The Grammar Commando Takes the Stage

When I was a kid, all the cool homeschooled kids did the spelling bee. Some of them even went national. I never did this, despite a significant natural aptitude for spelling. (This is completely a gender-linked trait in my family. None of the male members of the family can spell at all, while all the women are pretty good at it. However, the guys can fix washing machines, and on the whole, my life would probably be better if I could drop the spelling of "pusillanimous," a word I have never used except right now, and replace it with information on how to operate a socket wrench.) When we played Huggermugger, a word game with a heavy spelling component, my siblings would refuse to tell me the word I had to spell correctly: they would just read the definition and then I had to guess what the word was *and* spell it correctly. I thought this unfair, as it was the only game I could win. But I still got it right every time, so I didn't protest too much.

This week, DOB found me the chance to take spelling onto a slightly wider stage, as the local adult literacy group has a spelling bee as an annual fundraiser and his Rotary club was sponsoring a team. It was only a very slightly wider stage, and there were eleven three-person teams on it, on a very hot May night in a community college theater built in the good old Washington tradition of "Air conditioning? Who needs air conditioning?" The ice ran out before the eighth round.

Many of the other teams had themes and costumes and banners and special cheers, like the "Beeutifuls" the "Trio in Bee Sharp," the "Bee Gees" (complete with disco ball) and the "Spellz Angelz." Our team had the uninspiring name of "The Bee-Wheres." However, good spelling and good costuming were apparently not correlated, as in the final round it came down to us and another Rotary club with the slogan "We Bee Ducks" and fuzzy yellow headbands. (I don't get it either. But, they could really spell. In fact, their main speller kept correcting the pronouncer.)

My great triumph of the evening was "parricidal," a word passed on by two previous teams, including the ominous Ducks, because nobody had asked to have it defined. Once I knew it was "pertaining to the killing of a close relative" the spelling was obvious, but everyone else had been thinking of parasites. However, I went down in flames on "ciguatera," a tropical disease caused by fish poison. (The words to hope for at the end are the really long ones with lots of Latin roots. Get an obscure short word from India or Brazil and you're sunk.)

So, we came in second, but it was still a lot of fun, and it even counted as a date night although we spent the whole evening at opposite ends of a crowded room, most of the time unable even to exchange significant glances because the Trio in Bee Sharp and Spellz Angelz were in the front two rows.

And while I'm feeling inspired, let me point out a spelling error that I've been seeing a lot of online lately.

This is satire:

This is a satyr:



See? Not the same thing. Also, it took me awhile to find an image of a satyr suitable for this blog. Those dudes have a reputation to maintain, and they work hard to maintain it. 

DOB was gratified not to be called up as an alternate on the team--his spelling is solid for ordinary purposes but not at the competitive level--but he is volunteering for team theme design next year. His thought is to call them the "Spell Casters" and have everyone dressed as wizards, including one dressed as Gandalf who, whenever another team tries to use their one free pass on a word, stands up and shouts, "You . . . shall . . . not . . . pass!"

Stress and Motherhood

A survey is showing that three kids is the most stressful number to have, and after that it's easier. Since that is what my mother always told me, I will not complain to much about the lack of meaningful statistics given. She had cause to notice, having spread seven children out over nearly two decades. (I was the magic stress-reducing fourth child, too, so that may be significant.) I also noticed my stress level go down significantly when we went from three to four children, probably because I spent the whole time in between in labor.

This has not been enough to entice me to further exploits--not that an extra child would be so hard, it's the acquisition process I no longer have the stomach for (quite literally). Also, it was enough of a challenge finding a vehicle that would fit four kids and a wheelchair. Upgrading is not really an option.

But, I definitely believe I am less stressed than mothers with three, or two, or maybe even one child. There are so many things that just don't matter once you realize you don't have time or energy for them any more. I saw one mother write about how she found it so freeing to be reassured that "As long as your children are fed, clean, clothed, and loved, you are doing a good job." And I thought: clean? clothed? Why? Fed, yes. You can't get away without feeding them, although here economies of scale come in. Clean and clothed are definitely optional.

Or again, a lovely mother of one little girl posted on Facebook about the challenges of getting stains out of socks. And I thought: stains? socks? What are those?

Also, once you have four you have hit critical mass for playmates--chances are anybody can find somebody to play with at any given time. 

There are stressful things, like looking at the grocery cart and bill and imagining what they will look like with four teenagers. I try not to think about that. It's too noisy around here to think, anyway. I'm getting very good about not thinking about things. Which is, I suspect, the key to a low-stress life. 

Rethinking Mother's Day

I am painfully conscious of the awkwardness of me writing this post, but, alas, that will not stop me.

It's about Mother's Day.

I have seen churches where it is a kind of competition, with the mothers standing up and prizes handed out to those with the most or the oldest or the youngest. This, understandably, has been criticized as cruel to the bereaved or barren.

Our current church, trying to be more mindful of the variety of human experience, recognizes *all* the women at once. I understand the sentiment, but I don't really see the point. Why call it Mother's Day, then? It's like having all citizens be recognized on Veteran's Day.

But I think both approaches misunderstand the holiday. (For one thing, why is this part of church? Isn't church supposed to be about, well, God? But that's another post.)

No, we're even missing the point of having Mother's Day. Did you know the woman who brought Mother's Day about as a recognized holiday, Anna Jarvis, did not have children? Mother's Day was never about claiming honor as a mother. It was about giving honor to our mothers.

Back in the day, as my grandmother taught me, everybody got a corsage on Mother's Day. Red if your mother was alive. White if she was dead--because loss is also universal. It wasn't about a status some people had achieved and other people hadn't. It was about being grateful for the tremendous gift of existence.

Not everyone gets to be a mother, but everyone had a mother. Someone's body nourished yours before you even knew you existed. Someone risked her life to give you yours, and will always bear the marks of it. Someone (maybe someone else) put food in your mouth when you still didn't know what your hands were, taught you to use food and the toilet. Maybe they did it badly, even cruelly, yet still they gave you the moon and the stars and that is something to be thankful for.

Perhaps if our focus on Mother's Day was outward, on gratitude and not status, we could better share it without slighting anyone.

Bad Parenting Confession

At Easter, the ducklings got bags of candy from the church Easter egg hunt. In a fit of hurried Easter cleaning, I tucked them out of the way up high in their closet, intending to get back to them later. We do not take a Wonka Sr. approach to candy, but we do try to dole it out very slowly and, in the past, under supervision.

Then I sort of forgot about the candy, or at least it sifted down to the very large receptacle in my brain labeled, "Things I Really Ought To Do Something About One of These Days." Until one day I was tidying up their room (let's not go into THAT parenting question) and came across a sizable stash of candy wrappers. Evidently they had not forgotten about them. So then I thought perhaps I really should address it except I wasn't quite sure how. They hadn't eaten all the candy, so evidently they were not consuming it recklessly, I hadn't expressly forbidden the candy, and mostly I just really didn't want to be bothered with it.

I continued taking the blind-eye approach until I saw the boys dashing past me outside with something in their mouths. This raised two red flags in my mind--one being that actively hiding something from parents is a different category from not bothering to mention it, the second being that just possibly they were eating something dangerous from outside (though on reflection, the latter was very unlikely). So I made them tell me what they were eating and assured them that it was fine--eating a piece or two of candy once a day was not going to hurt them, just not to bother me about it.

No such luck. Immediately, and ever since, I have been barraged with questions. Can you get the bags down? My bag is out and everyone else still has some! How many can we eat? Can we eat this kind?

I kind of wish I had just let them keep hiding it.

It's time for a post

Because if I don't post, then all the posts I thought-about-but-didn't-make pile up deeper, and get muddled together, like the papers on my desk, and the bookcase, and the other bookcase, and the pictures of epic battles of merfolk get muddled up with the natural gas statement and the traffic ticket (ouch) and a rough draft of a map for the next role-playing adventure.

And then I never get around to recording the way the oven thermometer that exploded and destroyed the roast chicken, or how much I love spring coming because the ducklings play outside after supper--even in the rain--instead of jumping on the couches, or my mixed feelings about having work or not having work, or my brilliant insights on an issue I have since forgotten (that one must have sifted off onto the floor and gotten thrown away).

So now I have posted and we can think of it as a clear slate and the next time something drifts through my brain I can actually post about it instead of about not posting.

Now if I could just do the same for my desk.

Teaching to the Test

The Duchess turned 8 before this school year began, which means she has met the minimum school age in our state and must complete a standardized test every year. This isn't shown to anybody so it always has seemed a rather pointless requirement, but it is the law and if it makes them feel better, it is no great burden to us. Especially not now that (as I discovered) you can just get them done online. As far as Duchess was concerned, it was a freebie 3 hours of computer time she didn't have to earn. So what if it was all bland multiple choice questions?

When I was a kid, this was our big social event of the year, as we went down to our church's Christian school and did them in the nursery. We didn't usually actually do them with the class--that would have taken too long and we were always impatient--but we could go out at recess and play with the other kids. Also we got cooler snacks than usual. It was still very low-key--in fact, we often graded the results ourselves, or I graded them for the younger kids once I was done with mine. One year Rocketboy tested with the first and second grade class (I'm not sure why, he shouldn't have needed to take them yet--maybe just to keep him out of the way?) and brought home the chicken pox. That was most unfair to the rest of us, who being considerably older suffered far worse than he did.

I have mixed feelings about standardized tests. On the one hand, they pretty handily demonstrate all that is most wrong about systematized, impersonal, factory-model education. And building curriculum on the basis of scoring well on these tests is about the best guarantee of creating a curriculum that would bore anyone to tears.

On the other hand, they just don't seem that hard to me. Mind-blowingly dull, yes. But not hard. If you can read and think clearly, it's not that difficult to score well. And you don't have to be teaching to the test to teach reading and thinking.

Still, this was my first encounter as the teacher and I was a wee bit nervous. Especially about math. And grammar. I don't hold to the standard methods or sequence for teaching those subjects. Duchess has never done a page out of a math or grammar workbook. She reads a lot, she writes (or copies) a lot, we do lots of mental math and real-life problems and math games, but I have never shown her how to do multi-digit math problems on paper, or taught her the rules for comma usage, and I knew the test would be full of that sort of thing. Not that it mattered. But still. I figured we had reading comprehension and vocabulary and spelling covered, but everything else was up in the air. Mostly I didn't want to shake her confidence that she was good at math and that it was fun, and standardized tests are designed to have problems that are too difficult. Or there might have been a little bit of fear that I was teaching it all wrong. Maybe.

She did get a little concerned when she saw multiple-digit multiplication and other things she had never encountered before, but I told her to just think it through as best she could and give it her best guess. And she did. And it worked--in fact, she was off the chart in math concepts and way up in computation, despite never having done long division in her life. Grammar was the lowest, but even so she did fine, on the rather simple principle of "what looks right."

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming of making up word searches, designing historic paper dolls, and jumping off the bed.

Teachable Moments

For the last few game nights with the kids, we've been playing a role playing game I developed--basically a very streamlined version of GURPS set in the Olympics. They are all loving it, and the twins have finally overcome their fear of combat and were enthusiastically taking actions to take down a hungry cougar. Dot (a lizard) decided to jump on his tail to distract him, while Dash (a child) started digging frantically (he has been very fond of his shovel) and found several pails of water (why not? it was a beach and we are always losing pails there), which he then used to hit the cougar on the nose. This involves a lot of rolling and counting up dice, and taking away hit points when they are injured, and adding them on when they find healing herbs, so besides being a lesson in natural history and divergent thinking, it's a great math activity.

The next day, Dash was sitting more-or-less quietly while I read out loud to the older kids, until I noticed what he had drawing. On both sides of two sheets of paper, he had drawn recognizable scenes of his four favorite Magic: The Gathering characters and was conducting duels between them.

We may have the world's geekiest preschool curriculum.