Lessons Learned

Yay! Midweek! Wait… is it?

This morning, Luke asked me how many days are in a week. I looked at him with disbelief and horror, struck dumb by the realization that I am failing tragically as a homeschooler. I hummed the ‘week’ song… “There are HM-HM days, there are HM-HM days, there are HM-HM days in a week!” hoping he would remember.

Then, full of desperation, I just shouted, “Seven! Count them!” and proceeded to name the days while holding up my fingers.

He looked at me sheepishly, and said, “Well, I can’t remember if it’s seven or eight because of the song (begins singing) “I love her eeeeight daaaays a weeeeeek!”

L.O.L.

So, I’m okay with that. It’s a valid excuse! I’m not failing (completely) as a homeschooler, I’m just sending him mixed messages by loading what I believed to be benign Beatles songs onto his ipod. I can’t blame him for that, and I can’t say it ever occurred to me that I was ruining his education. Plus, he IS the third child, so it’s not like we spent a whole lot of time on trivial things like days of the week, months of the year, etc. With the third child, you kind of wake up one morning and realize… “My baby is FOUR, and he can only count to TEN!”

Okay, it was actually my second child, he was three, and it was colors, not numbers. But, you get the point, right?

The point IS, third (and later) children learn some things a little later than their siblings did, but they learn them faster. With Jake, we read the Book of Colors EVERY night for weeks when he was around two, until he finally, FINALLY got them. It was very stressful. With Levi, he was about 3 ½ when I realized the deficiency and panicked, dug out the color book, and he learned them in a day or two. No problem! So, it’s actually more efficient to WAIT. Or forget. Whatever. They all eventually learn what they need, and that's what counts.

Today, Levi, on the other hand, had a really exciting morning. He finally finished the chapter in his math book on long, long, looooong division. He has struggled for days with these huge problems, like 764,355 divided by 893: problems most sane adults do on calculators, but that you HAVE to learn, anyway.

He doesn’t have a problem with division, he has a problem with sitting there forever, following step, after step, after step of the never-ending problems. It’s hard for a little boy to get his numbers printed nicely enough and his lines clean enough to do long division in the first place, so when you couple that with having to follow the DMSCB sequence 5 times in one problem, it’s basically torture. I might as well pull out his fingernails as assign those problems. (In case you haven’t done long division since the fifth grade, DMSCB is ‘divide, multiply, subtract, check, bring down.’ We use the mnemonic aid ‘Don’t Make Sam Chew Bugs’ to remember it. Making someone else chew bugs is much more interesting to boys than the order of mathematical operations.)

As for Jake, the highlight of my day with him (so far) has been his attempt to impart wisdom to his little brothers. It’s not very often he takes the time to explain things to them with the ‘heart of a teacher,’ but he made the effort today.

We were sitting in the car at the library, finishing up our lunch, when an older woman with… an unusually LARGE and, well, LONG bust, walked past us. There were exclamations of surprise and confusion as to what was her top, and what was her middle. Jake took advantage of the moment and proceeded to enlighten his brothers.

“You see, boys, MOM will never have that problem. Since she doesn’t have any… I mean, since hers aren’t like OTHER women’s, she won’t ever have that sagging problem.”

Yes, really. He dared. And he was totally serious and couldn’t even tell how much I equally wanted to bust out laughing and bust him in the mouth.

Then he bit his tortilla into the shape of a monacle and placed it over his eye. When I rolled my eyes and gave him a look that conveyed my lack of interest in his puerile behavior (and breast lesson), he said, “Hey, just be glad I didn’t make it into a core processor!”

Oh, the child. My child, but, still… so foreign to me.

I’m thankful for days like these… learning days.

I’m thankful to be having school again, because, instead of yelling, screaming, upsetting the neighbors, or choking each other, they are learning. They are busy doing something productive every day, and, while they had short spurts of work, they’ve missed that during the move (whether they realize it or not). So have I.

I’m glad I get to be with them to celebrate finishing a wicked long division chapter with high fives and hugs.

I’m glad I can see where and why there are holes in their education and know that all it takes is a simple deletion on itunes to fix it.

I’m also thankful that no one will ever have a problem telling whether they’re looking at my top or my middle. That’s a true relief.