Thursday, the First:


    The day began like any other.  Ruby smashed her toe on the basement stairs till they bled a little bit.  It hurt, but the hospital was narrowly avoided once more.  To distract her from her pain, I asked her to count the polka dots on her shirt.  The older kids helped out and it was discovered that she had at least 250 on just one sleeve.  We used the method that they use to count hundreds of thousands of bats in a cave that we learned a few years ago.   Count how many are in a small patch and multiply the number of patches to cover the sleeve.  Ok, Tobin rolled his eyes at Mom's bringing out math at breakfast but oh well, I can take it.
     After eating, the kids snuck upstairs and immersed themselves in lego creations.  This is the oldest trick they've got.    It's a clever ploy to be busy with something constructive and creative to avoid the math books.  And by golly, it works because it's not every day that they get excited about lego.  I told myself that I could write a very schoolish assignment requiring the children to visually represent scenes from their favourite literature,  Lord of the Rings,  in 3-dimensional space.  A+  for occupying themselves for over an hour with it.   It is a shame that Captain Underpants does not come in lego sets.
     Besides lego, the hamster is a new and popular diversion. Isaac and Tobin segued into a new construction venture of building mazes for the hamster with toilet rolls.  Isaac took it one step further and built mazes out of wood blocks.   What if we turned this into a beginner lesson on Structures, thinks Mom?   I asked Isaac if he could build a bridge that would support a hamster and then gave him some supplies.  He gave it a go until Big Brother made a disparaging remark and kicked his rough start over.   And Younger Brother has a rule that he lives by:  If at first you don't succeed,  destroy your attempt and mutter about how it wouldn't have worked anyway.  Oooooooooooooooooh the lecture was boiling and festering just behind my clenched teeth.   Here's what I managed not to spit at him:   "Well, with that attitude you'll never get anywhere!  How are you ever going to get a job if you quit before you really try?   You'll end up sitting on my couch until you're forty playing video games and getting chips all between the couch cushions.  And another thing...."   It's the fear that makes us crazy.  Fear that your kids won't succeed and you'd better do something about that right here and right now.  But if you give into the crazy you're more likely to bring about the thing you feared in the first place.   By the grace of God, today, instead of making him a condemning speech, I made him a sandwich.  The pressure that he felt, thinking that I expected architectural genius in his hamster bridge-building project subsided and we all returned to our heads after lunch and sat down to play with the building materials.  We had watched a Bill Nye youtube on strong shapes used in bridge building and we experimented with a few and the little rodent made it safely across the pass.
     Tobin spent a part of the rest of the afternoon writing up and printing a flyer he wants to distribute in the hood to promote his snowshoveling/dog-walking services.   He's trying to save up dough to replace the ipod that I may or may not have lost 3 weeks ago. A real life math problem that didn't make his eyes roll was figuring out the cost per page to print the flyers at home vs.  at a copy store.  He appreciates sensible problems that  could actually save him real money.   He also spent time researching information on the net about hamster care and social behavior .  He thinks he wants one of his own.  We spent a little minute learning how to search online and order library books on hamsters too. 
     I feel like I learned more than the kids today.  I want to direct their energy toward ideas that might take their play and work one step further to open their eyes to new possibilities.   But you've got to do this without being super lame or putting pressure on them to perform brilliantly when all they want to do is putz around.  Die hard unschoolers will defend to the death the educational benefits of a kid watching videos all day while eating Doritos.  I think the sweet spot of freedom and inspiration in education lies a little to the left of that scenario.  It's a delicate balance.