Cabin Fever and Its Fruits

Another week and though I'm improving slowly, I'm still sick. I guess I need more sleep. But unschooling carries on, albeit at a somewhat slower pace and with a measure of cabin fever.

In the world of ideas about school: Two different people pointed me to a Washington Post article about a school board member, a very successful businessman, who pledged to take the high-stakes tests students in his district were required to pass for graduation, and to publish his results. Of 60 math questions (to take just one section), he knew the answers to none but was able to guess correctly at 10. This experience raised huge questions for him about who writes these tests, who decides what should be on them, and how the results should be used -- he would have been required to take a remedial reading course based on his results. I recommend the article heartily.

Here's a simple, mama-needs-sleep-soon list of highlights for us this week:

• We set up and decorated our large artificial Christmas tree. P is now strong and dexterous enough to get the branches into place on the trunk, and T can now read letters reliably, so my role has been reduced to fluffing up the branches, mediating minor squabbles, and doing things too high for either child to reach. It was a good exercise in cooperation among the three of us, and we did pretty well. Our biggest wrangle was over playing with ornaments (delicate) as if they were toys (stronger). After gluing several broken ornaments back together, I ended up hanging the precious things high and giving up on protecting things that weren't of great sentimental value to any of us. The subsequent decrease in interest in the ornaments has me wondering whether my reaction wasn't one of the fun parts of playing with them. In any case, one of the things I'm working on is decreasing my attachment to particular objects and ways of doing things, especially where that attachment conflicts with my kids' desires for learning and interesting experiences.
• We rolled, cut, and baked dough ornaments. Decorating them is waiting on a trip to the craft store for acrylic paints. As we measured the flour for the dough, we found it infested with some kind of maggots. We looked them up and found they were probably Indian Meal Moths, common worldwide. We looked at photos of them, read a bit about their life cycle and methods for controlling them, and then proceeded to sift them out of the flour and make our ornaments. At least one was alive and wiggling. Having lived in Northern California, where similar (identical?) critters called orchard moths are everywhere, we already keep most of our vulnerable foodstuffs in airtight containers, but our crafts-only white flour was unprotected.
• We roasted some chestnuts, after looking up different ways to cook them and settling on the method used by New York street vendors, which is to boil them until tender and then just toast them a bit for nice looks. Along the way we looked at photos of chestnut trees, chestnut lumber, and the furry green casings in which the nuts grow. We talked a bit about chestnut blight and how its has almost completely wiped out American chestnut trees, so we're eating chestnuts from Asian chestnut trees, which coevolved with the blight. After speculating a bit about the etymology of chestnut, we looked it up and found it has nothing to do with chests, but is most likely what some English speaker heard when someone said Castanea, the genus name and original name of the tree in many places, across language groups.
• P got out an origami-per-day calendar I gave her a while back and wanted to learn to fold things from it. I'm helping her learn to read the instructions and diagrams and do the various techniques. She gets very frustrated sometimes. This week she was fuming loudly in the spectators' area during T's gymnastics lesson, and I said if she couldn't handle her frustration without bothering the people around us, she should wait until we got home to work on the origami. I was pleased to see that she was able to to quiet down and still work through her frustration to a satisfactory result. Learning something you're interested in is always satisfying generally, but not always fun in the moment!
• I'd been noticing that lots of P's pretend play was about being poor, so on one car ride, I suggested we brainstorm the minimum possessions a family living in very limited conditions (no running water or electricity) would need. P took me up on it. She played along as we thought about things like one cooking pot and a fire ring or some kind of stove to use it on; but she really lit up when we started thinking about toys and books. She thought they'd have a few, but when I told her that many poor families have no toys or books at all, she thought long and hard about what kinds of things the kids would play with, or how they might learn to read if they had the opportunity. We got another angle on poverty on a more typical United-States level when I told her a story I'd just read about a family, living on a very tight budget, who had decided to give each other only one gift each, with a $5 spending limit -- and how that Christmas was the best they'd ever had. We have been burning through savings this year and doing less discretionary spending than usual because we're waiting to see the first income from an independent software project to be released very soon, and I can see from her play that money is very much on P's mind. I'm trying to strike a balance in talking with her about money and poverty, not romanticizing poverty, but also letting P know that not having lots of money doesn't mean a family can't have a good life. The kids and I had planned to sign up to help sort gifts at the Share-a-Gift "store," where families who can't afford Christmas presents can pick out donated toys and books to give their kids; but while I was ill and delaying new commitments, volunteer registration filled up. We'll still sort through what we have to donate some gently-used toys to the program.
• After last week's bullying in gymnastics, P and I talked about what might happen if we spoke to the hair-pulling girls and their parents (with possibilities ranging from the situation being resolved to the girls really having it in for her). Today in class, P made a connection with one of the girls and got her to stop; the other girl wasn't in class. Here's hoping this episode of P's education in dealing with bullies is over.
• After reading a thread about art on my favorite unschooling email list (AlwaysLearning), I decided to increase the kids' independent access to art supplies. We took our arts/crafts basket down from the counter and put it on the train table, which never gets used for trains anyway since the floor is so much nicer for big track layouts. P and I sorted supplies and found containers to make them easy to find and use, and I put just a few things up high so T can't decorate too many walls in an unsupervised moment. There's more ongoing art happening now. P has been writing in pretend Chinese characters -- she loves the concept of ideograms for words. I dug up a postcard from my adventures on PostCrossing.com on which my correspondent had illustrated the steps for writing "hi" (Ni Hao) in Chinese, and put them into a form P can use more readily when she's ready for some real characters. Besides art supplies, we started a container of bits and bobs that could be incorporated into creations. P enjoyed taking apart and reassembling some older, less-efficient sink aerators we recently replaced, asking about what they were for, and then transforming them into buildings in a town, with scrap-yarn roads and an inexplicably tall dentist's office building. P's appetite for making creations has been whetted; now she wants lots of yarn she can use to make giant spiderwebs. It's on the shopping list!

The kids have spent a lot of time on Netflix and at other iPad pastimes while I've been sick. I get glimpses:

• P writing "I Love You" with alphabet-soup letters in the Morris Lessmore app
• Both kids transforming Morris Lessmore characters into characters from famous books and related movies. One was the Bride of Frankenstein, which reminded us of a friend's photo I'd recently shown P on Facebook, of her post-op "Frankenfoot," all gussied up with neck bolts and such to go with the stitches, and accompanied by "Bride of Frankenfoot," her other foot, with the classic tall, gray-templed hairdo -- everything really does relate to everything else somewhere! P was curious, so I told her the basics of the story of the creation of Frankenstein's monster.
• P asking today, out of the blue, what a shrine is. She's been watching Phineas and Ferb, a Disney cartoon series she discovered on her own, and one character built a shrine for another who'd been sucked into another dimension. P described the shrine to me in great detail. I told her a little about shrines on different scales, from a tabletop to a building, and we talked a little about what they're for (reminders of loved ones or religious figures; places to focus, pray, and/or meditate). Thank goodness there's something to be learned from P&F, and P's willing to ask the key questions.

P and I also watched a bit more of Cosmos together. One episode, "Heaven and Hell," covered some ground we've seen before, about asteroid impacts, the Tunguska event, etc., as well as vividly describing the hot, corrosive atmosphere of Venus. I stopped to clarify things, including why the planets' appearances and their distances from each other couldn't easily be shown in the same scale, and how the solar-system model used in the series obscures the fact that an asteroid or comet, zooming through our solar system, has a negligible chance of hitting any planet. The word negligible made for an interesting discussion -- I explained it as "so small you could basically ignore it," which led back to more talk about scale -- how small is that? So small relative to what? We also wrestled a bit with helping P understand Kepler's Second Law of Planetary Motion (planets in orbit sweep out equal areas in equal times) -- we'll have to find some better ways of exploring the concept of area, but I think P got the basic idea.

The other big vocabulary-builder recently has been Dragonsinger, which UnschoolerDad finished reading to P tonight. P asks about unfamiliar words, and when UD isn't sure, he calls me in for my knowledge and my willingness to look words up. Just tonight I gave them definitions of querulous and sinecure, as well as a couple more I've already forgotten. Bless Anne McCaffrey; from beyond the grave she's enriching my daughter's vocabulary along with her imagination.