"In spite of everything I shall rise again ..."

"I felt my energy revive, and said to myself, 

In spite of everything I shall rise again: 

I will take up my pencil, 

which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, 

and I will go on with my drawing."

-Vincent Van Gogh, Letter #136 to Theo (1880)

The past four months have been complicated and difficult for our family.  At the beginning of January, we got news from AC's company that they would be looking into the cost of moving us to the UK for a year or two, and AC was instructed to begin handing off some of his responsibilities in the US, to travel a couple of weeks each month to the UK, and to direct his energy there.  

We were nervous about such a big change, but very excited.  As a family, we began to take steps to prepare ourselves for this large move.  AC and I modified our 10For10 trip #5 in February to include time in London for house hunting, and were able to add me onto a work trip in March using airline miles.  We began to research schools for SC, as we knew it might be easier for her to transition into a new culture if she is able to be around other people more, but we still wanted to find one that allowed her to continue being herself, and focused more on whole life learning.  We asked our good friends if they would be willing to live at our home and take care of our three cats, as they are a bit older, and we knew we would be living in a much smaller space.  

We also took our family dog, Rexy, to get a check-up at the vet, because we would be bringing him along.   He had been having breathing problems for a while (noisy breathing), which in the past we had been told was caused by a soft palate issue, and it would need a quick, cosmetic fix.  Our local veterinarian office had recently brought in a new doctor, and she was very worried when she looked at our pup.  She told us that his breathing issues were much more serious than we had been told, and she could see him turning blue as he got excited and breathed heavy.  She suspected that he had a bit of a collapsing trachea, which is apparently very common in small dog breeds, and ordered a fancy x-ray called a fluoroscope, that takes moving images.  The fluoroscope confirmed that his trachea is collapsing, and not just a bit.  It was collapsing to almost completely closed from the top of his neck, all the way down into his rib cage 2-3 inches.  

We were sent to a surgeon who has performed many successful fixes for this problem, but because of our dog's age (8 years old), the success rate would be much lower.  Also lowering the success rate was the fact that the surgeon would not be able to get to the part inside his rib cage to fix it.  However, after examining him and viewing the scan footage, she expressed deep concern that he would make it even the next few months without having a procedure done to attempt to alleviate his breathing issues.  We chose to have surgical rings inserted on the exterior of the trachea, because the long-term success rate of those seemed to be higher, rather than an interior stint, which would build up scar tissue over the course of a year, and either need to be re-done, or cause irreparable damage.  

The surgery went well, though the surgeon mentioned afterwards that things were much worse once she got inside, and she was shocked that he had lived with such a large area of his trachea collapsing for as long as he did.  We took him home, contained him so that he would not pull anything while running around, gave him all the medicines to help get him healed quickly, and just loved on him.  After two weeks of recovery, AC and I had to go out of town for our 10For10 #5 trip, to London and Paris.  We left our pup at a great boarding facility, and knew they would take as good care of him as if he were at home with us.

Unfortunately, the Sunday night before we were to come home, we were awakened by a call from the boarding facility that Rexy had stopped eating, and his behavior had changed dramatically.  They took him to the emergency vet (which is, luckily, attached to the surgery center), and he was having serious problems breathing.  After an x-ray, it was determined that one of the rings had cracked, and was causing tracheal collapse again.  However, because of the place he was in recovery, his body was not responding well to the level of sedation needed to fix or replace the ring.  He had a breathing tube in, but was only ok with the lightest level of sedation.  Each time the doctor attempted to take him deeper, his vitals would tank.  In the end, AC and I had to make the most difficult decision in our marriage to date, and from thousands of miles away.  After talking to multiple doctors, including the surgeon, the option to attempt to extend his life had too low of a success rate, and could have gone wrong in an extremely traumatic way for Rex.  AC and I have previously discussed quality-of-life issues, specifically with regard to ourselves/each other, and we decided we needed to make the most unselfish decision in this case, as we would if it were one of us struggling with life.  

When we returned home two days later, we had to go through the terrible process of explaining to SC what had happened.  She had known that there was a risk involved with the surgery, and that his healing and health were not guaranteed, but it is one thing to explain that possibility to her, and quite another to explain that the dog she has loved all of her almost seven years wouldn't be coming home.  I personally still struggle with little things every day, like hearing the dogs next door bark and him not reacting, or not hearing his collar jingle when I first come into the house.  The worst for me is not feeling his weight on the bed, especially when AC is gone on a business trip.  I never realized how much I counted on Rex to get me through the loneliness that comes with having a traveling spouse.  As cheesy as it is, for me Rexy defined the phrase "man's best friend."

Sadly, the bad news didn't end there.  Just before AC and I were to leave on our next trip to London, where we hoped to begin nailing down housing options, and even pay a deposit on the awesome Montessori school we had found for Sophia, AC had a meeting with his bosses, where they told him that after looking into the company's own policies, it was simply too expensive to send us over there.  After the struggles with the dog, specifically in an attempt to make sure he could come with us, the news that we would not be going to the UK at all was a devastating blow.  To top it off, we had already "paid" for my ticket (through miles), and had made arrangements for SC to stay with my parents for spring break while we were gone, and we didn't want to disappoint any of them.  The trip actually turned out excellently (and became 10For10 trip #6, but more on that in another post), but going into it, both AC and I were not in a happy place.

Things have turned around for us a bit.  Since we weren't going to be moving to the UK, that meant AC wasn't going to have to keep traveling there for weeks each month, and was able to revert back to his one or two days at a time trips within the US.  We cashed in more airline miles to take an impromptu family trip to Whistler, Canada, where AC and I took our honeymoon, and SC got to try skiing for the first time (10For10 trip #7).  It was a much needed true vacation for all of us.

We decided after finding that wonderful Montessori school in London to look around our area for one, because it has been a real struggle for us to keep up with the social needs of SC and get as much academic work done as we all would like.  We have had a hard time fitting in with many of the local groups, so we either spend a lot of time driving around and meeting various friends each day, or we sit at home, all alone, doing schoolwork until it is time to go to SC's different activities in the evening.  Luckily, we found one that will only take 30 minutes each morning to get to, and it seems just as good as the one we liked in London.  It also goes through eighth grade, so if all goes well, we won't have to change schools or figure some other option out until it is time for high school.

Finally, we decided to go forward with our pre-UK plan, to move a little bit east toward both AC's office and the airport.  Initially we were going to look to move this summer, but as we were watching the action on Zillow every weekend, we stumbled upon a new housing development less than three miles from my sister-in-law, closer to AC's office, but not so close that we wouldn't be able to reasonably get to SC's current activities that are near where we live now.  We were not planning to build new, mostly because the new developments available in the areas we were looking were way out of our price range, but then this new development popped up recently, and it is exactly what we were having trouble finding in an older home.  We are all very excited, though our finish date won't be until early 2016.

So, that is what has been happing with us these past few months.  Even though we will not be homeschooling in the near future, I will hopefully still find time to blog and share what has been going on with us as we continue on the journey toward the wisdom spoken of in Proverbs 2.

Thankful Thursday: "The truth is rarely pure and never simple."

"The truth is rarely pure and never simple. 

Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, 

and modern literature a complete impossibility!"

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, Act I

This week I am thankful that SC successfully completed our first-ever standardized test.  I wrote previously that we had her tested just before she turned five years old for IQ and achievement, but other than a new understanding that she is gifted, asynchronous, and really needs to work on listening skills, there wasn't much we could do with the results at this point.  

What I really wanted to know was whether or not I had missed anything in planning and teaching.  In the State of Texas, the Texas Education Agency publishes a set of standards called the TEKS, and while that is helpful in directing planning, it does not tell me now, before we start, what SC really already knows.  I went through the kindergarten TEKS standards last summer, and other than a few of the science and social studies parts, in my opinion, she had already mastered most of it because of the product she was generating when we did preschool and kindergarten level work at home.  

For starting this fall, I did the same thing, looking at the first grade level TEKS, but I was more unsure.  Again, we had not done much of the science or social studies items at home, though many were taken care of at the Mother's Day Out pre-k program she went to.  However, I am not that worried about missing information in these areas for the upcoming year.  It is the math, reading and language arts skills that I really wanted to know about, especially since she is working so far ahead: what has she already mastered, what is a struggle, what does she not know at all?

I chose to go with the ITBS Level 6, which is the level for students going into 1st grade (K.7-1.7).  I did not want the test to be so difficult that she was only getting a few questions correct (what I thought might happen if I had jumped two years and chose Level 7), but I hoped that she wouldn't just blow through this one, either, and have wasted my time giving a test that she scores 100% correct answers on.  

Level 6 was a perfect test, and though I do not know the "official" results yet, because I was the test administrator (ITBS allows this, as long as you get certified, which requires a bachelor's degree), I was able to see where, when and how she made mistakes.  Most of the mistakes were made with regard to listening comprehension.  Though we knew that she struggled in this area from the previous tests, it really helped to see her make the mistakes.  I was able to see that she does fine when there is one or two pieces of information, but if there was three or four, she tends to forget the first part of what I was saying.  This held true across all the categories, both in the actual "listening" section, but also in the math area when she had to listen to word problems that had more than two numbers to manipulate.

The other problems she got wrong (other than for listening reasons) were in the vocabulary section, and specifically had to do with categorization.  Some of the words she was asked to identify (by choosing the picture that best represented the word she heard me say) were things like thick/thin and skinny.  I realized that as a family we have purposely avoided these types of categorization words due to the fact that they can be applied to people, as well as the word "fat," which is the opposite of "skinny" in this context.  AC and I have not wanted to deal with SC pointing out these specific differences in people (because she does notice and point out in a childlike manner) in public because though her intent is not to offend, sometimes the words of a child can be taken as offensive, and people can still be hurt by them.  

 So, I would say that overall, this was a great testing experience.  AC and I both wanted SC to have some experience with taking a standardized test, and though the State of Texas does not require that we test or submit scores, we think the information we can learn from the testing (as long as it is analyzed in way that is not simply "did she score X" or "did she pass") will be a great help to us going forward.

Have you had experience with testing young elementary students at home?  What do you think about the ITBS test specifically?  Let me know, then check out some other Thankful Thursday posts here:

Top Ten Tuesday: "Teaching a child not to step on a caterpillar..."

"Teaching a child not to step on a caterpillar 

is as valuable to the child as it is to the caterpillar."

-Bradley Millar

A few weeks ago I was mowing the lawn (something I love to do, by the way) and I noticed there were hundreds of fuzzy caterpillars all over my sunflower plants.  Worrying that they may be poisonous (as they were fuzzy), I ran inside and looked up "what caterpillars eat sunflowers" on Google and discovered that not only were they not poisonous, but that they are fairly easy to raise in jars through to butterflies.

Ten Easy Steps to Raise
Gorgone Checkerspot (Chlosyne gorgone) Butterflies:

1. Plant some sunflowers and wait for them to bloom.

2. Set up a jar with cut sunflower leaves and a stick or two, using cotton cheesecloth (or netting) for the top.

3. Look for the tiny, bright green caterpillar eggs that butterflies have laid on the underside of the sunflower leaves.

AND THEN

4. Go searching for evidence of caterpillars that have hatched.  Gorgone Checkerspot caterpillars will congregate to eat when they are really young, but venture out on their own as they get bigger.  They also kind-of skeletonize the sunflower leaves, which will be an indicator as well.

5. Gather a few caterpillars munching on the leaves and drop them carefully into the jar.

6.  Watch them eating.  Also, you may have to clean out their excrement (called frass) after a few days if you get them while they are very young, as well as provide them with new, fresh sunflower leaves.  Carefully remove the leaves they are on and wipe out the tiny frass with a damp paper towel.  Remove any mostly-eaten leaves, and then place new leaves into the jar.  Carefully place the leaves with the caterpillars on them back into the jar as well. **See #7.

  

7. When they are ready to perform metamorphosis, they will find a nice spot to curl up and hibernate   **Be careful if you are moving them around to clean inside the jar after they have started to curl up.  I had one adhere to the top of the cheesecloth a day before the others even started to slow down eating, but was able to lift it off carefully, place it over the mouth of a cup, and then replace it without disturbing the pupa.

8. It will only take a few hours before the outside of the pupa forms around them.

9.  Wait and watch the transformation.  This took at least a week.  Then, one afternoon, we noticed one of the pupa was transparent.

Upon further examination of our jar, we had one Gorgone Checkerspot butterfly ready to be released!  (It the below picture, you can see it drying its wings and waiting on us, but you can also see one of the other pupae as well, yet to emerge.)

10.  Release the butterfies back toward the sunflowers to do it all again.  I had to reach into the jar and let it ride up on my hand because it could not climb the glass and was not utilizing the stick, but that was okay.  After it flew away, it came back to say hi again and SC thought that was amazing.

Sorry that some of the pictures are blurry.  My nice extra-zoom camera only wanted to take pictures of the glass of the jar, so I was stuck using my phone, which only barely focused through the glass.

Sunflowers also attract other butterflies similar to the Gorgone Checkerspot; in fact, at first we thought we had Bordered Patch butterflies!  You could also plant parsley, dill or fennel to attract some Black Swallowtail butterflies, which produce long, fat, beautiful caterpillars, and of course planting milkweed will attract the Monarch butterfly and its offspring.  

Also, there are a number of companies that sell live baby caterpillars and will ship them to you, complete with a food substitute, small jar for them to pupate in, and a large cage to observe the butterflies once they emerge.  However, I don't think this is nearly as fun or educational as creating a home for them based on what they eat in the wild.

Finally, here are some early reader books that go along with learning about the life cycle of a caterpillar/butterfly:




        

Have you ever tried raising butterflies at home?  Leave a comment with how it went, and then check out some more Top Ten Tuesday posts here



**This post contains affiliate links.  Please read my disclosure statement.

Thankful Thursday: "You can never get a cup of tea large enough ..."

"You can never get a cup of tea large enough 

or a book long enough to suit me."

- C. S. Lewis

Today I am hugely thankful for a nice hot cup of tea.  I seem to have developed a sore throat and sinus issues as the weather here in Texas has changed once again from cool and breezy back to hot and sultry.  So, I made myself a nice cup of peppermint tea this morning before taking SC to Mother's Day Out.  Here is picture of my tea shelf, so you can see how serious I am about tea.

The tea at the back is double stacked, and there is more back behind the snap-lock tubs.  I have tea from quite a few brands, including loose leaf from Teavana, Taylors of Harrogate, Tea Forte, Sterling Tea, and Rishi Tea.  I also have bagged tea from Stash, Republic of Tea, Twinings, and Celestial Seasonings.  

My all-time favorite tea is White Peach Wuyi Oolong from Stash.  My second favorite is Lady Gray from Twinings.  I prefer oolong tea over all others, and like green tea the least.  Black tea is okay if drinking iced, or, like with the Lady Grey, a blend that is not as strong.  AC prefers black tea, and Earl Grey specifically.  I am not a fan of the bergamot flavor, but we have found an Earl Grey with Lavender by Rishi that is delicious.  Herbal, ceylon and rooibos teas are all lumped in the middle, and I drink them according to my mood.

I do prefer loose leaf teas in general over the bagged variety because the flavors seem better to me, though I cannot describe it more specifically than that.  However, you will notice that both my two favorites I have in the bagged variety due to the ability to make them more quickly.

Though I am thankful for hot tea today, I also love iced tea and that has become my drink of choice over soda when I want something other than water.  I used to drink my tea sweetened, but now drink it all black (see my page on eating Paleo).  However, if I have a sore throat and allergies, nothing helps faster than local honey in my tea!

As always, any comments, advice or opinions are welcomed.  Let me know what your favorite teas are, and how you like to drink them.  Don't forget to see who else is thankful today by clicking through below!

**This post contains affiliate links.  Please read my disclosure statement.

"We dole out lip-service to the importance of education ..."

"We dole out lip-service to the importance of education--

lip- service and, just occasionally, a little grant of money; 

we postpone the school-leaving age, and plan to build bigger and better schools; 

the teachers slave conscientiously in and out of school hours; 

and yet, as I believe, all this devoted effort is largely frustrated, 

because we have lost the tools of learning, 

and in their absence can only make a botched and piecemeal job of it."

-Dorothy Sayers, "The Lost Tools of Learning"

So far this week I have made only a little progress on my large list of books that I want to read in order to better understand my choices when it comes to educational styles.  The first article I read was Dorothy Sayers "The Lost Tools of Learning," presented by her at Oxford in 1947.

What struck me initially was that her understanding of what education had become sixty-five years ago is true today, if not more so.  She questions whether it is natural that "when the proportion of literacy ... is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard of and unimagined."  I wonder what she would think now think, with the technology boom of the 2000s allowing every child to have access to said "mass propaganda" at his or her whim?  She also states that this problem, coupled with modern educational methods, produces a graduate who "is less good than he or she might be at disentangling fact from opinion and the proven from the plausible."  

She speaks specifically that schools no longer teach children to think, but rather "subjects," and because of this, "intellectual skills bestowed upon us by our education are not readily transferable to subjects other than those in which we acquired them."  She goes further by stating that because of the advancement in technology (remember, this is 1947), because of this lack in their education, when students are constantly battered by words, "they do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects." Our current culture has found a way to combat this, though it is a poor one -- society has drastically reduced the level of education needed to both communicate and understand the media, so far that many people not only use poor grammar and "text-speak" in their written communications, but actually supplement their spoken communication as well.  I am not ROTFL; I am horrified.

So far in the article, I agree wholeheartedly with Sayers' judgements.  One of the reasons I am second-guessing public school for SC is because my recent experiences (and those of our friends) has left me to wonder whether SC will develop into her "best" self if left to the devices of the Texas school system.  In fact, as I began to look back on my own educational career, much of the problems Sayers points out that have occurred under the modern educational system I, myself, avoided because my parents pushed me to ask questions, and when the answers were not found at school, I continued to look for them on my own by reading.  However, I am very much aware that SC is not me, and I do not really want to just take my chances that she does well for herself.

The remainder of the article Sayers breaks down her ideas for classical education, what she calls the Trivium.  While modern education is subject-focused, Sayers states that "medieval education concentrated on first forging and learning to handle the tools of learning."  It consists of three stages: Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric.  The Grammar stage is based around learning language; the Dialectic stage around how to use the language, defining terms and making accurate statements; the Rhetoric stage around expressing himself through language.  For ease of quick-reading, I will summarize each stage through a bulleted list.

GRAMMAR (approx. age 9-11)

• the best grounding for education is the Latin grammar, which should be begun as early as possible
• observation and memory are most active, so anything and everything which can be committed to memory should be memorized, specifically through recitation
• students should learn a contemporary foreign language (French or German)
• focus on reading classical stories (myths, legends, etc) in poetic and narrative forms
• learn the dates, events and personalities of history and geography
• come to identify and name scientific specimens of "natural philosophy" 
• memorize the facts of math, like multiplication tables, and recognize geometrical shapes, which will lead naturally to addition and subtraction
• become acquainted with the story of God and Man in outline

DIALECTIC (approx. age 12-14)

• introduce formal logic, the art of arguing correctly
• concentrate language lessons on syntax and analysis, as well as the history of language
• focus on reading essays, arguments and criticisms, as well as attempting to write the same
• lessons should take the form of debates, and include dramatic performances rather than recitation
• advanced forms of arithmetic, algebra and geometry should be introduced as a sub-department of logic
• history should be discussion based, focusing on constitutional history and ethics
• focus to include events from student's daily life as subject of discussion and argument

RHETORIC (approx. age 14-16)

• student needs the freedom to learn what they feel they can "specialize" in
• literature should be focused on appreciation rather than criticism
• writing should be focused on self-expression rather than argument
• "subjects" will be difficult to separate
• Latin grammar may be dropped; focus can be turned to more modern languages
• each student should learn to do one or two things very well, but continue other subjects so as to continue understanding the inter-relation of all knowledge

Sayers sums up her arguments for the Trivium by mentioning that parts of this medieval method can still be seen in modern education, but states that "however firmly a tradition is rooted, if it is never watered, though it dies hard, yet in the end it dies."  She believes in order to restore our civilization to its high point, education must return to these medieval roots.

While I definitely agree with Sayers' assessment of modern education as "an educational structure that is built upon sand," at this point I do not necessarily agree with the menu she puts forth specifically to fix the problem.  I personally understand that much of classic writing cannot be translated perfectly into English, but I do not at this point see a need for the study of Latin.  I think a student of the Rhetoric stage can be taught the mechanics of building a good argument based on the styles of the classical writers/orators without him or her actually reading the works in the original Latin.  I agree that young children are memorization sponges and should be introduced to as many facts and stories from history, science, literature and the like, as well as mathematical facts, as early as possible, but I think that this plan needs to be tweaked for each individual child.  I wonder how my probably-gifted child fits into this plan, especially since we are starting semi-formal schooling at age four.  

I also think that children of all stages should be familiar with all forms of writing, and that well-written modern works have as much to offer as many of the classics.  However, the onus is on the parent to read and decide which works those may be, and if a parent lacks understanding in this area, it may be difficult.   I also disagree in that I think formal logic can be introduced as early as the grammar stage, as long as the parent/teacher has a sound understanding of formal logic.  How do you talk to your child, especially when explaining to him "why?"  Do you use logical arguments to model, or do you say "because I am the mom/dad" and vague things of that nature? 

I do like that the Rhetoric stage allows for much personal choice by the student, because if a student has a solid background in the basics of every subject, he should be able to choose what interests him and excel rather than continue to sit through "survey style" courses that offer only remedial knowledge to fill in the gaps.  I think the only reason schools in Texas continue to do it the latter way is because students have so many gaps from missing information during the learning years when "subjects" were poorly taught, due, honestly, to the required standardized testing being much of the focus at those ages. There will be students who simply test poorly and should be helped with "tricks" and whatnot, but to turn every classroom into a test-review center, eschewing actual knowledge in lieu of only what is on the test, has created an educational farce, one that I am loathe to participate in.


To further my study of educational styles, I should either be reading "The Great Conversation" by Robert Hutchins or The Paideia Proposal: an educational manifesto by Mortimer Adler next, depending which looks more enticing at the moment.  Depending on how strongly I feel about each, I may post a review of each of the works, or simply a general review of my understanding of classical education.


If anyone has any suggestions, advice or opinions about anything I have posted here, please comment!


**This post contains affiliate links.  Please read my disclosure statement.