As both mother and teacher, I find I am very quick to identify when my children appear to be “afraid to try”. When they are so worried about being right that they simply fail to start. I give the appropriate encouragement, “Making a mistake is not bad. It’s part of learning. We don’t learn from our successes nearly as much as we learn from our mistakes.”

I get that last part from one of our favorite movies: Disney’s Meet the Robinson’s.  A story inspired by Walt Disney’s own beliefs about success and failure.  In my favorite scene, the main character is sitting at a dinner table with a family. One of their inventions (for combining peanut butter and jelly) is broken. He is encouraged to try and fix it. He does fix it, he thinks. But when they try it, it squirts peanut butter and jelly all over everyone. He cowers in fear of making a mess, making a mistake. Instead, the family breaks out into a musical number celebrating the failure! One chara Read More »

“I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils.” –Joe Fox, You’ve Got Mail.

Today is the first day of public school and the first time I have ever not been a part of it. (We started homeschooling in October of 2008.) I thought I might perhaps find this day and the weeks leading up to it somehow painful, like I was missing out or more importantly my children were missing out. To add to the concern, we live inside a school zone with one of two crossing guards right in front of our house. We can hear the bells of the school from our house. There is no avoiding it.

 Or do humans not follow basic natural laws? The example I’m thinking of is polarity. A negative magnet attracts only positive magnets and repels other negative magnets. A negatively charged electron attracts a positively charged proton.

I left my son's religious education (formerly CCD) this afternoon more than a bit annoyed. My son is 7; he's preparing for his First Communion. As part of this preparation he must attend religious education for 2nd graders (which does not cover First Communion specifically, that's another class). So this is the 2nd grade class I'm picking him up from.

Inside I see kids lined up at a chart titled: Lenten Promise. They are coloring in a square by their name. I jumped to conclusions - angry, sensitive, defensive - and sadly I was right.

To jump start my hopefully regular habit of blogging about life, homeschooling, and other such things, I begin with a list. Four months ago we began homeschooling our two children, daughter age 10 and son age 7. So here’s my list of:  Top Ten Really Cool Things So Far.

I have spent hours in the library with my children and with no rush or clocks to watch. I just let them wander and pick up books, and they let me wander too. It’s Heaven.

[I wrote this to a web group for parents of gifted kids. I was responding to a woman who’d had a very very bad day dealing with the public school officials regarding her gifted daughter. The longer I wrote the email the more it sounded like a blog entry. So I present it here now, only slightly edited.]

I so sympathize with you. I've left meetings shaking, crying, etc. After one early on, I told my husband I would never attend another meeting without him -as he keeps me balanced and logical that YES dear you did hear what I heard!!

Anyway, it was the emotional stress and toll of dealing with the "system" for me; the emotional stress of learning NOTHING new for months on end if not an entire year for my son; the emotional frustration of TAKs obsession and no social peers for my daughter that final led us to become: "Accidental Homeschoolers."

We have so many kind and caring friends and family. But my kids haven't been the only ones a little tongue tied recently at the frequently asked question, "So how's IT going?"

IT is the codeword for home schooling. This strikes me as funny now, but flash back a year and I probably would have asked the question with the same hesitancy.

The question also comes to my children in the form of "do

 Since beginning home school nearly a month ago, the kids have chosen the Otter as our mascot. Our colors are, as reflected in the 'M' logo - blue and tan - because, they said, otters live in both the water, the blue, and on the land or beach, the tan. We even found $2 Beanie Baby Otters (two of them) at the local resale shop, which now each reside on the children's desks.

A motto is still in the works, but my son has created a sort of symbol-stamp with the date to act as a 'copywrite' or seal (pun, ha ha) and my daughter altered a saying of mine: "Leave Mommy Alone" time to work with the new theme: CLAM Time.

Ok, well, only in the sense that I'm starting to want to tell the government (especially the state government) to get the heck out of my life - my children's lives.

Recently found in the Student Handbook of the Junior High and High School in my area the following statement in a BIG BLACK BOX.

"Refusal to Obey

If your daughter went to see Kit Kittredge: An American Girl this past Summer 2008 or is one of the millions who has read the six or more books that detail Kit’s life from 1929 to 1934, you might be fielding a few unusual questions from your daughter these days.

Every channel that reports news and nearly every sound byte has compared the recent 2008 economic “crisis” to The Great Depression. Some say it’s not even close, some say it’s “in the same family”, and some even say it’s got the potential to be worse. To your daughter (and many of adults) the details matter very little. What matters is that your daughter overheard that we’re facing another Great Depression.