I agree with you that, many times, when people feel overwhelmed by too much to do and not enough resources to do it, there's room to cut helpful-but-not-needful and needful-but-not-mission-critical stuff. I'm not sure it's always a perfectionist issue - where the problem is being unwilling to lower standards anywhere. Sometimes I think it's more of a broader prioritization issue: willing to cut the fat, but they've cut all the fat they can see. So another pair of eyes can help, along with the usual suggestions on how to look at things differently. But recently I've had conversations with women where it becomes clear they really *have* already cut all the fat. They've long since gotten the low-hanging fruit, they've done all the standard things, they've done in-depth research on the non-standard things - all the obvious things and most of the non-obvious things have been tried long ago. They have a clear-eyed view and they've done the analysis, and there is just too much that needs to be done and not enough resources. Their situation just sucks, really. There's no good solutions and the women themselves have a much better idea of the costs and trade-offs of the various not-good solutions than anyone coming in cold. I don't really blame them for getting a bit shirty when they hear the umpteenth suggestion to just "let the non-essentials slide" - they did that two years ago. They aren't wrong that everything left is mission-critical. I have a relentless drive to find a solution, to refuse to admit defeat, to refuse to admit that life could suck like that. But I think that sometimes life *does* just suck like that. And that I can cause more harm than good by refusing to admit that it could - that it's better to acknowledge that an overwhelming reality really *is* inherently overwhelming than to keep stubbornly insisting that it *is* solvable if only you keep trying. Insisting that an overwhelming-but-solvable problem is indeed solvable is offering genuine hope - especially when you can help solve it - but insisting that an unsolvable problem is actually solvable is offering false hope, telling an immensely cruel lie. It's why I pray so much more now - I have a much clearer sense of the huge number of unsolvable problems - and it has highlighted for me how even the existence of solvable problems is a supernatural gift from God.

I completely agree with your overall point here. WRT the bolded: I'm coming more and more to think that the important things shouldn't be taken as given. That the important givens only *stay* important and given by being constantly and explicitly stated, over and over again. There's a saying in my corner of confessional Lutheranism: justification assumed is justification denied. If you aren't constantly and deliberately *affirming* the important things, then you are de facto contributing to their decline. Channelling Alastor Moody, it takes CONSTANT VIGILANCE to keep the important things important.

I agree that it's easier to let things go when you don't care about them. But that's not the same as those things intrinsically not deserving to be cared about. Often I think women - or whoever the party is who thinks a given thing deserves to be done - care more because they understand more. AKA they are *right* to care, because those things *actually do matter*, because those things *actually make a positive difference*, because not doing those things really does lower the quality of life. It's kind of a corollary to the mental load being necessary but non-obvious to the unskilled: how a given task relates to the bigger goals and ends of life is not obvious to all. And it's easy to not care about a task when you don't understand how it contributes to the big picture. But just because you don't understand doesn't mean there's nothing to understand. AKA your failure to understand why something matters could very well be *your* failure of imagination, instead of being a sign of the task's intrinsic unimportance. Just because one party finds it easier to slough off a bunch of expectations doesn't necessarily mean that party is *right* to be doing so. "Easier" doesn't mean "better". It's kind of like the idea that if you have no idea why a law was passed - you have no idea what the point was - then you actually have no business trying to repeal that law. The fact that you can't imagine why anyone could ever have thought it was a good idea isn't a good argument for getting rid of the law, but rather is a sign you need to *better understand the reason for the law* before you start deciding what to do about it. (Else you are on track for discovering the reason for the law the hard way.) Before letting things go, it's worthwhile to consider the costs as well as the benefits. If you can't think of a single good reason why someone would do something, it's a strong indication you have very little understanding of it. (Likewise if you can't think of a single good reason why someone would *not* do something.) On average, women tend to have a greater focus on building and maintaining relationships than men. So it's not surprising that women, on average, would have greater expectations around things that build and maintain relationships (such as remembering birthdays) than men - because they understand more of the value of relationships and the work that goes into building and maintaining relationships. (My understanding is that binding families and communities together was traditionally considered one of the central contributions of women to the common good.) IDK, I don't want to discount the pernicious effect of media on men and women's expectations, or how the binding impetus of doing what others in your community are doing can just as easily be a force for evil instead a force for good. One of the many reasons to re-examine why we do what we do is *because* what we are doing isn't working. But just because a thing isn't worth the effort in our current situation doesn't mean the thing isn't worth the effort, period, or that cutting out the thing doesn't involve a genuine loss, even as we anticipate a net gain. But the whole "if others don't value your expectations then your expectations aren't valuable" assumption - especially in the context of men not valuing the traditional concerns of women - it does seem far too related to dismissing the inherent value of the traditional concerns of women. That in the conflict over how men often don't personally understand the intricacies of women's concerns (and so are prone to dismiss those concerns as unwarranted or unnecessary), there's this implicit assumption that men are *right* in their judgment that traditional women's concerns are indeed unnecessary. Which I reject entirely. Both on the general grounds that it's wrongheaded to judge things you don't understand and on the specific grounds that traditional women's concerns *are* inherently valuable. ~*~ FWIW, I'm coming at this as someone who, in my teens and 20s, *didn't* understand people or relationships and who didn't value traditional women's concerns or traditional female ways of relating. I cheerfully sloughed off every expectation that didn't make sense to me. But in my 30s, I've come to better understand people and relationships, enough so that all those expectations and habits that I dismissed as so much unnecessary effort - I now understand something of their value. After years of being the sort of non-conforming woman who didn't have a lot of respect for traditional female ways of being and acting, I'm now starting to understand the sense and purpose and wisdom of so many of the things I used to unthinkingly reject. ~*~ IDK, it sort of feels like, in this thread, that there's this all-or-nothing assumption about who gets to decide if a given expectation is valuable. Or, more accurately, that a lot of people are assuming that *the opposing side* has an all-or-nothing assumption. It's like both sides are trying to argue that *both* men and women's concerns are of equal value, but they each assume that the other side is coming from a place of valuing one over the other. So when side A argues that a given concern of sex B is sometimes invalid, side B assumes that side A is *comprehensively and universally* dismissing the concerns of sex B in favor of sex A. And likewise, when side B argues that a given concern of sex A is sometimes invalid, side A assumes that side B is *comprehensively and universally* dismissing the concerns of sex A in favor of sex B. When, actually, I think both sides are coming from a position of "both men and women's concerns are of equal value". The difference, I think, is that different sides see different sexes as the underdog. Side A is primed to think sex A needs defending, while side B is primed to think that sex B needs defending. And so side A sees B's defense of sex B as defending the stronger side against the weaker side, while side B sees A's defense of sex A as likewise defending the stronger side against the weaker side. Both sides respond by championing their perceived underdog all the more.

Well, I grew up with an open concept house with a cathedral ceiling, and I've measured every house I've looked at since by that standard. I feel closed in with standard 8' ceilings in the living areas. And I like the living areas all open to each other. Our current house is just about perfect: it's semi-open, with the living areas arranged in a U-shape, and the ceiling peaks in the middle at about 11' (versus my parents', which peaked at 14'). (There's 9-10' ceilings in the master bedroom, which I love, too.) There's a wall between the living room and kitchen, so you can't see the kitchen from the front door or anywhere in the living room, really. I have a little standing desk in the dining room that allows me to see almost all the living areas, plus down the hallway. Most parts of the dining room can see most of the kitchen and living room. The main downside is the comparative lack of bookshelf walls, but we managed to fit our 20 shelves in anyway ;).

Dh's car was flooded once, and the insurance company totaled it. We "bought it back", they cut us a check (probably for whatever the settlement value was minus the salvage value), and then it was on a salvage title, which meant there was no resale value. Also it meant that insurance was liability only. But we used the money to fix the car and drove it for 3-4 more years, until my parents gave us their old car, and then we donated it.

This is part of what reduced my sympathy for the author: there was no acknowledgement that her husband does invisible work, too. As far as the article was concerned, his invisible work was as unnoticed and unappreciated by her as she felt hers was by him. Her detailing all the ways he doesn't think of anything outside himself while she was exclusively focusing on her own problems with nary a hint of acknowledgement wrt the good things he does do: it undercut her point with me. She wasn't acting as she wanted her spouse to act. ~*~ WRT the larger question of, given that so much of what people do is invisible to others, especially others unskilled in that area, how should we live in light of that. Especially since failures are so much more noticeable than successes in those areas. On a small note, if I'm pointing out a failure, I try to bear in mind that there might be a ton of successes I missed. I mean, you only notice the tote that *wasn't* put away, not all the totes that *were* put away. So I try not to go down the "you *never* pick up the tote"/"you *always* leave out the tote" route. One, because it's probably not even true - as I tell my middle, always/never are very strong words and not usually warranted - really think about if they're deserved before using them. And two, because it makes the whole interaction start off negatively and guarantees it will be unpleasant for all concerned. I try to use CM habit-training language - it's both low-key and free of negative emotions plus it hopefully is reinforcing the habit of paying attention to how things should be instead of the habit of only do things when mom points it out. I don't really think of it as "me having to use a special tone of voice" so much as me forcing myself to be polite and keep my anger under control - it's about me regulating my emotions because it's a good work, not because "people won't listen" otherwise. (Usually when I start yelling that no one pays any attention to what I say till I yell, it says at least as much about my refusal to get off my butt and do something effective as it says about those not listening.) Also, I *do* try to pay attention and say thank you when I notice a good job. And I appreciate when people do that with me. Not as a "quid pro quo" accounting sort of thing, but to be kind. To show I noticed and appreciated what they did. (And it ups the positive work-related interactions, to hopefully help offset the occasional negative ones, so that our work-related conversations are a net positive, not a net negative.) And just in general, I try to be aware that, just as so much of what I do is invisible, likewise there's a ton of stuff dh does that I don't see. So I try to assume its presence, just as I hope he assumes the presence of the stuff I do that he doesn't see. As a practical point, to avoid reminders turning into nagging, I do try to make sure that we are all in theoretical agreement about what needs to be done. That way, if I notice something's undone and remind the responsible party, I'm just helping them do the job they already agreed to, not nagging them into doing a job they otherwise wouldn't agree to do. Since I notice more and remember better, it's not a huge deal for me to take on extra mental load there, so long as the person I'm reminding is indeed on board with doing the thing - they just need help remembering, not "help" being annoyed into getting off their butt. (If they start treating my reminders as nagging, I point it out and tell them to cut it out - they agreed this was a thing worth doing, so they need to act like it. We're partners in getting it done, not one person annoying the other person into doing it.)

I agree that the mental load is real. I've really appreciated the cartoon I saw that first made the concept explicit for me. And since mental load is invisible, it *does* go largely unnoticed and thus unappreciated by those who don't know what goes into it. (I think that's true of a lot of jobs, actually. In Harry Potter, our family has discussed Ludo Bagman and the Quidditch World Cup - I mean, *there's* a man who has no idea the mental load that goes into planning it and doesn't seem to think any of it's even necessary - he definitely wasn't appreciating all the hard-but-invisible-to-him work that his staff was having to do. We actually discussed if being his assistant would be perfect or hellish for Percy Weasley. On the one hand, since Bagman handwaves all the details, you'd have free rein to organize however you'd like, and you'd have the satisfaction of knowing you are *very* needed. But on the other, you'd have to be able to live with little praise for doing a good job, since Bagman has zero idea what goes into a good job and basically assumes good jobs happen by magic. And I think that stereotype - of bosses who don't appreciate all their employees do because they have no idea what the mental load is - exists for a reason.) Honestly, I think what I'm reacting to in the article (which seems to be an excerpt from a book, Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward, by Gemma Hartley) isn't the frustration of bearing a disproportionate share of an invisible-thus-unappreciated load. Because I totally agree that it *is* frustrating. I don't mind overmuch hitting the details others in the house miss - because it's a strength of mine, it's a gift I can give to my family plus a sensible division of labor. The problem is that others miss them because they are largely invisible to others, and so while they all enjoy the results of it being done and feel the lack of it going undone, they have no idea that anything *was* done. It's frustrating having one's labor be invisible. What I'm reacting to is *how* the author deals with that very legitimate frustration. It's not that she finds it frustrating - I find it frustrating - but that there's this sense, not just that she shouldn't have to live with that frustration (that it's legit for her to take steps to change it) but that it's unfair that the frustrating situation exists in the first place. That it's unfair that *she's* the one who has to take steps to change it. I especially see that when the the author is discussing her kids, and how she's stuck doing stuff for them because she can't face dealing with their whining and refusal to listen. She says it like it's not part of parenting to deal with kids not wanting to do what they are told. That's my issue, I guess - not her frustration, not her assumption that it's unjust that she's suffering the problem, but her assumption that, since it's unjust that she's suffering in this way, it's unjust that she has to be involved in seeking a solution. It may well be unjust, but, idk, I don't respect how she's responding to that injustice. She seems more focused on blaming others than in relieving the problem. I mean, I think you can use the mental load concept and raise awareness of the impact and effects of the mental load without needing to apportion blame.

Talking about the issue in general - "women don't tend to tell their husbands they need HELP! with this sort of thing in the home until they really, really need it" - not the article in particular. I agree that's a very common scenario, and I tend to see it coupled with "letting it go is *not* an option". And it makes for a really rough situation: the women has nothing extra to give, which means she has no extra energy to teach the task or to turn over the mental load in stages. She's at the point where her only option is to turn the whole thing over to an complete beginner in a "sink-or-swim" way. But even a spouse with the best intentions and effort is probably going to screw it up the first few times - and, really, that's how you learn a lot of the mental load, realizing what's needed through the failures that result from not doing it. Couple that with an absolute unwillingness to let things fall apart, even a little - which is totally understandable behavior in a stressed person - and there's a no-win situation. There's no extra energy to teach others how to do it well, and no willingness to just allow the inevitable initial failures of a sink-or-swim method to do the teaching. I have a lot of sympathy for the woman here - I have totally been there - too stressed to keep doing it but too stressed to do an orderly hand-over and too stressed to handle even the temporary chaos of an abrupt turn-over. But it's an impossible situation for one's family, too - expected to suddenly do a new job perfectly and with no help. Which is why it's a really bad idea here, as in most things, to let the problem hit red-alert status before saying something. But since you can't go back in time to tell your spouse earlier, when you had the energy to deal with the handoff, everyone is just stuck with the current breaking point problem. Which probably means that something has to give, at least temporarily. ETA: I think my point is that, yes, at this red-alert point one really needs help and one's spouse ought to help them. But I think it's unrealistic, and maybe unfair, to expect absolutely nothing at all to change except who's doing the job. The help one's spouse gives ought to be helpful, but not necessarily by doing the exact same job in the exact same way as the original spouse did it. A *comparable* job, yes, but not necessarily an identical job, kwim? I mean, spouse A did it in a way that suited her time and talents; it's not fair to expect spouse B to do it in the way that suited spouse A's time and talents, but instead spouse B ought to be able to do it in a way that suits *his* time and talents.

I think a there's a learning curve wrt taking on the mental load for a new task or area. And that there's a difference in failing as a part of learning to do a new thing well, and failing because you didn't really try to do it well in the first place. Also, that just as people who've never done a task underestimate the mental load involved, a lot of people who've long since mastered the mental load involved underestimate the difficulty in learning it. In so many mental load discussions, there seems to be two threads: no one appreciates how much work the mental load is, and it's ridiculous how people unused to the mental load fail so miserably when initially attempting to take it on. There's this sense, when it comes to *my* mental load, that it's so much work - and unappreciated work, at that. But when it comes to others taking finally taking on their fair share of the mental load, taking some of it off my shoulders, there's the sense that they should be magically good at it, that "it's obvious" what needs to be done, and so their miserable failures are because they just didn't try, instead of trying and failing because managing the mental load well is actually skilled work, and is *not* intrinsically obvious to the unskilled. An example: now that we are in the country, we only go to town once a month for "town groceries". One mental load thing I turned over is making the shopping list. Dh had been remarkably bad about remembering the state of the cupboards and about predicting what will run out before next month - our first few trips we forgot a lot of things, things that I'd have put on the list if I'd done it. But instead of taking over the list, I just let him keep learning. And he has - both in actually taking a visual look at the cupboards while list-making (instead of going off his hazy memory) and in predicting more accurately. He still does it differently than me, but he's doing a good job now. He figured out the mental load. But in a lot of people's stories, it sounds like they take the job back after the first failure - they take it as proof the other person can't/won't do it ever - and in process take away the opportunity of ever learning how. ~*~ I've noticed that with driving, some things are obvious to dh and me, but are apparently non-obvious to some of the drivers we share the road with. Things that fall under the mental load of thinking about the whole situation of all the drivers on the road, or thinking about upcoming driving decisions, instead of only thinking about me and my immediate concerns. (Things that seem really comparable to people's complaints about dhs taking on tasks by only doing the narrow task itself, with no consideration as to how to their execution of the task affects other people or other tasks.) Honestly, I'm coming to the conclusion that a decent-sized chunk of people simply *don't think* when it comes to the larger picture of driving. And, significantly, recent discussions with my dh about his driving habits has opened *my* eyes to a whole world of driving concerns that were pretty much *invisible* to me before. In so many ways, *I* was guilty of being an oblivious driver who just didn't think - because I didn't even know those categories of things even *existed* to think about. Now that I know, I'm trying to learn to pay attention to them. ~*~ I naturally took on a ton of the mental load for our family lives, as many women do, because I was around more to notice more, because I naturally had better EF skills to notice and remember details, because I wanted to make sure it was done right. (I'm the go-to person to ask where things are, not because I make a deliberate point of watching out for others' stuff, but because I just naturally notice and remember where things are.) After a few mental load articles brought the concept to my attention, I realized I might actually be stunting the growth of mental-load-managing skills in my kids. Like with so many things, it's easier to do it myself than to teach them how to do it themselves. I'm now trying to deliberately think through my own process and explicitly teach that sort of reasoning to the kids. Also, my memory isn't what it used to be, so that's been the impetus for me turning over - and teaching - some areas to the rest of the family. People used to just shout out what needed to go on the grocery list, like mom's got the magic list memory. Thing is, I *did* have the magic list memory - I *would* remember it. But now every time people yell out "we need more 'x'", I just say, "Put it on the list!" And they do. (We had some notable failures at first, but the kids came to realize that I was serious - if it wasn't on the list, it wasn't going to be got.) There's some things that I am just too tired to teach - so I just keep limping on doing them on autopilot. Or just don't do them at all. ~*~ I have a differently mental load history than so many women. So many women say they simply *can't* let things not be done, because it makes life ultimately harder for them and everyone. Well, I was seriously depressed for years, hardly functional, and dh didn't have any more house-running skill or interest than your average mid-20s male. The only way dh and I could manage without being constantly mad at each other was to divvy up the chores, do what we each felt like, and let the rest go. A *ton* got let go. The house and our lives were undoubtedly embarrassing (although I was too depressed to distinguish qualities of bad), and regaining mental ground and house-keeping ground was a years-long process. (I still kept the schedule because that was basically effortless for me, even depressed. And I still did the planning, because I wanted control of it, even when I wasn't really up to it.) Unlike all the more functional "but I *can't* accept it being undone" women, dh and I *both* did the "do only what you personally want done" and left the rest undone. And really, that only works (or "works") when you and your spouse are at similar levels of functioning, be it high or low. Dh and my's biggest conflicts in this area came when one person was really trying to improve while the other wasn't. We had to improve together or the resentment started to build. And, honestly, it took a lot of improvement before we were functional enough to for "take on a task only your spouse cares about out of love for them" unselfishness to be a viable option. (That's still pretty hit or miss, tbh.) Even having lived it, it's really difficult to tease apart "can't do it" and "could do it but won't" - the two pretty much went together for both of us. IDK, we were both selfish and incompetent and the two just fed each other. When doing something is hard, you are just less likely to do it, unless it *really* matters. IDK, my experience is that even largely selfishly motivated failure is often not really a deliberate refusal so much as it is a taking-the-path-of-least-resistance failure-to-try. Which often feels like a "can't" to person who failed, even as it seems like a "won't" to the person who asked. It's not a "I don't want to help you" thing so much as a "doing this is hard" thing. Which is both mundanely common and intensely frustrating.

My kids rode in my Ergo till 2.5-3yo.

Both my girls slowed down in 3A - as you say, all that multiplication and long division. They did do 3B much faster. Also, it's not the end of the world to be behind. I did a (kinda failed) experiment with delayed formal math with my oldest, and she started 1.5yr behind and ended 1 yr behind. In her case, I skipped SM6 and went straight to Pre-Alg in 7th (Dolciani), where she is doing fine. But I could have completed SM6 in 7th and done Pre-A in 8th, and then gone into Alg in 9th. My middle (I paused math until she was reading well) started a half year behind and is still a half year behind. With both girls, we just started the next book when the previous one was completed, and picked up after breaks wherever we'd left off. My oldest's situation really did worry me some, the closer we got to 7th grade, because it was my own darn fault, but it did work out.

Third'ing or fourth'ing that the Robin Hobb books, while excellent, are definitely not for kids; my 12yo is moving into adult books, but I wouldn't let her read Robin Hobb for a few more years yet. I do love the series, though - I read through all of them last year. A good dragon-themed YA series is Timothy Zahn's Dragonback series, which starts with Dragon and Thief. It's more of a sci-fi take on dragons than fantasy, but it is *awesome*. I re-read it every few years as an adult, and my oldest first read it around age 8 or 9 and re-reads it once or twice a year. Dd12 just suggested the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, by Patricia Wrede, which starts with Dealing with Dragons - she says it's fun with a lot of references to fairy tales (and it also humorously pokes at fairy tales).

Looking at this some more. If it's true that there's more to recovering pre-modern culture than recovering classical education, yet many people are nevertheless pursuing classical education "done rightly" as a magic bullet to resisting modern culture - then they are doomed to fail. But if they respond to initial failures by figuring they just weren't "pure enough" or that they just didn't do classical education quite "authentically enough" - that the reason they failed is because they just didn't get it right enough - then it makes sense for every round of failure to result in increasing narrowness and increasing rigidity. If pure classical education is our only hope, and it's not living up to that hope, then we must not be doing it right enough, purely enough yet. Instead of more cowbell, we need more purity. Also, it seems to pair with an assumption that there is the One True Way to do classical. Either you are unaware of historical and cultural variations or you are searching for the One Best variation. I had that naive assumption - that there was One True Classical Tradition to recover - but it was knocked out of me when I read a dissertation on classical education in the Lutheran tradition, comparing medieval Catholic to Reformation Lutheran to 19th American Lutheran. He discussed what changes the Reformers made and why, and in the process opened my eyes to how they saw classical education as a *means* to an end, and not an end in itself. When different groups had different ends, they modified their approach to classical education accordingly. (It also showed how the 19th century American Lutherans had *already* lost a certain amount of understanding and their planned approach reflected a certain rigidity in their attempts to recover what was lost.) I think that might be key: do you understand what end you are aiming at? I know I used to be all gung-ho on recovering classical education *because* I knew I didn't know what end to aim at - I wanted to learn the classical end. Of course, the problem is that there *isn't* just One True Authentic Classical End - there's a ton. Plus there's the deeper problem Hicks pointed out: if you don't know what end you are aiming at, even if your materials do, you won't be able to get there. ETA: Because if you don't know the end you are aiming at, but only the means you hope will *reveal* that end to you, then you can't deviate from those means at all, because you have no idea how they work. You can't really *evaluate* if they are working; all you can do is just *trust* that they *will* work. The only thing you can really evaluate is your fidelity to the means. That, and how well your means stack up to the (worthy) classical educators of the past. Purity and narrowness.

This reminds me of David Hicks' article "Is Classical Education Still Possible?" I'm not as pessimistic as he is about the possibility of families and small communities genuinely recovering pre-modern ways of thought and life (which I agree are necessary prerequisites for a pre-modern classical education). But I do agree with him that you can't recover the culture *through* classical education - that the culture has to be in place *before* kids can be successfully educated in it. If you don't understand the ideas and assumptions that animate a given curricula or approach, then no matter how perfectly it embodies them, you can still screw it up by importing your own foreign ones. Which is a problem, because that culture is largely lost in this time and place. So many people seek out some kind of traditional classical ed in an effort to recover the culture that went with it. They don't know what the that culture is like, though they desperately want to, and since education is formative, they latch onto traditional classical ed as a means of forming both themselves and their kids in that alien-to-them culture. (A few years ago, I was right there with them - figuring out what to do when everything you know is wrong - wanting to do something different than what you know, because all you know is wrong - that's hard and frustrating. It's easy to idealize what you aspire to as a magic bullet.) But it simply doesn't work: the classical teacher must *already* be formed by the classical tradition before they can pass it on to their students. You can't just rotely follow-without-understanding a classical curriculum and expect it to magically have imparted the culture that formed it to you. You have to have recovered the tradition yourself before you can impart it to others. But it's very hard to recover a tradition without seeing it lived out, without being part of a community that is living it out. And there are very few communities in the West that are living it out - there are a lot more people who *want* an alternative to modern education than there are people who genuinely *have* an alternative. There are significant differences between modern Western culture and premodern classical Christian culture, and too much contemporary traditional classical ed ends up just applying modern Western assumptions to classical education, which mostly just forms students in modern Western culture and largely fails to do much to form students in the pre-modern classical Christian culture they were aiming for. And people don't realize it, because they don't know what they don't know. IME, the sort of rigidity the OP describes is a result of the natural inflexibility of the zealous beginner, when *everyone* in the community is a beginner, when there are no genuinely knowledgeable people to teach and guide and correct and deepen understanding and generally keep the apprentices well aware of how much they still need to learn. I mean, imitation is a powerful way to learn. There's a common theme among committed adherents of given hs philosophies: at the beginning they followed the rules exactly, strove to be ever more pure in their implementation. Then, later on, they start to really internalize and understand the *point* of the rules, and then are in a position to follow them more flexibly. Usually this is retold with the moral of: since people with true understanding don't follow the rules rigidly, but flexibly, *no one*, including newbies, should ever follow the rules strictly. But the problem with that is that beginners just don't have the knowledge or experience or judgment to flexibly apply principles from a position of deep understanding - because beginners don't have deep understanding by definition. "Doing what experts do" doesn't itself build up the mastery necessary to *be* one of those experts. It occurred to me: what if the newbie period of strict imitation was *itself* laying the foundation for the later true understanding. The problem wasn't the strict implementation so much as the conviction that an ever-more-strict implementation *is* mastery, as opposed to the beginning step *towards* mastery. It's a common beginner mistake, to have no sense of the depths of mastery, to have no sense of what it means to act from a place of deep understanding of the subject. But usually the masters knock that misconception out of the beginners. But if there are *no* masters - everyone's a beginner - the field is dominated by the blind leading the blind - then beginner mistakes get enshrined as common knowledge. Especially if none of the leaders of the community has ever truly mastered something - it makes it harder to realize how little you know of a new subject when you have no reference point for what deep knowledge of something would be like. And double especially if the leaders of the community lack humility - if they are unaware or unwilling to admit just how much of a beginner they are, of how little their knowledge really is. Also, there's a certain kind of desperation that comes from realizing that it's not just that *you* have a shallow understanding of something vital, but that increasingly it looks like *everyone's* understanding of that vital thing has no roots. I mean, then what? There's no obvious path to solving it, no master to study under. And the need to live by it doesn't go away even though your ability to do it has crumbled. It definitely primes you to grab onto anyone who says they have a solution. And if you had been one of the solution-givers before your uncomfortable realization, I think there's a temptation to just refuse to admit it, to refuse to poke at your shaky understanding out of fear it might crumble - to be ever more inflexibly confident in public to shore things up. Possibly without ever really consciously realizing what you are doing.

Mine's the answer to life, the universe, and everything ;). (It's from The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. An alien race built a super-computer to find the answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything. After seven-and-a-half million years of computing, the computer, Deep Thought, spits out the answer: 42. This naturally rather confused the alien race. Deep Thought said that they now needed to find the *question* that would make the answer comprehensible. It wasn't able to do that itself, but it was able to design the computer that could. That computer works on finding the Great Question of life, the universe, and everything, to which 42 is the answer, for ten million years, but five minutes before it completes its calculations, the computer is eminent domain'd and destroyed. Oops.) 42 is also a great domino game, which I played a lot at the time I'd first started using it. I picked it when I needed a camp counselor nickname when I was 19, and have used it online ever since. (I'm now approaching the time when my age is going to match my username. When I was in my 20s, it was funny when people assumed my username reflected my age. Now that my username is getting close to *actually* reflecting my age, it's a little disconcerting, actually.) ETA: My avatar has nothing to do with my username. It's my favorite illustration from Beatrix Potter, from "A Tale of Miss Moppet" (now in the public domain). The expression on her face when she opens up the handkerchief to find the mouse she'd trapped in it had escaped without her noticing - it just cracks me up every time.

In one of his most famous thought experiments there were two twins. One traveled in a rocket at almost the speed of light to a star four light years away, while his brother stayed on earth. When he got back he had only aged eight years, but his brother on Earth had aged 29 years. This is the most unobtrusive way to fix it I can think of: breaking up the sentence into three sentences, and adding in "on Earth" for clarity.

In addition to Wise Owl Polysyllables, Phonics Pathways (and its companion reader, Reading Pathways) and Webster's Speller (free pdf) both provide a similar kind of scaffolded practice. I second ElizabethB's Syllables Spell Success program. She also has a lot on her site about using Webster's Speller. ~*~ With my kids, I did have to do more than just practicing the patterns. (It was because they were unable to break spoken words into syllables or orally blend spoken syllables into words, and they needed those underlying skills to be able to decode unfamiliar multi-syllable words). So after we'd worked through all of the multi-syllable practice in PP/RP without it generalizing, and did ElizabethB's previous syllables activities (it was before she'd expanded it into SSS) without it generalizing, and did a chunk of Webster's without it generalizing, I did REWARDS. (I got a used older edition for reasonably cheap.) Between REWARDS and learning to write in cursive (which requires the ability to read and spell in syllables), they learned how to do it.

Here's some of the books my 12yo read recently and particularly liked: *Enchanted Forest Chronicles, by Patricia Wrede (juvenile fantasy) *Redwall series, by Brian Jacques (juvenile fantasy) *Quadrail series, by Timothy Zahn (adult sci-fi) *Dragonback series, by Timothy Zahn (juvenile sci-fi) *Chronicles of Chrestomanci, by Diana Wynne Jones (juvenile fantasy) *The Knot in the Hedge and Spindle's End, by Robin McKinley (juvenile fantasy) *MacDonald Hall series, by Gordon Korman - these are very funny She also re-reads Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings on a regular basis.

Thanks all :). Practicing with her today, she was able to listen to the metronome and count to it in a general way (1-2-3, 1-2-3, etc) and was able to start herself, instead of needing me to give a two-measure count as a lead-in. So I *think* she can now translate the steady metronome beat into a meaningful count by herself, and that's new. She still either can't tell or doesn't care when her playing gets off the metronome - she needs me to tell her. And she also can't really play to the metronome herself but needs me counting/conducting. So in effect she's progressed to where middle dd is. We're using an app, and it might not be loud enough, though I hold it close to her ear. But somehow, in a mysterious and kind of miraculous way, she's largely internalized the beat for the song in question and last week played it perfectly in her lesson. I wonder if she could count to any beat, or if she could count to *this* beat because she's internalized it. She's seriously resistant to the idea of getting her body into it, although when she plays she naturally moves to the beat when she feels it. Neither of my girls like clapping out their pieces - they'd much rather just count them out-loud with no hand/body involvement - but I do make them do it till they've proven they can, because it does make a big difference in their ability to accurately count it, and there's no way to effectively play to the metronome if they don't even know how to count the piece. My youngest successfully did her contest piece to a variety of different speeds (hw assigned by her teacher) with my help, but I've been too scared to try it with older dd. But I think I'll try clapping - or patting - to different beats and see if she can do that. If she can't, I'll see if I can bribe her into marching to the beat.

Not lewelma, but with my dd we did a lot of working backward. She'd solve the problem first, and then I'd walk her through the standard problem solving steps, having her answer each question in turn. Here's an example of problem solving steps (from our Dolciani Pre-Algebra book): 1) Read the problem carefully. 2) Decide what is asked for. 3) Look at the facts given. 4) Decide which operations to use. 5) Perform the operations. 6) Check your answer with the statements in the problem. So, with my dd, first she'd solve the problem. Then we'd go back through the steps. I'd have her read the problem aloud to me (Step 1 in the above list). Then I'd ask her what she was trying to find and, once she told me, I'd ask her if she had enough information to find it right now, or if she needed to find something else first (Step 2). Once we'd worked back through the chain of Things We Need to Find to a starting point, something we could find with the information given in the problem (Step 3), we'd start working forward. So what do you need to do to find that first thing - what operation do you need to do and with what numbers? (Step 4) Once she could tell me that (sometimes I'd have to prompt her "So, do we add? Subtract? Multiply? Divide?", but she could usually identify what to do from there, once I'd broken down the options and went through them one-by-one), I'd have her write down the equation and solve it (Step 5). Then we'd look at the next link in the chain: now what do you need to do? (Back to Step 4) And once she could tell me, I'd have her write the equation and solve it (Step 5 again). We'd keep working our way forward step-by-step through our list of Things To Find till she'd found what the problem was asking for. Then I'd have her write the answer in a sentence, which required her to look back at the problem and check that what she found was what the problem wanted her to find (Step 6). I think we spent the better part of 4th grade working together through Intensive Practice in that way before she really internalized it. When she got stuck on a step, I'd go back to the usual teaching methods for whatever concept it was, I'd often pull out manipulatives, I'd work through a bar diagram with her - whatever it took for her to make the connection between her intuitive understanding and the logic of the steps. With my n-of-1, I did it by a) letting dd solve the problem her way first, so that she had an intuitive understanding to build on, and b) by making sure each step made sense to her, that she at least understood why it was a mathematically valid, legitimate step to take, that it connected to her intuitive understanding of math in general even if she didn't necessarily see how it connected to her intuitive approach to this problem in particular. If she felt like something I wanted her to do made no sense, we'd stop and look at it from as many directions as it took for her to understand. It definitely helped that she flat out won't do anything she doesn't understand. If something was a black box to her, she'd balk and refuse, instead of go through the motions to get it over with. So I always knew if she was having a problem understanding.

My oldest dd has a lot of stealth dyslexic characteristics, and it's taken a lot of effort from both of us for her to learn how to show her work. I think it took all of her 4th grade year before writing the needed equations went from pulling teeth to something she could do fairly fluently. I walked her through the thought process and the writing process for months before she really internalized it. Now we've embarked on Pre-Algebra, and there's a new way of showing the work, and teaching her the new way - and how it's really very similar to the old way (not the entirely new and confusing thing) - has been one of the more time-consuming parts of Pre-A for us. There was a thread a few months ago on showing your work, and lewelma had a really insightful post that nailed our experience perfectly. Her post was about how some kids have problems "showing their work" because what they did in their head really isn't *showable* at all. It's not that they did the usual linear steps, but in their head instead of on paper, but that they didn't do any of the linear steps at all. Learning to show the usual work isn't a matter of just learning to write down what they did, but actually requires them to learn a whole new way of thinking about math. It's more learning to show *the* work, not learning to show *their* work. I'm quoting her post here in full because it's that good 🙂:

I started WWE2 with my oldest when she was 9 and hated both the act of writing and oral composition. It was a very good thing for us. She enjoyed the stories and that made the rest palatable. That level begins teaching summarizing by asking leading questions before narrating, and still separates oral narrating from the act of writing, although it does start using the student's narration as copywork one day a week. It also starts studied dictation, where you do a sentence for copywork one day and then do it as dictation the next.

My parents recently had their siding replaced, and their contractor tried to put one over them. When it was done except for the gutters being put back on, they asked Mom to go ahead and officially approve it, just as a formality, even though they were of course still going to finish up. Mom refused - no official approval till she's 100% sure she's happy with it. Well, turned out there was a problem with putting the gutters back on: they wouldn't fit with the new siding and instead they would have to be replaced. My parents had gone through Home Depot, and there was some wrangling between the contractor and HD over who was going to have to eat the cost of the new gutters, but eventually they got their gutters. It's really hard not to think that the contractor was already fully aware of the gutter problem and was basically lying about "just a formality; of course we will finish" as he tried to get Mom to sign early, in order to make the gutter problem her problem instead of his.

These kinds of exercises have been a huge help here, as well - and likewise were extremely hard for dd to do at the beginning. Consonant blends, in particular, were a huge bugaboo - she couldn't distinguish the individual sounds making up the blend either. I heavily used the Dekodiphukan sound pictures in doing this; it provided a visual reference for what sounds she was supposed to be hearing but still forced her to blend instead of sight read. (She could do CVC substitutions by picturing the words spelled out in her head and visually noting which letter was different, instead of doing it by sound.) I also made magnetic tiles of the sound pictures, and used them in doing these sorts of exercises - she could build the word from the sounds she heard, and then read it back and hear any mistakes. With blends, I initially had her build the word "rap", say, and then have her turn it into "trap", for instance. It gave her some visual and kinesthetic cues to help bolster her weak auditory processing, but without allowing her to "cheat" by sight reading. (I did/do the same sorts of exercises with my younger two as part of the learning-to-read process, and they were/are invaluable.) LiPS teaches kids to learn how sounds are made in the mouth to provide that additional visual and kinesthetic feedback (it also does a *ton* of sound replacement/deletion/addition activities), and though we only got through learning consonant sounds, even that little bit helped a lot. There were sounds the girls couldn't distinguish between, and sounds that even I couldn't say on their own, but only in a word that contained them, and by learning how to mouth moves to make them, we all learned to both hear them and say them.

Spelling is a harder skill than reading, so spelling skill tends to lag behind reading skill. I didn't start spelling-as-spelling until my kids were reading well. We did a spell-your-way-into-reading approach - so that they heard the word, spelled the word (with guidance in choosing the correct spelling for each sound), and then read back what they spelled. So they were spelling (with guidance) right at their reading level. It was great for learning to read, but it didn't do much for their ability to spell (which kind of surprised me). So once they were reading well (end of 2nd), I started spelling from the beginning, tying it into learning cursive. Also, ymmv, but I've been surprised at how much my kids *haven't* picked up spelling from reading. I mean, I'm sure the exposure helped, but it wasn't enough. I was a natural speller, and I've been surprised at how much deliberate spelling work my kids have needed.