Finis
2022-23 in the books
Remember what the last week of school was like? Movies in class? End of year parties? Very, very little academic content? It’s just the same for homeschool. Here’s a quick look at the vaguely educational content of our final week.
Calculating: Let’s start with math because that is totally actual school. We did some of our math program, but also, in an amazing example of ✨living math✨, we compared the volume of two new ✨laundry hampers✨ I was considering purchasing. And I have to hand it to the living math people - the kids are in fact weirdly enthusiastic about these sorts of math applications.
I assigned a laundry hamper each to Benedict and Kateri and, of course, made them predict which would be larger before we started because you have to squeeze every last drop out of Teachable Moments. We immediately realized we did not actually know how to calculate the area of an ellipse, so we even learned something totally new (reassuringly intuitively, it turns out to be the product of half of the major axis and half of the minor axis times pi). And I have a new, high-capacity laundry hamper1 heading my way, so wins all round.
Reading: Motivated by beating grandpa last week, Nicholas has been hitting the chess books. Other than that, everyone is reading Brandon Mull at every possible moment (except Agnes, who is reading the first couple of Betsy-Tacy books). Younger me would not have approved these books, but older me is still trying to keep the Marvel movies from entering our home and feels like she has to give a little somewhere.
Listening: We met friends at the big city park for an outdoor big band concert. The kids were delighted to hear “Green Onions,” a tune also performed at their year-end band concert. Other highlights were a “Proud Mary” sing-along and a soulful take on Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.
Watching: Human Planet (to wrap up this year’s study of geography) and Victorian Farm (because we like it). The Principal is a sucker for nature documentaries and the like, so we’ve been watching these with him in the evenings.
Full disclosure: a few sequences in Human Planet were later revealed to be staged, and the BBC (but not our local library) withdrew it from circulation. To be honest - with the exception of one bit in which the film makers perpetrated a true distortion rather than simply a re-enactment - this doesn’t particularly bother me any more than, say, your average historical fiction.
By the end of this week’s episode of Victorian Farm, one child had decided to be a basket weaver and another a blacksmith when they grow up.
And speaking of Ruth Goodman, I quite enjoyed Jane Psmith’s review of her book about how coal changed domestic life. The closing paragraph also serves quite well as an explanation for why we do many of the odd things we do here at the Gothic Homeschool and Homestead-ish:
Making and doing things, even when you don’t have to, is practice in believing that you can change your own world. It’s weightlifting for agency. You can outsource the making of your physical world, but social worlds — the arrangement of your family life, your personal relationships, the organizations and institutions you’re involved in — must be created by the participants themselves. A good society would be one where the default “builder-grade” scripts lead to human flourishing, but unfortunately that isn’t ours, so you have to be able to decide on your own changes. Start practicing now: find one little thing about your physical environment that annoys you and fix it. Put the new toilet paper roll actually on the holder. Replace the burned-out lightbulb. Hang the artwork that’s listing drunkenly against the wall. Pull some weeds. And then, once you've warmed up a little bit, go and make something new.
Partying: We attended two graduation ceremonies, an end-of-year poetry recitation, the Principal’s school’s year-end happy hour, and my baby brother’s birthday celebration.
And that’s a wrap. In a few days, I’ll have some end-of-year reflections and then plan to blog my way through the process of preparing for next year.
7514 cubic inches!