Oy… did mama get a lesson toDAY. People, lemme tell you something: my Master’s is in Secondary Education with a specialty area of Education Technology. I taught high school in the business department and that included (other people) teaching office productivity applications and an end-to-end systems architecture overview (which I taught) but it did not include teaching typing, netiquette or some of the other ins and outs of collaborating or learning online.
And you do not learn this well on your own. This is how I found out…
And it starts with swimming. Our state is mercifully lax on homeschool laws. No registration, no number of days, no testing… just that you teach in the English language and at some point during the year, cover 7 subjects (with no dictate about how much time you spend on any of them). Welcome to “Physical Development and Health”.
Because BigGuy is a 5th grader, it’s his last year of Cub Scouts. There are a contingent of people back home who can’t believe we would involve ourselves with Scouts because of their historically explicit rejection of homosexuals. Policies have changed about the acceptance of Scouts that are homosexual but I have not kept up on whether that trickled into leadership. Continue reading To be or not to be a Boy Scout→
I actually speak on this topic and people always find it informative so I thought I’d share it here. Financial education is near and dear to my heart. When I taught high school, I taught business and computer courses. My business courses were Intro to Personal Finance, and Business Management. I loved them both; but it became really clear that the majority of my students knew very little about financial responsibility even though many of them had jobs. I didn’t want that for my kids.
Yeah… I think this is going to work out–not being part of the Young Philosopher’s group that was meeting on Fridays from 11:30am-1pm. I mean, that’s lunchtime. Seriously? And it’s kind of far. And it falls on the day that BigGuy and I are supposed to hold our big Socratic white-elephant-in-my-head discussions… which might be too much heavy conversation for a day.
But Fridays are really, really open now and I think that’s going to work well for us. For one, it’s the day we prepare for the weekend. We do our “weekly home blessing” (thank you, stronghold of The Fly Lady) which is a set of two chores per family member that help get the house cleaned up before the weekend. This started long ago when we hosted “Wine Night” at our house every Friday night for nearly a year before relocating. Taking care of cleaning up the house before the weekend set in meant that we enjoyed a clean house all weekend and company dropping by wasn’t an issue. We could just relax.
Well, we are returning to that. And I think having the review of the week’s work and the Socratic discussions on Friday are going to dovetail nicely into preparing for the weekend. Because we can also have these discussions WHILE we work on stuff.
So each day the kids have all kinds of responsibilities…
Make their bed
Put their laundry in the hall basket and one of them takes the basket down to the laundry room (or one of the adults do)
Pick up toys in their room (which usually happens twice/day–once before going down to breakfast and once before bed… but we’ve removed a lot of toys from their rooms)
Pick up whatever toys they were playing with all day before getting their screen time or going out to any cool play dates
Set the table and get drinks. Honestly, I have no idea who does what part of this now except that at a prior family meeting, Girly wanted to put out the plates. That meant someone had to get them for her. Apparently, not anymore. She’s pushed her kid chair to the cabinet, stood up on it, got down four large dinner plates, and put four forks on them and then carries it all to the table. Whaaaaa…..???
Clear the table after every meal
BigGuy has to clean his bathroom and the master bathroom–and doing that is broken down so that he does a different part each day. He often forgets this chore or forgets to include my bathroom… but this is a new one.
At the end of the week, it goes like this (or rather, IT. IS. PLANNED. to go like this):
BigGuy learning to vacuum. #fail Now we sweep
BigGuy vacuums the entire first floor and upstairs hallway. With his complete failure to master vacuuming, we are now sweeping.
Girly is supposed to dust and put away whatever toys are left out.
Papa is supposed to empty EVERY. GARBAGE CAN. IN THE HOUSE. including the laundry room and powder room; and mop the first floor
Mama is supposed to clear ALL of the horizontal surfaces–desk, kitchen island, counters; and sort/purge all papers–bringing the keepers to the office.
Honestly, the kids are the only ones being held to this right now and BigGuy bears the brunt of it. So add this to the list of “things mom should really get better at”. To be fair, Girly is WAY more helpful in general than BigGuy so I kind of don’t feel all that horrible about it. At 5, she tap dances rings around him in the helpful category. I love my son and he has his amazing qualities. I’m just saying that being helpful isn’t one of them.
And then there’s the general keeping things in their place crap. Shoes go in the closet, not out and about. Pencils have a place. Library books have a place. Board games have a place. My core sense of self is only at rest when “everything has a place and everything in it’s place”. With this house presumably the final place (until retirement), sh*t’s gotta get put in it’s place and that needs to become a habit.
Friday is also farm share day. So if we can get the rest of the house clean, by the time we get our farm food later in the day, we really don’t have anything standing in our way to deal with the vegetables. We get two shares from a farm in town; but then another farm uses our house as a drop-off point (it’s complicated–they started using us mid-season when we were already midway through a full season share with the other farm. Although to be fair, last year we did 4 shares total–two from each of these farms; and we’re likely to go back to that next year since we will not yet have our own gardens to the point of supporting us. Wait-wait-wait… I digress..
I’m looking forward to Fridays. Especially if they’re sunny. And clean.
Remember back on Wednesday when I told you guys that BigGuy and I had plotted out his work for the week? Well we just had our end of week meeting to go over his week’s work and clearly this was a bad idea as implemented.
Takeaways:
First, BigGuy cannot manage his time. Ummmm… duh. Seriously–he’s 10. Wth was I thinking?
Second, BigGuy needs some learning about actual study skills. Again… duh. And above and beyond being 10, he’s not been challenged to learn like he’s being challenged now… so double duh.
Okay, okay… not horrible. We’re just trying to figure it out. But we will clearly do it differently next week.
Oh wait… next week start’s Papa’s 2-week vacation with a trip to Minnesota for Labor Day weekend in the midst of it. Ugh… Okay… I need to figure this out. We have some faith and tolerance lessons to work on anyway so maybe we’ll redo that which wasn’t done this week on the reading front, learn some study skills and do the remainder of the faith and tolerance lessons over the next two weeks. And maybe I’ll sandwich in a book on audio for the trip to and from Minnesota.
AND… he is not auditioning for the current show. He would’ve missed 3 rehearsals and they said that missing 2 or more means they’re likely to get cut (you have to note any rehearsal conflicts on your audition papers). We’d either have to miss our Minnesota trip and miss just one rehearsal or take the Minnesota trip and miss 3 of them. I let BigGuy decide. He chose to go to Minnesota. I’m really kind of relieved. I’m not sure we could handle the chaos of being involved in a show right now. The parent commitment is really no joke.
I’m sitting here listening to the sounds of Girly crying in her room and BigGuy finishing an hour’s worth of trying to clean the bathroom vanity in my room.
I’m not exactly getting this “teaching practical life skills” thing down very well.
Ideally, these are things that would have grown with us as a family–learned and added as time wore on. But that’s not what happened. Instead of gently ushering my kids into independence and the keeping of their environment, my untreated PTSD led to a rather volatile “mom can’t take any more of the mess and freaks out” method of trying to keep house. Only further derailed or enhanced, of course, by 7 moves in 4 years (Girly aged 8mo-4 and BigGuy aged 6-10… formative years).
Now my kids have grown into a lifestyle of simply not taking care of their things and not really wanting to keep the household clean. Mama’s upset about the state of all of it doesn’t really move anyone because Mama’s been kind of a b*tch for the last several years as the symptoms of her condition got worse.
So… first, Mama canceled this afternoon’s events “because obviously we need more time to get things done”. That resulted in lots of playing. Cool that they’re having a good time, but Mama can’t do it all by herself. Then I tried some consistent redirection. #fail
The biggest mistake Mama made was telling them that I sold tonights tickets to “the circus” (it’s really Cirque Shanghai). Oh my. They get upset, but they don’t exactly get motivated to do anything. In fact, sometimes BigGuy will cry and plead that “he’ll do AAAANNNYYYYthing” to get whatever he lost back and sometimes, I fall for it. I tell him to do some subset of what he was responsible for and he still won’t do it.
The whole thing is really just a parenting mess that needs to be made right. And the way I’m handling it is nothing positive… which is making everyone miserable and not exactly suring up the shaky foundation we’re working with.
Mama’s decided that I need to be WITH my kids as they do this–talking them through it and helping them find joy in the process until it becomes a habit. I need to be engaged instead of just barking out orders.
Educated Adventures 