thoughts, words, deeds

writing with an eight year old reading over my shoulder

"We don't stop going to school when we graduate." Carol Burnett Do you agree with this quote?

I completely agree. We need to spend our entire lives in learning because when we stop, we’re dead. That’s one reason that I like to read so much and the reason that I like to write. Sometimes, the best way to figure out what I think about something is to write it out . . . to put my thoughts into words so that I realize what those thoughts are.

I haven’t been blogging much lately. Too much going on, and there are children still awake right now reading over my shoulder as a write. It’s kind of frustrating, actually, because I don’t like to write with an audience. But I guess I make him let me watch him do his school work, so it’s par for the course.

My sister-in-law homeschools (my brother does too, except here we’re dealing with the main breadwinner vs. the person who drums learning into some frustrating little heads), and because the baby is three weeks old and she’s still on bedrest, I’ve been taking over some of the pushing. She does it much better than me, of course. She knows what they’re capable of and how to coerce them into doing it, even if it does take all day. Home school has some advantages over the school I went to . . .for one thing, it’s supposed to have only a short period of formula learning followed by long periods of learning through activities and daily life.

In other words, they’re being prepared to learn through their lives. I just wish it was easier to convince them that it was important NOW. Because the little eavesdropper in particular is as frustrating as my baby sister was when I helped her with her homework every night for a year while she struggled with dyslexia and thinking that she was stupid. She wasn’t. He isn’t. He’s just trying my last nerve and if he doesn’t go to bed soon, I’m going to do something nasty. Yes, I’m talking to you, you little foolish person laughing at what I’m writing right now.

I would just like to also comment that this isn’t hard to write. It’s not difficult to come up with sentences in response to a prompt. Here I am, I wrote for less than five minutes about learning (or going to school after graduation—or Carol Burnett who is a funny lady that I wouldn’t mind getting another thought from in the future) and I have five paragraphs. My little eavesdropper sees a prompt and his mind goes completely blank. Trying to get him to write complete sentences is like pulling teeth out of his mouth . . . it involves pain and possibly blood.

Speaking of blood, we had a bloody nose this morning because of (a different) child who got overexcited and managed to hit his nose into a table. I didn’t know that it was possible to give yourself a bloody nose, but I have a talented family. He was in the middle of an online lesson, and his teacher offered to let him stop, but he wanted to continue. Now, that’s learning beyond schooling.

But I have an eight year old to terrorize and send to bed. So that I can sleep. I'm tired. And the annoying thing is that I have a hard time sleeping if the kids are up. And he refuses to sleep. And he bruises me and refuses to do chores and hits his little siblings and is generally misbehaving which is probably because he wants more attention, but I can't reward disobedience. So, he better get to bed.

NOW.