bearing blog

bearing blog


bear – ing n 1  the manner in which one comports oneself;  2  the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~];  4  pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation;   5  the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

  • In the moment.

    A real-life friend of mine recently started blogging her journey towards healthier eating, and I've been enjoying following her entries. 

    Something she wrote last night struck me as worthy of comment here:

    So today I could have done worse, but I could have been much, much better.  It is getting easier to look back at the day and say "OK, I should have done it this way."  I am wanting to transition to thinking of it on the spot so I don't have to look back on the day and apply to tomorrow….  I know it'll come eventually.

    I think it's actually really, really hard to learn the habit of "thinking of it on the spot" — making careful food choices in the moment, in the face of hunger and possibly cravings, and sometimes in a less-than-healthful food environment.  I can make on-the-spot choices that match my goals now, in almost any environment, but this is something I had to learn.

    And I did not learn to make good on-the-spot choices by making good on-the-spot choices, or by making bad on-the-spot choices, or in fact by making ANY on-the-spot choices at all.  What taught me to make on-the-spot choices was to make choices well in advance, and then stick to them.

    Back in 2008, when I was learning, I would sit down in the evening and write out everything I planned to eat the next day, and when I would eat it.  Very quickly I realized why I had been unable to make good on-the-spot food decisions:  It takes time to figure out what to eat in advance!  Even more time when I expected my choices to be limited by circumstance. So why was I being so hard on myself for failing to make good choices on the fly?

    The good news is that, after many months of planning ahead, I found that I had gotten better at making choices on the fly. I'd gained a lot of experience in difficult situations, like fast food restaurants and buffets, and I'd internalized some good rules of thumb that I can call on "in the moment" — like "Eat entrees as if I were half a person and vegetables as if I were two people."  

    I'd also learned that in some situations, even if my kids needed to eat a meal right then, the best choice for me might be to wait, to stay hungry until I could get home and have a real meal.  In other situations, I could eat something very small with protein in it — a handful of the almonds I keep in my car, for instance, or maybe a kid-size hamburger — and complete the meal by having vegetables and fruit, by themselves, later in the day. 

    And I had more knowledge.  I had learned that a homemade bran muffin has just about as much protein as an egg — so I don't need to add the egg to the bran muffin if I eat the bran muffin first.  I had learned that certain "healthy" items have more calories than the "unhealthy" items.  I had learned that it was possible to ask to have the cheese and croutons left off, the dressing on the side.  Things like that.

    Just yesterday I found myself at Sonic with the kids at lunchtime.  There are no "healthful" meal choices there, although to their credit you can get fresh bananas or apple slices on the side.  I could have stayed hungry till I got home, but instead I opted to order one ordinary (not double) hamburger with "the works," and skip the sides and drink. It's a reasonable portion size, really.  Adding a banana might have added a health halo, but I know darn well (by now) that the calories in the burger were enough to be my whole lunch.  In the past I might have ordered a superficially "healthier" sandwich (like the grilled chicken wrap) and let that convince me I should order fries and a soda too.   Which would have given me far more food that I needed — a gluttonous amount — even if the sandwich part was theoretically better (something I question anyway).

    But the point is, I only got to this point by planning ahead, which forced me to learn the real content of my choices, and empowered me to make better ones.  Once I had plenty of practice, I knew what the best choices really looked like — and they aren't necessarily the ones I thought was best before, with people in line behind me and my children whining for fries.  I know better now.

    [Editing note.  Years and years later, I wish I’d done a better job distinguishing gluttony from other problems with food, like clinical eating disorders and other kinds of compulsiveness.  

    I want to emphasize that, whereas I identified some behaviors in myself that probably qualified as self-centered gluttony in the technical sense, I am not and never have been qualified to make that distinction for anyone else.

    I hope to add some commentary to all the posts that have this problem as I find the time to review them.  Here’s a more recent post where I acknowledge some of the problematic material I wrote and set new ground rules for myself going forward.]

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  • Confession.

    I recently received a question from a reader who agreed to let me share the question and my response.  Here we go:

    I am 42 and had our 5th child almost a year ago. Previous to that pregnancy, I had cleaned up my eating and dropped to 120 lbs. – my college weight! I never thought I could do it and it was such a victory.

    Since then, I have been discouraged day after day because climbing back onto the healthy eating wagon is turning out to be so hard for me. I know what I need to do because I’ve done it before. Yet, I keep choosing to eat junk.

    … You credit the Sacraments to your weight loss. PLEASE elaborate on that if you have the time.

    About the Sacraments and weight loss. It’s funny, I don’t think I’ve ever confessed the “sin of gluttony.” I consider myself to suffer from an eating disorder, and so I was never really aware that I was being gluttonous for a very long time. If one is not aware  that one is doing something wrong, one doesn’t incur guilt or require confession.  And guilt is mitigated in the presence of compulsions or even strong habit. I’m positive my sin [of gluttony] was venial, if there was indeed any sin at all.*

    After I realized that my behavior was, objectively, gluttonous, and became convinced that I had to change, I asked Jesus for help in the Eucharist, and received that help. Specifically, I asked Him to remove my disordered attachment to  all food except Him. I don’t think it’s entirely removed, but I am much less disordered than I was before!

    I have never been “convicted” (as the Protestants say) that I was committing a sin in most incidences of overeating. It has been more a case of trying to develop the virtue of temperance in myself. As such, it’s entirely appropriate that I got that strength through the Real Presence… as Food. 

    Also, one has to eat every day, and it’s not helpful to work hard at trying to draw the line [between sinful gluttony and garden-variety overeating]. Eating ten gumdrops is okay, but the eleventh is a sin? Is it only a sin because I’m overweight? Does a normal person need to confess every time she eats a double helping of ice cream and cake at someone’s birthday party?  Thinking that way is, I’m convinced, harmful to me.

    What I did bring to the confessional was my backsliding into bulimia. 

    Whereas I need to eat every day, and it’s difficult to decide when moderate eating crosses into immoderate eating; I don’t need anyone to tell me that it is immoderate to make myself throw up. It harms my health (I have damaged my larynx) directly, in a way that eating a bag of chips doesn’t. 

    What’s more, I was very aware of my free choice in the matter. I would feel  that I had eaten too much. I would see before me two paths: 

    (1) I could remember the uncomfortably-full feeling and use it as a lesson to eat less the next time, to  stay out of the near occasion of sin-by-purging;

    (2) or I could go to the bathroom, stick my finger down my throat, and make the extra food go away, thus reinforcing the habit and allowing myself an easy way out that would  even promise I could overeat in the future, again and again and again.

    Sometimes I chose #2. And that is what I brought to confession. And for a long time after each confession, I believe I had the grace to not be tempted to purge.   (It wore off eventually. I have backslid and reconfessed this sin numerous times in my life.  But not constantly. I can tell I am receiving real help in the confessional with  this temptation.)

    It’s not a problem for me right now, I should add.  But I don’t think I’ll ever be completely safe from it.

    *

    [Editing note.  Years and years later, I wish I’d done a better job distinguishing gluttony from other problems with food, like clinical eating disorders and other kinds of compulsiveness.  

    I want to emphasize that, whereas I identified some behaviors in myself that probably qualified as self-centered gluttony in the technical sense, I am not and never have been qualified to make that distinction for anyone else.

    I hope to add some commentary to all the posts that have this problem as I find the time to review them.  Here’s a more recent post where I acknowledge some of the problematic material I wrote and set new ground rules for myself going forward.]

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  • 4/19

    The Mom remembers Oklahoma City.

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  • Co-schooling (2). How it changes things.

    How is my life, and my children's schooling, different because we've chosen to co-school?  Some thoughts off the top of my head.

    (1) It's the central pattern around which our week revolves.  Since co-schooling is Tuesday and Thursday, there is a comfortable routine with no two days in a row the same.

    (2) This means I never have to spend two days in a row isolated in my house with my children.  I'm never more than a day away from being able to spend a significant amount of time with another adult — someone to bounce ideas off of, someone to vent to, someone to celebrate successes with.  

    (3) Teaching someone else's children is interesting and challenging.  It often prepares me for teaching my own children.  I also find myself coming up with cleverer, more interesting lessons, since I know I will have a somewhat larger audience, and since I feel more acutely (if less deeply) the responsibility of teaching someone else's child.  

    (4) My children are learning alongside people with different learning styles and personalities.  This occasionally has some unexpected results.  Some days, it seems that between my 9-y-o and Hannah's 10-y-o we see (and are exhausted by) the dynamics of an entire classroom of fourth-graders.  Other times the kids work together with a peculiar synergy.  At the same time, our kids are learning to respond to different teaching styles as well.  

    (5)  It pushes other things off our schedule.  Whatever else we choose to do, we have to consider whether it conflicts with our co-schooling Tuesdays and Thursdays.  This has on occasion meant giving things up that we like.  My family also belongs to a Catholic homeschoolers' co-op that participates in some great science classes at a local nature center.  My kids got a lot out of the classes, and I enjoyed passing time with the other mothers, as long as the classes were scheduled on Fridays.  This school year they went to Thursdays — so we had to drop them.  That was disappointing to me.  But it is a trade-off I was willing to make.

    (6)  But it hasn't completely destroyed our flexibility.  We occasionally shift things around to make room for doctor's appointments or travel plans.   There is always room for extra flexibility at the beginning or end of the day — sometimes we meet for only a half day, sometimes someone leaves early for one reason or another.  At times it enhances our flexibility, because we know that we can definitely count on each other for child care on those days — sometimes instead of co-schooling, one of us is watching the others' children.  Usually some school manages to happen even on those days, even if it's improvised.  I had my kids plus two of Melissa's, all on my own, for a couple of days recently when Hannah was out of town; since nature study had been about birds for weeks, we had a showing of March of the Penguins and then drew comic strips retelling the story, a lesson I invented pretty much on the fly, but which went surprisingly well and was effective for ages 3 through 11.

    (7)  It changes the "off days" too.  Monday, Wednesday, and Friday are my days at home.  But on those three days we have to do five days' worth of the non-co-schooled subjects.  At times it feels like Oscar spends half his MWF time doing math.  On the other hand, we've all gotten pretty efficient.

    (8) We are able to have much more interesting discussions about what we're learning when other families are involved.  I'm so glad that my oldest is learning both World History and American History in a context that allows us to develop ideas and debate them.   Our Civil War unit was fantastic, largely because of the contribution made by all the different members of the group.  I watch the children working on Latin together, spontaneously making up silly sentences ("Oculus meus non est mensa!"  "Ursae non navigant!")  

    (9) The kids also get plenty of play time together.  Particularly important for me, my children get to spend time in the other families' more-spacious backyards and roam a bit wider in their less-urban neighborhoods than they can if they are at home on a school day.  I can tell, too, that they are just as happy to see their friends, to play board games and dolls together, as I am happy to see my friends, to collapse into a chair with a steaming cup of tea and catch up on our last couple of days.

    (10)  And then there's the relationship-building.  My situation is a bit unique because we've been doing this for a long time already, but it's good to feel those bonds growing between the families.  It's so much more than me and my friend spending time together while each child makes a friend around the same age; no, I'm learning how to teach each of my friends' children as individuals, and they're learning how to respond to me, and my friend is teaching each of my children, and I'm learning how to let go and let someone else be the teacher.  It's good all around.

    (11) Of course, there's the simple benefit of specialization:  I don't have to plan anything for English grammar or composition or nature study because someone else did that.  Although I do try to stay at least a little bit on top of what's going on just in case I have to step in and teach it (as I did with the penguin thing).  We also get the benefits of each other's resources — I don't have a piano, but Hannah and Melissa each do, so my kids get to fool around with theirs.  I hate to deal with messy art supplies, but my friends are generous with the homemade play dough and other fun things.    And of course there are all the books and games we can share with each other.  

    (12) Advance planning has to happen.  Last Wednesday evening Hannah and I met in a coffee shop for a couple of hours to hash out our vision for next year.  We'll have to meet like that several more times to nail down the details.  Once, these planning sessions were all about which days we do what when.  This time, being a little more experienced, we spent much more time on general academic and character goals for our kids — how to get this one to think more deeply, how to motivate that one to remember dates and names, how to stop this other one from blurting out all the answers, how to encourage yet another one to stretch herself beyond her fears.  Which days we do what when, that we know by now we can do on the fly.

    (13) It changes how you set up your home school.  I don't think I would ever have contemplated putting a whiteboard on the wall, for instance, if it weren't for the fact that I'm teaching a group larger than my own family.  I probably will put one up soon as soon as I can find a place to hang it.

    (14) It changes how you think about the future.  Maybe someday we will hire a Spanish teacher to come to one of our houses once a week to teach all the children and adults together.  Maybe someday we will send everyone that's interested for piano lessons in a big group.  Maybe some of the kids will walk together to take martial arts lessons at the Aikido studio up the street from my house.  Maybe someday the older kids will teach the younger kids.  We don't know.  They are all so young.  The possibilities seem endless right now.

    (15)  I don't have a "large" family, not six or eight or ten children like some people I know.  But two days a week, I feel like I have a large family.  These are the fun days of my week.  Perhaps I have the best of both worlds.

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  • Labels.

    I've been thinking lately about whether I ought, someday, to get myself screened for Asperger's syndrome.    It's something I've been pondering for a while, really ever since I first heard about the classification.  (It wasn't identified widely as a distinct syndrome until 1994, when I was about twenty an adult) [corrected:  added text  in red].  Lately it's come to my attention more directly because the 6-year-old son of one of my good friends has recently received a diagnosis.  

    In the absence of a professional diagnosis, I make the assumption with a grain of salt, but at this point I'm assuming that if I went through such a screening I would indeed be diagnosed with Asperger's.  There are a couple of online quizzes around to find out your "Asperger's Quotient," and I have taken them and score quite high, but most of my conviction comes from descriptions in what I've read, both by clinicians who work with people who have Asperger's diagnoses and by those people themselves.  

    This is something that interests me mainly for entertainment value.   It's kind of fun to point at the various weirdnesses of my character, like the fact that I can't stand to have my plans changed, or my touch of synaesthesia**, or my intense discomfort at parties, and say "There's another marker of it!"  

    The whole thing, especially looking around me at some of the children I know, has got me thinking about whether it is good, bad, or neutral to have a "label" for such a syndrome.   A lot of it depends on how the label is used.  A lot of the stigma of having a labeled diagnosis is gone; on the other hand, there is a tendency today to slot people into boxes based on diagnoses.  And different people feel differently about those who have been "labeled" in some way.  

    Ironically, being the sort of person I am is

     (a) liable to get me a diagnosis of Asperger's if I look for it

     (b) liable to make me think a certain way about the label of Asperger's 

    (c) liable to make me unable to predict how [cough] "normal" people react to that label.

    Incidentally, I should add that in the controversy over whether Asperger's syndrome is a "disorder" or a "difference" — I have to say that I come down on the side of "difference."  The personality traits that are characteristic of Asperger's have benefits as well as difficulties — and I don't mean that there are "good traits and bad traits," I mean that the same traits often have a flip side to them.  I think a lot of the troubles that some individuals with Aspergers have, especially as children, are mostly products of institutional expectations — the way that schools are run and maybe have to be run, for instance, or the accepted formats of things like job interviews.

    I was lonely as a child, with few friends.  But I would not trade the person I am today for a less lonely childhood.  Should a pill ever be invented that would suppress "Aspergerism," I wouldn't go back in time and medicate my five/six/seven-year-old self, or even my young adult self.  

    On the other hand, I wish sometimes I could go back to the time before I knew of this neurological variant, and tell myself that my problems fitting in, my essential weirdness, were not because I was a bad, selfish kid; go back to being pregnant with my first child and tell myself, "Stop feeling sorry for your unborn baby because he has to have you for a mother." 

     Because having this label for myself has helped me.  I always thought there was essentially a moral failure there, and it made it so hard when I kept trying and failing to meet outward expectations.  It sounds like I'm trying to make excuses for not changing.   No, what I want to say is this:   understanding that the difficulties I have may be neurological — not moral — understanding that has shown me that I do have the ability to make my way in the world without hurting other people.  If it were a moral failure, if I was essentially a selfish person (as adults told me when I was a kid) then I couldn't change the way I behave towards people, or maybe I wouldn't care.  But instead I know that it's more a matter of being aware of the differences between myself and most people, and that the things I have trouble with are skills that can be learned, even if they don't come naturally to me.   

    Here's an example.  Hannah called me last night to ask if I could watch her kids for her this morning.  Now, I already had plans for the morning.  They weren't the kind of plans that can't be changed:  we were all going to go to the gym while Oscar had his swimming lesson.  Nevertheless, the idea agitated me.  Changing plans always agitates me.  I am always thinking that whoever asked me to change my plans is TOTALLY UNREASONABLE.    I almost said no.  

    But!  Knowledge of this label helped me here:

    • Because I have an understanding of myself as probably someone with Aspergers syndrome, i.e., someone who's different from the general population, I understand that most people are able to change plans without agitation.
    • Therefore, most people expect a certain amount of plans-changing.  
    • Therefore it's not unreasonable for a good friend to ask me to watch her kids on short notice.  
    • Also, I am aware that she would do the same thing for me, and it is only fair that I should do the same for her.  
    • It is one of my long-term goals to be a more hospitable person and a good friend.  
    • Hospitable people welcome unexpected guests.  Good friends help each other on short notice if they can.  
    • I can help in this situation.
    • Therefore the correct answer is….  "Yes, Hannah, of course I can do that."  QED.

    (I tried to use a tone of voice that would convey that I was actually happy to help out, but probably failed there.  Fortunately, I think, Hannah is used to this from me.)

    In a way, I like having the Asperger's label because it's useful for me to have a label for other people.  I don't really need to have a label for myself.  I understand myself fine.  But because there is a special syndrome that describes people kind of like me, I can turn that around and use it to understand the people who are not like me, but who nevertheless are quite common.  

    People without Asperger syndrome have the following characteristics:

    • they are extraordinarily eager to talk to many different kinds of people… 
    • they obsessively insist on making eye contact with others who talk to them…
    • they engage in bizarre rituals in which they must begin a conversation by discussing irrelevancies such as the weather or the performance of local sports teams before introducing the subject that is the purpose of the conversation…
    • they show unusual apathy about numbers, lists, and classifications… 
    • they can perform certain athletic maneuvers with uncanny accuracy… 
    • they make friends promiscuously…

    You get the idea.  If I can intellectually understand the expectations the world places on me, I can make my way in it far more easily.

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    ** The kind of synaesthesia I suspect I have (see my post about it — what to call it, kineto-graphic?) is not one that anyone seems to have a "test" for.  I recently thought of a way of designing a test that could be performed on me, and compared to the results given by other people, which might be able to determine whether I really am synaesthetic or whether I'm deluding myself because I just think it is so cool that I might really be a synaesthete.  I can't administer such a test to myself though, because I would already know the answers, so to speak.  If anyone is interested in working with me on such a project, let me know.

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  • Aaaaargh

    I want to take EVERY SINGLE crayon, pencil, scissors, glue, piece of paper, sheet of motivational stickers, spoon, book, ice cube, napkin, apple, broom, ziploc bag, math manipulative, DVD, Lego, magnetic ball thingy for the magnetic ball thingy building set, and eraser and put it waaaaaay up high where none of my children can get to it ever ever ever again.

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  • Driving through.

    Driving home from meeting Hannah for coffee to hash out some school plans.  My stomach grumbles a bit.  I had had an early dinner with my family before rushing out and drinking plain black decaf.  I don’t need to eat, though; I’m just going home and going to bed, after all, and am still working on dropping the pregnancy weight.

    I reflected on that, how nearly two years ago — it does not seem so long ago — I  set out to train myself to endure mild hunger, to learn that hunger is not an emergency.  To go beyond the diet advice of “Eat only when you’re hungry,” and get to the place where, like normal people, I don’t have to eat even when I am hungry — I can wait.    I think I have it in my bones now.

    Reflections from restaurant signs slid up the windshield and over the car and I left them behind in the puddles on the pavement, smeared red and yellow.  My ever-chattering mind still suggests them to me.  I could pull through a drive-thru and get a hamburger.  I could stop and get bagels for tomorrow’s breakfast.  But I put a stop to it these days with the simple truth that I don’t do that anymore.  

    Even though I really am kind of hungry, and thus somewhat more susceptible, I know what it’s about — if I stop off for a snack, I will get to prolong the evening out, delay the coming home to the house full of kids.  I have seen this destructive impulse before in the form of “If I make myself another sandwich, I will get to sit in front of the computer longer while I eat it.”

    Sometimes the answer is to permit myself a lunch break that lasts longer than my lunch.  Other times the answer is just to laugh at my silly ruse and go home to my family.

    Leo’s almost 11 weeks old and I am at 126 lbs, and am planning to lose 13 more.

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  • Co-Schooling (1). What is co-schooling?

    When Hannah and I tore everything down and reworked our schooling from the ground up, we scrawled in a page in our spiral notebook a new vision.  No longer would we be two families schooling side by side.  Instead, on our days together, we would strive for one or both of these patterns:

    ONE  LARGE  HOMESCHOOLING  FAMILY

    -or-

    ONE  ROOM  SCHOOLHOUSE

    Since then, that's what we've tried to create.  Sometimes it feels like the "one family," other times it's a little more schoolhousy.    You may desire something a bit different.  But I wanted to start with our vision so you know what we've been shooting for — not so much where I'm coming from as where I've been trying to go.

    * * * 

    Let's begin with a discussion of scope:  what kinds of teaching am I going to be writing about when I use the term "co-schooling" in this series?

    Simply put, co-schooling is homeschooling families together.

    This is, at bottom, a kind of homeschooling (or you might say it is a method or an approach or a style).  I won't be writing about after-school enrichment or playdates.  I'll be writing about the education, in a group, of children from a small group of families, by the parents of those children.  It's not just enrichment, either — it's real learning, real "school."

    Second:  The co-schooling I am writing about is repeated, regular, and frequent.  It's not one parent calling up a friend and saying, "Hey, let's get together and go to the museum next Thursday!"  It's not gathering a group of families together to hear one speaker or do one workshop.  No, I'm writing about families who get together on a schedule, perhaps every day, perhaps one or two days a week, perhaps a few times a month, to do real schooling together.   I think we can allow the co-schooling to be either open-ended, or temporary:  it can be planned to last a semester, or a school year, or through however long it takes to get through this or that curriculum.  But it must be repeated, and often enough that it becomes a significant part of the families' school life.

    Third:  Co-schooling is reciprocal.  Each parent works with the kids; each family's children are among the learners.  So I'm not going to be writing about the book club hosted by one literature-loving mother, or the Scout troop.    (But I might be writing about families where one parent mostly cares for the families' toddlers and preschoolers while another parent concentrates on teaching other children.  We're all about lifelong learning here.)

    * * *

    How does this work with us?

    Well.  Hannah and I and Melissa are working in each other's homes.  These days, mostly at mine and Hannah's.  We do spend some time at the park, especially in the summer, and take the occasional field trip.  But we spend most of our time in our houses.  Tuesday I'm at Hannah's; Thursday she's at mine.  I forget what Melissa and Hannah do when I'm not there.

    And we're working together on some of the kids' core education.  Though the combinations are a bit mixed and matched,  co-learning is happening in English grammar, composition, science, world history, American history, and phonics.   As well as the "electives" of Latin, art appreciation, and music theory.  And a lot of preschool learning as well.

    Our frequency is two or more days a week.  And we've been doing it for a long time now — this is our second school year since we sat down and really unified our curriculum, and we've been doing it even longer if you count our first, stumbling, clueless years.  

    And it's definitely reciprocal, too.  In fact, it's rather mixed up.  I teach Latin and history to Hannah's ten-year-old son and Melissa's twelve-year-old daughter and my nine-year-old son.  Hannah teaches English composition and grammar to the same bunch.  Hannah teaches science to Melissa's seven-year-old girl and my six-year-old boy and her own seven-year-old boy.   I planned music theory and art appreciation, which any of us can teach depending on how it goes on a given day; any of us can run phonics practice sessions for the three emerging readers, although I think Hannah is the best at on-the-fly pho; together we collected a set of preschool and kindergarten materials which we each use at will.  Hannah and Melissa get together without me and do some things, too; I can't remember everything they do, but I know that some of the children learn science, cooking, and history together on those days.

    But I'm confident it's possible to start small and simple too.  Two families, one day or one afternoon a week, just a couple of subjects — that can be co-schooling.  

    I think in the next post I'll write about some of the changes you might expect, if you and another family decide to take that step.  Some may be intended, some not…

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  • Getting fit after 40.

    Alice Bradley (of Finslippy fame) has a column online  in Redbook.

    When I was in second grade, my gym teacher told me I was uncoordinated. I was lying on the ground when she said this. All activity in the room had stopped, and the other kids were staring, and I didn't know what uncoordinated meant, but it sounded ominous, like I could die at any moment.

    "What's 'uncoordinated'?" I asked her.

    "Uncoordinated," she replied, "means that you cannot move your body parts correctly."

    Well, she should know, I thought, while my classmates stared at me and my nonworking parts. After all, she's a trained professional.

    Worth a read.  Alice is a funny woman.

    Solitary pursuits like running, swimming, and the weightlifting that Alice took up at age 40something, are ideal for the physically and socially self-conscious.  Why, then, do they take such a back seat to team sports and games in our nation's school gyms?  Only last weekend, as I went for my morning run on the sidewalks of the town I was visiting, I was designing an alternative national elementary physical education program in my head.   It went like this:  Instead of every kid in the country being forced to pick teams and play dodgeball, kids could choose instead to simply run around the edge of the gym or field for the entire period.  This option would begin in, oh, fourth grade or so.   Older kids could be issued stopwatches and logbooks, and thereby watch themselves improve, or design their own running programs.  And it could all happen without any extra work on the part of the teachers.  Mark was skeptical, but I think it could work.

    Ideally the gym teachers would be willing to enact rules against hurling sporting equipment at the running children, too, but we won't quibble.

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  • Co-schooling.

    I've been meaning for the last couple of weeks to start a new series of blog posts, but I haven't been able to sit down and pound any of them out because I can't quite figure out what the structure of the series.  So let me tell you what I'm thinking, and maybe a pattern will emerge.

    I've wanted to write for a long time about the co-schooling that I do with Hannah and Melissa — how we organize it, how we set it up, the foundation of relationships out of which it grew, the parts that are organic and accidental and the parts that are deliberately designed.  I would like to help more homeschoolers figure out how to make co-schooling work for them, if they want to, although I'm reluctant to lay out a step-by-step plan — my situation might be impossible for many folks to duplicate.  Perhaps the best I can do is describe our situation and maybe inspire a vision of possibilities, or throw out a few ideas.   

    I talked with a (different) friend over the weekend about how such a series of posts might work best.  Normally (as with my series on weight loss and the one on exercise) I find it easy to write chronologically forward:  first I did this, then I did this, then I did this, and so on.  But that doesn't seem like the right approach here.  

    For one thing, though we didn't know it at the time, it was more than nine years ago that Hannah and I laid the foundations for our twice-weekly co-school days.  I wouldn't want to begin my instructions with "First, when your first child is four months old, find a friend who also has her first child…"  I'd like to write something that's useful for folks who already have school-age children, even those who are well established in their own comfortable school routines. 

    For another thing, it will be a more challenging and interesting series to write.  The proof of this is that I have not written it yet.  

    So I'm thinking about writing from now backwards, instead of from the beginning forwards.  Or perhaps writing on a sort of day-by-day basis about what we're up to now, and incidentally explaining how we got to where we are.   That seems too loose for my taste, though. 

    I can tell already that there are two very separate and important aspects of the partnership:  how to arrange the school plans so that they mesh together, and how we have cultured our families so that they can, well, live together over the course of a weekday, and over the years as the families grow  A third interesting aspect has been how, as our families' importance to each other has grown, the individual families have started to shape or plans and habits — schoolwise and otherwise — around each other.  There's an element of luck, or maybe providence, in how it's played out.  But there have also been deliberate decisions, some that turned out well, some not so well.

    Let me know in the comments if there are any especially interesting questions you would like to read about, and I'll see if I can hash out an outline over the next few days.

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    1 comment on Co-schooling.

  • Amen, sister.

    Jamie schools the world in her latest post at Light and Momentary.

    Here are two things you might like to know about the study published Monday in Pediatrics. 

    1. The authors do not say anywhere that mothers are not trying hard
      enough. No one needs to read about this study and then run through the
      reasons why she stopped breastfeeding to make sure they're good enough.
      You in the pink shirt over there, relax. It's not about whether you
      suffered enough, not at all.
    2. It's all about the fact that modest differences add up to big
      numbers in large populations. Because of the magnitude of the potential
      savings, the authors call for improved support and infrastructure for
      breastfeeding mothers.

    Most of the blogosphere buzz about this article has focused on its
    calculation that six months of exclusive breastfeeding by 90% of
    mothers would save more than 900 children's lives as well as $13
    billion annually. We can't have those kind of breastfeeding rates
    without paid maternity leave, people are saying, so what's your point,
    Dr. Bartick?

    But they're not just talking about Breastopia in this article. The
    authors present a range of numbers, and the 90% values have gotten all
    the press because big numbers make big headlines. No one seems to be
    talking about the more attainable outcomes: if we could just hit the
    Healthy People 2010 targets, we would save still save billions annually
    (billions as in 2.2, but still, billions, plural) and 142 children's
    lives. Those are reachable goals: they specify that 75% of babies will
    begin breastfeeding — a single attempt counts — and 50%
    of babies will still be receiving some human milk — even a tiny
    fraction of their intake — at six
    months old.

    We don't need to reform the whole maternity leave system to save
    lives and dollars. (Not that I'd complain if anyone wanted to tackle
    the vexed issue of maternity leave in the US.) Here are some things we
    do need    …

    Read the whole thing.

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  • For everyone who drives the family around in a ginormous van.

    A glimpse of the future from Simcha Fisher.  

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