Raising Future Adults

My oldest son is very aspie. I had a second child while terrified my marriage was about to end in divorce because I felt my child needed a full blooded sibling to have any hope of being socially functional. I fundamentally don't agree with a lot of the nonsense we hear about how children today are being born with Autism Spectrum Disorder or Attention Deficit Disorder.  Spiders  are born with certain social behaviors hard wired in. Humans  get raised for eighteen years and much of their social stuff is learned behavior. When I was growing up, I was one of three kids. My mom was one of twelve kids. My dad was one of five. I had an aunt, uncle and four cousins down the street and a next door neighbor with eight kids. We have a lot fewer children per household on average today and that means a lot fewer siblings, cousins and neighbor kids. And then we jump to the brilliant conclusion that kids today are simply born  with serious social deficits that we imagine didn't exi...

We originally homeschooled through a charter school. They did testing, supplied the books, and had a record-keeping system. The following year, I liberally borrowed from their system when we began homeschooling on our own. I have described this system so many times, that I figured it was time to put it on my website so this is the last time I have to say this! I found a skills check list by grade level for the state we live in. Twice a year, I would read through the skills they were expected to have for that grade level, check off what I knew they had mastered, orally quiz them (if possible -- or observe them for a week or so) on things I wasn't sure about, and then I made a list of goals for the things I knew they had not mastered and were having trouble with. This was the first step in my planning process and the notes I made became the basis for planning the curriculum for the next six months. We homeschool year-round. We did year-round school with the charter school and...

My ex-husband was a bibliophile whose most bitter memory of our marriage was any book I ever made him get rid of. Which I did because he was in the military, so we moved a lot and had weight limits and sometimes had DUPLICATES of books, like the illustrated and unillustrated version. THAT was his zinger during our divorce: He regretted every single book I ever made him get rid of!!!!!! GRRR!!!! He also had extremely serious eyesight problems. Between the two, I picked up seemingly obscure information about physical books that most people seem to have never heard. Prepping A Large Hardback  I've never seen or heard this from anyone else, but he prepped new books for reading to protect the spine. Especially large hardbacks because they are prone to breaking when you hold them open a long time at the same spot. So before anyone was allowed to read a new book in the house, he went through a process of opening the book in several different places and applying enough pressure to break i...

I recently tripped across this clip of I love Lucy  where Ricky reads a children's book and keeps running into different pronunciations of ough . It reminds me of the much longer poem called The Chaos which sometimes gets called English is Tough Stuff. Wikipedia describes it as a poem demonstrating the irregularity of English spelling and pronunciation . Ricky goes on a rant about in Spanish, the same letters are always pronounced the same way. I have read that they don't have spelling bees in Spanish. That's a peculiarity of English education because of the extreme irregularity of English spelling and pronunciation. àMy ex-husband and oldest son are both not very social and they read a LOT. They both are prone to quirky interpretations of the pronunciation of words they learned from reading. As much as possible, I tried to make learning fun while homeschooling my kids. We spent a week on The Chaos while they objected to my pronunciation and looked it up only to find I w...

Some video about rich kids get more per pupil educational expenditures and THAT'S why blah blah. Yeah, no, fool. In a high school gifted enrichment class called G.L.O.R.Y (Greater Learning Opportunities for Resourceful Youth), I studied Latin and Greek root words of English words as preparation for the college entrance exam.  I'm good at taking tests, in part because I was taught how to test well. That class had something like ten people in it from all four grades, 9th through 12th, and I was something like one of four 10th graders, I think. I ended up STAR student, which means I had the highest SAT score (plus top 10 percent grade point average) of my graduating class. One of the other three was one of the two students "above" me, making me the #3 student of my graduating class. I was taught tricks for how to do well on that test to optimize my chances of getting a good score, qualifying for any college that interested me and having the opportunity to try to reach ...

An early incident where I vividly recall eyerolling and face palming  occurred when my oldest turned two years old in Germany. He was born in Texas and it was June and not all that hot by our standards. Completely coincidentally, I bought him new shoes right before receiving a package from my mother. His brand new shows were a combo of primary colors: Blue, yellow and red. In the package, my mother included a hand-me-down coat in good condition in the exact same colors . OH. MY. GOD. THEY MATCH. So he's psyched and wants to wear them TOGETHER!!!!!!! Matchy-matchy!!! In summer . So I roll my eyes and tell him he's allowed to wear the winter coat IF he doesn't zip it all the way up AND leaves the hood off. I explain to him "You lose half  your heat through your head, so if you leave the hood off, you should be fine." SCIENCE EXPERIMENT TIME!!!!! He puts the hood on and off a zillion times to check if that's true while trying to look up to see it. So now I'm...

There's a movie called At First Sight  based on or inspired by real world events. A blind man who lost his sight in early childhood gets his eyesight surgically restored as an adult and it doesn't go like people imagined. At one point, he walks into a glass wall and breaks it because he's never learned how to see. Physically functional eyes aren't sufficient. There's more to it than that. Sight involves two functional eyes and substantial training of the brain over years to figure out how to interpret the imagery being fed to the brain. We have stereoscopic vision where we have two eyes next to each other on the front of our face and that's a predator arrangement.  We triangulate what we see. One eye sees it from this angle, one eye sees it from that angle and it tells us important information about how far away it is but limits our field of vision.  And that triangulation happens in the brain, not the eyes. So there's a substantial mental piece to seeing an...