Homeschooling Hatters: The Adventures of a Gifted, Asynchronous, Eclectic, Homeschooling Family
, but really, that's just not the same thing as wiring up a boost button for the car. I mean, come on. He can make the lights light, sure, or he can make the car go turbo. No contest. And so, I started the hunt for a tinkering kit.
It's gotten to be almost an annual event. That someone has put their foot in their mouth and something needs to be said. Last year, it was a post about "All children are gifted, every single one." This year, it seems, there are some big names going on about how giftedness is a school-based construct, and doesn't exist. I'm rapidly reaching the point where I've run out of spoons to deal with people so catastrophically closed-minded as to not even acknowledge that not all people think the same way, and so now I feel an awful lot like the bitter old lady everyone knows in their childhood, bound and determined to just be grumpy. Kind of a shame, really.
This post contains affiliate links to materials discussed. Purchases via these links help support our family at no additional cost to you. Thank you for choosing to support my little blog. Read my full disclosure statement here.
This post contains affiliate links to materials discussed. Purchases via these links help support our family at no additional cost to you. Thank you for choosing to support my little blog. Read my full disclosure statement here.
, but that's still Gingerbread. He comes to our house every year between Thanksgiving and Christmas... and behaves very oddly for an Elf on the Shelf.
Thinking about raising children, you think often about how they'll grow up. What kind of wonderful person they'll be, what kind of possibilities are open to them, and how much you're looking forward to seeing them grow and change and learn and do. What you don't usually consider, though, is how to teach them to be good people. I knew I wanted to raise Mad Natter to be a kind person, big hearted, generous, caring, sensitive, and strong. But what do you have to do to get there?
As we roll up on Thanksgiving, more and more thought turns to gratitude. How to teach it, how to live it. Something I said recently was that I'm learning to appreciate my father because. Not despite our clashes, not instead of being any other way, but just because. My father and I are very much the same person. He'll tell you that's bullshit. I'd have said the same until about three years ago. But, we're very much the same person. Interests, drives, passions, no. Not at all. I enjoy spending evenings watching Doctor Who. My father prefers sports games. I enjoy computers and computing, my father would love to throw his computer out the window. But, at our cores, we're the same. Impatient, demanding, temperamental, stubborn, headstrong, uncompromising, driven, focused, blunt, honest, deeply loyal, intense... the list goes on. This often causes more issue than it solves.
I've had a number of years in teaching - both in classroom, and at home. Granted, not a lot of years, but still. I'm used to having a planner. A simple two-page spread showing each subject across all five days, so I know what I'm covering in each subject for the week. Unfortunately, that doesn't translate as well to our homeschool, where only four of our twelve subjects occur on all four of our school days. As a minor note, holy COW, we do twelve subjects in a week?!? But, I digress.
Heading into the holiday season, just coming out of Mad Natter's birthday, it has rapidly become apparent that we have entirely too many toys, not enough space for them, and far too much parental nostalgia for our house.
Sitting on the verge of pneumonia, it's pretty easy to see where community would be really handy. Someone to keep an eye on Mad Natter for a couple hours so I could sleep would have been a dream come true, but it shook out that Skeeve had to work, and our physical community... Well, either they were working too, or they were five hundred miles away wishing they could help, even though we all knew it just wasn't possible. It's one of those rare times that online community just doesn't help - about six hours before I finally fell incredibly ill, my brains started dribbling out my ears and I couldn't understand what my usually wonderfully adroit friends and comrades were saying, and worse, they couldn't understand me anymore either.
You know, one of the best things about homeschooling is the ability to make your own schedule, but honestly, there are a couple aspects of that idea that seem to get left behind when we talk about it.
This is another blog topic that's kind of laughable from me. In general, I'm just spectacularly bad at self-care. I have a million things to do, and they're going to get done if it kills me. And sometimes I wonder if maybe that's not really the best attitude to have. Determination is all well and good, but sometimes maybe it's worth it to take some time off of tasks to just relax.
In the last few days, a news article has come out of Cambridge University. Now, in having done some poking around of my own since reading it, I've learned a thing or two, namely that not even 
I am a gamer. Like most people I know, I enjoy the occasional tabletop RPG, I enjoy my fair share of board games, and of course computer games. Minecraft, League Of Legends, Terraria, Kingdom of Loathing, and MUCK-ing are my preferences. But, you see, there's a dirty little secret in gaming, one that's neither little nor secret anymore. Gaming space is inherently dangerous for women. Saying so out loud, in public, however you quantify what saying this to my limited audience as? That's even more dangerous. Happily, I'm not famous enough to actually see a lot of pushback from speaking my mind. But Felicia Day did.
I come from a large family. My nuclear family is only five, and my father's side was another eight (while I was growing up). My mother's side is now topping sixty people (it was closer to 45-50 when I was young), and the bulk of those are my cousins. I'm used to events having a large number of children present, and wouldn't know what to do with myself if there weren't a whole herd of littles underfoot during pretty much every family event.
As I get older, I've realized many things. Not least of them is how often I just went with the flow, changing my own likes and dislikes just to try to fit in. It didn't help, of course. I was different as a child, and no matter how hard you try to blend in, the bullies will almost always find you. Deciding to peg jeans, wear two pairs of socks, ditching Tiffany and Debbie Gibson for NKOTB, and doing my best to fly under the radar - none of it changed anything; I was still a target, and despite all my efforts, the bullying never really abated until I left compulsory education.Mad Natter is, chronologically, a first grader. Our compulsory attendance laws state this is the first year he's required to actually have some kind of formal education. And yet, we're already on our second math program to date. I'm not sure whether or not we'll have a third (there's one I've heard wonderful things about, but still), but for right now, we like what we have. We started with Right Start A when Mad Natter was 4. He finished that, and half of B, in about a year. Problem was, he spent so much time treating the manipulatives as toys that he didn't really retain the math. Needless to say, this isn't exactly desirable in a math program. And so, after much hand-wringing, teeth-gnashing, and a little bit of panic, we moved on.
Every now and then, my personal Facebook feed gets all up in arms about the direction of American education. In general, I tend to believe that the Common Core is not everything we're led to believe it is, but inevitably, I wind up shaking my head in disbelief, watching the arguments go by and wondering when we hit the twilight zone, because I'm on the side of the common core. How does that happen?
It's often thought that giftedness is only found in specific places: wealthy families, white families, anomalous cases in middle to lower-middle class families. Generally, no thought is given to gifted people of color, nor to gifted people of lower socioeconomic status. I shudder to think of the plight of the people of color who are also of lower socioeconomic status. Invisibility, while sometimes desirable, also comes with entirely too many problems and blockades for appropriate supports.
I've made little to no secret of the fact that Mad Natter hates the dentist. I kind of don't blame him - he goes in, a stranger sticks their hands in his mouth, and he goes home feeling funky... and usually in pain. Who signs up for that on purpose? This week, though, Mad Natter needed to have some dental work done. He had a cavity, and wouldn't let anyone near him to clean it up - he would barely let us brush his teeth, which the dentist insisted we do, as he isn't doing a good enough job himself. But with his anxiety about the dentist, it's never as simple as a drill-and-fill.
I meant to get this review up ages ago, but then life happened, and NOPE. Nearly three years ago, when Mad Natter was already reading and doing basic math in preschool, and I was wondering why he was the only kid there who wasn't able to write at least a little bit of his own name, his cousin was tested and diagnosed as Gifted. WonderGirl (who is my cousin's daughter) was just like Mad Natter when she was his age, and I started to think maybe that was what was going on with my little monkey. We ran through a "Five Levels of Gifted" milestone assessment, and Mad Natter scored with an above-average IQ, even at just three years of age (the test is designed for 6+). Because this is me, I immediately hit the bookstore. One of the first books I picked up was The Everything Parent's Guide to Raising a Gifted Child.
Homeschooling gifted children, especially if they're twice-exceptional, is always an interesting adventure - and one that rarely, if ever, looks like anything anyone else is doing in their homes. Even more striking is the contrast between our school table and a public school classroom. Come on in, pull up a chair in the living room, and I'll show you what I mean by the 'differences' and what it means for Mad Natter.
I don't often think of what I do as "advocacy." I mean, I'm a homeschooling mother, who am I advocating to? But, if you stop and think, every time I try to enroll Mad Natter in anything, or take him out during a regular school day and school hours, every time I have to deal with unsolicited advice from others about how to parent my child - each of those times I'm advocating for him.
Each year, about this time, I do a post on our homeschooling schedule. I laugh, because really, this is the second year, but still. Our household runs on an unusual schedule, and it is prone to changing at any time. It's not my favorite thing, but it's worlds better than Skeeve not having a job at all, so we'll take it, and work with it.
One of the things that is so very challenging about Mad Natter is that he is an extremely quick learner - who abjectly hates all things to do with "review." Add in the fact that math is one of those subjects you have to master before you move along, and it gets extremely tricky very quickly.
At this point, it's like tradition! Book/Resource Review Friday! 
I am crazy excited. I got the opportunity to review a book I've long meant to read, but for whatever reason just never got around to. Making the Choice: When Typical School Doesn't Fit Your Atypical Child has been on my TBR for... probably years. I first perked an ear May 22, 2012, when I heard Corin and Mika speak via a web conference. Mad Natter was just three and a half then, and 
Mad Natter and I recently came home from a trip to Hammie and Buppa's house. This is a six-to-eight hour trip in the car, each way. This time, we had a bonus trip, five-and-a-half-to-six hours to Upper Peninsula Michigan for our annual family camp-out. Needless to say, we spent a LOT of time in the car this month.
"We are spreading the word to all homeschoolers to fill the social media sites with their #notbacktoschool photos on August 25th in a community effort to normalize homeschooling. |
| photo by Sarah Klockars-Clauser |
When I think of the people who are truly my friends: The Law Mom, Stellar Mama, AngusChick, Daizy, KD, Mrs Warde... I didn't meet any of these people in school. I met one before, four after, and one in University. The friendships that have had the most impact on my life are not the ones forged in the schoolroom, where I sat being the odd kid out, the "friend of last resort" or the friend of the new kid - until they found 'cooler' friends than Care. The friendships that matter were made on my own terms, outside of forced interaction, and in the context of living my life. These are people who have the same struggles, the same interests, the same... Almost the same sort of soul. We get on well because we do. We can not speak to each other for months or even years... and pick up one day as if we'd only just talked the day before.
So what kind of friendships do I want for my son? The kind that are forced, and don't last beyond the school building? Or the ones that really last? The ones with people who genuinely care about you, and think of you fondly? There is a reason that Mad Natter still has Skype chats with Girl Friday, even though she and Stellar Mama moved across the continent six months ago. They get along. They like each other. They miss each other, and I'm not going to encourage Mad Natter to make friends with whomever he's the same age as... and not encourage him to keep his friendship with Girl Friday - where there's a genuine connection. Friendship has a few things in common with childbirth - you can't rush it, and something beautiful is waiting for you if you take care of it. And I'm not going to force friendships. It never led to anything good for me - quite the opposite - and I doubt it would lead to good things for Mad Natter either. And so, let childhood run its course. Let parents matter more than peers. Let your kids find their own friends, don't force them into superficial relationships that only matter in counting how many kids are coming for a party. Let them pick their own friends, and let them develop real friendships. 