Archive for the ‘Family Notes’ Category

So sorry about no freewrite!

I thought I had one prescheduled and didn’t even notice until now that there was no Friday Freewrite for you today. Please forgive me.

For those interested, yes, I did successfully pass my oral defense of my MA thesis and I have now officially earned the two capital letters to go behind my name: Julie Bogart, M.A. theology, Xavier University. What a thrill! I’ve started a blog entry to discuss academic writing and some of what I learned “in the trenches” for next week’s reading. Also, I will now have the time and focus to get the important fall schedule nailed down and posted. There will be book lists and important news about the language arts subscriptions coming your way soon.

In the meantime, I’m taking the weekend to unwind and celebrate. I hope you have sunshine where you are and that all is well.

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Sleepy reflections on mothering…

Mom and Daughter

I did what any mother would do. I manned the After Prom* trampoline from 11:15 p.m. until 5:00 a.m. After Prom needed volunteers and I needed to be where I could steal glances of my soon-to-be off-to-college daughter. I can’t stop looking at her.

Sometimes when her long red hair swings by, I see redheaded baby curls so tight, I couldn’t squeeze the fine toothed comb through them. When I catch her pointing the camera at herself, ripping off an America’s Next Top Model pose, I flash back to the careful smile and erect posture of her six year old self posing for a studio photo. And when she’s laughing her head off on the cell phone outside on the deck, I suddenly see the three year old girl jumping in circles shouting the ABC’s at the top of her lungs.

So while I stood at the head of a line of trampoline-bound teens, I kept my eyes open for Johannah. She’d fly by in the middle of a pack of friends and they’d shout, “Hey Johannah’s Mom!” And my heart skipped a beat, snapping another mental picture of Johannah at this stage which will be gone in the blink of an eye, aware that she is about to go out of our house and into her life and I can’t do anything to stop it. Nor would I.

Last night, she sent me to her Face Book where all her friends’ prom photos are posted. I discovered a place where she wrote a stream of consciousness piece that described what she loved about her life. It was filled with the wonderful details that mean a lot to anyone who knows her, like the way she loves to do Sudoku every day while she watches Oprah, or the fact that she is passionate about spelling words correctly. Right in the middle of that big long list, my heart stopped.

She wrote, “I love that my mom used to sing me lullabies and I love that I can still remember them.”

So she’s remembering too. If we can remember together and write these memories down, perhaps the baby, little girl, teenager, young woman will go with us into the future as she becomes whoever she chooses to become. I’ll miss all the girls she’s been, but I am finally looking forward to the woman she will be, too.

*After Prom: The parent-funded public school post-prom extravaganza of food, bounce houses, casino games, trampolines, movies and raffles that keeps teens off the streets and out of trouble after midnight on prom night.

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When Kids Need Extra Help

Brave Writer

April 10, 2007

I just dropped my 12 year old off at Rita’s house. Rita Cevasco (Rooted in Language) is our reading and language specialist. She’s testing our fourth child, Liam, for issues similar to Noah’s. Because I now have a better idea of what the issues might look like in a home that accommodates their non-traditional learning styles, I felt it would be helpful for us to get a better picture of what we might be able to do for Liam so that he doesn’t have quite as bumpy a transition to a traditional schooling environment (whenever he chooses it for himself). He hopes to be a zoologist some day and we both know (he even more than me) how much science and math that requires. It’s quite possible that he’ll uncover a non-traditional route to his dream job, but in the meantime, the primary requirements of every zookeeping and zoological post we’ve discovered include at least two years of college heavily focused on science and math.

Liam happens to be gifted in both… but can’t handle learning them in anything resembling a traditional educational format. He learned his math facts literally through playing online games. He has never used a math text until this year… which is a chore for him, but given his maturity, he is more willing to keep at it in spite of frustrations and tedium. All his natural science knowledge has come through reading, observation, zoo classes and Discovery channel. He retains animal related data like a steel trap!

Questions and Concerns

Rita and I chatted a bit about my recent blog post and many of your questions. The truth is, Rita says that she rarely sees a parent who comes to her that has misread her child. Usually a mother does know when something isn’t quite right. Sometimes the disparity is that the child is so amazingly gifted or bright in one area and then is profoundly average in others, that that gap between the brilliance and the average performance gives rise to concerns. And those concerns are often warranted because for a talented, smart child, the frustration of being held back by lacking verbal skills or poor handwriting or the inability to write or sit or organize thoughts is more frustrating than it might be for a child whose skills were more balanced.

As I read through the questions and comments in last week’s post, I thought I’d address one at a time as I have time and the ability to post. (My Master’s thesis is in revision right now so I’m juggling that in the midst of everything else!) Clare asked about the articles I read related to brain development. Because it’s been ten years since I read them, I no longer have the specific articles in hand. But interestingly, through a quick google, I did find an article that stated something similar to what I remember reading. (Note the happy placement of the word jungle as his metaphor for how the brain functions!)

Recommended educational approaches, then, consist primarily of trying to maintain a relaxed, focused atmosphere that offers options for learning in individually satisfying ways. The old paradigm of students as empty vessels waiting to be filled with knowledge has given way to the constructivist belief that students continuously build understandings based on their prior experiences and new information. The idea of a fixed intelligence has given way to a more flexible perception of gradual intellectual development dependent on external stimulation.

Gerald Edelman, chairman of the Department of Neurobiology at Scripps Research Institute and 1972 recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physiology, offers a view of the brain that could influence the future classroom. Edelman’s vision of the brain as a jungle in which systems interact continuously in a chaotic fashion suggests that learners would thrive in an environment that provides many sensory, cultural, and problem layers. These ideas suggest that students have a natural inclination to learn, understand, and grow. Surround students with a variety of instructional opportunities and they will make the connections for learning.

From How Can Research on the Brain Inform Education?

The primary breakthrough in brain research has been that real learning occurs through:

  • relationships between ideas,
  • building on previous learning,
  • and engaged interest.

For kids who struggle with verbal skills, sitting still to study, handwriting, sequencing and so on, this kind of brain research would indicate that perhaps you can cut a different path through the jungle. Capitalize on your child’s interests, hook up learning to areas of competence, and immerse your child in a subject area long enough for a child to form a relationship to that subject matter. Learn through channels that work rather than trying to beat a path through dense forest and obstacles.

Focus on a Single Topic

When we first “deschooled” Noah based on the brain research I had read, the revolutionary new concept I incorporated into our lives was to focus on a single topic of interest at a time. We didn’t study math, spelling, writing, reading, history and science all in a day or even a week. Instead, when Noah showed interest in origami, we got books from the library, we bought the little colorful square papers from Michael’s, we looked up origami artists online and then, we made origami… for weeks. It’s not that origami was all we did for those weeks, it’s that we gave into it fully while the interest existed. I didn’t think to myself (as I had been likely to do previously), “When can we get done with origami so I can get him to do his mathbook?” Origami was sufficient for that season.

Origami naturally led to an interest in Japanese culture. I found and read the book Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes aloud to the kids. This book led us to World War II. My husband started checking out old WWII videos from the library and he watched them with Noah in the evenings. Noah became fascinated with old tanks both due to the movies and due to a computer game he liked to play with his dad called Bolo. So I checked out Dorling Kindersley books about WWII tanks from the library. The Internet was in its infancy at the time and Jon (my husband) was a big Internet dabbler. He set up a website for Noah and Noah built a website to feature tanks. It was never finished, but it did host photos and diagrams of the tanks and gave Noah his first taste of the power of html.

I could go on from here, the way his love of computer languages (and our family obsession with Shakespeare) has climaxed in his interest in linguistics in college. I see it now. I did not see it coming then.

The Learning Journey

Sometimes when I give this example of Noah’s, it looks too pristine, too obviously educational and wonderful. You must know that in the midst of this learning journey, he still had a hard time coming when called, remembering to brush his teeth (and other ordinary daily life kinds of expectations), and he became a target of bullying in our neighborhood. Learning became wonderful for a time (until I panicked again and imposed schoolish learning), but life was not without challenges.

Our fourth child, Liam, exhibits many of Noah’s traits, but his interests have been far more narrow and less obviously schoolish in disposition. His primary area of interest has been a couple of computer games he plays online. Having raised Noah and having watched the way pushing him to learn backfired so many times, I have been more hands off with Liam. His computer gaming led us to making a notebook (of about 20 pages which took a year to complete) that featured maps of an island chain he created out of his imagination. Because of his online gaming, he became deeply interested in maps, languages, flags, wars, topography. We used “Mapping the World by Heart” as a way to understand things like longitude and latitude, how to indicate mountain ranges and so on. Handwriting has consistently been a struggle for this left-hander so half of the text is in my handwriting as he narrated to me.

It was fascinating to see that his love of gaming led to this creative project. Immersion has been key to keeping his interest. It’s taken some creativity on my part to see how to capitalize on it.

Time’s up! I need to go pick him up from Rita’s right now.

-julie

Brave Learner Home

Posted in Advice from the pros, Brave Writer Philosophy, Family Notes, General | 5 Comments »

Family update

I’ve shared a bit about Noah’s journey in college and want to offer the continuation of that saga for those interested. First of all, good news: he passed both his classes winter quarter! After his difficult first quarter, he was relieved and we were thrilled. Then during the spring break, he went through diagnostic testing through the learning center. We found out those test results yesterday.

Before I share the results, I want to make a couple of comments. Because Noah has been homeschooled his whole life, our primary sense of who he is and how he learns has always been that he’s incredibly bright and a deeply engaged learner when interested. He is self-taught, for the most part, in the areas he cares most about. We’ve given him his head in learning, as a result, following his lead, allowing him to study the subjects that interested him, fanning the flames of those interests by supporting them with enthusiasm, finances for books or memberships, time listening and facilitating, lessons, etc. In looking back, I would do it the same way. Through interest-directed learning, Noah has developed competencies in surprising areas. He also has a very strong sense of what he likes and doesn’t like. That means that when he likes something, he is much more willing to work hard than when he doesn’t. Because his life has been guided by his interests, he does know what interests him and he knows what happens when he’s interested and when he isn’t. I can see now, at nearly 20, what a gift that is!

On the flip side, evidence of what has finally been diagnosed has shown itself since Noah was eight and nine years old. My concerns about some of his behavior back then were: his fits of inattentiveness when disinterested, his level of frustration when he couldn’t solve a task, his self-criticism when he couldn’t match the expectations of a particular setting, his distractibility… These led me to wonder if he had ADD. At age ten, I took him to an educational specialist. She had worked with him all year in a once per week setting. Her response, “No I don’t think Noah has ADD. However, he would probably benefit from some of the techniques that parents use with ADD kids.” She also gave me some articles on brain development that showed the power of learning subjects by full immersion in six to eight week bursts rather than six subjects in short fragments every day.

I checked out ADD books from the library and followed some of their advice. And I immediately changed from our Sonlight style homeschool to unschooling. In six months’ time, Noah taught himself rope knots, origami, developed a website of WWII tanks, watched about ten WWII movies and read a slew of library books about the topic. He learned all his math facts without a book and listened to books on tape nearly constantly. He organized and threw a Gold Rush party complete with sewing individual bags for fool’s gold mined from a sand pit, creating pin-the-nugget-on-Sutter’s-Creek, writing out notecards of Gold Rush period characters for each of the invitees and sending out invitations. (This project took us a full six weeks to create and it was a huge success.) He went from a kid who had declared one morning, “I hate my life” to a kid who woke up every day excited about living.

The ADD tactics were really helpful too. I learned to give him one thing to do at a time.

“Noah, go upstairs and make your bed.”

When he finished that, I’d say, “Now put on your clothes.” I had wondered why he couldn’t remember to make his bed, put on his clothes and brush his teeth all at once. I’d send him up to do three things and instead, he’d complete a Lego creation in his boxer shorts on his unmade bed. Why? Because he saw the Legos and they looked fun.

Still, since Noah was the oldest and there was no official diagnosis, I kept assuming that as he got older, he’d pull this distractibility into focus, that he’d learn through time and maturity how to manage himself. And in many ways he did. As a teen, he held jobs successfully, he starred in several Shakespeare plays learning all the lines and making it to rehearsals without prompting.

But underneath, all the time, there’s been evidence that in a traditional schooling format, he would not thrive. Yet his ambition is to be a linguist! (Not exactly the career path of someone without a college degree.)

I won’t bore you with all the ins and outs of the years leading up to college where we alternatively wondered if he had ADD and yet were reassured that he did not have it. Once he hit college, the symptoms became much clearer. And as of this week, the diagnosis is ADHD (inattentiveness). One of the side effects of so many years of ambivalent diagnoses (“he manifests the symptoms in some ways but we don’t think he has it”) is that it took him two quarters to be willing to look at the possibility that he might have this condition. In a reverse kind of way, he started to think that there really shouldn’t be anything wrong with his brain wiring and almost felt guilty imagining there might be. Still, in the end, we are happy to report that with this diagnosis, all the help he needs will be offered to him and he is very happy about that.

His current class load suits his temperament to the tee. He’s studying World Performance Music (which includes banging African drums and playing a thumb piano!), the history of language (how language developed over time worldwide), French 3, and a philosophy course which he raves about. He dropped a class because his mind wandered while the teacher spoke (right on!).

The learning center will provide notes, untimed testing, tutors and study groups and access to teacher power points/lecture notes. He is also able to make use of someone who will help him with time management.

One of the most powerful changes we observed is that his computer broke down last quarter. That means he can only use the on-campus computer which has meant he has not had the distraction of the computer at home when he studies. He told us it has made a world of difference! Isn’t that interesting?

Posted in Family Notes | 9 Comments »

Best Advice I Received

Best Advice I Received

It was early summer and hot.

The seven of us (Jon, me and our five little kids) were strolling through Palm Springs with a truckload of appendages – toddler backpack (empty because said toddler was running ahead and climbing dangerous wrought iron fence posts), stroller (also empty of baby who was nestled instead in a sling), and the fifteen pound diaper bag, 10 pound purse, leaking water bottle and half-eaten snack foods necessary to all outings with five children… lounging in the empty stroller.

Of the older three kids, one scampered ahead of us and another cautioned him not to. This little brood ran circles around us or held onto the stroller handle to stay close. Jon and I actually had a conversation over the top of all this chaos. They were our chaos and we were oblivious to the fact that we looked like a dangerous amoeba about to take over the pathway.

As I worked my point and Jon gave supportive details, an older couple approached ahead of us. I felt that zing of awareness where I suddenly knew that we looked more like a mob than a family and worried that I couldn’t get the climbing, skipping, balancing on fence posts kids out of their way in time for them to avoid a collision, fall, and hip surgery.

“Kids, get down, I mean, move over, I mean, come here, I mean, grab hold of the stroller. Now!” I shouted in my public happy voice.

The couple smiled as a unit. Then the husband stopped as my kids slowed their enthusiasm and dutifully moved toward the stroller. “Are these all your kids?”

“Why, yes, they are.” (I quickly counted to be sure they were all, in fact, ours…wasn’t sure if we hadn’t picked up a few along the way!)

His wife said, “They’re beautiful. Love the red hair.” (We have two red heads that draw compliments.)

She went on, “We have six children. They’re all grown now. You have a beautiful family.”

Her husband then looked us in the eyes and stated with conviction, “When our children were young—those were the best days of our lives. Weren’t they, honey?”

“Oh yes. They’re adults now and we love to see them, but those early years were so special. Don’t miss them. These are the best years of your life.”

They smiled, stepped off the curb, walked around the brood of “adorable” children, and continued their walk. Time froze for a moment right there, however.

I scribbled their words on my heart.

I knew they were right. I knew that the early years of energy, enthusiasm for life, unity as a family were fleeting even when I was exhausted or overwhelmed. So I deliberately chose for myself, for our family, to enjoy the cacophony and chaos, not waiting for some later date when things would be “easier.” What if easier wasn’t as much fun, or as lively, or as intimate and affectionate? What if later was not a relief but a loss? When I felt those feelings of ‘wanting out’, I would remind myself that these years were the best (even if I couldn’t see it yet.) And it helped.

Yesterday Jon and I had breakfast with our college-student son. I hadn’t seen him in weeks. We chatted about the other four kids. He said, “Gosh, I almost feel like a parent. I’m enjoying watching them grow up.” So sweet.

Our 17 year old daughter is half-way through her senior year of high school. She’s gone more often than she’s home now, putting on the school play, hanging out with friends, studying, acting. The college housing documentation is arriving in the mail. Her time at home is rapidly coming to an end. Jacob (our middle child) has elected to go to full-time high school starting this fall (as a sophomore). He is active in band and wants to be at school to participate in the full range of band opportunities.

That means by September, I’ll only have two at home with me, both of whom are out of strollers, slings and backpacks. It’s a different time. There really are days now when I miss those early years, when we were all together all the time. I have loved being a full-time mother of five.

The experience has been far beyond anything I ever imagined.

Every walk in the hills, trip to the art museum, face paintings, reading aloud to all the kids sitting around me listening raptly, Legos strewn everywhere, a busy dinner table where everyone competes to tell jokes and stories, five kids raking leaves and jumping in them, soccer balls kicked, fireflies caught in jars, Shakespeare plays and camps, dancing and knitting and painting and writing, and finally, my favorite memory, tucking them all into their beds, knowing that all of our children were asleep under one roof, safe and at peace in cozy blankets, sure to wake up the next morning starving and ready to begin a new day at home with me.

It’s not like that anymore, “faster than the blink of an eye,” it seems to me now. But because I took that older couple’s advice to heart, I don’t have regrets. I don’t. I lived those years aware of how precious they were. Jon and I put good memories ahead of new hardwood floors, superior education and two incomes. We lived conscious that creating family closeness in the early years would pay dividends for the rest of our lives. When all else failed and our ideals crashed or we hit a road block, we put appreciating each other’s company ahead of everything else.

So far, so good.

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