6 Little (Groups of ) Words

Inspired by Mama Kat's Writing Prompt: List 6 of your favorite quotes.

You may have noticed I homeschool. Homeschooling parents fight a lot of doubt--from without:

                     Is it Legal?  
                     What makes Do you think you can?     
                                   How will they get into college?" 

                           "What about SOCIALIZATION?"


 and from within :


                                                            {What makes me think I can?}
        Will they get into college?         
                                                                    Will I kill them before then?



So any quote that comes with cred can really buoy a homeschool parent's confidence.Below are six  that have sustained me:

1. It is nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom;without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail. - Albert Einstein

2. My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself. -George Bernard Shaw

 

3. I believe it would be much better for everyone if children were given their start in education at home. No one understands a child as well as his mother, and children are so different that they need individual training and study. A teacher with a room full of pupils cannot do this. At home, too, they are in their mother’s care. She can keep them from learning immoral things from other children. -Laura Ingalls Wilder

4.I'm sure the reason such young nitwits are produced in our schools is because they have no contact with anything of any use in everyday life. - Petronius

5.Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other. - Edmund Burke

6. Thank goodness I was never sent to school  It would have rubbed off some of the originality.-Beatrix Potter

And because this homeschool teacher is not good at math ;-), I bring you:
 

7.  ¹⁸ Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. ¹⁹ Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.--Deuteronomy 11:18-19

Got a quote? Tell Mother All About It!! She can always use more!

The {7th-Grade} Power Within

In 1972 in a suburb of D.C., some Smart People in the Public School Powers-That-Be Room decide junior high school will begin in seventh grade. Then these same Smart People decide that junior high should continue through 9th grade. So, you will spend your first year of high school in junior high. Yes, you will enter High School as a Sophomore.

Keep with me.


Like I said, it is 1972. You've been wearing dresses and skirts to school your whole elementary life up until a year ago when those Smart People realized that the boys were way too eagerly anticipating the new trampoline lessons on P.E. Day. That's when those people agree to let you wear pants---but only on P.E. Day. If it's 20 degrees with a wind-chill, but NOT P.E. Day, you wear a skirt. Because that's what the Smart People said to do.

So now it is 7th grade and you are going to Junior High School.

For the first time, you have to ride a school bus, you change classes and teachers til you're dizzy, you get lost in a never-ending circle of painted cinderblock, you go unrecognized by scores of kids streaming in from other elementary schools, you can't walk home for lunch, you see girls wearing bras, you see girls smoking in the bathrooms. And as if that wasn't enough already, there is Gym!

You discover that Gym will be every day. It will be a huge deal. You will learn to play all kinds of sports, some you've never even watched, because it's 1972 and the only sport girls are playing is softball. Not even soccer. BOYS are hardly playing soccer. 

But the hugest deal of all is that you will have to CHANGE YOUR CLOTHES! In public! In front of those unknown girls from the other elementary schools that are cooler than your elementary school was.
 
And just when your life, your very fragile sense of self, is at the breaking point, those Smart People
deal one more cruel blow. They issue you:

A Gym Uniform.

These girls are not smiling about the uniforms.

On the second day of Junior High you and the other 7th-graders are lined up on the sunny asphalt in full view of the passing boys gym class, and are handed plastic packages of blue serge cloth. You and the other bewildered girls open them to reveal these one-piece rompers with snap fronts and elastic waists. The short sleeves aren't short enough; they hang almost to your elbows. The legs likewise are to the knees. They have prim little shirt-collars, but that is all that can be called styling. They will be inadequate as clothing in just a few weeks so you will have one more reason to hate them by November.


You don't have an older sister to warn you about this. Some of the other girls obviously do. You can tell they are the ones who will rise to the top of the social strata because they make such a big deal about how dork-worthy these things are. Kids like you, well...you knew they were ugly, but you wouldn't have thought to roll the legs and sleeves up as high as they could go so that you looked sexier. 

You are responsible for taking them home every Friday to be washed and bringing them back every Monday  to begin another week of drills and vocabulary tests on sports that you would play for six weeks or so, never really gaining any proficiency in, only embarrassment. You will stand on the field in that thing while a snotty little bee-atch reams you in front of all your soccer teammates for your lousy kicking. And your mother, who never had to play soccer, will call HER mother and demand an apology. And then you will want to die.

Of course the day will come when you DON'T  have it washed by Monday because your Mom who never played soccer has three other kids with equally demanding teachers and that particular load of laundry didn't get done. Then you will have to face the woman with the very short hair who makes ugly marks next to your name. And feel the sting of embarrassment that comes from having to wear your school clothes to gym!

But wait...
Isn't that what you'd prefer anyway? Losing the uniform?

And it's then that you take your biggest step in your education. You begin thinking for yourself.

And in two more years when you should be allowed to create your own schedule because it is, after all, your Freshman year even though you're still in a Junior High building, you don't back down when the Very Smart Powers argue against it. And you win. 

And it's then you get your first taste of what bucking the system feels like. And later in life, when you have daughters of your own, you'll remember the decisions of the very Smart Powers-That-Be, and you'll say...

I think we'll homeschool.



Inspired by Mama Kat's Pretty Much World Famous Writing Prompt: " a 7th grade memory."

Yeast Is Yeast, and Homemade Is Best!

Our ongoing study of the monochromatic kingdom of non-flowering plants allows us to chalk up baking as science. I'm talking yeast here, peeps. (I love homeschooling!)

To get us primed we read through the lower book, Molds and Fungi, in one sitting (a very UN-Charlotte Mason thing to do. whoops.) Lots of facts in an easy-to-read format. I learned plenty myself.
The other book, Molds, Mushrooms, and Other Fungi, is more Dorling-Kindersley style with lots of pics and stuff. Darling daughter Mei freaked at both of them at times. Therefore, boys will love them.

Our science curriculum, Considering God's Creation, is neatly lining up with the monthly Outdoor Hour Challenges at Handbook of Nature Study where they're currently focusing on Lichens, Mushrooms, and Moss. (You can see our other entries on lichens here and fungus here.)Yeast, being a type of fungus like mushrooms, I figure it fits right in.

Fungi, we learned, grow by sending out hyphae, which are like little tentacles looking for food, usually in the form of something dead. Get enough hyphae, and you've got yourself a registered, incorporated mycelium. When these hyphae want to start a new colony, they shoot some spores into the atmosphere (e.g. your breathing space) and hope to colonize in the great beyond. But the work is done in the dark, mostly underground. It's happening everywhere and we should be glad of it cuz' if it weren't, well, in a nutshell, we wouldn't be here to tell about it.

Want to see a mycelium at work? You won't have to go far. Got a rotting woodpile? Matted dead leaves you forgot to rake? How about well-seasoned shredded mulch? That's where we found this:

My-oh-mycelium

The white stuff is not some sort of messed-up spider web. It's the mycelium full of hyphae. And it's eating away at that mulch. Which is why we have to keep replacing it every year.

Another place we were able to observe fungi was on the bread that we purposely let go for the sake of science. After over a week in a Baggie with a piece of old brie, we got this:

Calling Alexander Fleming

 Not like you've never seen that before (deliberately). But it makes for cool microscope study. We're also comparing the french bread with a piece of cinnamon bread (not shown) to see if cinnamon indeed retards spoilage. It seems it does!

Notebook page from Considering God's Creation

So back to that yeast. It does not do the hyphae thing. But is IS a fungus. I'm so glad we know how to use it. It makes some of my favorite things possible. Like bread. I recently got my second bread machine and have gotten back into this fun, healthy, delicious hobby. And the timing was PERFECT because we were going into this yeast study.

Yeast makes the bread rise simply by---well---burping. You feed it, it eats, it digests, and it burps. And the burps make the bubbles that make the bread rise. Doesn't sound so appetizing when I put it that way, but...

Now to coalesce science with baking even more, we had to grow some starter. A starter is a happy little town of live yeast that live in a jar, and that you feed and take care of.  (You can name yours. Ours is Fi-dough.) If you do a good job, the yeast will reward you by rising your next batch of dough. But this will be a different flavor because THIS yeast is SOURDOUGH! And it happens when those spores that a yeast fungus releases are caught and given a nice home of flour and water.

Baker's yeast. britannica.com

Want to try it? There are many, MANY places on the web that will teach you how to grow a starter. We ordered a fresh one for our purposes to ensure success. You can get some here. Did you know that they will taste different depending on where they are from? Because each region has a different yeast floating around in it! That's why a San Francisco Sourdough Bread can only call itself  S.F if the starter was actually grown IN San Fran!

Here, Mei is doing another experiment with some yeast to show how much it "burps." 
Mix a 1/2 cup lukewarm water with 2 teaspoons of sugar and 1 tablespoon of dry yeast (doesn't matter what kind.) Set it aside for 15-30 minutes.
If you do it in the ziploc bag, like we did, keep a close eye on it or you will get to experiment with cleaning starter off the walls.

Left: Mixing up the ingredients to grow yeast. Right, the proof! Ka-BOOM!

Before: cold from the frig

Here's another example of just how fast yeast can grow. We took some of our sourdough starter out of the frig and warmed it for just 30 seconds in the microwave. It increased in volume by at least 2 tablespoons just from being warmed up!

After 30 seconds in MW: frothy yeast.

 But here's the best experiment of all: a piping hot loaf of homemade sourdough bread. If only we had some taste-testers! Any volunteers?

Got yeast? Got comments? Tell Mother All About It!

There's a Fungus Amongus!

In the natural kingdoms of the world, the non-flowering types are the Rodney Dangerfields. They don't get much respect. We're talking molds, fungi, mushrooms, that sort of stuff. But they don't deserve the "dis" they get. They decompose stuff, make nutrients available, draw or retain moisture, and on and on.Without them, as Dupont would say, life itself would be impossible. In the last couple of weeks, our attitudes toward these un-green things have been altered. We might still go "Eww," but at least it's an educated "Ewww."

With encouragement from the Outdoor Hour Challenge, this month we have spent a number of our daily walks looking for members of this kingdom. 

We realized our woods are rife with the evidence of decay. As I said in my last OHC post, We Like Lichens, these woods have suffered a lot of attacks by nature the last few years, being in a straight line with prevailing westerly winds. The historic D.C. derecho storm of 2011 brought down many trees along with Hurricanes Irene and Sandy. So, sadly, finding trunks and branches covered in bracket fungi wasn't all that surprising anymore. 

Anna Botsford Comstock in The Handbook of Nature Study puts it:

"...those of us who have come to feel the grandeur of tree life can but look with sorrow on these fungus outgrowths, for they mean that the doom of the tree is sealed."

On our hunts, the bracket fungus was the most abundant as it was not dependent on warmer conditions like mushrooms would have been. It's really just there year-round, so we were able to spot many examples during this unrelenting winter. It was interesting to learn that, unlike your basic toadstool-type mushroom with its "gills" under the cap for spore production, that the brackets release their spores through tubes found on the underside.

Various bracket fungi. Oh, and BLUE SKY for a change!

Below you can see a bracket that I harvested. Starting at the top left you can see the firm top side of the bracket, next the soft spore-producing underside, then (bottom left) a close-up of the tubes from which the spores are released. The last picture shows what you can DO with these fun-guys!

The undersides of these are now hard and brown from the cold and dry winter. It was surprising to find a fungus for drawing on in January 2007.

We have an annual tradition at our vacation cottage of finding a bracket fungus specimen and creating a scrapbook of sorts by etching little glyphs and captions into them as keepsakes of the season. Some years the woods are bursting with them, other years we can go all summer before finding even one. We have a basketful. I used to display them on a windowsill until I noticed black "dust" spilling out of their undersides. I wrongly concluded it was the result of little drilling bugs. Now, thanks to our study, I know it was the spores being released. I find spores less disturbing than little bugs. That's just me. 

If you want to make one, our advice is to look after heavy rains. They are fresh and moist then. Carefully, without touching the soft white side, break one off from the trunk.( The big ones can be very stubborn. ) Carry a basket or sack to help you tote it out unharmed, or you will be hiking with a fungus in your hand until you get home. 

Don't wait, but get right to work while the fungus is still fresh. Using any sharp instrument--pen cap, golf tee---draw and write on the soft white side. Plan your design because you can't erase! :-) Again avoid holding that side because your fingertips will also be preserved! 

When finished, stand it somewhere and it will dry and harden within a short time--a day or two usually. Then it is almost indestructible. The buyers of another old cottage nearby found a treasure trove of "artist's fungi" from the previous owners that were headed to the dump. They rescued them and found some to be dated from fifty years ago!

So who needs Creative Memories?  Have FUN-gus!


Got Fungus? Got Questions? Tell Mother All About It!

Check, Please!

This is probably going to be the most politically-incorrect, begging-for-nasty-comments post I'll ever write. Unless my readers can forgive it because the prompt that I was told to write about was...

SOMETHING I ATE.

We were in China adopting our 15-month-old daughter. These trips are very, very organized with a new activity, tour, and dining opp every day. Or several times IN a day.  This would be okay IF you hadn't just added a new little person to your family. But by Day 10 (of 14 plus trans-world travel) you have lost interest in another Temple of The Divine Priesthood of Holy Sunshine.  Especially when you are sharing this experience with ten other families who are also losing interest because their babies, like yours, are keeping them up at night in hotels where nobody understands you need stain remover for the diarrhea on your white pants.

At long last, there was a night where we didn't have to experience tasting another animal body part we didn't know could be eaten (speaking of What I Ate,...). And WE were the fortunate ones who happened to have brought along a babysitter in the form of our 14-year-old, now-no-longer-only daughter. At long last, my husband and I could eat out ALONE.

Now the China Center for Adoption Affairs wants to make the best impression on you of your child's birth country, so one thing you can always count on is a top-rate hotel. We were in a 5-star Ramada while in Guangzhou. It was adorned with boutiques devoted to one Parisian designer after another. There were several top-notch restaurants. If Trip Advisor had existed a decade ago, we would have racked up tons of rating points without even stepping outside.

One of these dine-ins offered sushi of the highest caliber. (My WWII-vet dad was astounded that the Chinese would welcome a Japanese establishment on their shores. :-)  ) My hubbie, being a huge fan, lined us up for reservations there, having anticipated the chance the moment we checked in as much (or more?) than receiving his long-awaited daughter.

So to say we were ready to kick back, relax, and let down our hair was like saying Hitler was ready to stroll the borders of Germany. We entered the golden-lit room and were escorted to the sushi bar, noting the large tank of beautifully-colored fish. We chose to dine at the bar in order to be entertained by the chef preparing his consumable artistry before our eyes. Overwhelmed by the menu, as usual I let my expert order. Among the various sushis and sashimis, he chose some red snapper, ordered wine for me and a sake for himself.

The wine tasted so good. We weren't usually ordering drinks at these communal "new family" dinners. The rolls started arriving and we dove in with both chopsticks. We had another round of drinks. Then the red snapper was served.

It was presented on a skewer standing up like a single blooming rose. We watched fascinated as the chef sliced off nearly transparent pieces of its side with a knife whose sharpness would make a samurai proud.
My husband, the epicurean, made moaning noises of approval at the freshness. The chef was very pleased. He sliced more. We ate more. We drank more.

We became very attached to our snapper. We were the only English-speaking people in the room and could say whatever we wanted. We decided to name our fish. We named him Sam the Snapper. We smiled at our cleverness.

Then a strange thing occurred. I thought at first it was all the drinks. The fish moved. A gill or fin did a little flap. Alcohol clouding a normal reaction of shock, we stared in wonder. The chef proffered a new slice. My husband, knowing Sushi Chef Protocol, pronounced it "Very fresh!" Yeah, no duh.
 
Then another glance. This time it was the mouth and it was gulping! (Vegans and card-carrying members of PETA are now excused from reading.) But did I shriek in horror? NO! I was so plastered. I even thought I should decorate Sam the Snapper. Deftly with my chopsticks, I inserted a marigold garnish into its mouth. I laughed so hard I almost fell off my barstool.

We ate a lot of new stuff in our daughter's country of origin--fried chicken feet, Peking duck served with the head on, and everywhere greens that smelled like sweaty socks--all selected by the tour guides. But none of those could hold a chopstick to dining with Sam the Snapper. He sacrificed himself that we might have a few good, uninhibited, crass, adult, American laughs before we went back to our room where the "babysitter" was coming down with tourista and room service was rocking our inconsolable little one.

Thanks, Sam. Play it again.