Ralph II

We had a wasp problem a couple of weeks ago, & you know what they say about lemonade...We decided to adopt a pet wasp...

We found the little guy crawling on the carpet, & by some divine stroke of personality-changing miracle-potion-ness, I caught him instead of killing him.

Even killing wasps is so far outside my comfort zone, I think my genes must have done that splicey thing where you get super powers. Obviously, since I then went completely round the bend.

We watched as "Ralph" sat beside us on the carpet, trying to sting his jar—isn't that cute, we sighed. My oldest watched the new friend like a fish in a tank.

A professional bug service came the day we adopted Ralph, to take care of our wasp problem. I didn't have time to move Ralph, so I was faced with the awkward problem of trying to explain our new pet.

"I caught one," I said..."um...we're homeschoolers, see...and...I don't really like bugs, at all..."

"No problem," he says, "lots of folks do that, to show us what kind they've got."

Well lots of folks are CRAZY.

I took the kids & ran away. (But had to come back for my glasses. And then again for cash. But then we RAN.)

At last, I came home to a note that said: "I sprayed the one in the jar. Be sure to wash the jar."

RIP, Ralph. I mean, metaphorically speaking, because let's face it: we all know where wasps are going. No peace there.

On a brighter note, we'd been home to the smell of bug spray for less than 5 min, & I'd already had the adrenaline-boosting opportunity to kill ANOTHER wasp. That was #4 for me that day. Too bad the bug guy didn't leave us a tally, so we could combine scores.

Eventually, the bug guy had to come back. My husband tried a fire in the fireplace (aka Wasp Hallow). We were lucky. We did not have angry balls of wasp fire chasing us & our dear children through the house. They were not on fire. And they were a little dazed from the smoke. Otherwise, yes, there were wasps to protect the homeland.

It was my 9yo who finally found the source of the wasps in the house (as opposed to the cute colony swarming outside the house, despite the genocidal attempts of the bug guy to wipe out the innocent population).

It's been a good two weeks now, & only yesterday did we begin to be blessed with the supernatural presence of those adrenaline-boosting beings. For some crazy reason, they were crawling across the floor en masse in a creepy zombie formation.

*sigh* I guess I missed Ralph. I grabbed a jar. (If you've ever met me, you think this whole thing is a fairy tale—goblin tale, rather—& you don't believe me anyway. It's true, though, so you might as well let the strangers in blogosphere be in awe of my crazy courage. I just hide it in real life. Don't test me on this, though.)

We were out of wasp spray, so I was armed with shower spray in one hand and a mason jar in the other. I guess it was because the jar was in my right hand, which is dominant. Maybe it was really the longing for Ralph. Something overcame my natural instincts (to run) again, & the jar went over the angry yellow insect who for some reason wouldn't fly.  My heart warmed. Ralph!

And so we named him Ralph II. And so began the First Wasp Dynasty.

Ralph II isn't as smart as Ralph I. He, too, tries to sting his jar, & now that he's in it, he does fly, but when my 7yo accidentally knocked it over, the figure head refused to leave his throne, & all I had to do was tip it back on the ground.

Ralph II also has some temperance problems. My husband offered him a drink, & the poor guy died of alcohol poisoning. It's ok, though. We're a preserving kingdom, so he'll get his place on a poster, & we might even give him a trip through the Magnifying Styx River.

Ah, Ralph. And Ralph. We have loved thee...well...not all that well, actually. Perhaps we will make up for it in sonnet, & at least your name shall live on. And all your progeny shall share the blessed name.

The End.

Ralph I

Seventh grade was torture. We dissected worms. And by "we," I mean the guys in my group because I quickly assured them that I had the best handwriting & should therefore be the note-taker. Anything to not slice into a gooey dead worm.

Then there was the shark dissection. We were supposed to bring money and order either small, medium, or large-with-a-baby sharks. I found the loophole in that one, though, & simply did not order a shark. Boy was my teacher mad the day that the room was filled with the scent of formaldehyde and my precocious answer to her inquiry.

Where's your shark, Aubrey?

Like I'd brought one from home or hidden it in my backpack.

The bug project was not so easily side-stepped, though. We had to collect fifty bugs. 50 Oh, excuse me, not bugs, but insects. So spiders don't count. I lived in an apartment at the time, and despite their buggy reputation, we had little other than cockroaches and spiders. Sure, roaches count, but only once, and only if you had the guts to catch them in the first place.

Besides hunting down fifty different species of insect, we also had to kill them in such a way as to preserve their color & shape. (No squishing, vacuuming, or bug-spraying.) Then we were supposed to pin them to a board & label them. Labeling's fine with me, but piercing the hard shell of an icky dead bug was not. I figured I'd cross that bridge when I came to it.

I'd collected 5 bugs when my ratty box of insects disappeared. We were all keeping them on the back table of our science class, and until now, I'd always assumed that a custodian had thrown mine out. Considering everyone else's bugs were still there, though...I bet somebody nabbed mine & added them to their own collection!

Either way, those five bugs represented everything I'd done—all the sweat, tears, and general ICK. The project was almost due. I did the only thing I could: I went to my teacher. She was relentless. I'd have to start over. I should have taken better care of my bugs.

I negotiated: what if I did a more in-depth project, detailed drawings of each bug? What if I did 100 like this? What if I wrote reports? Anything. Just don't make me go after more bugs.

She would not negotiate. I worried for a little while, and then I realized: I'm not doing this. Period. It's yucky.  I've tried to be reasonable.

So I failed that 6 weeks of science. It was the first time I'd ever failed anything.

My mom was furious. When she heard what had happened, she decided the best consequence would be to make me collect & label bugs for her. She was always a homeschooler at heart. I cried over the torture of it for about a week. By then, though, she'd had to take me out looking for bugs. She liked bugs about as much as I did, so when she stopped mentioning it, so did I.

Until last week, I'd caught 5 bugs in my whole life, all of them for 7th grade science. I'm 30-something now, and my kids have mysteriously fallen in love with the hobby of catching grasshoppers in the backyard. For a recent science project, they were bringing in leaves for us to identify, press, and label, but one had a bug on it.

It was a pretty cool bug. A yellow-striped beetle-looking thing. I happen to have mason jars sitting around, one of the few things that have been unpacked since we moved last month. I looked up how to kill bugs for collecting, but it turns out, you don't need the freaky cotton ball soaked in stinky stuff. (I can't remember what we used in 7th grade.) You just throw the mason jar in the freezer for a couple of days, & voila! Dead bug.

So yesterday when my 3yo began crying about a bug in the hallway...well...it was pretty easy to scoop him into a mason jar. So he's in my freezer now, too. Just an average ugly black beetle. Maybe a click beetle.

Today we caught a moth. It was trying to get out the window & scaring the kids, so it really needed to be dealt with somehow. So what if he's in the freezer?

It's funny how life comes back on you like this. I guess I could say homeschooling is its own punishment? Or curiosity breeds courage? But I haven't had to go after one cockroack, and nobody's stealing my collection. Plus, it's a group project. If I get too wigged out, I've got a 9yo boy. He thinks icky bugs are pretty awesome. He's hoping for a dissection. ICK!

Learning By Hand

I managed a garden this summer, for the first time in my life. Well…I should clarify…I helped the kids plant some seeds indoors and then transplant them outside. Since then, I have allowed (and sometimes reminded) them to go and water the plants. They have weeded, nursed, and made friends with the zucchini, squash, potatoes, corn, tomatoes, peppers, and other living things out in the triple digit Texas heat.

But I’ll take credit.

I’ve also started cooking more from scratch in the past year and a half. My husband has a mild wheat allergy and a more serious milk allergy, and we finally pulled all of those things from his diet, which for me, meant learning to cook all over again. Or…for the first time, maybe.

There are things in life that we learn from books, like math and reading and history. There are things, though, that can only be really learned from other people. Recipes are printed out of order, with ingredients lined up at the top, as if they were to be plopped right in the bowl, only to be followed by instructions that say, “Wait.” Oops.

I have always found the things that are learned from people too difficult, too disorganized, too overwhelming to learn. Books about gardening are worse than cookbooks. I’ve got my seeds and some dirt, and they start with a more complex scientific experiment than anything in Advanced High School Chemistry: something about the pH balance of dirt.

I give up at step one. Or I skip it and give up at step two: Advanced Geography. I’m planting in a region, and I have to find out which one. Which season, which region, what kind of dirt, and after all that, the seeds I’ve got are wrong or outdated or need to be organic, heirloom, sentimental, royal, something-or-other. My kids look up with sad, dirt-streaked faces when I say, “Oops. Our dirt molded.”

“Does that matter, Mama?” I have no idea.

So what changed this year? I think it was the impetus of feeding my allergic husband something other than salad. I decided to start small, with just one strange kind of flour, one recipe. I bought him a loaf of bread, and I made a batch of cookies. I checked GFCF cookbooks out of the library, and I bought one more kind of flour, made one more batch of something non-wheat.

I realized I couldn’t use cream of anything in any recipe, since those cans are filled with smooth mixtures of wheat flour and milk. Bit by bit, I built up what I knew, but I wasn’t reading a book with a twelve step program, like my linear brain prefers. It was more of a spiral, a process of trial and error, as my hands learned to cook. Now I can look in the refrigerator, see a cauliflower that needs to be used, and just leave it to my hands. My head gets in the way.

Hands chop, melt butter, add rice, mix it all with chicken, and surprise! I’ve got a cauliflower-rice casserole, despite the hours of fretting my brain did, to no avail.

Gardening has been the same way. I skipped the instructions, a method that works well for me, since hands and brain seem to lack communication. We just planted. Our peas died, and our squash ruled one side of the garden, to the dwarfing of the peppers. The kids wanted to plant “real” cantaloupe seeds, which I knew would never work. Instead of stopping them, though, or trying to find the answers at the hardware store or in a book, we made it a science experiment, and we planted the seeds from the melon we ate at one end of the garden, and the seeds from the packet we’d bought at the other end.

Both grew, but the ones from the melon we ate were bigger and heartier. So we planted lemon seeds from a lemon, without bothering to read books about seed preparation. We’ve got tiny lemon plants in the window sill.

As we encounter plants that won’t grow, bugs, and brown spots, we look for answers, ask questions, read books. When our cantaloupe cannibalized our tomatoes and then peeked out from tomato cages like overgrown tomatoes–as if we can’t tell the difference–we laughed. When my three-year-old later mistook a jalapeno for a tomato and grinned as she swiped it but later cried, “Whew! I almost nearly died!” we laughed again.

As we weave our own stories about plants we are getting to know on a first-name basis, we find more of the information making sense, and so we know a little more. Our hands are learning to cook and grow, so that next year, instead of brains too full to know where to begin, our hands bear memory that will grow squash, if nothing else.

With confidence, now, we’re following the spiral, learning how much information we can contain before we let our hands try, like little pots that can only hold so much water. Then we plant and cook, and ask again. The information seeps in, past too-linear brains, to hands that have learned the feel of dirt, the rhythm of sauce, a kind of knowledge our brains still cannot explain, but which is passed relationally, from one friend to another, grandfather to grandson, neighbor to neighbor.

In the freedom to try and fail, it has been not only squash and sweet potatoes that have blossomed, but curiosity and courage as well.

The Shoot-Out

My husband died last week in a shoot-out with Shoshone Indians on the Oregon Trail, and while it doesn’t seem to be bothering anyone else (including my husband), I find myself brooding over the situation as I put away laundry and wash dishes.

We were approached by six Shoshone Indians on horseback. There were seven of us, and we panicked. Well, the kids did. One of them wanted to start shooting right away. The other convinced him to call their grandparents.

The reasoning was quite rational. It went like this: you can’t outrun them. You’ve got oxen and a wagon. If you try to talk to them, and they’re “fierce,” you won’t have a chance to get to your guns. So the safest, most logical thing to do was shoot.

And they did.

Yeah, we were pretending. But my kids still chose to shoot at innocent strangers rather than talk first. They were caught up in the simulation, I know. In real life we don’t even own any guns, and we never shoot strangers. I’m taking it too seriously, I’ve been told.

But I played the simulation with my husband before the kids began. I knew that the situation could be gotten out of with a friendly conversation and a gift. Like most things in life, if we will use our words, we will have less trouble.

The “guns” we shot were just rolls of the dice. The Indians were make-believe. Nobody got hurt, not really. “But,” I asked them, “who were these men you killed? Brothers? Fathers? Husbands?” And even now I want to weep. Because I know that these imaginary people in a history simulation represent real people who were killed just as senselessly as my sweet children rolled the dice.

Yes, it seemed safer to just shoot. In many ways, it often seems safer to just shoot. Then we don’t have to worry about understanding other people, being hurt, risking ourselves in an attempt to cross the chasm between one human heart and another.

But I believe in stepping away from my guns and risking my life to cross the prairie to a stranger, hand held out in friendship. It doesn’t sound like much, not shooting strangers for fear they’ll shoot you first, but sometimes…when you’ve run out of food and outrun cholera and winter’s approaching…sometimes life is hard, and it’s easy to think only of survival. In those difficult, stretched-to-the-point-of-breaking times, that’s when we really choose Who to follow, and survival was not a message He preached.

My husband and I have a strict policy of non-intervention with this simulation. We let them buy the snake oil from Professor Thaddeus P. Farnsworth and get sick trying it. We let them bring the silverware and every spare part a wagon could need, even though that meant bringing less food. We giggled but said nothing when they decided to buy oxen instead of donkeys, since that meant they wouldn’t have to bring donkey food. We knew those oxen would come to places where the grass was too scarce to eat, would pull the wagon too slowly and leave them fighting blizzards and avalanches.

We let them decide to shoot the Indians, too.

The simulation does not teach you what to think. It’s merely fact, choices, odds, dice. If you try to outrun the Indians, they’ll ride beside you and laugh. If you try to talk to them, they’ll trade with you. If you shoot them, they’ll shoot back. The impetus to give meaning to these outcomes is on us as teachers.

I’ve told the kids what I think: they killed innocent people. But you can see in their faces that the information does not register, not really. They think they went left when they should have gone right, made an error of judgment. They don’t see the deeper significance. They don’t see that these six characters represented real people.

So we’re reading about Native Americans for the next few weeks. We’ve learned that the Hopis are a subgroup of the Pueblo Indians, and my son is fascinated by the pueblos they built. We’ve read If You lived With the Sioux Indians and learned about some of the things they made from bison. We’re working our way around the continent with crafts from More Than Moccasins, and more books and films that are on hold at the library now.

My son said to me this week, “Wow. The Indians are really interesting. They’re like real people!”

Almost all my kids knew about Native Americans came from Little House on the Prairie, and I failed to realize it sooner. I’d dutifully pointed out the racist passages that that book contains as they were reading through it, we discussed them, and we kept reading.

When presented with a group of Shoshone Indians, though, and grandparents who suggested they might be “fierce,” I asked them, “Are they? Are these Indians ‘fierce?’”

My daughter quoted Ma’s objections to Indians and my objections to Ma’s racism.

“So what does that mean?” I asked.

“That means I don’t know,” she said.

We will be reading about the Shoshone next week and about Sacajawea and her baby, her joy over being reunited with her older brother, a relationship my two take very seriously and so will relate with deeply. When we do, then then they will weep. Because then they will know who they killed at Independence Rock.

How to Teach Writing

Writing has long been one of the most feared and most hated subjects in school. Honestly? I think that’s true for public, private, AND home educators. I believe part of the reason for this is a hyper-focus on grammar & punctuation balanced by only a vague picture of what makes good writing good. Properly placed periods never made bad writing good, and good writing is only improved by such formalities. I love perfect punctuation & clear grammar, but it is no reason to make a student cry.

Writing is about two things: vivid detail and strong voice. My two older children and I finished reading Across Five Aprils today, and while we already knew the ending–that President Lincoln would be assassinated and would not in fact be the beacon of hope for the wounded nation that the main character so longed for him to be–the actual description of the loss made it so much more personal, so much more devastating, that my son and I wept for a loss we had known but never tasted. The detail was vivid.

In students’ writing, we must remind them to use all of their senses, or they will forget that the greatest beauty of homemade bread is the smell of it cooking and the way that its smell reaches inside you and grasps your heart like the hand of a loved one. They will forget that its taste is not flavor alone but texture, and remembering the airy lightness of a special bread made by Grandpa, who passed last year, can be like suddenly smelling his aftershave on the air. Remembering the sticky hardness of a bite taken before news of sudden loss, the feeling of it sticking in your throat as you struggle to swallow it past the grief brings back so much more than just the taste or the texture of the bread.

Strong voice is not as simple as reminding students to use their five senses. This aspect must be developed over time by asking students, “And what do YOU think about that?” It’s not that our personal opinions are more important than facts but that our opinions, feelings, and reactions are human, and ultimately, when we read, we are looking for human connections.

One of my students once wrote about how he decided to become a dentist, perhaps an unusual career ambition for a sixteen-year-old kid, but otherwise a typical writing assignment with its mundane response. Except his wasn’t. He wrote about being in a car accident, regaining consciousness, and immediately feeling for his teeth. He wrote so passionately about his teeth that I was laughing out loud, and I will never forget his essay.

When the humanity of the writer, with all of his or her foibles, eccentricities, pain, rage, laughter, and passion, comes through on the printed page, this is strong voice. Leave the reader laughing or leave him crying, and your story will never leave him.

Teaching the humanity of the voice of the writer and convincing a student that the image in his head is not on the paper of course is more blood, sweat, and tears than it is lovely philosophy.

One way to begin this process is by listening—let the student read his work to you, so that you are not distracted by his spelling or grammar errors.

Focus on content and big ideas the first time through, and immediately find something to praise, preferably two to three things. Give concrete examples of what the student did well—I like how much detail you gave about the dinosaur! This kind of compliment sits deeper with anyone, as it comes across more sincerely and serves as a measuring stick by which the student can remember that he is a good writer, but it’s also a subtle example of how to write. In your praise, you are demonstrating vivid detail.

Next, ask the student if there’s anything he’d change about his finished product if he could. Mine usually take several minutes with very serious faces to read back over what they’ve written while I actively bite my tongue. Listen, and either agree or disagree with his assessment, but remember that his feelings are involved. Writing is personal. You will always have greater success teaching a student who believes he can complete the task you’ve assigned than one who’s convinced he’ll fail before he even starts, so be gentle!

Finally, add a suggestion of your own. This is different from a correction. It’s an interested request for more information or guidance in reading. For example, you could say,

“I sure would like to know more about that dinosaur. I wonder what color he is. Imagine what he smells like! Try to use ALL five of your senses when you’re describing. Except…don’t lick the dinosaurs!” (See—no hurt feelings here.)

Never give more than two or at the most three suggestions. It’s overwhelming, and it’s too much information to remember anyway. The goal is to give the child a sense of pride in his work and the feeling that he’s good at this and can do even better next time. The simple change between believing that one can write and believing that it’s too hard produces dramatic results in itself.

Suggestions should be given according to importance. The most important thing about a piece of writing is NOT punctuation or grammar but coherence. After all, how long can you continue reading something you don’t understand? It’s a painful activity! If the writing is incoherent, ask the student questions to try to draw him out, and make notes of his answers, so that he can see how he might compose a better response in the future.

Second in importance is how focused & clear the writing is. Does the student respond to the assignment? Does he stay on topic? Does he support his ideas well? You may understand all of his ideas, but if he jumps around from one topic to another so much that you feel as if you’re suffering from mental whiplash, you might want to spend some time talking to him about his main ideas, making outlines, and filtering supporting details from rabbit trails. Again, though, be gentle:

“Wow! That’s really interesting information you included here about Australia. And I’d love to know more about the House Finch. But…I’m wondering what those have to do with dinosaurs?” There’s usually a silent pause here, followed by laughter as the student realizes his own mistake. If he defends his choices, though, be prepared to hear him out and offer suggestions for either writing separate papers about Australia and House Finches or changing the topic of the paper to illustrate the student’s understanding of the connection between these three topics. You may just be lucky enough to get a rare and beautiful peek into the mind of your child.

Only after the big things listed above are in order should we worry about grammar and punctuation. The good news? Some of those grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors will likely be self-edited by the student along the way.

This is where you could tell a student to watch out for sentence fragments or explain comma splices, my personal favorite piece of punctuation. However, if you see that basic grammar and punctuation are a problem but the big issues are not in order, you should make a note of the grammar problems and address them in grammar class, when his feelings and writing are not at stake. Teaching grammar within the natural context of writing can be overwhelming if approached too soon. I imagine that it feels like juggling to the student–remembering good spelling, punctuation, capitalization, topic sentences, content–it’s enough to leave grad students in tears! I think it’s best to keep the grammar separate from writing until the writing is so good that the grammar IS the biggest issue.

One final note. It’s easy to get bogged down with writing and feel as if you’re slogging through endless trenches of Nowhere, whether you’re student or teacher. Make sure to keep samples of students’ work so that you can both go back and look at the progress you’re making together. The difference between a piece of writing produced at the beginning of the school year and one produced in the middle or especially at the end, is the best piece of encouragement anyone can offer.

Ode to Old Green Beans

I have loved thee long, green beans, though not well,

Since thy days in darkness I have squandered,

Seeking other, fresher goods from the dell,

While thou, waiting, hoping, my love pondered.

Long hast thou lived in the stank repose of death:

Thou hast seen holidays and merriment

Beyond the fleeting dreams of life’s stale breath,

More than legumes before you ere they went!

But today the dirge is finally sung,

Thy plastic coffin I joylessly rend:

It looks as though thou wilt again be young

In the fungal afterlife without end.

Green beans, string beans, I will remember you

Until trash be taken, whilst your smell I rue.

The Gift of Story

I'm a story-teller—a reader, a writer. While Prufrock is measuring his life with coffee spoons, I measure mine with stories. The ones I tell, like birth stories and the loss of my father, and the ones that I read, from Mrs. Piggle Wiggle to Faulkner.

For a long time, I looked forward to having and homeschooling children because of the stories we’d share. I remembered the deep-down rapture of Charlotte’s Web and the magic of Narnia, and it was like the smell of baking brownies inside me—the tantalizing aroma of a good story waiting to be shared in a way that you can’t as a child, when language is still relatively new and in a way that you don’t in college classrooms, where E. B. White and L’Engle are too humble to grace the pages of a syllabus.

My oldest is nine. He’s read a lot, and for the most part, it’s been of a higher quality than what I’d read at his age. I haven’t read most of the books he’s reading, and he’s just on the cusp of the ones I remember loving most. Next year, I’m planning to give him A Wrinkle in Time because I read it when I was ten, and I think it has been my favorite story ever since.

We have not yet shared stories in the way I’d always imagined, and my son is old enough that this has recently begun to bother me. I read Charlotte’s Web aloud a couple of years ago like my second grade teacher read it aloud to my class when I was a child. I pre-read Carry on, Mr. Bowditch and then challenged my sensitive son to read it despite the grief and loss within its pages.

My husband and I have each taken a turn reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and I finally found a copy of an out-of-print mystery that was my mother’s when she was little. Three generations of my family have loved The Ghost of Dibble Hollow now.

My point is that we do share stories. The Secret Garden, Peter Pan, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, to name a few more. But the sharing that has happened? It reminds me of sitting on the back porch with my dad when I was a little girl. I’d catch frogs while he looked at the stars, and he would tell me, “Listen.”

“Listen to what?” I’d ask, but he would only say, “Shh. Listen.” And I would listen to the sounds of the night, straining to hear beyond them to whatever deeper thing it was that Dad was listening to, until I became distracted again by frogs and we were called in from the supernatural to the mundane.

I’d expected sharing stories and midnight talks with my children to feel like that, but I hadn’t seen it yet through my dad’s eyes. I’d expected to feel the magic the way I’d felt it as a child and to experience my children’s reactions to it firsthand.

Whatever is going on inside their brains and hearts, though, is theirs. It comes to me in bits and pieces, as they try to patch together the words I insist they share, but their feelings are filtered through language that is fresh. Instead of the child enrapt in the wonder of a brand new story, I am the teacher now, the parent, the voice pleading under the stars that little bodies be still for a moment and listen.