Things I've Learned Homeschooling

Ian is becoming quite the independent worker. He no longer wants me to read his World History book outloud. He prefers to do Math by himself (for obvious reasons), his Science is easy but he does allow me to take notes when he's doing one of his weekly experiments. And of course, Treasure Island is still sitting on his bedstand (I have ordered a Playaway from the library and am desperately hoping it arrives soon - although it's amazing how many lessons you can do without actually reading the book---more on this later.)

I kind of miss this. For example, yesterday I just finished reading "The Gendarme" which is an incredible book on the Armenian Genocide during WWI. As the narrator is describing the death walk, he talks about the ziggurats he comes across? How many of you know what a ziggurat is? Yeah, just what I thought, not many. I do and only because Ian and I just studied them (for your information, just in case you're ever on Jeopardy- a ziggurat is a temple built to the various gods early cultures believed in).

I've done a couple of experiments involving steam and liquid and density and other things which I can no longer remember. What I do remember is that one experiment had us distilling coke, orange soda and cranberry juice. What we ended up doing is distilling just about everything in the refrigerator, including pickle juice, to see what would happened. (for your information - pickle juice tastes just as bad distilled as not distilled.)

I have, of course, given up on "Treasure Island" and have joined the Dark Side - classics are classics because they are boring and long.

I have, of course, given up on Math. Some of our Math is interactive and we get to move the mouse around and listen to the cyberspace of Mr. Thomas and have him move the mouse around. Ian gets it, I'm still stuck on why Judy insists on keeping four balls and only giving Alan three - what kind of a mother raises a kid like Judy????

Art is fun and Ian loves it which means I don't get to help. I don't even get to make a relief sculpture out of this really cool clay that we bought. But Ian did. Mine would have been better.

He doesn't listen to me on grammar - I don't think he believes me when I tell him I really, really do know grammar. I teach ESL and my advanced students are always asking questions about conditional tenses and subjectives and auxliary verbs and all the things that most of the United States population knows nothing about and still speaks correctly, for the most part, unless you live in Alabama or Tennessee or Mississippi or Texas.

He has an interactive Spanish course but of course, although I'm somewhat fluent in Spanish, thanks to my ESL students, he doesn't listen to me about that either. Okay, okay,  maybe one day I was maybe wrong when they were explaining the difference between "tu" and "usted" but the online program could be wrong also; it's not unheard of for a computer to be wrong.

But it's okay. I'm enjoying seeing Ian have so many successes. I knew he was smart.