Enemy of Entropy

Archive for Homeschooling

Extreme Introvert Attack In Progress

25 March 2008, 12:01 am. 2 Comments. Filed under Blogging, Critters, Health, Homeschooling, Reading.

Seri­ously. I didn’t even want to make a post, because it counts as inter­act­ing with the world. But hey, that’s the price of Blog365, right?

I remem­bered those “Writer’s Block” prompts on LJ, and decided to try that as a starter. Who comes up with these things? One of them was about what you’d want to do with your favorite “super­star” if you were alone with him or her. What, are we all 12?

Katie and I had more run­ning around to do today, but it didn’t hap­pen. I should have planned to have a flare, since we did. We had another appoint­ment sched­uled tomor­row, but it’s been post­poned. Yay.

I def­i­nitely need to find some­thing more uplift­ing to read than Laura Lipp­man. There’s a fair amount of casual fat-​​bashing going on in her books. Very look­ist, all around.

Happy Wednesday!

23 January 2008, 11:11 pm. 1 Comment. Filed under College, Education, Family, Homeschooling, Reading.

Sam and I had a very nice date night while Katie was out with her beau. He had started mak­ing chili last night, fin­ished it tonight, and added corn muffins. I’m not a big fan of chili (I won’t eat it if Sam didn’t make it), but it was a very sat­is­fy­ing meal.

The girl is doing very well in the online course she’s tak­ing, and I’m happy to say that my semes­ter is going well, too. It’s hard to believe that my baby will likely start col­lege courses this sum­mer or fall!
Read on…

Have any homeschooling or education thoughts?

19 January 2008, 9:05 pm. Comments Off. Filed under Blogging, College, Family, Homeschooling, Parenting.

Today’s entry, Home­school­ing High School in Col­lege?, is over at Acad­emy Car­i­tas. I expect to update there more reg­u­larly, now that we’re offi­cially home­school­ing again.

Further Prof of Insanity: Blog365

1 January 2008, 11:45 am. 1 Comment. Filed under Blogging, Family, Fun, Geekery, Health, Holidays, Home, Homeschooling, Music, RPGs, Reading, Writing.

I got through NaBloPoMo, as ridicu­lous as it was to com­mit to post­ing at least once a day for a month. So of course that small suc­cess has led me, in a moment of more-​​than-​​usual-​​lunacy, to sign up for Blog365 (oth­er­wise known as “Out of the Fry­ing Pan, Into the Fire”).
Blog365
The pur­pose is fairly clear: to post at least once every day of 2008. Feb­ru­ary 29 is a “rest day.” Posts may be writ­ten on any site, rather than stick­ing to just one blog, so I’ll try to spread them around on mine/​ours. If I can’t get some­thing on the actual site on a par­tic­u­lar day due to net con­nec­tion issues or what­ever, I have to write (yes, write! like, cuneiform or some­thing!) a jour­nal entry and trans­fer it to a blog as that day’s entry.

It would be far sim­pler to have a sys­tem of some sort. Maybe I’ll cre­ate a rotation:

Hope­fully there will be new pod­casts up soon. There will def­i­nitely be more music, as we have that lovely con­cert piano we received via freecy­cle all repaired and put together. It’s beau­ti­ful and sounds great! Not at all bad for one drive to pick it up and less than $200 in repair fees! (Sam wanted to just take it to the near­est autho­rized repair cen­ter rather than doing it ourselves.)

2007 wasn’t a stel­lar year, but nei­ther was it ter­ri­ble. Sam has a steady, secure job that he enjoys, in an orga­ni­za­tion that’s allow­ing him to advance. , Katie had a lot of health prob­lems, but I’m hop­ing that we’re on the right path to resolv­ing them. Shel­ley passed away a lit­tle shy of her 18th birth­day, but since we’d been told in 1999 that she only had a year (at most) left, we felt that we’d got­ten an “extra” 8 years with her any­way. Kioshi has grown into a nice com­pan­ion, too.

We really kept to our­selves a lot through the past two years. When you’ve been betrayed and hurt as deeply as we were by our for­mer housemate’s sud­den crazi­ness in 2006, there’s a lot of heal­ing to be done. I don’t know if I’ll ever approach Thanks­giv­ing with­out trep­i­da­tion again, but we had a good one any­way. The stress did con­tribute to the dete­ri­o­ra­tion of my health, and that does make it harder to get out. We’re work­ing on it, though. We cer­tainly learned who our true friends were, and we’ll never for­get that.

So on to 2008, which we hope to be full of more time with friends, bet­ter health, much more music, Katie spent last night and almost all day today with friends from the school she was attend­ing as well as her new beau. Sam and I spent the day gam­ing, upgrad­ing some web sites, eat­ing good food and watch­ing movies. If it’s true that what­ever you do on Jan­u­ary 1 indi­cates how your year will go, we should be just fine.

Reading

21 November 2007, 11:07 am. 5 Comments. Filed under Education, Family, Home, Homeschooling, Parenting, Reading, Relationships.

So, the Crazy Hip Blog Mamas want me to talk about what read­ing means to me or my child. How about both?
Katie reading
You might have noticed that I talk, a lot, about read­ing. I think Now Read­ing shows at least four five of the books that I’m read­ing right now, and that’s a fairly nor­mal num­ber. I don’t include my text­books, because they’d be there too long!

Read­ing is one of the things that I can still do, most of the time, despite the fibro and other crap. I can’t always man­age to read on a screen, or fol­low some­thing like a text­book. For­tu­nately, though, fic­tion by some of my favorite authors — espe­cially an old favorite novel, like Part­ners in Neces­sity — is eas­ier, and is a very good way to dis­tract myself from the pain for a while.

I haven’t talked about it much, but Katie has had increas­ing health prob­lems over the last year. Her migraines are no longer man­aged, despite tak­ing high lev­els of pre­ven­tive med­ica­tions. The res­cue med­ica­tions aren’t work­ing well because she has to take them too often. She had another round of sleep stud­ies, too, and a new neu­rol­o­gist has been try­ing dif­fer­ent med­ica­tions to help her get a decent night’s sleep (which should help the migraines and other prob­lems). So far, any­thing that helps her sleep despite severe rest­less leg syn­drome leaves her zomb­i­fied the rest of the time. Provigil, even taken twice a day, can’t keep her awake and aware enough to func­tion in school. She’s lit­er­ally sleep­ing like a cat, 14 – 18 or hours a day, just never deeply. Her dark cir­cles have cir­cles, now.

But she can still read, too. Slowly, some days, and going back to re-​​read some pages, but she gets the same com­fort from it as I do. You know she’s mine when you real­ize that she’s never with­out at least one, and often two, books in her purse.

I started read­ing to her dur­ing my preg­nancy, along with talk­ing and singing and play­ing music for her. I read out loud to her from her first week out of the womb, too, some­times while breast­feed­ing, other times while just being with her. She talked at an early age, and was very clear. She learned to read quickly, too, and has always been very opin­ion­ated (where did she get that?) about her choice of read­ing mat­ter. One of her favorite things about leav­ing the pub­lic school sys­tem was being free of that damned Accel­er­ated Reader pro­gram and its ridicu­lous restrictions!

It’s no sur­prise that I hope my nephews and niece are read­ers, too — although that’s far less likely, since their par­ents aren’t, really. My brother used to brag that he’d never read any whole book, even those assigned for classes. (I never under­stood that being a point of pride, even if he did get good grades.) My sis­ter has never read any­thing that wasn’t required. I don’t know their spouses very well, but I’m fairly sure they aren’t recre­ational read­ers, either. At least the grand­ba­bies have our mother (their Nana), who got me started read­ing, and will sit for hours with any child, read­ing book after book (or the same book, over and over) patiently.1 I’m not close to my sib­lings, geo­graph­i­cally or oth­er­wise, so I don’t have many chances to influ­ence the babies. I can give them books, though, and hope to catch their fancy so they ask to have them read!

Being a flu­ent reader gives one more of an advan­tage that any other skill you can give your child. Read­ers can use that skill to learn absolutely any­thing else. They can explore math, sci­ence, crit­i­cal think­ing, his­tory, cur­rent events, art — you name it. If you teach them to read, get them in the habit of doing so, and teach them to judge their sources well, you’ve given them an incred­i­ble start on life.

1 Mom (and I!) did read to my sib­lings, but nei­ther of them ever wanted to sit still long.

 

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