Okay, I know know it has been something like four months since I have posted anything. And I'm not moonlighting over on Facebook, either. I'm AWOL there as well.

I'm lost in the land of homeschooling four children. Boy oh boy is it still crazy!

This is such a different year from our past ones, and there are great points and transition points. I'm finally in a place where I am not worrying that we are not covering what we should be covering or where I am solemnly swearing that this is the year that I will not neglect Frances. The pace of what we are doing has picked up tremendously, and our discipline is also at an all time high. Well, okay, the discipline of actually keeping up with an outside workload and staying on schedule. I am writing this while Jane Eyre sits by my bed with the bookmark only at page 101 when I need to get to 383 by Monday. I suppose in a way I'm procrastinating.

My own workload is what has gone through the roof. I am tutoring and directing a program for 10th grade students, and the philosophy of the program is that a single tutor who engages students in every subject can create an integration of topics and subjects in a way that separate classes taught by master teachers in their own individual subjects cannot. It's a fascinatingly different take on how to manage education in the upper grades, and sometimes there is a part of me that thinks, "Really? You think I ought to be tutoring Algebra II to anyone?" But there it is. I sub out my Algebra II tutoring to Kerry, who comes in and handles that hour of class, but then I work through Latin II, British Literature, Western Cultural History including art history and music history as well as an overview of philosophy and cultural periods and trends over the past 2000 years, traditional Aristotelian logic, and biology. It is a handful! Last week was the first time that my time management choices left me scrambling in the dust to complete what I needed to for the week. I won't do that again!

We tend to run in cycles of a heavy week with a lot of work and then a slightly lighter week. Actually, my weeks are lighter than those of my students because I do not have to write all of the papers they do (though I do research the topics and take pages and pages of notes on them so that I can effectively engage with what they do write) and I don't have to take and pass the tests they do (woe to me if I had to do the biology or logic exam!) and I don't have to do all of the math problems. But our workload is pretty intense. So far we have read Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, selected Canterbury Tales, several books of Paradise Lost, Pilgrim's Progress, Gulliver's Travels, Pride and Prejudice, and A Tale of Two Cities. There was a time when I had a lot more time to inhale a heavy reading load, but that time is...kind of past. Now I'm shoving it in after 11 p.m., trying to sneak away on campouts to get a chunk of pages down, and tucking my novels into my purse no matter where I am going, since you never know when you might have a spare three minutes, and three minutes might be three pages....

I am totally loving what I am doing, though. I have learned more than I ever thought I could in a short time, and I have to say that it is much more pleasurable to be doing school again when I don't have to worry about grades and a transcript. Now I'm just along for the ride and for the enrichment of my life. I can't wait until my own kids are doing this work because it is truly the good stuff.

Meanwhile, I do have to keep up with my own children and their work, which can be daunting for their level. In some ways it has been a rude awakening to them to have deadlines and a week's worth of work to accomplish in, well, a week. There's not a lot of self-pacing possible. There is enough work that it is hard to get ahead. And the expectations are very high. Two to three page essays when they aren't always quite ready for that. Interpretation of the passages they are reading before they are writing about them, rather than just reporting or expressing an opinion. Having to use multiple sources for almost everything that they write now. The IEW book we are using this year is, in my opinion, well beyond what they should be expected to do right now. It is better suited for high school students, and writing is not my children's precocious area. They are still struggling with basic structure and consistently having all of the parts of a sentence in place. So adding in Bible interpretation and an increasingly complex checklist of stylistic devices (dual adverbs, adjectival teeter-totters, invisible who/which clauses, rhetorical questions) has really pushed our limits. But during this time, I have seen them go from needing a hand held while writing to now being able to take their weekly science topic, research it themselves from several sources, and write a pretty respectable report to read aloud to their class. They have also come along in Latin and math, conquering some of their previous difficulties with poor handwriting and sloppy organizational skills. It's not that we don't have our challenge areas with it, but they are really starting to be more meticulous and to see the value of taking things step by step.

Probably the most growth has been with Frances. She is really astounding me with what she has managed to learn and retain this year. In 9 short weeks, she has learned all of the multiplication table through 14x12, has learned squares and cubes through 10, and can skip count any numbers 1 through 15. Constant repetition and some strategic songs have really made these things stick. She has also improved a great deal in writing, going from not knowing what a sentence is to writing one or two paragraph essays, with help of course. And she can do her chart with the four types of sentences, four purposes of sentences, five parts of a sentence, eight parts of speech, and seven sentence structures in under two minutes. She complains that she is still the slowest in her class, but I have seen her go from never having done any grammar at all to mastering concepts and memorizing information that probably most adults do not know. Each week she has material in six subject areas (history, math, science, Latin, English grammar, geography) as well as music theory information and Bible verses to memorize. In addition, we are learning a 200 point timeline 8 cards at a time. So now we are up to 64 points on the timeline, and even Rutledge can sing most of them, though there are some words that he either ignores or says as one droning syllable ("unification," "monotheism," "Phoenician"). In a perfect world I would be keeping up better with having her go deeper into what some of these things are, but right now, it feels most valuable just to get the exposure and have a sense of relative time. There is plenty of time for filling in the gaps later.

The beauty of all of it is that there isn't time to second guess whether one curriculum or another might be an improvement. We're just so darn busy with what we have there isn't room for much else. And yet they are all learning by leaps and bounds. In three more weeks we have a very big break--6 weeks. It is going to feel good, but we will also have enough work in there so that we don't get rusty.

I'll have to save our non-school life for another post. There is much to do and it is late, I have to read more Bronte, and tomorrow morning starts nice and early with Rutledge's speech therapy.