Morning. Hope the caffeine kills that headache truly dead. Today: experimenting with switching our Sunday & Friday schedules, so I can grocery shop on Friday mornings -- otherwise, for Reasons, shopping happens Saturday AM which isn't ideal for having a Sabbathy rest day. So ... Breakfast Reading for boys, I prep list Errands with boys, bring cooler for cold stuff Lunch at sidewalk cafe in town Hit the art store if we haven't yet Home, math + languages + some drawing Afternoon Zoom chat with a friend Dinner. ??? Something super comforting, extremely nutritious, that everybody likes and can be prepped in 15". Ha! I'll be sure to post if I find such a meal. More likely, a meat-and-cheese board type situation. Or sandwich fixins. And tonight is sort of movie night. Popcorn! Hope y'all are doing well out there. e-hugs to y'all: I'm glad for you.

No, the vibe is great -- it is CLRC, and they just have the best ethos. Closest to my own I've found. He's just sort of bored, and not engaged. To be fair, Latin is a requirement of my schooling for him and not an elective. But so are math and writing, subjects also generally despised but from which he take some joy. This year, the Latin is largely translating chunks of Aeneid. They are beginning in Book IV, and weren't assigned to read the English translation beforehand (I did have him run through a graphic novel version; my plans to assign a prose or poem version fell victim to Pandemic Situations). And the real reason, I think, that this is the work for the first translation class is to prep them for the eventual AP. So I'm just saying that the material wasn't chosen to inspire, and kiddo is 100% non-inspired. So I'll probably dedicate the year to holding ground & building joy/interest. I'm thinking we'll take a week off Latin entirely, then have him work from Lingua Latina as review and do other simple reading, plus join a weekly conversation class in October. Then re-assess. We'll focus on building reading & speaking skills and finding bits of Latin he gets a kick out of. I'll have to outsource & it'll be a challenge to supervise, but hey, keeps my brain stretchy. 😉 Otherwise the day went pretty well. Mild migraine, sleep problems to address, but nothing too unusual going on.

HomeAgain, hope zoo was unexpectedly rewarding! Here, I sort of staggered through the day. I have a cold, am stupid & demoralized, and realized that elder's Latin IV class is simply not going to work for him. You know, I thought I had solved that particular problem. This child is so. hard. to. educate. But he's a terrific person, which has gotta count for something. Thank goodness we have a bit more to spend on school this year; I just placed the order with Rainbow Resource for the materials we'll try to switch to. Argh.

I don't know, sort of a briskly refreshing honesty don'cha think?

Afternoon! I suppose we're all grinding away today, then 🙂 Hit the books this AM; I'm moving our start time forward by 5" a day (but not Fridays!) until we're at our Official Start Time. We did great with that today, though it was a bit of a scramble. This afternoon: Latin, Math with younger; elder has independent stuff; would love to review some poetry memorization all around; fitness for boys. Fitness for me, too. Wash day's dishes and do a spot of cleaning; shakshuka + fry bread for dinner. Read-alouds before bed, oh my! And I ought to bathe at some point.

Evening! Today was light, and ended with an RPG game in which I played (but of which I wasn't the GM -- much easier). Now to bed with everyone. All in all, pretty successful: bits of fitness, and cleaning, and school planning, and of course the RPG which was part Zoom, part a friend we're podding with.

Yay, rain! and this morning saw us clear of smoky air for the first time in days, which was lovely. Today went to various forms of catching up. Some school for boys, lots of planning for me. Goals: set us up well tonight so that tomorrow goes well. quick, short nap for me fitness with boys souffles, salad + fruit for dinner. cleaning up, fitness for me, get ready for bed -- boys probably get video tonight so I can get some exercise in. somewhere in there, make sure things are ready to kick off in the morning

I think I missed two days. !!!! But, in related news, we've kicked off our official school year. Whew!!! Off to get some exercise & a bath in before tucking in kiddos & heading to bed. Happy nearly-weekend, y'all.

YES!!!!! I declare, every one in my family can read at breakfast. Except me. WHY????? (I've started breakfasting at my desk 😉 )

Morning! Not so hot here today -- hoping a cooler breeze comes your way soon. Super dry, though. Today: School planning: get things rough & ready for the start of the year/term tomorrow. House: FlyLady stuff, cleaning generally, getting necessary school stuff accessible, box up some of the stuff we won't use this year to clear space. School: piano for younger, some math; elder has work for online classes Fitness: run + Darebee for boys, aerobics, strength & yoga for me Meta goal -- have the evening, especially, run earlier in keeping with getting folks to bed a bit sooner & up a bit sooner, too. Garden -- putter. Which mainly means watering stuff enough to keep it going, and putting bags of things away.

Morning, all! Parched 'round here, smoky air. Today's agenda: Celebrate elder's 16th birthday: hurrah! Migraine management, which looks a bit different 'cause we have some folks working in the house. Focus on school planning & prep so that I can run school Wed-Fri and trial our plan. Clean. Esp. FlyLady routines. RPG tonight -- the other regular GM is running it, hurrah again!

@lynn-- so glad you are able to do this for your child, since it is clear she's so relieved. At least she'll be motivated to make it work! 🙂 We've homeschooled all along; to my mind, I started in preschool when my older child was 4. That's when I made the choice to drop grad school and come home with him full time; he's starting 10th this year. It has been a sometimes-wild ride. Totally worth it. Still a ton of work. Can't imagine doing it any other way.

Can't speak to this with direct experience, but through DH's academic grapevine we learned that his colleagues at pediatric hospitals are seeing the beds fill up, and are very concerned about COVID & unvaccinated kids. I don't know whether or not the children getting sick were already vulnerable/at risk somehow; I don't think our information touched on that.

... aaand back into migraine management. Whee. You know, it'd be delightful if the news read less like those little faux-news quotes at the beginning of the chapters in post-apocalyptic novels. Just sayin'. So: manage migraine. This'll involve exercise, somewhat, so I'll try to expand that and hit aerobics, strength, bit of ballet & yoga today. cultivate joy & gratitude. project vacation-enjoying presence for children plan, clean, &c as necessary, useful, and as I can

What can one say? I'm so sorry. It is incredibly hard. Just know you aren't alone -- we see you, and hear you, and your little ones do too. I have learned, over the past few years, that to live a good life -- to try and show up, to do the right thing, to try to be unfailingly kind and loving and also tough -- isn't only hard, it is isolating. It can leave one feeling lonely. And one of the most painful things about my decisions to educate my kids, the fact that we homeschool and the manner in which we do it ... well, it means that my kids are also going to find themselves, sometime or other, standing in a very lonely place. You know, I think what you're doing -- trying to do the right thing -- is sort of like climbing a mountain. A big one. Back before you could hire folks to schlep everything up for you. Not many people do it. It's hard, and even if you have companions you have to power through yourself, in the end it is you & whatever source of faith/strength you have cultivated. But there is a place beyond the struggle, and past the loneliness. There is truth, and strength, and an astonishing beauty: and you'll get a glimpse of this, sooner or later, you'll catch an echo of the good you've done, you'll see that the trail you cut eased a fellow traveler's way. And then it'll be up the next slope; or back into the fray; or paddling through the next series of waves. You'll be in the thick of it so much more than up on the peaks. "You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know." -- Rene Dumal

This combination of (balancing of?) Bennett & Zinn looks wonderful. I'd not come across the Bennett book and am glad you shared what you're doing.

I used Homer with elder until he asked to do WWS instead. 🙂 Those were his two options. I do like a lot about CW, but not how contortionist it is. So, trying to get my head back to what we did for the first week. What we did NOT do: anything grammatical, no sentence diagramming. I left all that to the grammar program. Do you have the Instructor's Guide? that was my home base, iirc. I could never have tackled it without the instructor's guide, not least because that made it easier to see which bits I was skipping on purpose so I didn't miss bits on accident. If you have the guide, I can tell you how I used it while we were doing Homer. If not, I am not going to be any use to you at all. 😞 ETA: basically, I set aside 45" or so and opened my Instructor's Guide and we plowed through: I skipped the "Theory" bit altogether, hit the day's Analysis & Imitation (minus diagramming), and spent the remainder of the time on the Writing Project. Then I tried to look ahead to what we needed for the next lesson. I did begin with the "Week 0" prep but in the future would use paper in a binder instead of that maddening copybook thing which I detested and we never could find anyhow, I was a total copybook failure. The most useful prep I did was reading stuff & adding "Day 1" "Day 2" "Day 3" and "Day 4" tabs to wherever we were in the analysis & imitation portion of the main book.

Late, late late to the party; I'm planning out our year and the subjects are pretty settled. We have a lot on our plate, so the plan is to focus on spending a good amount of time on school and loop through what we want to do. Priority is going to piano, three Rs, Latin and art. Logic: Thinking Toolbox / Fallacy Detective, games like Gravity Maze, AntiVirus Mutation and maybe some chess. Math: finishing up MEP & Beast Academy 5, on to MEP 6 and then give AoPS PreAlgebra a whirl. Do either that or upper MEP with him. Science: finish RSO Chem, McHenry's Elements; read from Hakim's Story of Science, graphic science books, Gray's elements & molecules & reactions books, some of Asimov's How We Found Out series, etc. Maybe a chemistry game if I can unearth it 🙂 History: WTM-ish Ancients history, with OUP's World in Ancient Times for reading + primary source material English Language: AAS, GftWTM, and a bit of penmanship/keyboarding Literature: stuff from LLftLotR, a Shakespeare play each term, poetry each term, and Figuratively Speaking Writing: alternate CW Homer with outlining practice; some poetry writing and basic literature responses. Foreign Languages: Form Latin series, Minimus to read; and Introduction to Classical Greek (I don't plan to finish the Greek book this year -- it'll have to be just 3 days/week) Art: online drawing class; Artistic Pursuits; Harmony Fine Arts Year 5 Music: piano, Harmony Fine Arts Year 5.

I love the stuff that you plan for your kids, and how much _they_ love it. Happiness!

I'm very, very late to this party. Eldest is 10th this year; last year was rather wobbly, so we're still wrapping some stuff up. Writing With Skill: finish 2, embark upon 3 Finish up Vocab. from Classical Roots, Stewart English Program, work through CW's Intermediate Poetry, review penmanship & keyboarding finish MP Geography III Math: OUP's Cambridge Pure Maths book 1 for As/A level; living book each term, starting with "A History of Pi" Literature, history & some science content: Great Books a la WTM, Ancients. Include some classic chem reading. AP Chem online Latin IV online Russian I online beginning drawing online; high school Artistic Pursuits in weeks that there's no online instruction art history let child pick amongst Gardner's, Van Loon and an Updike book to start; music let child pick between What to Listen for in Music and How to Listen to Great Music; various music books and some arts periodicals. Super casual.

And you've ALWAYS been more organized in your homeschool, and knowledgeable about the overall terrain of educating right through college. I'm still, to be honest, in awe.

Very true! 8fill's experience, and advice, over the years mean each day in my homeschool is better than it would have been. My kids are still a bit far out from the grad school themselves; our perspective is from the students in our lives through DH's lab and other friendships. I also am in agreement, which I meant to come back and add earlier but ran out of time this AM, on 8fill's point that these schools should be better serving their students. Absolutely. YES!!!!! DH and I are sort of gently encouraging our kids to think about good, non-uber-elite schools for many reasons, that being one of them.

We have a bit of that, too. Good luck! @Critterfixer-- hoping coolness descends, and moods rise 🙂 . Here: no migraine this AM -- hurrah!!! AM fitness with boys 25" of something Useful and Important. Morning outing to a nearby beach for shell gathering, outdoor time, &c -- this is a vacationy week Hit the grocery store on the way back Work with elder on organizing for his online classes, b/c nobody told the online providers that school ought to start in September 🙂 Clean. Figure out dinner: galettes???? Fitness for me, eventually. Plan some school. I'm gonna go for 6-7 off that list. And #7 probably really is 3 items. Ah well. I'm engaging the planning process, at least.

@Clemsondana-- that list is great. Really super for considering schools; talking with current students is something few folks think about doing. One would be shocked at what you can learn if you simply ask; and if you don't ask, it can be very hard for current students to deliver a warning even if they want to. Ask faculty you know and either respect or detest about the different schools -- which value individual achievement most, which foster inter-student competition, which operate more collaboratively -- that sort of thing can matter. One could also ask one's advisor what they want in a grad student applicant for a bit more data. Knowing whether or not a post-grad year of working in a lab is expected or desirable can be handy. @8filltheheart-- the most selective schools are sometimes being the very slowest to move away from sink-or-swim as a working theory; or, as Ruth said, they trust that if the students wants to take it on then the student can handle it. Most of the students applying to the DH's department are also applying to grad school at Stanford, MIT, and/or Harvard, and he's done admissions stints for several years -- serving & chairing. From where he sits there's no expectation that MIT will be particularly helpful, at an institutional level, to its undergrad students. Or its young faculty 😉 . Kids from Brown would have better odds of getting good help imho. Fellowships are also really different to grad school apps. Which itself is a bit of arcane knowledge, I suppose! But the grad school apps are just the place where lewelma's various fields of experience over the years are leveraged. You want great grades, great scores, great LoRs, and a personal statement that shows passion,skill, and grammatical competence at a minimum; if it's both erudite and fun to read it'll make the top % of stuff those sciencey, Ivy-league admissions committees wade through each year. Help with things like cold requests for LoRs, formatting resumes, editing letters, plus the bigger-picture scenario of balancing life out -- that seems to me & to DH like a great place for help, and if the parent can help & the student wants it, fabulous. imho. ymmv. &c!

It's great to see this conversation. Very true that getting help from the insiders is very leveraged, and can be very powerful. And that not all counselors are useful; and that one should try a few times before throwing in the towel.