juthwara

I spent most of last evening on forms; generating our affidavit and educational objectives (largely cribbed from the Internet) and medical and dental forms (ditto). And then I spent a good hour bashing my head against the Philadelphia School District's web site attempting to figure out where we should send all this. Searching the web site resulted in the names of at least four different offices, none of which could be found in the directory. I found a FAQ which said we needed to contact our Regional Office, which was a link to a 404 page, and there were no other clues on the web site as to where our Regional Office might be.

So it really wasn't a surprise when a phone call this morning revealed that it had to go to an office in the School District's main office in Center City. It can in fact be found in the directory, so this is likely the right place. One hurdle (potentially) down.

We got everything notarized this morning and I stopped by the dentist to get the form signed to prove we're making a reasonable effort to keep her teeth from falling out of her head before their time. All that's left is the TB test tomorrow, which kind of chaps me because we didn't need to do this to actually send her to mingle her germy self with other children in the public schools. I briefly considered filing an exemption request on the theory that I do feel this is a bullshit requirement, but couldn't make myself actually say that I have a religious or strong ethical objection to medical tests when really I just want to avoid a minor pain in the ass.

So if all goes well, I can get the medical form signed tomorrow and we can get this all wrapped up by Wednesday. Of course, we are dealing with big city bureaucracy, so we'll see.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, now that our plans to withdraw from school are underway, we're feeling astonishingly apathetic about getting work done this week. I did make K do some work today, partially just to avoid giving her the idea that we might suddenly no longer be doing any work around here. But I did then let her spend over an hour watching whatever videos she wanted on BrainPopJr, an educational video website. It was educational after all, even if it wasn't fulfilling any actual assignments. Goodness knows what we're getting accomplished tomorrow.

I haven't been talking much about school this year, mostly because I've been preoccupied with keeping my eyes open and food in my stomach. Truly, I don't recommend combining homeschooling and the first trimester if you can help it. But as I've started coming out of the first trimester fog, I'm realizing that quite a bit of the difficulty has been K and her resistance to most of what we're doing.

One big issue is she has a combination of shyness, perfectionism and performance anxiety that prevents her from wanting to answer a question unless she's absolutely sure of the answer (and to make it even more fun, when she's bored or feeling resistant, she sometimes likes to play dumb). This is a poor combination for a program where a teacher calls every two weeks to ask her to read out loud, let alone with standardized testing time comes along. Her kindergarten teacher last year had a reasonable amount of success with her, but we got off to a bad start with her teacher this year due to miscommunication, and while things have improved, K absolutely refused to read for her the last time she called.

The other issue is something it took me longer to realize: she's bored. This is too easy for her. The way she moans and whines through a list of three-letter words but brightens up when you start introducing more difficult words makes that clear. But I can't make any sort of case for accelerating her if I can't get her to show what she knows.

So she resists while we slog our way through a program with a heavy emphasis on output - worksheets, projects, constant mini-quizzes between the frequent tests. Just the thing a child who doesn't like to give answers needs. I keep thinking that if we could have at least half of her school day be things she likes, it will be possible to get her to do the stuff she likes less. But so far, that's only science, which is three days a week. No word on when we might introduce some other (state-mandated!) subjects, like social studies, music or art.

So: we have an educational program with only three subjects (reading, math and science), two of which are on too easy a level and which emphasize all of the things that she dislikes most. It demands that a child who is very shy and has performance anxiety when it comes to showing her knowledge get regularly quizzed by someone she has never met in person. A surefire recipe for success!

If we were homeschooling on our own and were having this kind of trouble, we could go out and find a new curriculum that's better suited to her strengths instead of her weaknesses (if we were homeschooing on our own, we would be required to be covering about nine different subjects, so I'm more than a little confused about why it's okay to just be doing three through school).

So clearly the answer is to start homeschooling on our own. More on that tomorrow.

Verdict of the doctor: no signs of any bacterial infections in the various orifices, probably a virus. Come back if the fever isn't gone by Friday. She took a urine sample, but K isn't having any of her normal symptoms, so I would be surprised if it were the primary cause of all this (it wouldn't shock me if there were another infection brewing, since when hasn't there been one brewing in the past nine months?).

This evening, K napped on the couch next to me and I could feel the heat radiating off of her without even touching her. The immortal UTI aside, we've been extremely lucky with our childrens' health. Neither of them has had a virus last for more than a couple days or an infection that hasn't cleared up promptly with antibiotics. A case of bronchitis as a baby has given Alec reactive airway disease, which means he gets a couple weeks of wheezing every time he gets a cold but nothing that a few nebulizer treatments won't help.

This is the longest either of them has been this sick in such a worrying way. I know it's probably a virus that she'll finally kick in the next couple days, or we'll get a call saying she does have another infection, but it's hard not to let my mind go in worrying directions the longer this goes on with no change.

I took K to the urologist last week, to see if we could find an answer to why she gets a new UTI every time she turns around. We got a maybe answer (this is the part where I hedge because I'm starting to feel like K's getting to the age where she deserves some privacy on these issues. So rather than get into the whole saga, Google "dysfunctional elimination" if you want to), and get to go back in a couple weeks for a delightful test called a VCUG, which involves a urinary catheter. I anticipate great fun getting K to sit still for that. Sigh. It will be at a children's hospital, so they should be used to dealing with uncooperative children.

Mostly, I'm hoping the office staff will be a little more on the ball this time around. We had a 9:45 appointment and didn't get home until 1:30, due to little things like the fact that it took over an HOUR just to check us in. Then we saw the actual doctor for about 30 seconds and a highly distracted nurse practitioner the rest of the time, if by "see" you mean "Spent five minutes someplace else for every two minutes she spent with us." And part of that approximately ten fragmented minutes was spent informing K that she needed to give up what the NP saw as a bad habit (completely unrelated to K's urinary tract) and outlined the behavior reward system we were apparently going to implement. All without every even directly speaking to me, the parent sitting right there in the room, let alone thinking that maybe things like this should be up to me, K'S MOTHER. Plus we already use a good bahavior chart, so her stupid star chart would be kind of redundant.

So now I have another reason to want the UTIs to end, so I don't have to keep finding myself wasting my quickly waning youth in a waiting room while waiting to get passive aggressive unwanted parenting advice.

This was a long and somewhat odd week, what with the city being paralyzed by snow on Thursday. In some ways, it made life easier, since longstrider was home Thursday to help out, although I think that was more or less balanced out by Alec also being home instead of at daycare.

Anyway, we've survived our first week of homeschooling. Here are some notes, mostly for my own use:

Curriculum:

We are using Calvert reading and math, which are pretty straightforward. There's a bit of prep needed ahead of time, mostly to make sure we have the math materials ready and have found all of the readings in the various reading books we've been given (I'm not sure if this is a "Starting in the middle of the year so it's assumed we know how to find readings" issue or they're just not being explicit enough, but it took me quite a while to find everything I needed on our first day because we have three different reading-related books and they didn't say which one we could find the stories we needed in).

Science and social studies, on the other hand, are requiring quite a bit more preparation and thought because so far, they're just telling us what to talk about without a textbook to read. Social studies, at least, has a list of suggested books you can read with your child. Science last week, however, blithely told me to discuss land masses, glaciers, the water cycle and air with very little guidance. Thankfully, I was able to message my personal librarian to ask him to bring some books home.

So far, of all things, What Do People Do All Day? by Richard Scarry has been by far the most useful book for this. Social studies has been a discussion of various professions, and even though it was written in the seventies, the sections on riding on airplane and taking a train trip were still surprisingly relevant (although the flight attendants served food. How quaint!). And while I used library books for the overcomplicated science lesson, I later opened What Do People Do All Day? to discover a perfectly good explanation of the water cycle, and also realized that we had his Great Big Air Book, which would have been very useful as well. Sadly, the next social studies lesson is fishermen, and Richard Scarry seems to be letting me down on that topic, so I'll actually have to find something else to be my social studies textbook.

Organization:

So far, our days are pretty free-form, but I would like to be a bit more strict about scheduling so we don't wind up having to do work in the evening. Part of the problem last week was unanticipated breaks while I did things I should have prepped ahead of time, like when I found myself having to cut out 78 letter cards, so hopefully we'll have less of that this week.

The workload is pretty reasonable. We're supposed to be spending five hours a day on schoolwork (since this is a public school, there are attendance requirements. We also had to send them vaccination forms, despite the fact that we're not coming in contact with any other human beings), but this is all on the honor system, so as long as we're getting everything done, well, no one is the wiser as to how much time it actually took.

Toddler wrangling is another area we need to work on. Right now, he's still going to daycare Tuesdays and Thursdays, so we have those days free, but there's still Mondays and Wednesdays to figure out. He's pretty good about being self-entertaining, but he does have a tendency to want to get in the middle of whatever K is doing. My best strategy so far has been to create an obstacle course between him and us, so he has a number of things to distract him as he comes toward us.

Another aspect of organizing our days is that instead of the various work options laid out, I apparently have decided on 5. None of the above, continue your normal schedule and level of childcare and just add a ton more work on top of it. Ai yi yi. Doing the math, working 20 hours a week plus childcare is about the same amount of money as working ten hours a week without childcare, but I don't feel ready to have both kids all day every day while we're still figuring out the homeschooling thing. So I've been trying to get some work done during the day and haven't been doing too badly. We'll see how long I can keep this up.

The student:

K seems to be enjoying pretty much everything except Reading. We're definitely going to need to stock up on strategies for when she doesn't want to do any work at all, but mostly she's been pretty good about doing schoolwork. I suspect the Reading issue is that she's always been very shy about demonstrating knowledge until she's quite certain about something. That doesn't mix well with being asked to sound out words, which so far she mostly refuses to try to do, even when it's things I know she's capable of doing. She's happy to listen to stories and to work on handwriting, but the phonics lessons are going to be our big sticking point, and I'm not sure what to do about it. Does anyone know any good strategies for encouraging the reluctant student who is too shy to reveal what she knows?

So I guess we're going to start doing it.


We had a parent-teacher conference before Christmas. I've been trying to write about it ever since, but never seem to find the time, and then the weekend before Christmas happened, which is the reason a lot of stuff I meant to do before Christmas didn't happen.

Anyway, we learned a number of things, many not surprising (our child is stubborn and likes to go her own way. Imagine our shock). But there were two things that stood out:

1. They have a two hour block of reading instruction every morning (and related, they're not supposed to have any formal playtime, but she has a good teacher who finds ways to give it to them by calling it other things). TWO HOURS of expecting five-year-olds to sit still and study the same subject, not to mention there's also math, science and social studies to cover over the course of the day. And then she gets to go home to at least another 45 minutes of homework.

2. One thing K needs to work on is that she tends to space out and fidget (gosh, I wonder why). And apparently that's fine now, but it won't fly in first grade, when apparently all six-year-olds are expected to stay on task at all times.

And perhaps the most important thing is that while K will vary on whether or not she says she likes school (usually based on whether she doesn't want to get out of bed or what sort of day she's had at school), she will very consistently say she's bored.

I don't want to make it sound like my precious genius is too good for public school. My concern is that 1) this curriculum is seriously developmentally inappropriate for five-year-olds and 2) if K's only good coping method for dealing with what must be a huge amount of repetition during the school day will start getting her in trouble, we have a real potential problem. And while moving might get her into a school with less crowding and better test scores, the curriculum is going to be the same.

So our conclusion is that while our preference for K's education is school, the Philadelphia Public Schools aren't it.* So after a lot of talking and thinking and discussing this with just about everyone we visited over Christmas, a couple weeks ago, we took a deep breath and pulled the trigger in the form of applying to Commonwealth Connection Academy, an online charter school. I don't feel quite prepared to come up with a curriculum myself this quickly, and truthfully, I almost always do better if I have a bit of external pressure motivating me.

There's a lot of logistics to figure out yet, ranging from what to do about my job to how to rearrange the house to how to manage several hours of schoolwork a day with an active toddler in the house. Part of me is really excited - lately, it's just so cool having a five-year-old around who gets so excited about learning - and part of me is terrified that I'll be scouting out unmarked graves in the backyard within a month. But we're really doing it.



*This is the place where I say that I don't think every public school here is terrible - there are certainly individual ones that are very good. But the conpetition for spots in charter schools, the only place we would escape the standard curriculum, is such that we would have to apply to every charter school within a five mile radius to possibly get a chance at a spot. And I'm definitely a big proponent of public schools in general. I'm the product of an excellent public school system and sometime I may treat everyone to my treatise on: Our Education System: Why It's Not That Damn Bad.

I'm also conflicted about leaving the public school system, since I generally feel it's not going to get better if people abandon it. By withdrawing my child, I'm also removing potentially involved parents, the influence and good test scores a good student provides, and perhaps most importantly, the funding that K provides. I mean, it's not like the cost of the facilities or teachers will change if K leaves, so the money they're losing is a lot more than what they would save. I generally feel that homeschooling parents probably should do something to make up for what they're taking out of the system. Fortunately, I think we have that more than taken care of by choosing to be underpaid civil servants in the public library system. We both provide for the education system all the time. But I've said more than once that it's not fair to make my child my agent of social change, and my primary responsibility is to prepare her for adult life in the best way I can.

So yesterday we had a birthday party, with cake and princess decorations and lots of splashing in the wading pool. It was a great success all around.

And then today, we woke up with a five-year-old. I can't believe how tall she is, and how much she's grown up over the past year. I know that the infrequency of my posting over the past year means that I'm most likely to post about her when she's driving me crazy, which could give the casual reader the impression that I don't like my older child much. But really, she's quite a delightful little girl.

She's enthusiastic. Everything she likes is her favorite. She loves just about anything you give her.

She's creative. She'll make clever lego creations or creations from paper and tape or cloth that actually resemble what they're supposed to be.

She's imaginative. I love listening to the running dialogues she gives pretty much any inanimate object she plays with. She rides her imaginary horse through the parking lot and then hitches it to the front of the car so it can pull her carriage. She spends about half of her life as a puppy and brings me items to throw so she can play fetch.

She's an excellent big sister. I won't say there aren't times that she doesn't want her brother touching her stuff, and she's not always gentle about pushing him away. She also takes rampant advantage of his good nature by snatching away things he's playing with, knowing that he probably won't fight. But most of the time, she's very generous with her toys, and very gentle with him. She's the best of all of us at getting him to laugh and is so good about playing with him. She loves her brother so much, she's campaigning for another baby.

She's such a kid. Her body has gotten so long, and her face has lost all of its baby roundness. Tantrums are being replaced with shrewd bargaining.

Happy birthday Katherine. I can't believe you're such a big girl already.

First, because I know many people reading this will be interested, Stephen Sondheim was on Fresh Air Wednesday. Shows like this are the reason I love Fresh Air so much.

***

Scene from Monday:

When picking K up from preschool, I was told that she hadn't been able to think of a "W" word for the letter of the week. Trying to lead her to a word, I asked her, "K, what do you put in the bathtub when you take a bath?"
"Toys!"
"Okay...but what do you wash with?"
"Soap!"
"And..."
"Shampoo!"

I finally had to whisper "water" to her so she could give it as her word. I suppose I should have asked her what puddles are made of, but I suspect she would have said "mud."

Speaking of school, I got a flyer yesterday saying that next week is Grandparents' Day, better known as "Special days that seem like a good idea except for the people who get it rubbed in their faces that they don't have as much family on hand as most people."

Have I ever mentioned that I grew up 1000 miles away from all of my grandparents? I could legitimately be accused of being a little sensitive on this subject. We were always able to dig up someone elderly from church to go for my brother and I, but the people I know best at church are a touch young to be asked to be a substitute grandparent. I just hate the thought that K gets to experience being left out of a special day at the tender age of four.

Ah well. K can focus on the fact that my mother is visiting in a little over a month. She's going to be at Oberlin Memorial Day weekend for her 50th college reunion. Five-O. My goodness. Anyway, since she'll be halfway here already, she thought she might as well come visit us. I'm not arguing. She really wants to take K to Sesame Place, which again, I'm not arguing. Sesame Place is one of those places where it seems a shame to have little kids and not go, but it's the most egregious example around here of the "price individual tickets so high it's only slightly more expensive to get a membership" pricing structure around here. It's annoying, because I don't have the time or money to belong to dozen museums, but there are plenty of places I'd like to go occasionally (as in, less than once a year) that I don't because it's just too expensive. Sesame Place would be $150 to take the entire family, so it's never been a remote possibility. But if my mother wants to pony up the money, I'm happy to let her. And I plan to try to convince her to put the money towards a membership so we have another place to go this summer.

***

Now that I think of it, there was another conversation I had with K this week. It went along the lines of "It's fine if you want to get some mandarin oranges from the jar in the cabinet, but once you open it up, you really need to put it in the refrigerator." I'm not sure how long it sat in the cabinet merrily fermenting away, silent but deadly, but eventually I opened it up to get a palpable wave of vinegar and the sight of some rather unspeakable oranges floating in a fetid soup. Yum-o indeed. Occasionally, I'm secretly happy to discover a container is an unrecycleable plastic so I can guiltlessly toss it away without opening it up to clean it and getting personally acquainted with its rapidly evolving contents.

As I poured K's prison wine experiment down the sink, I found myself wondering if citrus is used as a base for wine. I know of alcoholic drinks where you add alcohol to orange juice (screwdriver, mimosa... and that's where my sad, tiny knowledge of alcohol dries up without additional research), but is it ever used as base for alcohol?

We have mostly come to a decision about kindergarten for K next year. I did some research on the public elementary school K would be going to, and it's really not that bad. We're in a fairly solidly middle-class area, so even if our school doesn't get any more money, the parents have more ability to be involved than schools in poorer areas, which can make a significant difference.* They also have an active music program, one of the areas I was worried about with public schools (she could start learning the violin in first grade!), and they have both a library and a librarian. With books. And I'm not being funny when I say that - there are schools in Philadelphia where they have a beautiful library room that was endowed, but with no books for it. And the early childhood education is in a separate building from the rest of the school, so although this school seems relatively safe, we have even less to worry about because the little kids are kept separate from the rest of the school. And as I said before, it's more the middle school and high school years that I worry more about in regards to safety. She's unlikely to get knifed in the first grade.

It doesn't look like even the cheapest Friends school will be financially feasible next year, so we'll hold off on that for at least a year, and maybe pull it out as an option if we get unhappy with her current situation. This is where I get mad at the mayor once again, because longstrider was supposed to step up in pay in January, but since his union is working without a contract while it's in negotiations, the mayor is claiming that the city doesn't have to give step raises. That's $200 a month we could find plenty of good uses for. It should come through eventually, along with a nice chunk of back pay, but I'd rather have it now. The car is going to be paid off in August, which will free up more money. And while I don't want to go back to the online job I left in June, I found a similar one recently that has a lot more flexibility in the number of hours I would have to work and when (my biggest problem with the last job was having to work four hours a day, every day with no flexibility, which made for some exhausting days when I worked both that job and at the library on Fridays). If I could only have taken Fridays off, I would probably still be working there). So I have to take a test to qualify for that, but I'm not terribly worried about passing, and hopefully that will bring in more money.

There's a long shot compromise option - there's a nearby charter school we've applied for. Charter schools aren't necessarily better academically than regular schools here, but there would be smaller classes and involved parents. They also have a big emphasis on community building and conflict resolution, which is a lot of what I wanted from a Friends school. Unfortunately, there'a a lottery to get in, and even if we do really well in the lottery, they have sibling preference. So I would be shocked if we get in.

Of course, the real question here is when did my baby get old enough for kindergarten?

*I've realized that there's no way to talk about this without sounding like an elitist asshole who doesn't want my pwecious snowflake around those icky poor people. But as I've said before, there are my ideals - that all children have an equal right to a quality education and it feels unfair to leverage my privilege to get K in an advantageous situation - and then there's the fact that I have a real, concrete responsibility to the non-theoretical child in front of me to prepare her for the world in the best way I can. And that means not sending her to school that would give her a bad education if I can send her to one that won't. It's unfair, but so is the entire system.

This started out as a comment on Fairoriana's post on boys and gender issues, but it's getting long enough that I'm making it a post instead.

I've found the gender issues for both of my children have been remarkably interrelated, which shouldn't be surprising since gender politics are interrelated. With Alec, I've confronted new issues that I haven't before with K, because it's more accepted for girls to transcend gender barriers. This, of course, is because boy stuff = good and girl stuff = bad, so it's more accepted for girls to do boy stuff than it is for boys to do girl stuff.

At the tender age of four months, the biggest area this has come up for with Alec is with clothing. When I was pregnant, K wanted to buy Baby Brother an outfit every time we passed baby clothes, and I was often happy to oblige. But I found myself steering her away from the frilly dresses she was attracted to, once biting down the words "Boys don't wear dresses" right before they came out of my mouth. Part of my motivation with this was that we already had plenty of baby girl clothes, so if I was going to spend money, I'd rather do it on more boy-oriented stuff. But the other part was the same thing that made me initially set aside the hand-me-down baby clothes from K that were pink or had flowers. It wasn't even so much my not wanting to see my son in pink as I was afraid of having to defend putting him in pink when we were out in public.

However, one night I was looking at a pink flowered nightgown that was of the type I liked best (snaps up the front), and decided that 1) it was stupid not to use perfectly good clothes because society has arbitrarily decided they're not for girls, 2) why do I care what random strangers think about how I dress my children, and 3), if I'm willing to buy dinosaurs for K, I should be willing to put Alec in pink. So now I do. I haven't put him in any dresses and I don't think I will, but so far the adorable pink sleeper with the bunny on it has failed to cause his penis to fall off. I'm still a little shy of putting him in anything too girly to go out, mostly because I'm pathologically conflict-averse and just don't want to deal with nose old ladies with rigid gender expectations.

This Sunday, Alec will be wearing the christening gown my grandfather wore in 1906. In fact, he wore dresses until he was three years old. I suspect he also wore pink since it was considered a boy's color in those days. He was still manly enough to father two children.

As Alec gets older, there will certainly be more clothes issues - would I let him wear a dress in public? Will I let him have long hair (given that his father has long hair, almost certainly). The issue again will not be as much what I'm comfortable with as trying to negotiate his desires with what the rest of the world thinks. The nosy old ladies will turn into his peers, and I'll have to decide how to help him balance expressing his true self with peer acceptance. But that will be true whether he wants to wear a dress or not.

But I'll also butt up against things that are more my issues, that I'm already dealing with K - as a feminist, what sort of toys do I allow my children to play with? And as usual, it's the girl toys that come up suspect. Out of the entire world of boy toys, military toys are the only ones that give me pause, and I haven't come to a real decision about that. But with girl toys, there are tons of things that bother me. Cooking and housework toys are fine, since I don't even considered those gendered toys as every adult needs to know how to feed themselves and keep up basic household hygiene. Baby doll play is about nurturing, which again I consider applicable to both sexes. Dollhouses are a miniature version of household play. All fine for both of my children.

But then we get to princesses, which I've already discussed. And Barbie. I'm more leery but consider both of those more or less inocuous if we approach them the right way. But then there's hair dressing toys, or play makeup kits, or fashion design software.

There are age issues with those things as well, but I don't want to get into that here. Let's say right now they're being considered for a hypothetical ten-year-old, and the makeup won't be worn in public.

When I ask myself, why is it okay for my child to pretend to cook or take care of babies the way she will when she's an adult, but not pretend to style hair or put together pretty outfits the way she will when she's an adult, the only answer I can come up with is that unlike housework or child care, those are things women do that haven't become acceptable for heteresexual men to do as well. Women are judged by how they look in a way that men just aren't, and knowing how to put yourself together well is an important skill for a woman who wants to be professionally successful. I often wish I had had more opportuntities to learn that sort of thing when I was younger. But because this is something that only women do, it's of course seen as superficial and worthless. But just try climbing the corporate ladder with no makeup on. So I wouldn't buy any of those things for my preschool daughter, but when she's older, well, why not? Do they truly have inherently less social worth than playing paintball? And if my son shows interest in these things, I can't in fairness deny then to him any more than I would refuse to buy my daughter a skateboard.

It's astonishing how far down the internalized sexism goes when you start interrogating it. And no wonder this got too long for just a comment. I just keep trying to remind myself the conclusion I came to when I started wondering why I didn't want to buy K pink: the only thing wrong with the color pink (besides not especially complimenting her complexion) is that it's the code color for girl that everything meant for girls is required to be coated in. There's nothing wrong with being a girl, therefore there's nothing wrong with pink as long as it's balanced with all of the other colors.