about a bunkbed in a succah, which he didn't quite get because he got distracted building himself a blanket fort).

Chana is almost done with Balak.  It's January so we're actually pretty on schedule for her finishing Chamisha Chumshei Torah by the end of the summer after 8th grade.  If she doesn't go to school, then the schedule is pretty irrelevant.

I'd love to learn with Elazar a bit tonight.  So many nights I feel I don't have the energy.  I wonder if I have the urge because I actually can't really do it, because I'm with Jack.

I do have a pile of laundry I've been ignoring for three days.  Now would probably be a good time to do it, as Jack falls asleep.  Then, if I don't have too much decision fatigue maybe I'll seek out Elazar.