Monday, August 16, 2010

First Day of School

I'm homeschooling the whole clan this year. (Not the original plan, but we're working with it.) I've got a senior, a sophomore, an eighth-grader, a sixth-grader, a third-grader, and a preschooler. If I ponder it too deeply, I begin to get jittery.

Really though, the only difference between the day before school starts and the first day of school is that starting today I will begin to sing the Song of Math. Everything else works itself out with a lot of reading and co-op classes, but Math is painful and relentless. The first day of Math involves a lot of whining. The second goes better. If we get cocky and skip the third, the fourth will be as miserable as the first. In fact, every single time we skip a day of Math there is weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth when we start the next lesson. The principle holds true even on weekends. If they get Saturday and Sunday off, they seem to truly believe that they are done. For life.

Math Boy is the exception to this. He collects Calculus books. He likes the stuff. This more than almost anything testifies to me that we lived before this life. Jacob, he studied Math before he got here. And spelling. Because brilliant though I am, Math and spelling are not my strong points. And even if they were, I still couldn't have imparted that brilliance through any normal teaching methods. He's just wired for it. He picks it up by breathing. Not so for the rest of the monkeys. We labor for our Math accomplishments.

Anyhow, gotta run. No time to edit. It's time to start the joy of Math. Happy day to you all.