We are all deep in production week for Legend of the Poinsettia here. It's a time warp kind of week, because even though rehearsals aren't until the evening, somehow the whole day gets sucked away without me even seeing it happening. We also still have a lightly scheduled week because our classes at RES haven't started back up yet (though they're looming way too close and I need to prepare for the two I am teaching), and art class doesn't resume until Tuesday, either. I also spaced out on trumpet and piano lessons this week because I lost track of time because we are so off of our normal routine still. And because we had more open space than usual in our schedule, I spent time with friends who I hadn't spent a lot of time with lately due to conflicting schedules, school, proximity issues, and illness. Today we went up to see my friend Christi, who lives up near Kings Dominion, and Monday Rebecca came over to move furniture. Both of these afternoons were great, but by the time they were done, I was in a rush not to be late to the theatre and to feed everyone before a long night. There also hasn't been the catch up time in the evenings to tie up the loose ends of our work or reading for the day. Tomorrow starts the actual performances, and after watching the dress rehearsal tonight, I can say that they have a fantastic show this year. It's always great, but this year especially doesn't disappoint. I'm especially impressed with how much Frances has improved. She looks much less jerky, spends a lot less time picking at her leotard or nose or rubbing her allergy-ridden facial features, and she really has the moves down pat. She still works to weasel her way to the front of the stage no matter what she is doing, but hey, she's my kid, and I don't mind seeing more of her! She is definitely maturing more as a dancer now, and I can see promise for future roles. Each year she seems to be in more dances in this show, and for this one I think she is in around 10 numbers. There are six in the first half alone. I'm also thrilled to be playing the part of the Virgin Mary again at the Saturday afternoon performance. Unfortunately, this year there isn't a live baby. Last year's baby Jesus has aged up, and she wasn't too tiny last year and wasn't overly thrilled to be held by someone other than her mother when she was already overtired from a hectic production schedule and being away from home for days on end. The doll is probably more reliable. But I'd still prefer the real thing.

I need to get to work early tomorrow figuring out where my writing classes are and how to push us ahead in both of them at a better pace. So far we are a little less than halfway through the program that I had chosen to use, and that's fine, since we are a little less than halfway through the number of weeks I had allotted for the class with the schedule. However, I'd like for my own children, at least, to make it all the way and to get to slightly more complex writing. Because of the short time period for the class (45 minutes) and the wide range of ages and abilities and parental involvement, I've had to modify as things have gone along. I'd like to stick more closely to the original plan now, if we're able, and to get us solidly into the next unit, which is where I think we need to be. We'll be using what the program calls a "Story Sequence Chart," and I have to admit, I'm not overly thrilled with stories because I'm not all that interested in what I guess you'd call creative writing. It's not that I don't value it, but I really want to focus on writing essays, and every other "unit" in the program at least focuses partly on something other than that, partly just to mix things up and give students experience in organizing ideas, writing topics and clinchers, and playing around with the dress-ups and decorations in what may be a less stressful environment than something that appears more academic. The IEW program can feel overwhelming sometimes because there are so many different products, components, and then this whole slew of helpful files available through the website and on some email lists I'm on. I often feel like there aren't enough hours in the day to go through it all and then come up with lesson plans or I'll start reading this stuff and then feel like I'm not accomplishing enough. My primary motivation for teaching was to do this material with my own children, and I think the break we've had has felt too long, and I'd like to have everything done already yesterday with them. I should be thankful for the steady progress we've had and just recommit to doing my best as we go forward now.

It's also getting to be testing season again. Not quite, but people are thinking about it. I'm pretty sure I'm going to simply use the CAT again this year because it's inexpensive. I have no concerns about how anyone is doing at this point--the boys could take a test tomorrow with no preparation and do just fine. Their grammar is improving a great deal, especially if they do not have to generate the grammatically correct sentences themselves and just need to describe, mark things, or identify errors in someone else's sentences. We have been using Saxon Grammar 5 this year, and it's a nice program and is fairly comprehensive. It is arranged the same way the Saxon math books are, with 30 question mixed review problem sets each day and a small new concept for each day as well, with a minimal amount of practice for it. I also appreciate the vocabulary words that it introduces two at a time and then reviews frequently in the problem sets. We didn't get off to a roaring start to the program because I fell into the trap of asking too much of them and myself. Yes, in a perfect world they would be writing down everything from the text in a separate notebook, rather than writing in their textbook like it's a consumable workbook. Yes, it would exercise their handwriting and just be more "like school" if they had to recopy the sentences or write out the whole word for their answers instead of just circling things or making marks under letters than need to be capitalized. But what I was finding it that though this didn't take overly long and they could use a computer for it, we simply were not getting to grammar many days, and so we weren't making much progress in the book. Our "school" time can feel rather limited, so if we have two things with 30 problem review sets, it gets to be rather time consuming, and something often falls by the wayside, and this is it. I don't mind actually sitting down and doing the work with them, since discussing it or seeing it modeled by someone else writing it down can also be an effective way to get through to them. They are now mostly on their own able to diagram sentences with prepositional phrases, dependent clauses, compound predicates, and multiple adjectives. I had to review these procedures myself, since I've never been a huge diagrammer myself. I know there are some people who insist that this is a lost art that is shameful to ignore. I'm not one of those people. And I'm no grammar nazi. I personally fall into the camp of people who believe that grammar is a cultural convention and not a set of laws sent down from God above for us to flout to our own peril. Correct grammar is what our culture at the time agrees upon as acceptable and as common usage. I also believe that grammar is fluid. But at the same time, I think that there is value in understanding how sentences come together, how the parts cooperate and relate to one another, and to knowing enough about grammar to insure that what you write makes sense and isn't confusing or unclear for a reader. Frankly, just about everything I know about grammar I learned from Latin. And the case is becoming the same for my boys. They can now speak comfortably about the predicate nominative (or subject and complement) and identify direct and indirect objects, and this mostly came from having to analyze parts of speech and their endings for translating Latin sentences.

I'm really pleased now with our change to a new Latin instructor and program. We had been using Latina Christiana, and part of the problem was me. I wasn't having them do the work in a disciplined way, and we'd end up doing the whole worksheet on the day or so before class. The program also doesn't have them doing a lot of translation, and because it focuses so heavily on church Latin, some of what they were learning didn't feel as interesting or relevant to them because it felt antiquated and Catholic. I'm still having them do some of the work in those books, but I guess I felt like there wasn't enough repetition or exercises for them in the book, so if I wanted more, I had to design it myself and supplement, and that takes time and energy I didn't usually find to devote to it. Now we're using Ecce Romani, which is what Chesterfield County Public Schools use for their Latin I classes. They are doing well with it, largely because they are so well prepared from doing Latina Christiana I last year and part of II this year, but the book itself is interesting because it has them reading whole paragraphs about a Roman family from day one. It's a bit light on the grammar--it takes the opposite approach from our previous book, which had them learning vocabulary words in isolation (not as part of something they were reading) and then grammar as something to simply be memorized, rather than demonstrating it in action as a method of teaching. This book has them reading, with a mini-glossary for each lesson, and then has them asking and answering questions based on the text. There are some drawbacks to this, but because they're already gotten down some of the grammar basics, I feel like maybe for now we have the best of both worlds. They have their first test with their new instructor on Monday, so I'm trying to coax through demonstration what good study habits would be, namely rereading the passages they will be tested on each day, doing a short exercise each day so that they have to think about their words and the content of the chapters multiple times, and not cramming at the last minute.

Tomorrow is book club, and this month's selection is Lord of the Rings. I hate to admit it, but I really just cannot love this book. I recognize its importance and role in the development of the genre of fantasy and even of the novel, and I can acknowledge its influence on our culture and on many later writers. But the story itself just fails to engage me. I've read it before, I'm listening to it on CD now, I've seen the movies, I've seen shows about it, read articles about it. But I just don't feel all that much readerly sympathy with Frodo or any other character in the book. And it's a long book to not feel a lot of identification or engagement. I can't help thinking about the book as having an EEG or an EKG readout, and though I wouldn't call it a flat line, it is a very regular heartbeat. There aren't the peaks and valleys and huge blips up that make so many other books exciting to me. The forward motion of the journey just seems to go on and on, with worry about whether there are black riders behind them, to meeting some new race of creatures with Welsh-sounding names to a warm fire, then back into a dank, dark forest or field or mountain, to wondering what's behind them, to some new creature with a name with a lot of "y"s and "l"s, to a warm fire. I was right there with them for about the first 3 CDs or the first 150 pages of the book. Since then, I'm fighting my urge to just move on to something that I actually enjoy. The kids are bored too, mostly for similar reasons. I feel awful, since I worry that my own non-enthusiasm for this book and its genre has influenced their feelings. But then I get on my little high and mighty mental horse and start thinking, well gosh, this book, rightly or wrongly, still isn't really considered canonical. Sure, there are scholars who study it, but it's still not generally treated by the stuffy literary establishment as really serious literature. And I know why. I guess I'm just not enough of a geek to want to argue otherwise. I have always avoided Star Trek, too.


And what we are enjoying right now is the book for another book club at our public library, The Thief Lord, by Cornelia Funke. I haven't really liked her other books--more of that dragon crap that bores me. But this book so far is about real people (I'm definitely a realist and like all characters to be human), and it's well-paced, well-written, and has an interesting setting and plot. The boys both really like it, too. We started it as a read-aloud because we only have one copy and three people wanting to read it, but now I'm having them alternate listening to me and reading about double that on their own. We actually own another copy of the book, but unfortunately have lost it this week when we really need it. The sad thing about this book club is that last month no one except Ollie showed up, and he was super excited about discussing the book, Elephant Run, which he had loved. It was set in Burma during World War II and dealt with a number of historical, political, and social issues that he found interesting (and no orcs, elves, goblins, or magical rings in sight). So in the end, Ollie opted to stay for a one-on-one book club with the librarian by himself--he might as well get the snacks, he figured. It seemed to be a good experience, since he's eager to go back. The first month they went there were two other girls there, which is still a small group, but better than a book club of one. I wish more people would find out about this, because this librarian has a super handle on what kinds of books are just right for this age child. The content is challenging, the topics are varied, but everything has been a real hit for both of mine so far, and they can have rather different tastes from one another. We've been working on going back through some of the earlier selections from before they joined, and no one has been disappointed yet. I feel like I have a real ally now in helping us find good books we might not uncover ourselves, though to be honest, I have such a long list of books I know are good that we're in no danger of having nothing decent to do next. What can be challenging about my kids is that they don't seem to like the kinds of series books on fantasy topics that it seems like most kids their age prefer. Again, I hope I haven't poisoned (edified?) then too much with my own opinions of that genre, since I myself can't abide that genre and have read plenty of those books and never want to go on to whatever book is next in the series, either. But there's just so much out there that really does seem to enlighten the human condition or teach a lot about another culture or time period that I feel okay that they aren't primarily reading variations on a theme of a boy/girl discovers that he is a wizard/djinn/vampire/guardian/etc. and now has the responsibility of saving the world/universe from evil/chaos/darkness/destructive forces.

I was desperately hoping for some real snow again today, but we are getting passed by. There were flurries when I came out of the dance rehearsal tonight, but by the time we crossed the river, they were gone. I had mentally counted on a day or so of being holed up in the house with a fire and few responsibilities. No such luck. When we had the amazing snowfall last month, it felt like it was a permanent situation. There was so much of it and it stuck around for a week or so, and it started to feel like this is what winter looked like. You know, like it does in postcards or in your dreams, where there's white stuff blanketing the grounds and the roofs. I had to remind myself that this is Virginia, and we can go whole years without getting more than an inch. Sure enough, there hasn't been any since then. I really believed for a while there that maybe we were on a roll and were going to have a truly snowy winter, but it seems to not quite be the case. Just a really cold one. And with that, I'm going to curl up under the covers and dream fluffy white cold dreams, and I'm sure I'll wake with at least enough optimism to rush to the window to see if maybe they came true.