Urban Survival Skills?

I was perusing some other blogs and noticing how many of the activities were outdoorsy.  I am not just talking about playing in the back yard (which I am not envious of since keeping yards is a lot of work), but learning outdoor skills like gardening or even hunting, gathering, or camping.  These areas are obviously important but given our city lifestyle, including the fact that our being carless is an added obstacle in this area, I feel inadequate when it comes to nature survival skills.  Will my kids be clueless and unable to handle situations that could arise?

We are not completely indoors of course, but our outdoor scenarios are very urban.  Without even a back yard, we spend our outdoor time in parks, playgrounds, sidewalks, walking, or waiting at a bus stop.  Clearly, I am going to need to look into easy-to-get-to and affordable ways to get some nature skills.

But are T & C learning a different kind of survival?   I am starting to think that they are.  Last week we went to two homeschool group activities, one on Tuesday and one on Thursday, both requiring two-legged bus trips.  On our first bus Thursday, T & C chatted away asking why we had to go downtown to get another bus.  I went on to explain that buses come together downtown and at the south campus of UB (where we changed buses on Tuesday) so that people could come from their neighborhood and connect to a bus that would take them to their destination.  They always ask me what bus we will be taking memorizing the ones we take most frequently.  On some occasions, they've wanted to follow the route maps as the bus rides along.

All of this discussion prompted some of the other passengers to remark about how impressed they were about T's & C's level of curiosity and enthusiasm in our transportation and activities.  I thanked them and told them that I homeschool (in my own little attempt to spread the word about how great it is).  Later on, at the homeschool group, where everyone drives to get there except us, someone remarked that they had no idea how to use the NFTA buses.  I was reminded that most people in our area drive everywhere and wouldn't know how to grab a bus without a fair amount of research.  T & C know more about using public transportation in our area than many adults!

While it probably still isn't good that T & C don't know how to properly go to the bathroom in the woods, at least they are learning the general principals of using public transportation systems as well as the related safety and environmental benefits.  Where they don't know how to survive in nature, their conservation is helping nature survive.

Homeschooling for Equality in the City

It was a glorious day of about 50 degrees today, so I took T & C to the nearby playground.  While there, some mothers were talking about what they plan on doing for school for their children for next year.  There are several "options": a handful of public schools and a couple of charter schools.  They were hoping that their kids would "get in" to a good school.  If you live in Buffalo, you probably know the ones that came up in conversation.  "Choosing" a school in Buffalo is complicated.  There are many ways to get into the good schools, either a test, living in a certain area, sibling preference, or lottery.  Many people who do not live in an urban area assume that city schools automatically must be bad, but if you live there you know that the schools in the city districts are a variety.  Buffalo has some of the best public schools in the country, award winning at times, and some of the worst schools, perhaps like those in some sociology textbooks.

T & C are quite bright.  T finished kindergarten in homeschool before age 5.  C is more than halfway done kindergarten despite not being four and a half yet.  This causes many people to wonder why I homeschool.  They tell me that I should take my kids to the tests and get them into the good school since they would make it.  Most likely they are correct about my kids making it.

But what about the kids that don't get into the good school?  Shouldn't all children be entitled to go to a good education or at least one of equal quality?  I am reflecting on this lately because of the recent article where Dana Goldstein of Slate says "Liberals, Don't Homeschool Your Kids".  I had to spend some time contemplating this since I consider myself to be more of a liberal than a conservative.  Two things stand out in my mind.  From a practical standpoint, by homeschooling my kids, two more slots are open at a "good school" so two more city kids can get a better education than they would have.  Contrary to the article's implications, I am helping other city kids.  This is something I can single handedly do rather than when parents "work in the system" to change it which may or may not yield results.

The other aspect of this discussion that comes to mind is what it means to be a liberal.  Liberals get far too enamored with the government running programs.  I would not advocate to take government out of funding or prioritizing education, but I strongly suggest that government is not good at operating education.  Rather than think that the enemy of public education is no education or private education, public education could come to mean something totally different and more effective.  Perhaps liberals should be fighting for government funding of families with school age kids to homeschool since giving up an income to homeschool is costly.  It sounds crazy at first, but public schools generally are not great, and certainly parents have a better incentive to educate their own children than strangers do no matter how well trained or certified.  There could also be a wide array of resources in some sort of online curriculum bank for families to choose with some mild accountability standards.  Strict accountability is not as necessary since parents are more likely to care about quality for their own kids than strangers.

When it comes to education in Buffalo, or any urban area, making homeschooling a real option for people could be a great liberal cause.  If students can be so easily left out of the "good schools", what other avenues do they have for some educational equality?  Working in the system doesn't make sense if the system can't be fixed all that easily or it takes so much time that children are left to fail.  A couple of years at the school age can make or break a kid's future depending on the quality.  Is that really fair?  Fairness is what being liberal is supposed to be about.  Time for liberals to do some soul searching when it comes to education!

Doing Math Online With Classic Offline Tools

T was working on his math today on Time4Learning when he started having some difficulty.  Since he has gotten so far ahead for his age, it isn't a surprise.  Anyway, he was working on some addition and subtraction that had some nuances.  After I talked to him about how to approach the problems I saw him revert to his hands as a study aid.  With numbers under 10 there is no harm, but now that these types of problems are regularly featuring numbers up to 15 I had to think fast.  Then I remembered the nuns in catholic school never let us use our fingers to count.  We drew sticks and crossed out or added whatever the problem called for.

I am glad that I have been saving used envelopes and receipts as scrap paper.  It looks like we may be in a new phase with math where it will definitely come in handy.  He seemed to do better after he got confident with this technique.

By the way, I also use the back of junk mail to print out worksheets.  Since I rely on the score reports for records and don't save the worksheets after I go over them with him, it is fine.

Learning Spanish in Homeschool

While I seemed to excel in other subjects throughout my schooling, learning languages was difficult.  I learned a small amount of French in elementary school, Latin in high school, and Spanish in college.  Little if any of it stuck in those traditional environments.  My husband was a little more successful with Spanish, but not enough where he can claim to be bilingual and do better in the job market or anything.

We hope that with the extra flexibility of homeschooling that our kids can spend more time on Spanish while learning at their own pace.  Of course, even though we are trying to learn with them, it isn't the same as speaking to native speakers or even going to a well run class in Spanish.  At some appropriate point, we are going to need to find some sort of class or environment to help with this, but in the meantime, we are working on exposure to the language.

So far, until they can read and do a more sophisticated online course or go to a real class with native speakers (maybe in a couple of years), we play Spanish Bingo or have them watch Kids Love Spanish.  We have had them watch many different sets, but this seems to be the favorite.

Spanish is important for several reasons.  First of all, in an urban environment it is clearly an important language.  When we ride the bus, many of the signs are in English and Spanish indicating the prevalence of people speaking Spanish.  Also, the hispanic population is growing at a faster rate than other groups in the United States so that Spanish will continue to be of value in the job market.

That said, I am not sure the need to speak Spanish will proportionately boom even though it will be pretty important.  Hispanics are one of the newest immigrant groups and are likely in another generation or two to blend in more language wise.  Just as my great-grandparents spoke fluent Italian (Sicilian dialect with one great-grandmother refusing to learn English only going to Italian stores in her neighborhood), my Dad, just two generations later, doesn't speak any Italian.  Ironically, my sister now is learning it to travel to Italy where my brother-in-law has dual citizenship.  Funny how things end up.  Anyway, we are going to try to emphasize learning Spanish as much as we can.  Any suggestions would be helpful!

Science Museum Visit

We went to the Buffalo Museum of Science last week.  We had a great time.  The kids especially love the Explorations section where they learn through play.  Check out some of the things T & C did:

We went to the exhibits too, but this was the part that was most fun for them.  It is interesting to see what exhibits they are drawn to, mostly the more hands-on ones, but sometimes they surprised me.  I know that I thought that rocks in glass cases would be of no interest, but because of the interesting shapes and colors, they actually wanted to stay in that part for a while.  I will need to keep that in mind.

The Homework Lie, Modern Child Labor

At first, I wasn't going to read this book because we homeschool and don't deal with traditional homework:

 

However, since most of my childhood and teenage years were consumed by homework to the point that college was more of a break, I was drawn to it.  The book is well written and hard to put down, even though it is a research type book.  It pretty successfully debunks the mainstream ideas about homework showing that there really are not compelling studies for it.  Often times, the researchers defaulted back to the myths despite no research evidence.

It was hard not to get angry about all the wasted time in my life on homework.  According to the book, I was likely to be just as successful without it and probably healthier and less stressed since I would have had more free time and more sleep.  It is scary that no one challenged it including myself.  I suppose I could have gotten lazier like some of my peers and not been so good about it, but since it was assigned, being the conformist that I was, felt inclined to push myself.  I kept pushing until I completed graduate school and further into my career until, due to health, I was forced to slow down.  Crash!  Homework can't be blamed completely.  My mother has similar health issues so there seems to be some genetic predisposition.  Still, hers set it at about age 50 and mine by age 30.  She had a lot of homework too, from the same catholic schools, but not as many of the career and graduate school stresses in her twenties, not getting her masters degree until her forties.  Perhaps after all those years of stress, when we heaped full-time work and graduate school onto them, it got to the tipping point with the genetics.  Who knows? But worth contemplating when I think about my own daughter, C.

Should I blame my parents?  In the 1980s, there was not anywhere near as much literature challenging traditional school so I can be more sympathetic to going with the flow back then than would probably be appropriate now.  Also, even though homeschooling was legal, without the internet, resources were quite scarce more challenging to come by.  Given this extremely high likelihood of going with the traditional school grain, my parents were far better than most.  While most parents kept their money for new cars and vacations, my parents sent me to the best catholic schools money could buy in our area.  When most parents thought education was so unimportant that they pulled kids out of school to go to Disney, mine had a whole family schedule: daily, weekly, and yearly that put the focus on school.  Education was the top priority even though it was manifested in the misguided idea that everything about school was good for us.

Now that I am grown up with my own kids, like my parents, education will still be important to the point that I am outside of the mainstream in homeschooling despite the still significant peer pressure to use conventional schools.  "School", however, will not be the priority.  Conventional school takes too much time from the family robbing it of the true education, health, emotional, and spiritual needs.  While I have said before that our homeschooling doesn't have anything to do with religion, we do have more time to read the Bible and make it to Church more consistently because we homeschool.  My kids can sleep when they need to get sick less than their peers despite lots of exposure to germs in parks, libraries, museums, and buses.  Instead of my husband struggling to help them with "homework" when he gets home, he has the joy of playing educational board games with T & C and reading with them, low stress family time.

While I enjoyed the book, it may be more important to recommend it to our traditional school parent peers!  Maybe it will at least get people to change the debate from how much to whether or not to assign homework or even use conventional school.

Homeschooling and Less Wasted Time

When I look at homeschooling, it is hard to not see so many benefits, but for me, one of the most compelling one is less wasted time.  Some of it is obvious.  When kids do their lessons at home, they don't need to wait in line or for the class to settle down.  There is also the much better commute time.

What about when you are waiting at the doctor or dentist?  Today, I had some ear discomfort and decided to go to the urgent care clinic at my medical group.  Of course, depending on how many people are already there, there can be a lot of waiting (even though it is comforting to know you can go when you are sick and not worry about getting an appointment).  While we waited, we read five of the optional reading books that go with T's unit in Time4Learning .  They spent less than an hour on their online curriculum earlier and the rest we took care of while we waited at the doctor (actually more than usual, we usually do one or two of the optional books a day).  Homeschooling turns some of your potentially least productive time into the most productive.

The verdict about my ear, unfortunately, was a bad ear infection.  I talked the provider into letting me go three days with continuous over the counter decongestants first to see if it would go away without antibiotics, but I took the script anyway in case it doesn't work.  Since 80% of ear infections go away on their own if you are properly hydrated and draining, I hate to mess up my micro balance unless I have run out of options.  That being said, if it comes down to it, at least antibiotics are temporary and loads of yogurt can be eaten later to compensate.  It is still a better medical technology than some of these new drugs for blood pressure, cholesterol, or pain whose expected use seem to be indefinite.  Medical consumers need be skeptical and ask a lot of questions these days.  While doctors aren't bad, their training is biased toward trusting the drug companies and the FDA.

Sorry to get side-tracked, but I just wanted to share how homeschooling can be so efficient.

Opting-Out

Sorry, but another great post from City Kids Homeschooling.

See it and my comment there.

Buying Socially Conscious Sunglasses

I had part of an Amazon gift card left and decided to use it to get sunglasses for the kids and I for this spring and summer.  I decided to try to find sunglasses made in the USA or at least another western country with good working conditions, like Canada.  While trade imbalances are more the result of policy than anything, it occurred to me that much could be done by thinking about where items come from and trying to make responsible choices.  Of course, because of a variety of factors, including homeschooling, I had very little extra money to put towards it beyond the gift card.  Perhaps with the economy so bad American items aren't that expensive anymore?  As far as sunglasses for the kids, I couldn't find many from the US.  However, I was surprised by researching other sites also that many safety sunglasses are made in the USA.  I found these and am quite happy:

From the picture, they appear a bit more "safety" than "sunglass", but not only do they have good cover from the sun and blowing snow (without being too dark), they actually look pretty good:



Not only full coverage with adjustable frame, but not expensive at all!  I think I am going to continue my quest for products manufactured in the USA.  Of course, with our budget, this naturally won't be very often, but I will keep you posted!

Homeschooling: Why Not?

Another great post at:

City Kids Homeschooling

Read it and my comment!