We got our World History book and the girls are very taken with Egypt. The idea of polytheism and the notion of the body itself having immediate utility after death are new concepts for them, being Catholic, and have brought much discussion.

They are especially taken with the chimerical Ammut, seen below. Crocodile head, lion forelegs, hippopotamus hindquarters.

Wacky!

Faith and Abaigeal attended their very first ballet class tonight. In fact, it was their very first class of any sort outside of home.

Faith drew this picture of her class. The tall figure is the teacher, and the shorter ones are two students.

According to Amazon, my history book is on the way. In fact, it passed from Kansas City to Dallas sometime between September 8th and September 10th. Bah.

At any rate, I hope it’s here soon. The other book, Abby’s encyclopedia, hasn’t even shipped. I’m so not going for the free shipping option at Amazon any more.

homeschooling.gomilpitas.com/explore/geometry.htm has some really great geometry links.

The Story and Its Writer is our main lit selection for the year, I think. When we’re not reading something else, we’ll be reading that. It’s such a fantastic compilation because it has a good selection of authors and also a great selection of literary criticism and essays at the end, many by the authors themselves.

And T.J. can find out if he loathes Hawthorne or loves him. Much like his writing, people rarely seem to find a grey area for ol’ Nate. I won’t tip my hand and tell you whether I like him or not.

Faith and Abby played with Renée’s kids, S and Z today. I’m not sure what was the most fun, but it’d be hard to beat the elaborate pipework constructed from soda straws in our bathroom going from sink to tub (sometimes less so than other times. it was very wet!) Although they also had fun using cookie cutters as stencils (and I discovered that Faith really really knows how to add and subtract, which she picked up from the air, like reading. Go figure. Oooh, bad pun!) and Bede and Z had a great time with some foam bath letters too.

While they were here I made good on my promise to teach Renée to knit! I sent her home with a ball of Peaches and Creme cotton and some bulky superwash merino, and some lovely slippy slidey aluminum needles for that first-time knitter tight tension, and a copy of SnB Nation. Yay R! Now a bad-ass fiber artist, w00t!

That’s all for me tonight, gotta get some sleep!

Today when T.J. came over my friend Renée was here with her two kids (who are also homeschooled.) They left fairly soon after he got here, but not before Renée presented us with a real-world architectural problem that she needed to solve. She will shortly be building a new garage, and she wants the attic space to be 7′ at the inside peak. Given that the width of the garage is 22′, she wanted to know:

1. how long the roof beam would be from floor to peak (the roof proper, if you will)
2. what the angle was between the roof and the floor*

*left as an excercise for the reader

We figured it out, with some help from Pythagoras and a cosine table (it was more trig than geometry, the second part anyway) and with the admonition to check it thoroughly, sent them on their merry way. As Renée&co were leaving, she said to T.J., “See, there’s another reason besides just doing better on the ACT for why you need to learn geometry. You never know when you’ll need it!”

I agreed with her at the time, but on reflection I think we got it exactly backwards. I think her problem and our solution demonstrate why you don’t need to learn geometry, beyond a vague notion as to what geometry does for you and what its uses are. And then, when you need it you can find out how to do it then, right when it’s applicable to the context of your life. Not five or ten years before, when you learned just enough of it to get the grade you wanted on the tests and promptly forgot it.

And of course that’s what life learning is, after all. Just about any subject can be substituted for geometry, from English literature to European history to Euler’s Seven Bridges. When you need to learn it and you want to learn it, you learn it. Just like life. I’ve never had geometry. I sat through about two weeks of trig in college summer school before I decided that since I didn’t need it to graduate and it was a lot of work for something I wasn’t particularly interested in I should drop the course, and I did. So it’s not that I had the stuff and it leapt forth from my brain. I just had some idea that I needed geometry to solve the problem.

Anyway it was Unschooling In Action, for sure, whatever your take on learning and coercion.

In a related development, T.J. is enjoying the pure deductive reasoning portion of our geometry book so much that he wants to pursue a course in logic. Hiding my glee, I said I’d get right on that and had my first-order logic texts out faster than you could say ‘Kurt Gödel’ Hahahaha!

I’m told that this blog is being used by family members who have an interest in T.J. but for whatever reason may prefer not to comment. As I had largely been keeping it for my own recordkeeping, thoughts and musings, I’m glad to know that others have been finding it useful! I’ll be updating it frequently with what he and I are doing.

T.J. and I are switching from a two-day a week schedule to a three-day a week schedule. We were both losing touch with where we were by only meeting twice a week, so starting next week we’re going from our Monday-Thursday evenings to Monday-Wednesday-Friday afternoons. Although I expect many evening spillovers for movie nights, most likely Wednesdays. Ah, Netflix!

T.J. has been very kind to accomodate my very real need for scheduling - if I had my druthers we’d play this more by ear, but that’s just not possible with our situation. I have to have blocks of time consistently set aside for this endeavor that I can plan on and have to cramp the true unschooling style, whatever that is. We’re still completely learner-led, just that the facilitator (that would be me) has to impose a routine structure on what is chosen to be learned. Make sense? I think it’s also realistic. Anyway, thanks T.J. - you are a good man to be patient with this busy mother and her fits and starts. We’re on this road together, rah rah, jolly good etc. The growing pains will iron out, to mix a metaphor.

Oh and geometry is going well.

T.J. and I are breaking each chapter into halves and have planned our attack. He thinks we can do this in the time I have allotted as well, and was pleased at the idea of doing in one semester what a institutional school would take a full year to cover.

So the first part is about the nature of deductive reasoning which is a lovely stroll down Memory Lane for me as a philosophy major with a logic specialty. Ah, sweet sweet inference! We’ll be into the ‘meat’ of geometry proper next week, so stay tuned, geo-wonks.

I sold a couple things on the MDC Trading Post so I could order two books. Here they are:
and

I was originally going to go with the much-more-complex Usborne Internet-Linked Encyclopedia Of World History, but decided that it was really too much information at this point, and we’d be better off with a more age-appropriate text. It sure looks nifty though! And The Natural World (The Usborne Illustrated Encyclopedia) also looked worth getting later.

So hopefully my history angst is silenced.

The First Encyclopedia is for Abby who is my little naturalist. She knows all the names for the young of animals, and she’s working on their collective nouns, to wit: “Mama a baby mouse is called a ‘pinky’ and the mouse family is called a ‘nest’ of mice,” etc. A new Maturin in the making! I’ll leave you to imagine her speech; she has a deep voice and tends to prononce all R sounds as Ys. Trust me, it’s pretty darn cute.