Blown Away By Beethoven

Asa took a piano class at the homeschool resource center last term, they brought in little electronic keyboards and learned some music theory, started to learn to read music, etc. At the end of the term they had a little recital and she played a short piece, it was her 2nd piece of music that she's ever played with two hands. One kid at the recital played a version of Beethoven's 5th, and she fell in love with it and asked me if I could get a copy of the music.

In the week after her class got out, she taught herself to play this. Given that she doesn't fully read music, had never played chords before, and barely knew how to play with two hands, I'm more or less blown away by her playing. Check it out for yourself!!!



Watching her work on this reminded me of something our karate sensei said about diligence, that people who appear to have great talent are sometimes thought to just have a gift, for things to just come easily to them. But in reality such people also work very very hard at what they do, and their success is equally, if not even more driven by their diligence and hard work as by their raw talent. Watching her play this, it would be easy to assume that she is just very musically gifted. Well, of course she is. We've known that since she was an infant and started matching tones and notes with her wee little voice. But she also works very very very very hard at this stuff. Wayne was going nuts with how many times a day she was playing this piece, and I had to remind him that there are thousands of parents out there who would kill for their child to WANT to practice their piano music two dozen times a day. I did count one day, she played this song 27 times. Not all at once. Sometimes she sits down and plays it through several times. Sometimes she would go up to her room and play it on the "pipe organ" setting on her synthesizer keyboard and laugh maniacally like the Phantom of the Opera. Sometimes she would play it and only play each note once (even if the note repeated she would only play it once) and hold each note out really long. None of these are any kind of structured methodology, just her playing around and really having fun with her music.

I have no idea if music will eventually be her life's career, but I absolutely love to see her passion for it, her drive to perfect it, and the completely free way that she approaches it. Today I heard her singing upstairs and she had gotten out the music for the Broadway version of Beauty and the Beast and was simply singing through all of the songs. She doesn't think of this as "practice" and isn't in any way coerced to do this. It's just who she is and what she does. And I for one am totally in awe of her.

Thoughts On the Other Side of the World

We're back from our week of camping, kayaking, and adventure (for Mackenzie and I) and another great experience with Missoula Children's Theatre (for Asa). But before I delve into photos of our fun time, I wanted to take the chance to share with you my sister and brother-in-law's blog, East Meets West.

In the time that we were away in the sagebrush side of our state, the aftermath of the elections in Iran have been unfolding on the other side of the world. Since my brother-in-law is from Tehran and much of his family lives here, these events are no longer just news stories for our family, but involve the lives of real people who share many of the same dreams that we do - to freely elect their leaders, to have the rights of self-determination. Not only do Marisa and Nickrooz share their wonderful photos and description of their latest trip to Iran on their blog, but I hope you can take the time to read their insights into what is going on in Iran right now and how important it is that we support the people of Iran and not just think of them in terms of a few stereotypes.

It Is With A Heavy Heart

That I write this blog post. Asa's beloved almost 2 y.o. cat Bandit died two days ago of antifreeze poisoning. It was the most horrible thing I've ever had to go through with an animal, bar none. We still don't know where he got it from, after looking under every car within blocks, it's a mystery (and one that still keeps me nervous for our other kitties.)

Asa is, of course, just devastated. She and this cat were so close, he was her best buddy and her first real true close pet companion. In all my years, I've never lost a pet that wasn't in old age, so this is all pretty shocking and hard to take. My heart is so heavy, especially for Asa, and for Garfield, Bandit's brother and constant companion. Bandit was just the sweetest most loving kitty you can imagine. I used to call him "Bandito the Sweeto", and the morning of his death he came and sat on my lap and gave me the full purr treatment. He just adored Asa, she could carry him around like a sack of potatoes and he would just love it.

I can't believe he's gone. More than that, I can't believe that an incredible toxin (just about 100% fatal to cats, and with huge fatalities in dogs, wildlife, and humans as well) is still just out there in everybody's car, garage, etc. I had no idea. I can't believe I had no idea. I'm still processing this all and finding out about things like bills that have been introduced to even just make the stuff taste bitter so animals and kids won't drink it (why this has not happened yet is simply beyond my comprehension.). I'm sure you haven't heard the last of my thoughts on this matter, but right now we're all just grieving.

R.I.P. Bandito the Sweeto.

Looking It Up

A friend recently gave us an awesome two-volume set of the ENTIRE Oxford English dictionary. Normally this takes up many volumes, but this set has been miniaturized so that the entire thing fits into two hefty books, with four regular-sized pages condensed onto each page. Reading it requires a magnifying glass, but it's completely fascinating. It gives the first known print references for every word imaginable, and many words you've never even heard of. The kids have been having fun just paging through and looking up new and unusual words.

I think we'll have to have some friends over and play "Fictionary", a game we used to play at family camp when I was a kid, which is the no-cost predecessor to boxed games like Balderdash. One person looks up a word that nobody knows. Each person then makes up a definition for that word and writes it down on a piece of paper, while the person with the dictionary writes down the real definition. Then you vote on which one you think is the real one. We had many hilarious nights playing this game at camp, but you need a really extensive dictionary to play it, especially with highly literate players.

According to the publishers, it would take a single person 120 years to type the 59 million words of the Oxford English Dictionary, 60 years to proofread it, and 540 megabytes to store it electronically

Day of Dissection

As I mentioned awhile ago, one of our homeschooling friends set up a GREAT activity. She has a neighbor who is a retired neurosurgeon, researcher, and professor at USC medical school who volunteered to dissect cow's eyeballs with some of the older homeschoolers (who knew you could order cow eyeball dissection kits on the internet!). Mackenzie was very excited about this, especially since he's been thinking a bit more about maybe going into biology or medicine.

It was a really interesting activity. Not having done any dissection before, it was all new for the kids, but they got a lot of great information from their mentor and it really was fascinating stuff. Mackenzie wasn't sure ahead of time whether or not it would gross him out, but he really enjoyed himself. Cutting the tissues was quite difficult, but when it came to slicing away the lens and the iris, he found that all fascinating. I can't imagine how difficult it would be to be a surgeon working with such delicate tissues, and trying not to slice them all up. I call this Mackenzie's "mad scientist" look...

The lens was very hard, almost like a marble, but some of that comes from the preserving of the tissue. The backs of the eyeballs are reflective, like many animals, to aid in night vision. They looked irridescent, almost like an abalone shell.


Of course, no dissection is complete without some hijinks with the finished product.


















One of the moms volunteered to lead a fun activity for the younger crowd. They designed containers using straws to drop eggs in, then dropped them from various heights and recorded whether or not they broke. Then they put on a skit for the rest of us when the dissections were complete. All in all, it was a very cool activity day. As the kids get older and more and more really interesting opportunities open up to them, homeschooling just gets more and more fun.

Chapter 345 of Unschooling Adventures, In Which I Become An Algebra Teacher and Assign Homework

I've been many things in my mothering career - mentor, guide, coach, and of course The Mom, but I've never been a teacher. Unschooling has allowed me to learn alongside the kids, to help the kids, to be their facilitator, but I've never had to sit down and formally teach them a lesson (a fact for which I've been profoundly grateful). It's been an exciting journey to watch their interests grow and change, to take part in their learning without having to explicitly direct it every step of the way. When I've had the chance to overhear homeschooling parents' discussions of curriculums and enforcements of study time, I've felt mildly exhausted by proxy and thanked my lucky stars that I just get to be a participant in the kids' self-directed learning adventures.

So then what's an unschooling mom to do when her son comes to her and says "Mom, I want to learn Algebra"? You see, most of the mathematics up to this point are learned organically - by doubling a recipe that includes fractions of cups, by counting allowance and figuring out how many months to save up for a special item, by helping dad measure the deck and calculating square footage of lumber. But somehow I doubt that anyone learns how to simplify polynomials organically, and negative exponents don't just fall out of thin air into one's head. In short, Algebra kind of needs to be learned in some sort of structured fashion.

Now I've never been the kind of unschooler who completely runs in horror at the notion of any kind of formal learning. I do believe that there's a time and a place for it, specifically when the kid asks for it. And my kid was asking for it. What's more, our unschooled neighbor kids were also interested in learning Algebra, so all of a sudden I had a class! Since my remembrance of all things Alegbra is sketchy at best, it was off to the library and internet for me, and finding PurpleMath.com was a real bonus, I can tell you. Alegbra for Dummies isn't a bad resource either, much better than those old textbooks that I learned from.

Coincidentally, I was going through a box of my old papers and discovered the following poem, written by me at age 13 and attached to a bunch of my old algebra homework:

Algebra (A Rime by Robin)

Addition, subtraction and others
Muddle the thoughts in my head.
And then there's fractions (oh brother!)
I wish I could just sleep instead.

This class is a bore for me
And I imagine it's the same for you
And just think of being a teacher!
Listening to this the whole day through

We look forward to the bell
With visions of food in our brains
But the school food is just plain hell
And always gives me stomach pains

So this is the end of my rhyme
I have an assignment to do
I wrote this instead of using a dime
To place a telephone call to you

Clearly, I was not enamored of Algebra at slightly older than Mackenzie's age. And I certainly wasn't begging to learn it. Moreover, I could imagine no worse fate than being an Algebra Teacher, and yet here I am. On the bright side, I could clearly do no worse than my own public school teachers at making Algebra palatable, and as a bonus I serve better lunches than the school cafeteria.

I read this poem to the kids in one of our first lessons and we were off and running. Immediately I saw the need for them to do homework or they would lose the memory of how to do this stuff from week to week. And I also saw the need to review each of the last week's lessons at the beginning of class or it also could flee from the memory cells. I do my best to keep it lively, and with only three of them I can make sure that everyone understands each lesson before we move on. That was probably the biggest disadvantage of my experiences with math in school - sometimes I didn't understand so well what we were doing and why, and no one could take the time to explain it to me.

So far we've worked our way through Factoring and Absolute Values, Exponents and the basics of Polynomials. We've memorized definitions and formulas, and it's been a real learning experience for me to go back over this stuff and realize how very little of it I actually remember! I couldn't for the life of me have told you how to calculate a negative exponent for instance. It's also been a learning experience to see the world of teaching from the other side of the blackboard.

More than that though, it's a confirmation of all that I've believed about unschooling from the start: when a need arises for more formal education, unschooled kids are motivated to pursue it. Mackenzie wants to do more complex computer and robotics programming, for which some knowledge of Algebra is essential. Lately he's also been talking seriously about wanting to go into medicine, and he knows that this will entail a science and math-heavy college load at some point in the future. Keeping in mind that I've always loved pure math, when I re-read that poem of mine I feel sad for a math experience that caused me to turn my face away from the fascinating puzzles of the Algebra world. It's a wonderful opportunity to hopefully give my kids a different kind of approach to math, one that buoys up their natural curiousity about how numbers relate to each other, and respects their own timelines for learning.

Motherhood: The Tough Job

When it comes to celebrating mothers, the standards are in place: breakfast in bed, cards telling them how wonderful they are, maybe some flowers and chocolate. And motherhood really is awesome, of course, and certainly to be celebrated. The days that each of our kids were born were two of the best days of my life. I can remember the excitement with which I greeted them, getting to meet them for the first time. Heck, I remember Wayne and I crying together over the little blue line on the pregnancy test stick.

As it turned out, Mother's Day Weekend this year was both a wonderful celebration, and a testament to how hard the job of mothering can be. My mom arrived on Friday to celebrate the weekend with us, and as we were all sitting around after dinner on Friday evening, Asa's cat Bandit came wailing up the stairs dragging his hind legs behind him in a crippled fashion. We had no idea what had happened - hit by a car? Fell out of a tree? (he's a notorious climber). We were off to the Emergency Vet, where about half of the city's population of pets also seemed to be having similar crises. After several hours there and X-rays and blood tests, we were no closer to an answer to what had happened to our kitty - no broken bones, possibly snapped tendons, possibly a blood clot, possible a spinal cord injury. The best the vet could give us was a bill for $500 and an appointment with a specialist, and some dire predictions.

I spent Friday night completely sleepless with worry. We wouldn't be able to see the specialist until Monday morning, and I had the sinking feeling that what we would be told was something along the lines of "We can do an MRI (closest feline MRI machine is 100 miles away) and this $10,000 surgery, or we can put your cat to sleep." How could we possibly make that decision? In the good old days (or bad old days if you prefer) there would simply not be this option. A cat with no working back legs would make a trip behind the woodshed with the father of the family and his trusty shotgun. Tears would be dried and that would be that. Sometimes the miracles of modern medicine come with the price of very hard decisions.

Fortunately for all of us, the little patient was on the mend and by the specialist's appointment on Monday he had regained quite a bit of strength and mobility in his hindquarters. The veterinary specialist was a wonderful guy who spent a long time going over possibilities with us. Near as we can tell, Bandit jumped out of one of his high trees and probably did some shock to his spinal cord, causing his back legs not to work. As it is healing, he's regaining his ability to stand and walk. With any luck, a few weeks of rest and he will be back to normal (and unfortunately probably back to climbing trees that he can't get out of).

Completing the Mother's Day weekend picture was a sick chicken who just kept on getting worse over the weekend. By Monday, her fate was not nearly so happy, and Wayne thankfully spared me the job of dispatching her as we were definitely NOT taking a $500 trip to the vet for the chicken, sad as that reality might be. Still, Foghorn was one of our sweeties, and the chicken who recently graced our photos in People magazine. Perhaps one of the most viewed chickens in the country, a poster-chicken for backyard poultry everywhere, she will be missed.


So it was with relief that the rest of the weekend was more along the lines of the Hallmark Holiday Mother's Day. On Saturday night, we got to go watch Asa in A Taste of Broadway, a review of different musical and dance numbers from Broadway musicals, put on by Upstart Crow, the theatre company that she has been acting with for many years now.

On Sunday, we took Mackenzie's kayak up to the lake for its first launching. My mom brought her kayak and the two of them had a grand time exploring the lake together. Although I forgot my wetsuit, I still went for a swim even though it was really a bit cold to stay in for too long. When we got back, Wayne had barbequed up a giant salmon, and my mom had brought a delicious pecan pie that she bought in an auction. All in all, a great Mother's Day, with a reminder thrown in of why we should all value our own mothers. Sometimes, unbeknownst even to the rest of the family, they take on the pain and the worrying and the hard job of holding it all together (even on no sleep.)