This school year I have begun a new practice with my younger children. We're consciously, intentionally practicing the art of gratitude, of thanksgiving.
After we have said our prayers, we each say at least one thing that we are grateful for in our lives so that we may not forget, among the disturbances of the coming day, that we still have reasons to be grateful. It makes us think. And it makes it harder to look at life and feel that everything is going all wrong. After all, it can't be going all wrong if we said just two hours ago that there were some very good things about our lives. I truly am hoping that over time we will all experience the increased inability to complain about things.
So I'll share with you one thing I am grateful for about this day.
It was a lovely, dark, September morning when I stepped out to go to my coffee-date-with-a-computer. As it wasn't raining, I peeled back the lid of the car—we are blessed to have a sun/moon roof—and opened the front windows on both sides of the car.
The temperature and humidity were perfect, at least to me, and I had the dark, still morning all to myself. Well, maybe I shared it with an occasional jogger or quietly moving car, fellow enjoyers of the morning. But we all kept respectfully to ourselves. The only breaking of what would otherwise have been pure silence was the singing of crickets.
Somehow it is easy to think of music as a uniquely human construct or idea, and to some extent, it is. But every now and then I have to rejigger my thinking and contemplate the sounds of nature as the only true music, divine music. It is beautiful. It is easiest to hear this music in the very early morning when the world of man has not yet joined the symphony. It is at its purest then.
Even the sound of machinery can have a certain beauty to it. Mostly not, but having lived in a city when I was a child, I do find a certain comfort in the sound of cars passing in the earlier part of the evening, when I am falling asleep. There is comfort in the knowledge of not being alone in the world, of there being other people with places to go, families to see. At least, that's the way it seemed to me as a child. So now the gentle hum of a car on the road at 9:00 or 10:00 at night is something like a lullaby.
In winter there are no early birds out singing. There are no crickets, no frogs or other animals making their warm weather sounds. There is just a cold silence. Perhaps there is the wind. Sometimes there is the sound of wind chimes that a neighbor leaves out throughout the year. But mostly there is the chilly quiet that provides such a perfect background for the silvery tree branches that reach rigidly up to the sky.
The most silent of all are the mornings that are snow-covered, when there is little movement from anyone or anything. School is out, and workers who have to go to work must first dig their cars out of the snow that piled up during the night. The snow is insulation. It is a sound barrier, a muffler. The world has slowed its tempo for just a little while, and a certain peace descends. People seem happier, calmer. Slow is good every now and then. It helps us to remember.
I'm quite happy with the peaceful ambience of winter just now, so the music of fluffy white clouds in a blue summer sky will have to wait for a while.
And for this moment I am grateful.
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Why We Home Educate
It is a common question to hear, if not explicitly, then at least in people's facial expressions and intonations.
Why do we, or anyone, choose to home school?
The reasons, as any parent will tell you, are many and varied, and never quite the same for any two families. I do try to refrain from criticizing "other" educational means, even though I am sorely tempted, because I've experienced just about every method known to modern America, either myself or through my children, and I can say with some measure of authority, that there are advantages and disadvantages to them all. Period.
No, rather than belabor any flaws of traditional schools, I will focus on the positive (and maybe some potential negative) aspects of home education.
At the moment, I have one in college, one who's a nearing the end of high school, one in elementary school and one just starting out in kindergarten. We have, at various points in the past, home schooled them. Early and mid-elementary school was the time when we had the older ones home for about three years, and the one who is now finishing high school is at home, earning her diploma through an online high school. She much prefers it to walking down the street to the local school.
When the two oldest were younger, we found ourselves moving from one state to another, renting in one location with the intention of buying a house in another. At first, we had them in a parochial school in the northeast, and when we moved south, we wanted to keep them in a similar situation to that which they'd left behind, so we chose another parochial school. Only problem was, I was spending two hours on the road and waiting in the car line every day, and halfway through the year my children were still not approaching the material (math, specifically) that they had been doing the previous year. We were repeating old information without any evidence that we would even reach the previous year's material.
We withdrew them from the school and decided to do it ourselves. As I said, we knew we would be moving, so to put them into the local school for half a year before moving them to yet another school the following fall just didn't seem like the right thing to do.
Fast forward a bit. What we found with home schooling was that we had better oversight of just what our children were learning, and we knew what their homework would be because we were the ones assigning it, so we knew immediately how to help them when they needed it (unlike our recent experience with an "institution", but I did say I wasn't going there, didn't I?).
We also found that we could do a lot more hands-on learning through field trips, not that we went crazy on them, but they were always an option, and we had the flexibility to take advantage of some of them when they arose on the spur of the moment. We attended plays, visited museums during the day, attending scout meetings and sports practices and games at times that were actually convenient (i.e. NOT during rush hour), we could have dinner at a reasonable hour and consistently in the evenings.
We were also able to plan our getaways. our vacations, when it was convenient in our schedule instead of having to forgo opportunities simply because the authorities wanted it that way—simply because it works better in their system. One October, for two weeks, we traveled to Japan to visit for the first time since moving back to the U.S. The weather was perfect (not sweltering like the summer would have been), and it worked with my husband's work schedule. Another year, we traveled to Paris and London for three weeks, piggybacking on my husband's business school "field trip". We traveled to different cities, and his trip was only ten days, so we spent the last week-and-a-half together puttering around London and loving life, for the most part.
A long-term benefit of having our children at home for their education was, and always will be, the closeness that developed in our family, between the siblings themselves, and between our children and us. If there is one thing that I think could make a huge difference in the state of the American family it would be to keep children home and learning with Mom and/or Dad for more years than we do. Is it all peachy and wonderful all the time? Absolutely not! Did we have our share of bad days and exasperation with one another? Of course!
But did we learn how to compromise, share, and take turns? Yes, we did. And we still do. We learned to talk things through in a civilized manner, and I can say without any hesitation that we have never (so far) had a "typical teenager" living in our house. We have largely avoided the strife that appears to have become the hallmark of the average American family, at least if you read the newspapers or watch television.
Now, there are other variables at play in our family life, too. We are Orthodox Christians, we attend church regularly, and our closest friends tend, by and large, to be people we know from church (with similar values and a like-minded approach to the importance of the family in society). We have chosen to forgo a second income (a decision we made long ago, before we had children), in order to have the relationship that we have now with our children. I realize that this may not be possible, or in some cases even desirable, for every family, but it's simply the way we have worked ours.
Home schooling, or home education, as I would prefer to call it, is not something that can be pushed at anyone. It is a de facto lifestyle change for anyone, child or parent, who is used to having the kiddies in school for seven hours a day, five days a week, so it is a decision not to be undertaken lightly. Many households are dependent on two parents working, out of necessity or habit, and to change that arrangement requires quite a bit of soul-searching and preparation. As for the expense, home schooling is not the least expensive option, though with school fees and fundraisers, even public schools are more expensive than I recall them being when I was a child.
Doing it yourself, however, is a truly viable means of educating your own children if you're up for it. It's not the strange, freaky thing that it was painted to be for so long. Will there be problem cases that appear in the news from time to time? Yes. There are bizarre happenings all over the world, most of them not involving homeschool families, and plenty about kids who are or were schooled by traditional means.
At its best, home education is a joy. At its worst, it's . . . "Eh, we had a bad morning. Let's take a break and get back on track."
As my five-year-old likes to say, "I can live with that."
Why do we, or anyone, choose to home school?
The reasons, as any parent will tell you, are many and varied, and never quite the same for any two families. I do try to refrain from criticizing "other" educational means, even though I am sorely tempted, because I've experienced just about every method known to modern America, either myself or through my children, and I can say with some measure of authority, that there are advantages and disadvantages to them all. Period.
No, rather than belabor any flaws of traditional schools, I will focus on the positive (and maybe some potential negative) aspects of home education.
At the moment, I have one in college, one who's a nearing the end of high school, one in elementary school and one just starting out in kindergarten. We have, at various points in the past, home schooled them. Early and mid-elementary school was the time when we had the older ones home for about three years, and the one who is now finishing high school is at home, earning her diploma through an online high school. She much prefers it to walking down the street to the local school.
When the two oldest were younger, we found ourselves moving from one state to another, renting in one location with the intention of buying a house in another. At first, we had them in a parochial school in the northeast, and when we moved south, we wanted to keep them in a similar situation to that which they'd left behind, so we chose another parochial school. Only problem was, I was spending two hours on the road and waiting in the car line every day, and halfway through the year my children were still not approaching the material (math, specifically) that they had been doing the previous year. We were repeating old information without any evidence that we would even reach the previous year's material.
We withdrew them from the school and decided to do it ourselves. As I said, we knew we would be moving, so to put them into the local school for half a year before moving them to yet another school the following fall just didn't seem like the right thing to do.
Fast forward a bit. What we found with home schooling was that we had better oversight of just what our children were learning, and we knew what their homework would be because we were the ones assigning it, so we knew immediately how to help them when they needed it (unlike our recent experience with an "institution", but I did say I wasn't going there, didn't I?).
We also found that we could do a lot more hands-on learning through field trips, not that we went crazy on them, but they were always an option, and we had the flexibility to take advantage of some of them when they arose on the spur of the moment. We attended plays, visited museums during the day, attending scout meetings and sports practices and games at times that were actually convenient (i.e. NOT during rush hour), we could have dinner at a reasonable hour and consistently in the evenings.
We were also able to plan our getaways. our vacations, when it was convenient in our schedule instead of having to forgo opportunities simply because the authorities wanted it that way—simply because it works better in their system. One October, for two weeks, we traveled to Japan to visit for the first time since moving back to the U.S. The weather was perfect (not sweltering like the summer would have been), and it worked with my husband's work schedule. Another year, we traveled to Paris and London for three weeks, piggybacking on my husband's business school "field trip". We traveled to different cities, and his trip was only ten days, so we spent the last week-and-a-half together puttering around London and loving life, for the most part.
A long-term benefit of having our children at home for their education was, and always will be, the closeness that developed in our family, between the siblings themselves, and between our children and us. If there is one thing that I think could make a huge difference in the state of the American family it would be to keep children home and learning with Mom and/or Dad for more years than we do. Is it all peachy and wonderful all the time? Absolutely not! Did we have our share of bad days and exasperation with one another? Of course!
But did we learn how to compromise, share, and take turns? Yes, we did. And we still do. We learned to talk things through in a civilized manner, and I can say without any hesitation that we have never (so far) had a "typical teenager" living in our house. We have largely avoided the strife that appears to have become the hallmark of the average American family, at least if you read the newspapers or watch television.
Now, there are other variables at play in our family life, too. We are Orthodox Christians, we attend church regularly, and our closest friends tend, by and large, to be people we know from church (with similar values and a like-minded approach to the importance of the family in society). We have chosen to forgo a second income (a decision we made long ago, before we had children), in order to have the relationship that we have now with our children. I realize that this may not be possible, or in some cases even desirable, for every family, but it's simply the way we have worked ours.
Home schooling, or home education, as I would prefer to call it, is not something that can be pushed at anyone. It is a de facto lifestyle change for anyone, child or parent, who is used to having the kiddies in school for seven hours a day, five days a week, so it is a decision not to be undertaken lightly. Many households are dependent on two parents working, out of necessity or habit, and to change that arrangement requires quite a bit of soul-searching and preparation. As for the expense, home schooling is not the least expensive option, though with school fees and fundraisers, even public schools are more expensive than I recall them being when I was a child.
Doing it yourself, however, is a truly viable means of educating your own children if you're up for it. It's not the strange, freaky thing that it was painted to be for so long. Will there be problem cases that appear in the news from time to time? Yes. There are bizarre happenings all over the world, most of them not involving homeschool families, and plenty about kids who are or were schooled by traditional means.
At its best, home education is a joy. At its worst, it's . . . "Eh, we had a bad morning. Let's take a break and get back on track."
As my five-year-old likes to say, "I can live with that."
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
An Ode to Endless Summer
I wonder if an endless summer would still seem like a good thing after months of temperatures in the 90's and 100's. I'm inclined to think I might eventually become weary of such a season. Really, if summer were truly endless, the entire concept of "season" would go right out of the window. The word implies that there must be change throughout the year, throughout life. "To everything there is a season . . ."
The first day after Labor Day has taken a wet and cooler turn. I can't say that it is truly unwelcome, though it feels more like a visitor who will be staying briefly, then leaving again until the next short and pleasant visit.
But, as happens every year, I must grudgingly accept that this brief cooling off is merely Autumn moving into the room, resting its big suitcase on the newly unfolded luggage rack and where it will come back a little later to move its accoutrements into the slightly more permanent home of the dresser drawers and armoire. The smell of sand and sunscreen in the bathroom will soon be replaced by the musky scent of crisp leaves and cold air, eventually giving way to wood smoke and spiced cider.
It's me. I'm the one slow to shift gears. And I know I am far from being the only one.
Summer is still, in my mind, the time of year when "everyone" gets to be a kid, to live a carefree life. No bulky layers to pull on and heft around outside while still trying to move naturally and freely. No shivering with cold and being told to put a sweater on while you're indoors. When stepping out of the shower there's no wishing for a heat lamp to replace the tub-to-towel-to-bathrobe ritual designed to avoid the goosebumps of clean skin in cold weather.
Summer is the time when colors are bright and cheerful. Shorts, skirts, T-shirts, sandals, seer-sucker, woven hats, and suntans with sun-streaked hair. Children drawing with sidewalk chalk and becoming rainbow-colored themselves. Little league teams dotting fields all over the county. Owners walking dogs and walkers walking themselves by 6:00 a.m., enjoying the early sunrise and the later sunset. Fruits from the garden that taste better than any at even the "best" grocery stores and even more so because you grew them yourself.
Summer, when the demands of school and extra-curricular activities lessen their grip and allow for deeper breaths and staring up at the blue sky. When rain either comes in dramatic, twenty-minute bursts, complete with light show and sending everyone for cover in the late afternoon, or gently falls, cooling the hot asphalt and sending little steam drifts waving upward, moisture floating back into the air to be saved up for later.
Summer, when the smoke from hot coals mingling with food runs, flying through the streets, taunting and goading the neighbors into competing to see who can out-grill all the others. The loud whine of motors moving across the ground just before the smell of cut-grass—and the sound of the sneezes that sometimes follow. The majestic, fluffy white clouds that drift leisurely through the sky like benevolent guardians keeping watch over the fragile beings below.
To be realistic, however, I must admit to wanting my outside temperatures low enough to keep my windows open all day long, and summers in the mid-Atlantic do not often, if ever, accommodate that wish. And perhaps it's just as well. If I don't want summer to leave even after it has forced me to shutter my windows from the oppressive heat, I can only imagine how I would feel if summer was truly perfect. I suppose I will just have to welcome Autumn with open arms, smiling warmly and entertaining it for a while until the next guest chases it away and takes over the room.
The first day after Labor Day has taken a wet and cooler turn. I can't say that it is truly unwelcome, though it feels more like a visitor who will be staying briefly, then leaving again until the next short and pleasant visit.
But, as happens every year, I must grudgingly accept that this brief cooling off is merely Autumn moving into the room, resting its big suitcase on the newly unfolded luggage rack and where it will come back a little later to move its accoutrements into the slightly more permanent home of the dresser drawers and armoire. The smell of sand and sunscreen in the bathroom will soon be replaced by the musky scent of crisp leaves and cold air, eventually giving way to wood smoke and spiced cider.
It's me. I'm the one slow to shift gears. And I know I am far from being the only one.
Summer is still, in my mind, the time of year when "everyone" gets to be a kid, to live a carefree life. No bulky layers to pull on and heft around outside while still trying to move naturally and freely. No shivering with cold and being told to put a sweater on while you're indoors. When stepping out of the shower there's no wishing for a heat lamp to replace the tub-to-towel-to-bathrobe ritual designed to avoid the goosebumps of clean skin in cold weather.
Summer is the time when colors are bright and cheerful. Shorts, skirts, T-shirts, sandals, seer-sucker, woven hats, and suntans with sun-streaked hair. Children drawing with sidewalk chalk and becoming rainbow-colored themselves. Little league teams dotting fields all over the county. Owners walking dogs and walkers walking themselves by 6:00 a.m., enjoying the early sunrise and the later sunset. Fruits from the garden that taste better than any at even the "best" grocery stores and even more so because you grew them yourself.
Summer, when the demands of school and extra-curricular activities lessen their grip and allow for deeper breaths and staring up at the blue sky. When rain either comes in dramatic, twenty-minute bursts, complete with light show and sending everyone for cover in the late afternoon, or gently falls, cooling the hot asphalt and sending little steam drifts waving upward, moisture floating back into the air to be saved up for later.
Summer, when the smoke from hot coals mingling with food runs, flying through the streets, taunting and goading the neighbors into competing to see who can out-grill all the others. The loud whine of motors moving across the ground just before the smell of cut-grass—and the sound of the sneezes that sometimes follow. The majestic, fluffy white clouds that drift leisurely through the sky like benevolent guardians keeping watch over the fragile beings below.
To be realistic, however, I must admit to wanting my outside temperatures low enough to keep my windows open all day long, and summers in the mid-Atlantic do not often, if ever, accommodate that wish. And perhaps it's just as well. If I don't want summer to leave even after it has forced me to shutter my windows from the oppressive heat, I can only imagine how I would feel if summer was truly perfect. I suppose I will just have to welcome Autumn with open arms, smiling warmly and entertaining it for a while until the next guest chases it away and takes over the room.
Thursday, September 1, 2011
Manners
Time for a subject that affects us all . . .
People can often be heard to complain about or, less frequently, to compliment someone else's manners. As with many things in life, the good is often not recognized as quickly or with as much clamor as the bad and the ugly.
But what are manners? Wikipedia does a pretty good job of describing the reason for manners, also known as etiquette, and some of the attendant challenges involved in observing them.
Growing up in Virginia, I learned a very specific set of rules of etiquette, which, of course, I took to be universal. It has been quite an adjustment throughout my adulthood to adapt to the highly diverse population in which we live, and I'm guessing—pretty accurately, I think—that many of our multi-ethnic society's interpersonal abrasions can be directly linked to our family and cultural understandings of what constitutes good manners. What is good manners in one culture is a non-issue, or even bad manners, in another. Personally, my own bias is toward the adoption of the rules, even if unspoken, of the country in which you find yourself.
The problem with my thinking, however, is obvious from my own experience living in another country. My husband and I used to live in Japan, and I know that it is highly unlikely that anyone not growing up in a culture will ever truly figure out all of the complexities and nuances involved in properly and fully observing the etiquette rules of that culture. Bring all of those various codes together in one place, as in the U.S., and it is no wonder that people are unsure when and if to be offended by the actions and possible intentions of others.
Even so, however, some manners would seem self-evident. For example, I have to fight the irritation I feel when someone breaches what, to me at least, is a minimum of etiquette, such as saying, "Thank you," when someone holds open a door, thereby allowing the another to walk through it. In the first place, it is a polite consideration to hold the door for someone else, often a stranger, and in the second place, the holder of the door is implicitly and voluntarily giving a primacy of honor to the one who walks through the door first. Unless you're THE KING or QUEEN—and we don't have any of those in this country (in real life, anyway)—no one should even be thinking of walking past the door holder without acknowledging his or her act of kind thoughtfulness. Just my opinion, sure, but I can't help but wonder how much nicer everyone's day would be with an extra thank you or two thrown in.
Having stated the above, I must admit to many breaches of the rules of etiquette as I learned them growing up. My biggest offense, I think, is in not sending formal "Thank you" notes to people for favors and gifts especially. I cringe at the number of times I have failed to send one. I was quite good about it when I was younger, but once became a grown-up and had seemingly a million other urgent matters to deal with, I am ashamed to admit that it was a practice that often stuck around on my To-Do list until it was almost more embarrassing to follow through than it was to forge ahead. I should have forged ahead. At least I might only be half as chagrined at my own lack of manners.
The bigger problem is what the generations are losing as we move down the timeline of history and culture. Last year, my then-sixteen-year-old daughter fumed one day after I had been nearly run down by a tall teen-aged girl who was walking into a clothing store right "past" me without any intention of stepping aside for a woman who was obviously her elder. I thought I would have to peel my daughter off the ceiling. Only my finer sensibilities were injured, however, and the silver lining to this episode was that I know my daughters have learned their manners. Bless all those parents who have taught their children well, and bless all those children who take to heart the lessons given them by their parents. Those lessons will serve you well.
It's never too late to begin adding manners back in to daily life—even if that life has become busier and ever more complicated. Perhaps one day we will have a universally practiced code of good manners in our country (I'm a realist—I'm not buying stock in that one), but until then, I'm going to put my Thank-you's at the top of my To-Do list, and do my best to cross them off rather than have them stare unblinkingly back at me.
For those who care to, when you have a few moments here is a list of websites that came up pretty quickly in my search this morning. Some are humorous, some are seriously packed with information for any and all circumstances (yes, it takes a tome to get it all down!), but all are useful in one way or another.
George Washington's Rules of Civility:
Emily Post
ThinkQuest-A History of Etiquette
Independent.ie—A Brief History of Manners . . .
U.S. Flag Etiquette
Etiquette Hell
Cheers.
People can often be heard to complain about or, less frequently, to compliment someone else's manners. As with many things in life, the good is often not recognized as quickly or with as much clamor as the bad and the ugly.
But what are manners? Wikipedia does a pretty good job of describing the reason for manners, also known as etiquette, and some of the attendant challenges involved in observing them.
Growing up in Virginia, I learned a very specific set of rules of etiquette, which, of course, I took to be universal. It has been quite an adjustment throughout my adulthood to adapt to the highly diverse population in which we live, and I'm guessing—pretty accurately, I think—that many of our multi-ethnic society's interpersonal abrasions can be directly linked to our family and cultural understandings of what constitutes good manners. What is good manners in one culture is a non-issue, or even bad manners, in another. Personally, my own bias is toward the adoption of the rules, even if unspoken, of the country in which you find yourself.
The problem with my thinking, however, is obvious from my own experience living in another country. My husband and I used to live in Japan, and I know that it is highly unlikely that anyone not growing up in a culture will ever truly figure out all of the complexities and nuances involved in properly and fully observing the etiquette rules of that culture. Bring all of those various codes together in one place, as in the U.S., and it is no wonder that people are unsure when and if to be offended by the actions and possible intentions of others.
Even so, however, some manners would seem self-evident. For example, I have to fight the irritation I feel when someone breaches what, to me at least, is a minimum of etiquette, such as saying, "Thank you," when someone holds open a door, thereby allowing the another to walk through it. In the first place, it is a polite consideration to hold the door for someone else, often a stranger, and in the second place, the holder of the door is implicitly and voluntarily giving a primacy of honor to the one who walks through the door first. Unless you're THE KING or QUEEN—and we don't have any of those in this country (in real life, anyway)—no one should even be thinking of walking past the door holder without acknowledging his or her act of kind thoughtfulness. Just my opinion, sure, but I can't help but wonder how much nicer everyone's day would be with an extra thank you or two thrown in.
Having stated the above, I must admit to many breaches of the rules of etiquette as I learned them growing up. My biggest offense, I think, is in not sending formal "Thank you" notes to people for favors and gifts especially. I cringe at the number of times I have failed to send one. I was quite good about it when I was younger, but once became a grown-up and had seemingly a million other urgent matters to deal with, I am ashamed to admit that it was a practice that often stuck around on my To-Do list until it was almost more embarrassing to follow through than it was to forge ahead. I should have forged ahead. At least I might only be half as chagrined at my own lack of manners.
The bigger problem is what the generations are losing as we move down the timeline of history and culture. Last year, my then-sixteen-year-old daughter fumed one day after I had been nearly run down by a tall teen-aged girl who was walking into a clothing store right "past" me without any intention of stepping aside for a woman who was obviously her elder. I thought I would have to peel my daughter off the ceiling. Only my finer sensibilities were injured, however, and the silver lining to this episode was that I know my daughters have learned their manners. Bless all those parents who have taught their children well, and bless all those children who take to heart the lessons given them by their parents. Those lessons will serve you well.
It's never too late to begin adding manners back in to daily life—even if that life has become busier and ever more complicated. Perhaps one day we will have a universally practiced code of good manners in our country (I'm a realist—I'm not buying stock in that one), but until then, I'm going to put my Thank-you's at the top of my To-Do list, and do my best to cross them off rather than have them stare unblinkingly back at me.
For those who care to, when you have a few moments here is a list of websites that came up pretty quickly in my search this morning. Some are humorous, some are seriously packed with information for any and all circumstances (yes, it takes a tome to get it all down!), but all are useful in one way or another.
George Washington's Rules of Civility:
Emily Post
ThinkQuest-A History of Etiquette
Independent.ie—A Brief History of Manners . . .
U.S. Flag Etiquette
Etiquette Hell
Cheers.
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