When Zach was first born and I was unsure of how to keep him alive, let alone help him grow up to be kind and generous and able to fix a toaster, Jeff and I would fight. Jeff thought that Zach was gaining weight just fine; I thought we should take him in to the office to put him on the postal scale. He thought giving Zach a pacifier was fine; I thought it would doom him to a life... Read more
Jeff and I sit together in the home office of Dr. Mark, the social worker who sees our son, the son with anxiety, ADHD, and a few other letters that make life challenging, exciting, and sometimes funny. We are there to discuss Mark’s observations and suggestions. The game of Pick Up Stix is mentioned. My son and Dr. Mark play at the end of each session, and Jeff remarks, “Yeah, Zach is remarkably good at that game!” “Are you kidding?!”... Read more
Is it possible to cultivate curiosity? You can squelch it, for sure, but can you cultivate it? As we drove home from my parents house on Monday, Zach announced, “I want to do an experiment tomorrow.” Taking charge of his own learning is not Zach’s strong suit, so I was delighted by this suggestion. “What kind of experiment do you want to do?” “I want to make a rubber band ball.” “Mmmhmm. And what kind of experiment would we do... Read more
Over the years, we’ve struggled to make family devotions a regular part of our life. So many things got in our way. First and foremost was the fact that our family has children in it. Children who drove me crazy whenever we sat down to read the Bible or pray. They would burp their answers to questions about Moses, or interrupt someone’s contrite prayer to suggest a more heinous offense that should be confessed, or generally wiggle, whine, and complain... Read more
I wasn’t going to say anything about Chrismukkuh. The Catholic Bishops and Jewish Rabbis recently put out a joint statement condemning the term as offensive to both Christianity and Judaism. And I get it. I know that you can’t just make up holidays, and that people have died over the differences between the two religions, and that Jews are concerned about intermarriage finishing the job taken up again and again by one anti-Semitic group after the other. I don’t take any... Read more
Conan, a twelve-year-old homeschooled friend of ours, is obsessed with the Revolutionary War. He spends his days reading about the war, re-enacting the war with figurines he made himself, and playing in the local fife and drum corps. An eleven-year-old homeschooled friend is a teaching assistant at Harvard. He spends his days doing problem sets and helping undergrads with their proofs. Another homeschooler we know cooks all day and reads cookbooks late into the night with a headlamp. Like most... Read more
Hey. Some people get themselves in a tither if you say Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas. Not me. Why would I not want to wish my neighbors Happy Holidays if they celebrate Chanukah? Or Kwanzaa? Or the winter solstice? I DO wish them a happy holiday. Not only that, when we found ourselves hanging out with those crazy Pilgrims in Plimoth during the last year, they made sure to point out that they had no interest in celebrating Christmas.... Read more
Update as of 5:30 pm, 12/13: The following post predicted the imminent demise of my Daddy. Well… His kidneys are still failing. And his heart is still in bad shape. But when my dad went to see his doctor this afternoon, expecting to get a hospice recommendation, he instead got some pills and some more time. Every day is a gift, and I am incredibly grateful tonight. I’ll leave the original post up, though. You can never say to many... Read more
Twenty Sunday school students sit in rapt attention as I roll out the Advent story. The script, the candles, the materials – they draw us in. As we get ready to hear the story of the Holy Family, the story for the second week of Advent, I say: The church learned long ago that it takes time to enter a mystery like Christmas. They gave us four weeks to get ready. During that time, we are all on a journey. A... Read more
It doesn’t matter how much decoding you work on if you never get to enjoy a good book. Recitals make the hours of practice worthwhile. Conjugating verbs in Spanish is a waste of time unless you are going to talk to someone who speaks the language. “Learning for learning’s sake” makes no sense to me. I love to study and to learn new things, but I always have some “purpose” in mind. I want to make a scarf, or be... Read more
The Homeschool Chronicles
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