Monthly Archives: January 2015

I’m not going to lie. Right now, getting any school done during the day has been a real effort. I have very little desire to keep everyone on task, and they have even less desire to do so.  The weather has been weird, there’s a lot of chores that need to be done (and furry friends needing to be snuggled) that I’d rather take care of, there’s other things that everyone would rather be doing.

Yet we slog through it as best as we can anyway, and hope it sticks. Today I cut Neve off before math because she couldn’t sit still and I sent her into the kitchen to make these:

This book is full of wonderful recipes for baking that are perfect for Neve’s current abilities.

It calmed her down, avoided the usual math tantrum, and kept her from distracting Emily. And bonus! She has to measure stuff, so…..math!

Ugh. Actually, no. It’s nice when you see homeschool people and blogs talk about using fun activities that incorporate learning math and science, and that’s great when your kids are like 7. But Neve really needs to be working on more complicated geometry and elementary algebra that she isn’t going to learn from whipping out a batch of chocolate chip cookies. Sorry, unschoolers. I’ve seen what happens when a kid isn’t well prepared for the SAT’s and college. You pay for two years of “Math for Dummies” and the like at the local community college before your kid can even start working on their degree requirements.  As much as we don’t love math, it is far easier for them to learn it young and keep building on it than trying from nearly scratch at 18.  And that whole argument about how kids will naturally learn what they need based on their interests? Also no. Not every kid is born motivated to work on improving their brains. It’s a discipline that for many has to be taught, along with time management skills.  And when at 16 your kid suddenly has to cram an entire school  lifetime’s worth of math into a year to prepare for college…it isn’t pretty.   Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m no fan of our public school systems. But there is a level of base knowledge everyone needs, no matter how they are educated.

This is where my brain is these days. It’s mired in the many things that have to happen each day and it certainly feels many days that we are just getting further and further behind. So we keep at it, knowing that this time is finite, and we will never get it back.