Perhaps It Will Kill Us All

And we're off

We had a good first week back to homeschool, though, thanks to the nature of my substacking blogging - sorry, I’m too old, I have to call it that - in stolen minutes here and there, it is now already a couple of weeks behind us. It’ll take us yet a few more weeks to ease into our full schedule, with band and math class not starting quite yet, and I’ll be iterating things a bit based on how it all goes, but overall, I’m feeling good.

First read aloud of the year for the younger set

First thing on the first Monday morning, I sat down with the youngest three students and helped them set up their work journals. They are keeping all their work in a single composition book divided with post-it note tabs for different subjects: an English section subdivided into “exercises” and “word hoard,”¹ a history section for summaries and outlines, a science section for written narrations, and, for Edmund only, a Latin section.

The word hoard puts into writing something we did orally last year - students write down new-to-them words from their readings, look up and record the definitions, and the use each word in an example sentence. Sometimes students claim they didn’t encounter a single unknown word all day, in which case their readers have handy glossaries of new or difficult words at the end of each reading that I use to quiz them. During such a quizzing this week, I asked Nicholas to define “barrier.” He offered “a guy who sells berries?” Nope. Agnes piped up with an alternative - “a guy who buries people?” So we got a little lesson on homophones out of it too.

After our first week ever of formal spelling lessons, Edmund has gone from misspelling “cake” as “cack” to misspelling “cake” as “caek.” Progress!

Agnes’s math book still hasn’t turned up, so I had her do some review of adding and subtracting with regrouping via worksheets from this useful website. Edmund jumped right back into Math Mammoth, Nicholas reviewed multi-digit multiplication with my new favorite math material, and Kateri got some fraction reps with Ray’s Intellectual Arithmetic, which I continue to think is a totally slept on math resource for middle school.

Can’t wait for this one with the big kids

I can tell the schedule I put together will need some serious tweaking. I need to reorder the little kids’ lessons and possibly move my meeting with the big kids to before lunch, because when I wait too long Kateri has a tendency to finish up her independent work and slip outside to rollerblade or into her room to practice music for the rest of the afternoon.

There were other first week snafus, of course. Edmund’s history book was supposed to show up on Monday, but they sent me the second volume instead of the first, which I already had and, in any case, comes second. Coordinating the timing of instrument practice and baby naps is going to take some work.

Kateri and Benedict did some final preparations for attending the national convention of the Junior Classical League, the highlight of their summer. They are both mythology specialists for their respective Certamen² teams so every morning I came out to a coffee table covered with Ovid, Hesiod, and various mythology dictionaries from the previous night’s study sessions.

Benedict spent his days at a summer camp related to a potential future career field, and on the last day, the whole family showed up very conspicuously to take in the exhibit of the students’ work from the week. Part of the exhibit was a display of each student's thoughts about the future impact of AI on our city. The other kids’ responses were all stuff like "AI will allow for more creativity, efficiency, and platitudes.” Benedict’s was something like, “If used wisely, AI may improve our future - or perhaps it will kill us all.”

Going to finally read this one with everyone this year for real this time

Coming up next in this space: some thoughts on direct instruction, how to think about what we do as home educators, and Siegfried Engelmann and John Carnine’s Could John Stuart Mill Have Saved Our Schools?

A few links!

I loved Ivana Greco’s piece asking “When We Outsource Every Hard Thing, What Do We Lose?”³ A mantra the Principal and I have is “the point of the task is building the relationship.” Work isn’t just work, and what we do is who we are.

Related, Alan Jacobs on one thing we might lose if we outsource certain hard things to AI: the ability to detect human voices. I would only add that perhaps our appreciation for human voices necessarily must already have been lowered in order to even begin to accept AI ones as a substitute.⁴

Nadya Williams notes, correctly, that “It Takes a Lot of Tape to Raise Kids.” I try not to spend too much money on curriculum in part so we can afford all the tape, stamps, index cards, and hot glue gun sticks. What supplies do your kids burn through?

1. “Yay, a vocabulary section!” - actual thing Agnes said as we were setting these up. And yes, some notebooks are actually labeled “word horde” - the Mongols are some people around here’s Roman Empire.

2. It’s Latin quiz bowl, in case you were unsure just how nerdy we are.

3. Not surprising since I wrote something on a similar theme many years, many children ago.

4. Kind of related, I recently read A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace’s essay collection that includes the one on television - despite being a xennial, I hadn’t read any DFW before, not even the famous commencement speech. It really illustrated, I thought, how much allegedly new media is actually an extension of old media.