lifeinflux

Fall in Full Swing (and left me with a bruise)

// August 30th, 2011 // 6 Comments » // Featured Post

As busy as summer is for us, fall is even busier.  And each year, as we transition from summer chaos to fall’s schedule, I breathe a sigh of relief that I’ve juggled yet another 90 days of travel, summer camps, vacations, school transitions, spontaneous weekend fun, get togethers and accelerated work schedules and look forward to the routine that comes with back to school time.   And normally that’s true.  But this year, Drue is not in “normal” school.  This fall I don’t have the luxury of calling her from the warm confines of her bed, rushing her through her morning routine, ensuring her backpack is stuffed with homework, lunch, snack, cell phone, gym clothes, etc and then sending her out the door at ten to eight and then jump into seven hours of peace and quiet and my work.  Nope, this year Drue gets up around 8, snags her own breakfast, grabs her books and settles in on the floor, on the couch, outside, in my room or her room or wherever the mood strikes and gets right to work.  And while that means a calmer, peaceful, more rested fall, getting here was an exercise in sheer overwhelming panic as I put together her curriculum for the next year, outlined lesson plans and gathered materials for the next three months, and bought materials, books and signed her up for classes to cover the areas I don’t have the time (or inclination) to create curriculum for myself.   I’ve had some great help thanks to Ocean Grove Charter School and our wonderful Education Specialist.  Don’t get me wrong; I haven’t been floundering along by myself.   But I have felt a great responsibility to ensure Drue had her three R’s covered, along with a healthy dose of electives (programming, Japanese, etc) and a dash of accelerated Science and Math to keep her plugging along at the rate of learning she has now become accustomed to in her home school environment.

Add to that the new group we’ve formed of parents and kids to socialize with (and that is pure pleasure to organize and get together), acting as Site Director for Drue’s local volleyball league, and our work with a local marine science group and we’re beyond busy.   Factor in time with the pups (and boy do we love our pups!), my own workouts, travel plans and spontaneous moments of must-have-at-this-moment fun, and we’re insanely busy.    Actually, more accurately we are insanely, blissfully, happily, overwhelmingly busy and we wouldn’t have it another way.  The one struggle I’m having is our adoption of and full embrace of  a Primal way of eating that does not accommodate snagging fast food or hitting the twenty million local Thai/Chinese/Italian/other eateries that have lots of processed foods and carbs galore (okay I exaggerate.. maybe just two million).  Basically, we’re having to do this weird business called “food planning” and this other weird business that I enjoy but need over and done with in 30 minutes or less called “cooking”.     Don’t get me wrong.  I LOVE to cook and I love to bake and am brainstorming ways to make some of our favorite staples (homemade almond flour and sweet potato tortillas anyone?) in order to accommodate my and Drue’s need for fast, healthy, on-the-go Primal eating.    Because as much as we LOVE eggs… we are getting a little bored with the omelet, scrambles, poached over veggies, souffle a la microwave with hot sauce and chopped veggies on top route we’ve been taking for breakfast, lunch and occasionally dinner.  If not for lettuce wraps stuffed with roast beast or turkey or chicken, red peppers, mushrooms and other veggies, Drue might have declared egg mutiny on me awhile ago.  And then there’s the whole grilling for dinner business.  We do love our bar-b-qued meat.  And we really love our bar-b-qued corn, and bar-b-qued asparagus and (well you get the picture) but it takes forever to light the charcoal, ensure the coals are the right temperature, move the coals around to ensure distributed heat, etc. and then actually COOK.  So we’re contemplating adding a gas grill (GASP! I KNOW!) to our grill collection.   You know for the whole ease in cooking, done in 30 minutes thing we’ve got going on.

It will be a few weeks before we have Drue’s homeschooling schedule down pat.  And it will be a few weeks before I get settled in with a workout schedule, work schedule, volunteer schedule and the like.  It’s been an amazing summer chock full of fun, family and friends.  I look forward to the fall and travels to see friends and family, activities with friends here in the Bay Area, activities, work for my clients and down time camping, kayaking, and enjoying this amazing place where I live.   In the coming weeks, we have canning tomatoes and pears to look forward to and by month’s end, I look forward to pickling green beans.  In a month give or take a few weeks, there will be apples to put down,  applesauce and apple butter to make.    Figs and piccadily relish round out the fall canning season here right around the time we’ll start looking for the perfect pumpkins to carve and to chuck.   Stanford football, volleyball games, cookouts in the park and maybe a visit back to the lake house round out a season that might not be as colorful as back East but is all the nicer for the weather.  And Tahoe will always provide fall foliage if we find we miss it too much.

I hope you’re looking forward to an amazing fall filled with fun activities and wonderful people.  What is the one thing you’re looking forward to most in the coming months?

The next BIG STEP

// August 17th, 2011 // 2 Comments » // Educating the Chaotic Mind

In the last five months, we have run the gamut as far as schooling goes. We started out the year in our local public school, left our public school in March and allowed Drue to “deschool” for six weeks where she lolled about in her pajamas, read a lot of books, spent a few hours a week with her therapist, chased puppies all over the backyard, and watched an unimaginable number of documentaries on marine life and World War II. No wait. That last part about WWII was me. Then came the testing and the observing and the research and discussions about all the different kinds of homeschooling methods and philosophies. Somewhere in all of this, I fell in with this great group of unschoolers who accept me even though I am Type A and write curriculum and lesson plans and align everything to the California Standard Course of Study. They just smile at me and whisper “OCD!” to each other and accept that I am strange in my own way and like me regardless.

And for the most part, Drue has thrived. The sad note is that she seems to have lost most of her friends from public school. Jason and I also lost our “parent base” either because we were out of sight/out of mind, we are “the parents of that girl who slapped that kid” (never mind that Drue got slapped as well) or we’re just weirdos who homeschool in “the best public school system in the country!” Or it might be our stance on protecting the oceans – we’re kind of marine fanatics in this house. We’re hoping the homeschool group we created will bear some friendly fruit and are looking forward to this school year more so than last year. Go figure.  We paid a fortune to move into one of the best school districts and found out that the US public education system let us down.  Good to know it wasn’t just a Virginia thing!

So after a series of BIG steps in the last few months, we just took another and applied to and was accepted in a Charter School. Regardless of what you know or think you know about charter schools, this one supports independent learning (aka homeschooling) but provides you with an Education Specialist who guides you to ensure your child is meeting state curriculum standards, provides state testing, report cards and transcripts and funding. Yes, you read that correctly. We are getting state funds to pay for some of Drue’s homeschool classes.

Now before you FREAK OUT think about this… I pay 38% of my income into the system. We pay into the school district even though Drue no longer attends. Our property and local taxes pay into the school district too – even though Drue no longer attends public school!  So am I comfortable with the fact that I am getting back a tiny fraction of what other children CONSUME in my tax dollars to attend public school here to pay for a small piece of my child’s education? Darn tootin’ I am! But even if I didn’t receive a dime, we are really excited about belonging to this particular charter program. We have a fantastic education specialist who has already proven indispensable in educating me on California’s a-g standards. a-g requirements are usually something a parent concerns themselves with in high school. But it seems my “emotionally immature, math-deficient” child blew threw her review of 4th through 6th grade math in a few months, dominated Advanced Pre-Algebra this summer and qualified for Algebra I and Geometry this fall and spring. What this means, for those of you who don’t remember the math progression through high school,  is that while my kid is sitting in Advanced Algebra II or Trig in 9th grade, those “emotionally mature” kids will  just have completed some form of Algebra I.   I can draw you a chart if you’re confused or just point you here if you need a picture to figure out how this high school math thing works. It might be a little different in your school district but I think you get the general idea.

Since Drue qualifies for Algebra I and Geometry as a 7th grader, we need to find a-g curriculum outside of a normal classroom setting. Usually homeschoolers hit up their local community college to ensure they are taking a-g courses, but Drue does not feel ready to sit in a classroom with 16-30 plus year olds. And frankly, I’m not ready for her to sit in that class either. Luckily, the San Jose School of Russian Mathematics teaches Algebra I and Geometry to kids as early as 7th grade provided they qualify (aka test in and have the necessary grade point average) for the classes. Unfortunately, this particular school is not an “a-g” school. That is where our Education Specialist comes in and we’re looking forward to her help in working around this little problem. Had it been me on my own, I have no idea what I would have done. I do know it would have taken hours of my own research, a lot of stress, time away from my 30 days of fun (yes, that is still going on!) and countless sleepless nights until I figured out a solution. But thanks to our charter school, I have a partner in this who is looking for options and solutions for me. That is complete and total happiness!

Over the summer, I worked for an hour or two (or five or six) each day on this year’s Fall and Spring curriculum and am really happy with it. Not only does Drue have a fast-track science curriculum that includes labs at home and at Rock It Science but she is taking 7th and 8th grade California Science Curriculum this year. It seems when I was not paying attention, Drue downloaded and completed 90% of the California required science curriculum for 7th graders this summer and managed to get perfect scores on every test I could fling at her. Go figure… She also found an ongoing science project to join, a nature studies class to take (plants, birds, and other fun things!), and we have curriculum from friends at the Monterey Bay and Birch Aquarium just in case she gets bored (or just in case she decides that this week, it is a moral imperative for her to concentrate her every waking hour on something pertaining to ocean life). I’ve created her history and societal studies curriculum (more on that later) and ensured we have fun projects, documentaries, museum trips and field trips to show Drue how fun and exciting learning about our past can be! Drue starts Japanese lessons in a few weeks (more on that later) and piano lessons next week. Drue joined a computer class – Introduction to Java Programming – that meets once a week and volleyball begins in September and ends in November whereupon Drue is trying out for Club Volleyball, hoping to get into one of the elite teams. So keep your fingers crossed for her!

All in all, it’s a busy and exciting time. School started for us for the fall on Monday the 15th so we are quickly integrating the new curriculum into our day while Drue attends volleyball clinics.  And because we homeschool, we have trips to the lake house and Irish Beach scheduled. We’re so excited for this fall and all our new adventures, both planned and those that might creep up on us, and I am so thankful that we took this big step into the charter school program.  I’ll post more soon on Drue’s entire curriculum for fall!  Feedback, particularly from my amazing friends who happened to major in history, journalism and linguistics, is most welcome.

Happy learning!

When All Else Fails…

// August 1st, 2011 // No Comments » // Educating the Chaotic Mind

After giving Drue a good month off to decompress or, as many homeschoolers call it, to “deschool” I realized I had three challenges ahead of me. The first challenge was that I had no idea what Drue actually learned after 7 years of public education. Second, I had no idea how she learns. And finally, my biggest challenge of all was I had no idea how I was going to homeschool her, run a company, take care of my employee, take care of my clients and somewhere in all of this, take care of me. My friend, TerriAnn (of Cookies and Clogs) recommended I join a few Yahoo groups, read a few books and most of all NOT STRESS. It was very good advice. But to be honest, for a few months, every molecule of my Type A personality was stressed. I did not need a plan but by golly, I wanted one so badly that it was almost punishing not to have one. I was also pretty torn amongst friends and family who are educators. In one corner I had the “Unschool” and Montessori advocates who have successful, happy young adults who flouted conventional schooling, did very well for themselves and currently lead happy, productive lives. In the other corner, were friends and family who live and breathe the tenets of public education asking me what my plan was, how was I going to ensure Drue did not fall behind the standard course of study and how was I going to teach her everything she needed to know when I had my own scholastic struggles growing up? There was also the fact that, while Drue and I adore each other, we’ve never spent this much time together. Being the type of social beings who require our own separate Gal Caves to retreat to with little to no notice, how would we respect each others space while smooshed together in a 1200 sq foot space day in and day out?

I’ve never backed down from a challenge and I realized one thing I did have was a little time on my side. So while Drue relaxed and deschooled, I downloaded the entire California Standard Course of Study, mapped out the entire thing in a spreadsheet, removed redundancies and then downloaded a slew of standardized tests and aligned it to the standard course of study starting in grade 1 and moving through grade 8. After a few weeks of R&R, I started testing Drue every morning, leaving afternoons open for Drue to focus on her passions, read good books, and spend time outside in the sunshine. This also ensured I would have the time, energy and space to get my WORK work done as well as start investigate educational options and opportunities for Drue. I was advised that we would have a few months to figure out what classes and extracurricular activities we wanted for Drue because we pulled Drue from her public school towards the end of this school year. However, we lucked into finding a fantastic science lab class called Rock It Science and was able to enroll Drue in a once-a-week science lab that started a few weeks after she left traditional school. Rock It Science and testing kept us busy through May. Testing helped determine where Drue’s strengths and weaknesses lie, and allowed me to observe Drue in a home school setting. We quickly determined what her distractions would be, what times of the day were better for certain subjects and I was able to gauge how she handles various elements of standardized tests. As a reward for her hard work and efforts, I gave her a week off for her birthday and put together an educational plan of attack. Immediately I realized my plan might receive some resistance from my child… because the only way we were going to get all of her required attendance days in by the end of the year was to pad her summer schedule with school time. And that would not fly with my child who, to date, spends her summers at camps, sleeping, shopping, watching Discovery channel, hanging with her friends at the pool and reading.   So, I approached her at a time of weakness… meaning I came at her after three days with her Uncle Erich, relaxing in front of the television with a red velvet cupcake in her hand.  The child could not have been more comatose if I had smacked her upside the head.   So naturally she agreed that yes, school over the summer was the way to go.  Absolutely, travel in the fall more than made up for the missed weeks of hanging out poolside with her friends.  And sure, some school work while she was at camp was understandable and oh, by the way, would I turn up the fan and pass her another cupcake?  Best Mom ever!!

Flash forward a month and all that agreeableness was lost somewhere between snorkeling in the Coronado Islands and her first two hours sitting in a warm classroom learning advanced Pre-Algebra.   Flash forward another month where a backlog of writing assignments, science assessments, and reading logs turned Drue from a generally pleasant person to a snarling,  sullen, zombie-like tween who decided the entire universe is out to get her and surely no one, NO ONE! on the planet has as much work as she has and you’ve got a pretty good idea of what my late June through mid-July has been like.  Oh, and add a Justin Bieber soundtrack running perpetually in the background.  Is it any wonder I don’t have much of my mind left from time to time?

By the last week in August I’d had enough.  So I did what any self-respecting Mom of a 12 year old who doesn’t mind being grounded, scoffs at losing any and every technical device in her room and can thrive on her imagination alone for days on end.  I gave her sentences.   Not 10, not 100 not 200 but an UNKNOWN number of sentences.   And she wrote sentences about how she would either do her work and do it on time and to the best of her ability or write sentences (yes, I gave her sentences about writing sentences) from the time she woke up until the time she went to bed.  And it took 2 DAYS of endless sentence writing, punctuated by loud sobs and muffled sniffles, but by the end of day 2, after contemplating the blister on her thumb, Drue decided that she would be right and ready to assume her school work the next day.   The next morning Drue was up with her alarm, diligently plodding through her backlog of work, asking questions and turning in item after item on time, and done well.   And we haven’t had a peep, whine, or complaint yet!

Man, I wish I’d had that sentence idea a couple of weeks ago, if only to lose the perpetual drone of Beiber in the background.   Granted, those sentences might not have been the most educational thing she did all summer, but by golly it was the biggest lesson learned for her in a long time.

The slap heard round the world…

// April 1st, 2011 // 1 Comment » // Educating the Chaotic Mind

For every well thought out reason a parent chooses to homeschool their child, I’d like to believe that for another, it’s a catalyst.  At least, that’s how my adventures in homeschooling began.  The irony of it all is that a few weeks before, an old pal – you know the kind, the person you talked to 10 years ago and are kind of interested in what’s going on in their life but not enough to actually renew a friendship – posted on Facebook that she was homeschooling her three boys. I remember posting on her wall “why?…”  Well, she never let me know why and really her family’s reasoning is not my business but I was curious.  Then the family got overwhelmed in Puppy Madness 2011 and I forgot all about the fact that someone I knew dipped her proverbial toe into teaching her kids at home. To be completely honest, my mental picture of homeschooled kids used to be of  under socialized weirdos who could not adapt to the norms of regular school or were being raised by total religious freaks who wanted their curriculum steeped in the Father, the Son with a nice dash of the Holy Spirit, snakes and strychnine not included.  The only real world examples I had of homeschooled kids growing up was a child from my grandparents’ church who ate her own snot in public and an autistic kid who took ballet at age 15 with the five year olds at my ballet school.     So when Drue slapped a kid and asked to be homeschooled, I figured I needed more and better information than childhood memories to make an educated decision.  And luckily, a lovely couple, who homeschool their equally lovely and incredibly smart and social daughter, happened into our lives by way of adopting one of our puppies.   But, first, I better back up and explain a little more about Drue’s situation.

First off, yes, it’s true.  Drue slapped a fellow sixth grade girl.  Like, OMG right?  But before you judge her – and me – think back to middle school.  Think back to the torture and hell that comes with middle school if you’re not into the cool music, wearing the right clothes, sneaking blue eyeshadow and pink lipstick behind your parents’ back and abandoning any individuality you have.  And god forbid if you’re actually passionate about something that does not involve “dating” boys and holding hands with boys and kissing boys and talking about boys.  Well, Drue is quirky. She’ll wear the same t-shirt two days in a row if it’s clean.  She is not into boys yet.  They kind of fascinate her but she still finds them a little repulsive and smelly.   She’s into all kinds of music which means that while she occasionally indulges in a five hour marathon of Lady Gaga and Katy Perry, she’ll also hit the music server and pull down some early Genesis, Foo Fighters and maybe a dash of the Eagles, too.  And she hates Justin Bieber which in middle school is the magical kiss of death, it seems. She loves lip gloss, mostly for the flavor.  However, like her mother, she doesn’t see the point in makeup.  Drue’s big passion in life is sharks.  She wants to study marine life and save sharks.  This has been her life’s passion since she was three.  She has a master plan.  This master plan does not include hanging out at the local strip mall or kissing a boy before she’s ready.  In Mom terms, I think that deserves a huge “YOU GO, GIRL!”

However, because of this, a lot of well-meaning educators in Virginia and California have labeled Drue “socially immature”.  Frankly, I label it “being on the right road to ensure you’re not pregnant and a total loser by 16″ but we’ll go with their label because it’s shorter.   I’ve heard this label twice now when approaching schools about bullying issues.  In Virginia I came in at the eleventh hour because I did not hear about the bullying until we were almost ready to leave the state.  So neither I nor the school district were particularly motivated to do anything about the little terrors.  The reality is that both Drue and I were circles trying to fit into square pegs in Fairfax so I dismissed the bullying as a “Virginia thing” and thought we were moving onward and upward.  And for a time, we did.

When we got to California, it was the land of promise.  And honestly, it still is.  Drue fell into a group of geeky, cool girls just like her – who are thankfully still her friends – and for the first time in a long time, I breathed a sigh of relief thinking Drue had found her niche.  But then Drue also fell into a popular crowd.  Actually that’s not true – she courted the popular crowd and, because she’s a pretty girl, they let her into their ranks.  The problem with popularity is that you don’t just become popular and automagically stay popular.  You have to work at it.  You have to make compromises.  You have to lose your identity and become one with whatever is “IT” and “IN” today.  And God help you if you don’t manage to walk that tightrope each and every single day because you quickly go from popular to tormented if you don’t.  The easiest way to stay popular is to make everyone who isn’t “you” the object of contempt and scorn and no one does this better than a pack of tween girls.  And after two years of being bullied during elementary school by a pack of girls and her fourth grade math teacher, Drue was at the end of her rope with the whole “mean girl” thing. So after months of displaying some pretty fierce anger issues at home that everyone assured us was “normal for this age” but actually stemmed from feeling compromised as a human being at school, she acted out against one of them.  She stood up for what she believed in and let one of the girls have it.

Now when I was in middle school, a slap in the courtyard would have been dismissed and gone unreported.  Or, maybe the parents would have been called and hell would have been paid at home. Maybe.  But, with the plethora of no tolerance for violence campaigns everywhere – you know the ones that don’t actually work which is why our tax dollars go towards police presence and airport type security scanners in schools – we were called, Drue got detention, the counselors were brought in and Drue was immediately labeled “a problem”.    While we were dealing with the school, Drue was dealing with harassment and bullying at school, on her way home and online.  But this was a secondary line item after the fact since Drue was “obviously socially immature” and “kind of asked for the bullying” by slapping a socially superior girl.   Needless to say, this attitude, sentiments confined to one knuckle-dragging harpy of a counselor from the Stone Age that was not, thankfully, shared by the school or the other counselor, started the process of our looking for other educational alternatives outside public education.

Before I go on though, I want it on record that we have no issues with the last elementary school Drue attended in Virginia or the middle school Drue attended here.   The principals at both schools and one of the counselors from her middle school stepped up, addressed the entire problem including the bullying and harassment, and did everything they could within the confines of the districts’ policies.  However, it is an unfortunate fact that a social pecking order does exist and that the average person conforms to fit into a social niche they are comfortable with as opposed to embracing exactly who they are and then finding people who accept them as is.  This is not only tolerated but expected and encouraged in all walks of life.  It is also a fact that middle school is really where the need to conform hits its peak. For a kid like Drue – a quirky, fantastic kid who does not fit the norm and who, at the tender age of 11, does not have the self esteem yet to be okay with herself exactly as she is – middle school is hell on earth.
So in the midst of meeting with counselors, trying to get meetings with the principal, finding Drue a therapist to help her deal with the stress of all the harassment, trying to help her find ways to sleep, taking her to school and back again to try to make her feel safe, monitoring her phone calls and emails to track down the harassers, calling my lawyer and the police when Drue received a death threat, checking the budget to see if private school was a viable option, and trying to send the message to Drue that standing up for herself was good but hitting people was not, Drue threw a “Hail Mary”.  She asked me to consider homeschooling her for the rest of the school year.  My immediate thought was “huh?” but since we promote a culture of tolerance, respect and fairness in my home, I decided it was only fair to properly consider Drue’s request and to really educate myself about homeschooling so we could have a real conversation around it.  So while the school was trying to figure out how to support Drue there and keep her in the district, I started reading up on homeschooling at a local, state and national level.

And it all moved forward from there…