Liberty Lyceum Gifted Homeschooling

Book Review: Admission Matters

2011-12-14T17:54:00.000-08:00

Wow, time flies when you're homeschooling a child as fun as my daughter has always been! Although she's now 14 and a freshman in high school, she's also in her third year of taking community college classes part-time. So we've begun the process of looking at the (full-time, 4-year) college admissions process, to make sure we are covering all the bases in her high school curriculum that she'll need for admission to a selective university.

In January, I'll be attending a 6-week class on College Admissions in Stanford University's Continuing Education program. The class meets once weekly and is taught by Jon Reider, who wrote Stanford's original homeschool admissions policy, and who is a co-author of the book Admission Matters: What Students and Parents Need to Know About Getting into College. I've read it and written a review of the book oriented to homeschoolers and posted it here on our Web site. Enjoy! There are several more books on his list, so I'll be sharing more book reviews in the next couple of months.

Archiving This Blog...For Now

2011-04-08T00:37:00.000-07:00

I had made this blog private because I was no longer updating it. But I have now made it public as an "archive" blog so its articles are accessible. Meanhwhile, I am actively updating our new "Travel Blog," while we are in Spain (and then Italy and England). We'll be in Europe for three months. We're just finishing up Week 2 and having a wonderful time. Check out our Travel Blog to share out adventures!

Spanish Conversation Tutor

2010-12-14T07:15:00.000-08:00

We're very excited to have a new tutor in Spanish conversation. Miss C will be taking Spanish 3 starting in January and we will meet with this tutor once a week for dinner (my idea). There are so many different kinds of Hispanic restaurants in San Francisco, I figured that with once weekly dinners, we'll only visit the best of them in the three months before we leave for Spain.

This tutor is a student at the community college, who intends to be a Spanish professor. She was referred to us by the professor there with whom Miss C and I both studied, separately. We revere this professor and since she endorses this tutor, we are thrilled. Our tutor is actually from Spain, and has lived in Madrid, Seville, and Granada. So we can not only work on our Spanish conversation, but we can talk about Spain, as well as the food!

We are really getting excited about our trip, which begins in late March. We plan to spend five weeks in Spain. I haven't decided whether I'll write about our experiences here, or set up a new blog just for our travels. I'll note it here, either way!

Early College Information & Resources

2010-10-26T08:58:00.001-07:00

For almost two years I've managed a mailing list for San Francisco Bay Area families with kids in early college, usually attending college classes concurrently with homeschooling or high school but sometimes full-time. Now that my daughter has successfully made the transition to attending community college classes, and we're preparing for an extended trip to Europe, I've decided to discontinue the list.

However, I've archived here all the links to information and resources that we collected during the life of the list. It's oriented to the Bay Area, but it also has early college resources that could be helpful nationally.

See my list here: Early College Information & Resources.

The Scottish Play

2010-08-19T09:04:00.000-07:00

Miss C and I saw Cal Shakes' production of "Macbeth" last night, and it was an interesting new take for us, having seen the modern play "Equivocation" at Marin Theatre Company this past spring.

"Equivocation" was written by Shakespeare scholar Bill Cain about the conflict Shakespeare might have experienced in writing a play that would be acceptable to the new King James (no living monarch could be portrayed) in the time of the Gunpowder plot, a Catholic rebellion against the Protestant king. The Catholic Jesuits captured could not lie as that was a sin, but neither did they want to betray their friends. Their facility with language allowed them to "equivocate," not actually lying but in their answers, not revealing the actual truth, either. Shakespeare used equivocation in Macbeth, which he wrote at the time, as well. Although the play was about an earlier Scottish king, it included many parallels to the current situation at the time, but didn't make outright political commentary -- it equivocated.

"All their prophecies are equivocations," Miss C whispered to me last night, as the the weird sisters did their "Double, double, toil and trouble" incantation. She was referring, for example, to their saying Macbeth would not be conquered by any man "born of woman," although we all knew, in the audience, that Macduff was "from his mother's womb untimely ripped" and that he would do Macbeth in.

The witches and ghosts Shakespeare included in Macbeth were a fascination (obsession?) of King James. No wonder they were involved in a rebellious plot against a Scottish king.

Extreme Mammals & Biology

2010-08-17T12:16:00.000-07:00

We're starting on Part 2 of AP Biology here, having completed 850 pages out of the 1275 or so in Campbell's Biology by the end of May this year, when we took a break. We decided not to cram it in, but to extend it to two "school years" so we could do it right, with Miss C taking the AP exam next May.

So today we re-started our biology study with a visit to the California Academy of Science's "Extreme Mammals" exhibit. After years of being Cal Academy members, we finally went during "members-only" hours this morning, and it was great. We were able to soak up every display before the screaming herds arrived, with Miss C doing her usual copious note-taking.

The "extreme" theme was a cute idea. In reality it was just a wonderful exhibit on all the features of mammals, with lots of emphasis on evolutionary developments, but it was interesting to focus on "extreme" representations, from brain size to horns to the biggest and smallest mammals, and so on.

We also finally got to go through the rainforest exhibit. The long lines have previously kept us out, but finally we were there when it was just opening for the day. We loved all the butterflies!

We're also resuming the long video series on Mammals on DVD, which we get from Netflix. On 4 DVDs, it's called The Life of Mammals, hosted by David Attenborough. Very enjoyable.

This is going to be a great part 2 of biology!

Back to Theater

2010-08-14T09:55:00.000-07:00

I can't believe how long it's been since I posted here. We've had a busy summer of camps and traveling, and now we're finally getting back to "normal" for fall. Instead of a big back-to-school push, for us, that means regular theater-going again.

Last night we saw the 1934 Cole Porter musical "Anything Goes" at Foothill College, where Miss C takes classes. This week we have three more shows: "The Wanderings of Odysseus" at Stanford University; "Macbeth" at California Shakespeare Theater; and "The Pirates of Penzance" at Lamplighters Music Theatre in San Francisco.

It's so nice to be back to normal.

Book: A Forgotten Voice: A Biography of Leta Stetter Hollingworth

2010-04-11T07:41:00.001-07:00

I have been intrigued by Leta Stetter Hollingworth, have wanted to know more about her, ever since I read this quotation by her: "In the ordinary elementary school situation, children of 140 IQ waste half of their time. Those above 170 IQ waste practically all of their time" (see article by Kathi Kearney).

Hollingworth's classic book, Children Above 180 IQ, based on a longitudinal study she began in 1916 and continued through the 1920s and 1930s, is practically impossible to find for sale, and when it occasionally becomes available as a used copy, it can be priced around $500 due to its rarity and desirability within the gifted world. It seems to be available only in university libraries in the Bay Area.

The next best thing I could find was a 2002 biography of Hollingworth, available used through Amazon.com. A Forgotten Voice: A Biography of Leta Stetter Hollingworth, by Ann G. Klein, was published by Great Potential Press, Inc., which is led by Jim Webb and specializes in gifted education resources. It is wonderful that Great Potential Press brings out the titles it does, but it is alarming to me how quickly such books go out of print. Eight years after this book was published, Hollingworth's work is in as much danger of being forgotten as ever.

Her work was critically important, especially her founding of the field of gifted education. She did other very important work in educational psychology, but her greatest contributions were in establishing that gifted children needed special guidance to reach their potentials, and that there was broad variability in those potentials and in the children's life experiences based on their levels of giftedness.

Hollingworth was considered an eminent scientist in her day. From her post as a professor at Teachers College, part of Columbia University, she conducted research, wrote articles and books, gave many presentations, and guided doctoral students. She started her career doing research to refute the widely held belief that the intelligence of women suffered during their menstrual periods. Her subsequent studies of the variability of human intelligence ranged from subjects with "subnormal" intelligence to those with the highest levels of giftedness. She was a strong opponent of group intelligence testing, asserting that only individualized testing could evaluate "the whole child" and fully ascertain that child's abilities.

Profoundly gifted herself, Hollingworth knew personally of the social and emotional difficulties of children at the highest levels of intelligence. She considered children of IQ 120-155 to be of "optimal intelligence," because they would be able to fit in with many other people in society, but those at higher IQ levels almost always experienced difficulty in "fitting in" due to the extreme differences in their feelings and perceptions of the world, even compared to other gifted children at lower IQs.

Hollingworth advocated that highly gifted children be both accelerated and segregated into programs for the gifted in which they could study more broadly and deeply than the general curriculum allowed. She felt that giftedness was innate but that only if that giftedness was nurtured would society reap the benefits of the optimal contributions of its most capable members.

Author Klein summarizes Hollingworth's assertions to her colleagues as follows, that "(1) human beings, from birth and throughout their lives, differ in all measurable physical and mental traits; (2) differences in mental traits are of a greater range than differences in physical abilities; (3) human variations can be plotted on a bell-curve distribution, and that each individual has a place on that curve that will probably be maintained; and (4) the principles of individual differences apply to the general intelligence trait."

Hollingworth suggested, Klein reports, that unresolved conflicts in America between liberty and equality resulted in major problems in education and in society generally. Because of this unresolved conflict, Hollingworth wrote, there existed "...malice toward excellence. Excellence is hated in America today... Any one whose professional interest has led him much into contact with the education of very gifted children will readily agree with this. The most unpopular request one can make of foundations for the promotion of human welfare is for funds to study or promote the welfare of gifted children."

Although in many ways much progress has been made since Hollingworth's untimely death from cancer in 1939, in many other ways the situation remains alarmingly as she described it then. And especially with the economic crisis our country faces now, we've seen gifted programs to be among the first cut, as if they are extra, as if they are not essential for the population that needs them.

One unfortunate reason Hollingworth may not have been revered through all the years since her death is that she was a eugenicist. She felt that some people were simply superior to others in all ways and that society would be better off if they reproduced more frequently, and "inferior" peoples would reproduce less. Of course, many otherwise important and valuable thinkers shared her opinion at the time. Lewis Terman, who developed the Stanford-Binet intelligence test and identified and studied populations of gifted children in California, was also a eugenicist. So were Margaret Sanger (founder of Planned Parenthood), Theodore Roosevelt, Bertrand Russell, Alexander Graham Bell, John D. Rockefeller, and a host of others. That does not make this view acceptable, but the context of the times casts at least a different light upon it. The world had not yet come to know of the atrocities the Nazis committed in the name of this philosophy, or begun its moral awakening about these views and progress toward civil rights for all and a humanity that embraces all humans as precious. We are still working on that, and there are many people in the world who do not yet "get it." Still, it is very disappointing that so great a mind, with such visionary ideas about intelligence and the education of gifted children, was not so great as to see beyond the anti-semitic, racist, and classist views of her time.

Nevertheless, Hollingworth's contributions to our understanding of giftedness were profound, as were her recommendations for educating gifted students. I'm glad I read this book and learned more about this very unusual pioneer of educational psychology.

For those who are interested in longitudinal studies of profoundly gifted children, I highly recommend a more recent book than Hollingworth's, one by Miraca Gross, Exceptionally Gifted Children. Although it is also out of print and used copies are similarly outrageously priced at $190 on Amazon.com, at least they now have a Kindle edition for a mere $46.58. Hopefully more such important books will be made available in electronic editions. We need them.

Homeschooling "High School"

2010-03-28T07:23:00.000-07:00

Well, it's official: We'll be homeschooling until my daughter is ready to leave home for a 4-year college or university.

That was my plan even this past fall. But then my daughter felt she wanted the high school experience, for social reasons, including being part of something larger, being in the theater program, working on the school paper, etc. Because I didn't want to compromise on high-level academics, we applied only to what I considered the two best independent (private) high schools in San Francisco for Fall 2010. And, after 4 months of school visits, applications, taking the SSAT test (standard for private high school admission), interviews, and waiting around for the envelopes...she was wait-listed at both. We only really wanted one of the two schools, so we played the wait-list game for another week, chatting with the admissions director of that school often by phone, and waiting for her call. But in the end, my daughter was not admitted.

We have moped a bit. During recent months, we had to get ourselves psyched up for these schools so that she would be a competitive applicant. Inevitably, then, we feel let down that it didn't work out.

But, at least I tried hard for my daughter, and she knows that. You should see the "Transcript & Homeschool Record" I created for her. It's beautiful, and thorough, and I believe that what she has done over 8 years of homeschooling is very impressive. I'll chalk up the huge effort it took me to create it as good training for the real thing: a transcript that will get her into the 4-year college of her choice.

In many ways, that will be much easier. She hasn't yet turned 13, and she's already completed two community college courses with As and will soon complete a third. We have plans for AP tests and SAT II tests, and with those and a bunch of community college credits, there will be plenty of traditional material to put on a high school transcript. Of course, the parts I will cherish will be all of her out-of-the-box activities and achievements. She'll have to talk about all that in her essays.

There is no question that her being one year younger than "normal" for high school age has to have been a factor in her not being accepted. But she is so ready for this level of work. How ironic that she's been able to take community college classes the year she has been 12, and done well in them, but could be seen as too young for high school.

One of the great things about homeschooling, especially if you do it "independently" here in California (by filing a Private School Affidavit, rather than using a charter school program), is that you can accelerate your child as much as you want, as much as is appropriate for him or her. That is what we have done all along, and it has been wonderful. The only difficulties have been in trying to plug her back into supplementary programs that are based on grade levels, and on age levels. Still, we've been able to navigate it all pretty well, most often enrolling her at accelerated levels. Because she is socially mature, that's truly where she fits best, in every respect.

The academic parts of the years ahead look pretty easy to me. My daughter loves being a student and is now really good at managing her schedule and work. And, she's extremely intellectually curious, interested in almost everything. It's a joy to watch her absorbing so much information and being the active learner she has always been, now at such a mature level.

But the social aspects will be daunting. Homeschoolers scoff at the frequent question of outsiders, "What about socialization?" We don't think the questioners actually know the meaning of that word. It's not the noun form of the verb "to socialize" in the sense of "to spend time with friends." It is what is done to a child, not what the child does on her own. My daughter is extremely well "socialized" at this point -- I can take her anywhere (grin). But, having a critical mass of peers for "socializing" is tough. Our plan going forward will involve more arts and theater programs where she can meet others who share her interests.

And, we'll spend more time looking ahead to college. In a couple weeks, we'll take a trip to New York and visit NYU and Columbia (and Barnard, I guess), and see a performance at each university. Oh, yeah, and there's some fun for me, too: We'll be seeing Denzel in August Wilson's "Fences." Ahhhh.

Book: Living with Intensity

2010-03-10T06:45:00.000-08:00

I really enjoyed reading and studying the book, Living with Intensity: Understanding the Sensitivity, Excitability, and Emotional Development of Gifted Children, Adolescents, and Adults, edited by Susan Daniels and Michael Piechowski. I say "studying" because although it's well written, for me it wasn't just a quick read. Many passages gave me great pause, and I found myself reading them three or four times before moving on.

This book is a compilation of pieces by a group of experts in the social and emotional aspects of giftedness. More specifically, it is a treatment of the gifted experience through the lens of Kazimierz Dabrowski's Theory of Positive Disintegration, a theory of personality widely accepted as particularly relevant to gifted people. The "intensity" of the title can be expressed in several ways, categories discussed by Dabrowski as "overexcitabilities."

Actually, the word "overexcitabilities" is frequently labeled a misnomer, a poor translation from the original Polish in which Dabrowski wrote. It is often said that "superexcitabilities" would be a better term, without the "too much" implied by the word "over" in English. Yet "too much" is how many gifted people have heard themselves described all their lives. Such people surely have extreme sensitivities, or overexcitabilities, in one or more of the areas Dabrowski described: intellectual, psychomotor, sensual, imaginational, and emotional. Sometimes spiritual overexcitability is also included in the perspectives of professionals who study this theory and its implications for gifted childen, adolescents, and adults.

Dabrowki's theory includes much more than the observation and description of overexcitabilities of highly gifted people. His Theory of Positive Disintegration describes human developmental potential and the process through which that development may take place in people who have the capacity for advanced development. I haven't read Dabrowski and few lay people have; the concepts as I understand them are difficult to fully comprehend, although one can get an overview from a Web site devoted to his theory. A great value of this book, Living with Intensity, is that it helps explain Dabrowski's ideas and shows why many gifted professionals today find them extremely relevant to understanding what makes gifted people tick.

That is, giftedness is so much more than advanced intellectual abilities (that would be intellectual intensity or overexcitability in Dabrowskian terms). In the person with an increased capacity for intellectual ability, one frequently finds other overexcitabilities or intensities. This is the "more" child, more of everything -- emotionally intense, extremely imaginative, highly sensual (for both good and bad), and very driven and often physically active (psychomotor intensity). Not all children have all these overexcitabilities together, but frequently two or three may be very evident in a highly gifted child. And, setting aside the nature vs. nurture debate about giftedness for now, Dabrowski considered these traits, when an individual has them, to be "original equipment."

Another great insight this book offers is that this original equipment doesn't go away as the child matures into adolescence and then adulthood. Adults continue to have these intensities and they affect everything about their lives, in their chronological life phases as well as in advanced personality development, which doesn't necessarily correspond to chronological age.

Despite ten years of studying giftedness on behalf of my daughter, I found new insights into myself through reading this book. I realized that almost everything I have read previously concerned gifted children. Although other readings reminded me of many experiences of my childhood, this book has presented me to myself as an adult and shown me what may lie ahead. The "lifespan intensity" sections of this book were the most riveting and eye-opening to me.

Just as important to me, however, was the excellent section on adolescence, as my daughter nears 13. I strongly related to the discussion that some highly gifted children (my daughter was one of them) experience "adolescent" issues at ages as young as 8 or 9. It made sense to me then: Why should a child so advanced intellectually not be years ahead socially and emotionally as well, even if the world still sees her small body? Even so, this book confirmed for me and reassured me that her inner experience is what it is, even if that is completely different from what most young people her age experience.

Anyone with a gifted child, especially a highly gifted child, could benefit from this book -- and will likely find insights about himself or herself as well.

Reading Galileo with Down to a Science

2010-03-09T10:22:00.000-08:00

Miss C and I had a fine time last night at our first book club discussion with Down to a Science. This San Francisco group sponsors lectures by scientists and also has a monthly science book discussion. Last night we joined in the discussion of Galileo's Daughter by Dava Sobel.

Miss C and I both really enjoyed the book but she was greatly frustrated with the Catholic Church's censorship of Galileo.

In Galileo's insistence that science is objective and subject to experimentation, that it must be kept separate from matters of faith, and that the Bible should not be interpreted literally, we saw direct parallels with current, ongoing attacks by creationists and intelligent design promoters on the science of evolution. We felt sad that 400 years later, so many still do not understand that by definition, religion cannot be science, and vice versa. There is no place for "belief" in science. We also find it sad that today, non-scientists in general still do not understand the scientific definitions of terms like "theory," "fact," and "hypothesis," yet discuss them as if they do -- just as in Galileo's time. And yet another parallel is that they discuss scientific issues without actually having read the scientific works, again, just as some (but not all) of the Inquisitors did with Galileo's work.

Something that was new to us was learning how religious Galileo really was. His close relationship with one of his illegitimate daughters, a cloistered nun with the order of St. Clare, was woven throughout this book to show us both the depth of his faith and the personal side of the man. The book succeeded greatly in both of these goals.

It also showed what a gifted person he was, not only in his great intellectual strengths, but in his extreme drive to discover, to study, to write, to be in the thick of the exchange of scientific ideas, whatever the cost, and despite frequent physical infirmity on his part. How difficult it must have been for him to "suffer the fools" around him in a scientific sense, while holding the deepest reverence for God and his religion. This seems yet another indication of his greatness -- the ability to tolerate such extreme cognitive dissonance.

Finally, this book painted a very complex picture of Galileo, his science, his religion, and his times, taking Miss C far beyond the more simplified version of his story she had known before. Altogether, this was a very worthwhile study and the discussion with other interested adults really enhanced it.

Camp Summit for the Gifted

2010-03-06T08:44:00.000-08:00

I'm very excited about the new summer camp, Camp Summit for the Gifted, Talented, and Creative. I'm serving on the Community Advisory Board, and so far I've been able to help out by creating the Web site and a brochure for the CAG (California Association for the Gifted) conference. The directors of the camp are wonderful and have a great vision for a camp that focuses on the social and emotional aspects of giftedness, and is a lot of fun for the campers.

My daughter will also be attending the camp, and it looks like we'll have a strong presence from other kids and teens in our homeschool group, San Francisco Bay Area Gifted Homeschoolers.

The camp is set in the beautiful Marin Headlands, an incredibly picturesque place with mountains, ocean, lagoon, and nature trails galore. It's a short walk to the Point Bonita Lighthouse, which overlooks the Golden Gate, the body of water that opens to San Francisco Bay, and over which the fabled bridge connects San Francisco to Marin County. We have spent quite a bit of time in the Headlands over the years, and feel this will be a fantastic place for such a summer camp.

Topsy-Turvy

2010-02-23T19:36:00.000-08:00

We're watching "Topsy-Turvy," a 1999 movie about Gilbert & Sullivan and their making of "The Mikado." It was difficult to find a copy of the video, even though the package declares that "23 film critics called it one of the best films of 1999!" It wasn't available on DVD, but I finally tracked down a VHS tape at the public library.

It seemed really necessary. Miss C has become such a big G&S fan, between summer camps at San Francisco Conservatory of Music ("Gilbert & Sullivan Scenes") and lessons with her wonderful voice teacher, who is very involved with Lamplighters Music Theatre in San Francisco -- a mostly G&S troupe.

We're set to attend Lamplighters' "Singalong Mikado" soon (having seen their "Patience" in January). So we need to know the music, and having the historical background only enriches the experience.

Considering the influence of G&S on early Broadway musicals, this study is really essential for my music-loving girl.

Molecular Primatology

2010-01-15T07:10:00.000-08:00

This week Miss C and I enjoyed a talk by Dr. Todd Disotell, a "molecular primatologist," at the California Academy of Sciences. The talk was sponsored by The Leakey Foundation, which promotes the study of human origins, and was opened with a video message by one of its poster scientists, Jane Goodall.

Dr. Disotell told an inspiring story about how he decided to become a primatologist, a scientist who studies primates. He said his mother had read Goodall's book, In the Shadow of Man, to him and his sister when he was about nine years old. He then wrote to Goodall and she wrote him back. He was on track to become a primatologist ever since then. I loved this story since I have always read challenging books aloud to Miss C and still do.

The molecular part of his job is analysis of DNA from fossil samples, using fast computers (molecular systematics). By analyzing differences in DNA between different related species over time, he and his colleagues are able to date the splits in evolutionary lineages.

He explained that there are now 18 primate species for which they have collected entire genomes, so they can compare genetic variation at a detailed level. This evidence is compared to the fossil record, which can either confirm or conflict with this genetic data.

Dr. Disotell discussed the "molecular clock" first described by Linus Pauling and Emile Zuckerkandl back in the 1960s, in which they asserted that analysis of molecular differences would tell the true story of evolution. But Dr. Disotell said that with advances since then, his team now thinks of this as a "molecular Swatch," after the multi-colored, multi-patterned wristwatch brand, because the record is seldom strictly linear. As an example, when an ancient fossil is examined, he said, it could be an ancient ancestor of a modern species -- or it could be like a coelacanth, an ancient prehistoric-looking fish that lives in the deep to this day.

Also, the fossil record, he said, represents only one percent or less of the creatures that actually have lived on earth. He said that the first primate fossils known have been dated at 55 million years ago. But based on his methods of molecular analysis, his team now is asserting that primates first originated 70 to 75 million years ago.

Advances in the molecular systematics field are limited by the speed of the computers used. Dr. Disotell said that a single chromosome run takes two days on the fastest computer his lab has (at New York University).

He and other scientists are also exploring more recent splits in primate evolution, within the last 200,000 years, such as between modern humans and Neanderthals. For that study to really flourish, he said, much more excavation and study is needed in Africa. Eighty percent of the world's human genetic variation is found within Africa.

Book: Lucy Long Ago

2009-12-26T11:52:00.000-08:00

Lucy Long Ago: Uncovering the Mystery of Where We Came From, by Catherine Thimmesh, is a wonderful book that shows how paleoanthropology is done, using the example of Lucy, the 3.2-million-year-old fossil skeleton found in Ethiopia in 1974.

My daughter's favorite part of the book was the artist's model showing how Lucy would have looked, with very real eyes, skin, and hair/fur. Also excellent are the photographic comparisons of skulls and pelvises that show how literally intermediate between chimpanzees and modern humans Lucy was. Of course it's also lots of fun that she got her name because the scientists exuberantly played a tape with the Beatles' song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" over and over during the night following the day she was found.

Lucy Long Ago takes you through the detective process that finding, identifying, piecing together, and classifying such a hominid skeleton is for scientists. Well written with excellent photos, diagrams, and illustrations.

Darwin and the Evolution of a Theory

2009-12-22T06:55:00.000-08:00

This past week Miss C and I finally got to the wonderful exhibit at UC Berkeley on Darwin and evolution, just before it closed. We'd been trying to make it there all fall but this has been our busiest homeschooling year yet, and it hadn't been possible until now.

The exhibit, "Darwin and the Evolution of a Theory," at the Bancroft Library Gallery on campus, was part of this year's celebrations of the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. We attended many other events this year celebrating these landmarks, mostly in the spring -- lectures and symposia, but also a wonderful "radio play" starring Ed Asner in "The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial" (we saw it live, but a recording is now available on CD) and a show with a reenactment of Darwin by anthropologist Richard Milner ("Darwin Live").

Compared to more exuberant earlier events, the UC Berkeley exhibit was reserved and scholarly, but very interesting. There was a collection of original copies of The Origin of Species and there were actual tortoise shells and finch specimens from the Galapagos Islands, which Darwin visited as part of "the voyage of the Beagle." We viewed a printed book of Darwin's original handwritten notes from the Beagle -- very neatly entered, but difficult to read. We saw handwritten notes by Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) in his copy of one of Darwin's books and learned that he and Darwin read each other avidly and were friends.

The exhibit drew upon the book collections of UC Berkeley's libraries and the specimen collections of its museums. The university has a fantastic paleontology museum but most of its holdings are not displayed anywhere; it is a research museum. To peek inside its collection is a rare thrill. Kevin Padian, a well known biology professor at Berkeley who heads the paleontology museum and whom we heard speak at an evolution workshop this spring, helped organize the exhibit.

We were able to appreciate many of the exhibit items due to having read a book together, The Young Charles Darwin, by Keith Thomson. This is not a children's book, but a study of the scientific influences on Darwin that led to his interest in and exploration of evolutionary theory. We heard author Keith Thomson speak at the evolution workshop at Berkeley this past spring as well (he is highly entertaining). Lyell's and Hutton's books on geology, which we read about in detail in his book, were there in the exhibit along with books by many other thinkers who influenced Darwin.

I'm glad we squeaked in at the tail end of this exhibit. I left a note in the visitor's book about the fact that we are homeschooling and studying evolution. I really wanted them to know that these are not mutually exclusive activities.

Book: Education Uncensored

2009-11-29T08:09:00.001-08:00

A new book by Laurie Block Spigel, Education Uncensored, takes readers through one mother's homeschooling journey to a career as a teacher of group homeschool classes and educational consultant in New York City. Education Uncensored is full of creative ideas for teaching and learning.

My daughter was lucky enough to attend four of Laurie Spigel's classes and we are so impressed with all her educational ideas (I previously wrote about her "Create Your Own Board Game" class here). Please see my full review of Education Uncensored -- it's a great read.

Sibelius & Beethoven

2009-10-29T19:49:00.000-07:00

Last night we had a wonderful evening at San Francisco Symphony, courtesy of SF Art & Film for Teenagers, about which I have written here before. It was a great evening for strings, with a modern piece by Sallinen, the incredibly demanding Sibelius Violin Concerto, and two pieces by Beethoven (Coriolan Overture and the Eighth Symphony).

We listened to various recordings of the music to be played before going, and Miss C announced she was most looking forward to the Sibelius concerto. At the concert hall, we listened to a pre-concert lecture by Susan Key, who directs the education component of Keeping Score, the Symphony's multimedia project. Keeping Score includes PBS specials (and DVDs) hosted by SFS music director Michael Tilson Thomas. Ms. Key was wonderful, really illuminating for us what to listen for in the pieces to come.

I loved this comment in the program notes about Beethoven's Symphony No. 8: "...Beethoven's symphonies alternate between two categories of artistic impulses...[which Friedrich Nietzsche traced to] ancient Greece and the fragile balance between the Dionysian and the Apollonian. Dionysus and Apollo were sons of Zeus, though by different mothers, and they came to typify diametrically opposed aesthetic ideals. Apollonian standards focused on clarity, balance, control, logic and classically accepted modes of beauty, while Dionysian inclinations lay in the direction of excess, chaos, even the orgiastic and the irrational. [...] As applied to Beethoven's symphonies, Dionysian characteristics tend to dominate the Symphonies Nos. 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9--the more obviously extroverted and even violent of the bunch--while the cooler forces of Apollonian ideals inspire the Symphonies Nos. 2, 4, 6, and 8. You can learn a lot about the person sitting next to you by asking one simple question: 'Evens or odds?'"

Miss C and I agreed that we like both evens and odds, which reminded me that I confounded the testers doing a personality profile of her at the Gifted Development Center, by insisting that she had equally strong extrovert and introvert characteristics, at different times.

Miss C was able to go up to the stage before the concert and say hello to the father of the family she babysits for, a cellist with the orchestra. We love being part of this town!

The big hit of the concert was indeed the Sibelius Violin Concerto. The soloist Vadim Repin was amazing. In the three movements of the concerto, he played so hard and so fast, and so incredibly beautifully. The audience jumped to its feet when the concerto was finished...and they don't do that lightly there. For example, they did not stand for any other piece in the concert, although all were wonderful. It's just that the Sibelius was magnificent.

Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost

2009-10-28T16:58:00.000-07:00

Miss C and I read Shakespeare's "Love's Labour's Lost" this week, in preparation for seeing a performance of it by the Globe Theatre Company next week at UC Berkeley. Today, we were lucky enough to attend a 1.5-hour lecture at Cal by Hugh Richmond, professor emeritus in the UC Berkeley English Dept. and its former Shakespeare Program director, about the play. It was a most excellent addition to our study of the play up to now.

But before he went into discussing the play, he regaled us with stories of the reconstruction of the Globe Theatre in London, for which he was an academic consultant. He had many great photos of the theatre, including its opening performance. The man has produced many Shakespearean plays, and it was a delight to listen to him talk about sets (or the lack of them) in the highly decorated theatre, lighting in the open-air theatre, costumes, staging, and blocking.

Then he gave us great insights into "Love's Labour's Lost." In the audience was a man who had performed in one of Prof. Richmond's productions of the play as a student, in 1978.

We had read online study guides about the play, but they didn't give anything close to the perspective of Prof. Richmond. He told how the 3 years that the King of Navarre and his lords plan to spend "studying" and away from women and feasting were Shakespeare's analogue of the 3 years one spent in university studies at Oxford at the time. He was thumbing his nose at Christopher Marlowe and other "University Wits" who had been educated there as Shakespeare had not.

It was fascinating to hear Prof. Richmond identify the real historical characters upon which the characters in the play were based. For example, the King of Navarre was Henry IV (Henri), who later did become king of France (Navarre was a small region of France before that). Biron was a real person who was later executed for his disrespect toward the king. And so on.

He had excerpts from Kenneth Branagh's movie version of the play, which was a critical and commercial failure, but Prof. Richmond explained what Branagh was trying to do in particular scenes and why it was correct in its interpretation of the play.

He quoted the director of the current touring company from the Globe Theatre as saying one reason he expected this production to be popular with American student audiences (it's playing on university campuses) is that it has a "Girl gang" who take on the men in it (that would be the Princess of France and her ladies).

We are very excited to be seeing this production next week, and so glad to have experienced Prof. Richmond's insights in between reading the play and seeing it.

Having Fun with Biology Lab

2009-10-24T08:01:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we seemed to really hit our stride with our AP Biology lab, which Miss C and I are doing with another homeschooling mom (a former lab tech) and her two sons.

This one was on Cellular Respiration and Fermentation (two separate experiments). We do not find the College Board AP Biology Lab Manual to be compelling, so instead we are using Investigating Biology Laboratory Manual (6th Ed.) by Morgan & Carter, the companion to the text Biology (8th Ed.) by Campbell and Reece. This is really a lovely lab manual.

Still, I can't be happy with its plan alone (my partner in crime, the other homeschool mom, says "Homeschoolers never do anything the way they are 'supposed to'"). For the respiration lab, I felt much of the interesting science was in the preparation for the lab, the instructor's job. There was putting our soaked-overnight lima beans in the blender to break down the cell walls; running it through cheesecloth to extract the solids; and then doing cell fractionation in a centrifuge to isolate the supernatant containing mitochondria (to be used in the actual experiment). So instead of doing this prep myself, this was the first part of the lab for our students.

We named our new centrifuge "R2D2" (see photo above for obvious reason). The students had a lot of fun using this to first pull out heavy solids (nuclei, etc.) and then collecting the liquid containing mitochondria. They then added succinate to this liquid (an intermediate in the Krebs cycle, or citric acid cycle as it is now preferably called) and DPIP (which served as a proton/electron receptor instead of FAD, as in intact cells). The DPIP offers the advantage of being a brilliant blue, but when it is reduced, it loses its color. And it loses its color gradually, as it gets used up. You can measure the change in color (and thus the progress of the respiration, or at least the step involving the conversion of succinate to fumarate) by repeated measurements in a spectrophotometer.

This the students did using the ancient Spectronic 20 (see above) that I bought used via eBay. It's a blast from the past (classic '50s look?), but it works fine. And that was just the first experiment -- they also constructed respirometers to measure fermentation.

A wonderful component of our labs as we have designed them is that after the day's experiments are done, the students then make presentations of their lab reports from the previous lab to each other. By then, they have had a chance to write them up (and we are trying to hold them to a high standard of AP-level lab reports), so they take turns presenting them, and then we ask questions, make comments, and discuss them. I think some of the best "science" we do happens in these discussions. This is where we really think through the principles demonstrated or discovered in the labs.

What fun.

Moving Online for Latin

2009-10-22T17:48:00.000-07:00

Miss C has been lucky enough to have two great teachers for Latin so far. She started out studying with a friend and his grandmother, and they covered Minimus, Minimus Secundus, and Cambridge Latin 1 together. Miss C had been asking me to study Latin since she was 7, and she enjoyed finally getting to it.

When we needed to find a new teacher, Miss C wanted a more rigorous study of Latin grammar. So we found a grad student in the classics department at UC Berkeley, a Ph.D. candidate, as teacher, and assembled a class of four homeschool students including Miss C. They have been using Learn to Read Latin from Yale Press, which is the introductory text used in Latin classes at Berkeley. We really like that book and accompanying workbook. The teacher is fun and inspiring and the mix of students seems just right.

Alas, it must come to an end. In January, this teacher will move to Paris to write her dissertation. Wonderful for her, but a sad loss for us!

So, we're following the recommendation of a gifted homeschooler friend and have enrolled Miss C in an online course in Latin with The Lukeion Project starting in January. This new course will use Wheelock Latin 6th Edition, which is comparable to the text she has been using (both are heavily grammar-based and translations are of original Latin, not made-up pieces).

We're very excited about this transition and that she'll be able to continue with Latin online, while taking Spanish at the community college. The community colleges do not offer Latin, so this seems to be a good combination. Stay tuned for our thoughts about the new course in the spring.

Early College for Homeschoolers

2009-10-17T08:40:00.000-07:00

Our homeschool group held a wonderful presentation by Wes Beach about early college options for homeschoolers this past week. Wes always has great information to share.

Perhaps the best part of the evening was the "Early College Student Panel" after his presentation. This was a group of seven students, ranging from age 10 to age 16, who talked about their experiences in accessing college courses.

My daughter was one of the panelists, one with the least experience, since she is taking her first course this semester. She had a great time being part of this panel. I think it was affirming for all of them, to be among other young people on a similar track. It was especially encouraging to meet a 15-year-old senior at UC Berkeley and to hear his perspective.

And it was very inspiring for those of us in the audience! We're excited to continue on this path. My daughter will be taking two college courses in January, while we also continue with the challenging work we are doing on our own.

Finding a Mentor

2009-09-21T09:57:00.001-07:00

Miss C has a new voice teacher, one who is a director and teacher in a couple of the programs in which Miss C has participated (classes and camps at ACT's Young Conservatory and a summer camp at San Francisco Conservatory of Music). We are thrilled that she will be working with this teacher, who is an incredible singer and musical theater performer herself.

Yet the change was emotional for both Miss C and me. We both loved her former voice teacher -- also a fine singer, though more classically oriented. It was bittersweet telling her that Miss C would be moving on.

I think the major difference is that we see a true mentor in this new teacher. In performance, she reminds me of what is most special about Miss C -- her expressiveness, her stage presence. This teacher is unquestionably plugged into the performing arts community in San Francisco. And finally, she was impressed with and excited about Miss C's voice, and happy to work with her -- although she only had an opening for her because Miss C is homeschooled, and available during the day.

My husband called this past week "Heartbreak Week," since we not only made this change but dropped another class that wasn't up to the level we wanted for Miss C. I guess the freedom to pick and choose her opportunities carries with it the need to say goodbye when it is time to move on to something new.

I don't know how far she will go with voice, but her singing has matured amazingly in the past year, and she truly has a beautiful voice. Since she also loves singing, it seems that whatever else we are doing in her education, she needs voice training. I'm very excited for her to have this new mentor.

Chaim Potok Novels & Plays

2009-09-13T15:12:00.000-07:00

Sometime during the 1970s, I read Chaim Potok's novels The Chosen, The Promise, and My Name is Asher Lev and I really loved them. So I was very excited when I learned that Theatreworks would be producing "The Chosen" as a play in Mountain View (in October). I've always enjoyed Theatreworks productions, and we have our tickets.

Then I learned that Marin Theatre Co. would also be producing "My Name is Asher Lev." We'll be seeing that next weekend. These productions sparked my re-reading Potok's books, and my husband and Miss C have read or are reading My Name is Asher Lev and The Chosen as well. I'm so glad they decided to take me up on reading the books before seeing the plays. It just enriches the experience so much.

Especially in this case, because playwright Aaron Posner worked closely with Chaim Potok to develop the script for "The Chosen," and then later, after Potok's death, Posner worked closely with his "first reader" and widow Adena Potok to develop the script for "My Name is Asher Lev." And Potok is directing "Asher Lev" in Marin. Here's a story about the production.

After I re-read Asher Lev and was reminded that the title character was partly based on Chaim Potok himself and partly based on artist Marc Chagall, Miss C and I visited the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco to see the exhibit, "Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater, 1919-1949." Among the large theater panels kept safe for 50 years in Russia until Chagall (who had fled the Bolsheviks) could return to sign them at age 77 was the famous image that inspired the iconic "Fiddler on the Roof." We felt a sense of awe as we sat and viewed these panels.

Both The Chosen and My Name is Asher Lev have universal themes to which many people could relate. Asher Lev draws a vivid picture of the conflict between individuality and community, and the need to pursue an inborn passion regardless of the cost. It's a wonderful experience to immerse in these books and to anticipate them being brought to life on the stage.

The Sweet Spot: Challenge but Not Stress

2009-08-31T15:43:00.001-07:00

Miss C and I have been working hard on biology. She just got through a long, dense chapter on cells. The basics were not difficult, but trying to understand the intricacies of membranes, microtubules and dynein, and actin and myosin interactions was really tough.

Partly, a stronger chemistry background would help, but partly, this stuff is just hard to visualize, even with the excellent drawings and models in Biology by Campbell and Reece. We almost went just past the "sweet spot" of "challenge without stress," in trying to sort out just exactly what happens when the microtubule doublets slide past the dynein. She started getting pretty stressed out about "not getting it," which we already know works against comprehension for her.

Okay. Calm down. Deep breath. Finally, we got to the point of understanding that the book is not looking for that detailed level of comprehension just yet... just the overview of the concept is "good enough" for now. "Good enough" and "you'll understand more later" are not satisfying to Miss C, and I'm glad for that. But these are concepts she'll need to accept if we are to continue pushing against the boundaries of her sweet spot -- the only way to stretch it upward.

I think she is doing very, very well in handling difficult material. And that's a pretty sweet feeling for me. It will be even better when she really starts to feel that herself.

SF Art & Film for Teenagers

2009-08-30T07:35:00.001-07:00

Miss C and I recently attended the first session of this year's "Cine Club," part of an incredible program, "San Francisco Art & Film for Teenagers." The brainchild of Ronald Chase, a creative and energetic person, this free program has been bringing serious film and culture to San Francisco teens since 1993. I love the tag line: "We give you what school can't." How could we resist that?

The program includes classic films every Friday night during the school year, followed by a discussion. Apparently there are about 50-100 teens who attend each week; for this first session, I would guess there were about 100. There is a teacher of creative writing at School of the Arts (SOTA), a public high school in San Francisco, who requires her students to attend. There are also homeschoolers and students from quite a few other high schools in attendance.

Then, on Saturdays, the group visits an art museum, has a picnic lunch in the (downtown) park, and attends a movie the students "might not otherwise have seen." The first classic film this past Friday night was "Seven Samurai," a Japanese film made in 1954. Then next Saturday, the first art museum outing will be to see the "Lords of the Samurai" exhibit at the Asian Art Museum in SF. Then we'll also see the current film "The Hurt Locker," about the war in Iraq, which I have heard is incredible.

Besides Cine Club and Art Saturdays, the program includes free tickets to many cultural events throughout the year -- San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Opera, San Francisco Ballet, and more. The program averages about four such events each week -- more than anyone would have time to attend. Miss C and I attended a wonderful performance of Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons" at San Francisco Symphony this summer, as part of the program.

Most of the older teens attend SF Art & Film on their own, but there are maybe a dozen or so parents who attend with younger ones. I've told Miss C I'll attend with her as long as she wants me to do so. My hope is that over time, she'll meet some other teens with interests like hers, without having to actually go to high school (smile).

We are so grateful to live in a city with so many cultural opportunities, and that a special person like Ronald Chase created this wonderful program to share them with teenagers here.

Noel Coward

2009-08-20T12:34:00.000-07:00

We've been doing an ongoing Noel Coward study from spring through this fall. I still haven't figured out why there was such a revival of Coward's works this year. Last night was almost the culmination of our Coward pursuits -- when we saw restored film of the 1929 performance of his "operette" called "Bitter Sweet" at the Museum of Performance and Design in San Francisco, along with some live songs from Lamplighters singers. It was especially "bittersweet" for Miss C and me because we'd also seen Lamplighters Musical Theatre's one-night-only live revival of Bitter Sweet in April, with the lead role sung by Jane Hammett, a wonderful singer and a revered teacher in two different programs in which Miss C has participated. Last night might have been the culmination, except that we also have one more Coward performance lined up -- an American Conservatory Theater production of "Brief Encounter," which we'll be seeing in September.

The Museum of Performance and Design has had a long-run exhibition, "Star Quality: The World of Noel Coward," since April. We saw part of it at an earlier talk there, on Noel Coward as a playwright, but didn't get to finish perusing all the wonderful objects, photos, and posters 'til yesterday before the show. Here is an example of the text on one exhibit, the reason Mr. Coward is so relevant to me in considering Miss C's multi-potentiality:

The Renaissance Man
At a party to celebrate Noel's 70th birthday, his old friend, Lord Louis Mountbatten, had this to say: "There are probably greater painters than Noel, greater novelists than Noel, greater librettists, greater composers of music, greater singers, greater dancers, greater comedians, greater tragedians, greater stage producers, greater film directors, greater cabaret artists, greater TV stars. If there are, they are fourteen different people. Only one man combined all fourteen different talents -- The Master."

And, indeed, Mountbatten could have gone further. As a songwriter, words and music, Noel Coward rivaled Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and Stephen Sondheim. As a playwright, he wrote more than Somerset Maugham and his work is more often revived. The relatively few films he made would constitute a major career for someone else. And even as an amateur painter -- tutored by Churchill in a style Noel always called "Touch and Gaugin" -- his work compared with world-class Primitives.

Among the delightful explorations we've done of Mr. Coward and his work in recent months, besides "Bitter Sweet," we enjoyed the revival of "Blithe Spirit" on Broadway, with Angela Lansbury as the medium; Craig Slaight's original production for ACT's Young Conservatory in San Francisco of "Bright Young People," a review of Coward's work; "Private Lives" by California Shakespeare Theater; and watching a documentary on DVD about Coward, "The Noel Coward Trilogy." We really appreciated the Web site, Noel Coward 101.

Among the great YouTube peeks into Mr. Coward and his works:

"Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Germans" -- great look at his wit and taste for satire

"Private Lives Act I" with Gertrude Lawrence (his dear friend since both were child stars) -- again, wit and playwriting and acting

For some of the most beautiful songs Noel Coward wrote, search iTunes for samples of "Zigeuner" (it means "gypsy" in German) by Valerie Masterson (it's from Bitter Sweet) and Jennifer Parish & Stewart Cameron doing "I'll See You Again" (also from Bitter Sweet).

It is so much fun to take my daughter where she wants to go, in the world of theater history and performing arts.

Shakespeare in the Park

2009-08-15T16:35:00.000-07:00

Just spent a dreamy afternoon with Miss C and her dad/my husband in Dolores Park in San Francisco, watching the Woman's Will production of "The Taming of the Shrew." It was quite an enjoyable twist on Shakespeare's exploration of gender roles!

Woman's Will is an all-woman troupe based in the East Bay. They have custom classes for young people, and I'm hoping one of these days we can line up something for Miss C in one of their classes. Their performances are quite a wonderful change from the usual male-dominated Shakespeare productions.

My husband and I were thoughtful about the wonderful performance of Kate Jopson, who played the leading role of Kate. Ms. Jopson has just graduated from UC Berkeley. We are wondering if community college and then a transfer to UC Berkeley (at a young age) will be a possible good path for our performing-arts-loving daughter. Berkeley certainly seems to have taught Ms. Jopson well.

El Beh was also awesome as leading "man" Petruchio. She's a lovely lady when out of character, but I had to keep reminding myself she was female while she was playing the macho role of Petruchio. Amazing!

Another great episode in our ongoing theater studies.

Grendel: Remembering Existentialism

2009-07-29T17:56:00.001-07:00

Finished reading John Gardner's Grendel and compiled some notes for Miss C to use in its study. How interesting to learn that Gardner had taught Beowulf at universities for years before sitting down to write Grendel! You can feel, in reading his book, that he had thought long and hard about the true nature of each of the major characters... not just Grendel, but Hrothgar, Unferth, and Beowulf... almost like he read between the lines of the poem well known and beloved to him. What can be inferred from Beowulf is thoroughly and descriptively drawn in Grendel.

Immersing in finding some good links to explain "existentialism" sent me down memory lane, remembering a course I took in college, "Existentialism and Zen" (great contrast!). I loved the professor in that course (the only philosophy course I took)...he was an older man, so intellectual, and so dear. I haven't thought about that course in many years. I remember writing the essay exams in blue books! Do they use those anymore?

Homeschooling my daughter at this level is like getting to experience some of the best parts of college all over again. I love being a lifelong learner.

Chemistry Review before Biology

2009-07-28T14:06:00.000-07:00

Another book from Pearson, the publisher of Campbell's Biology, is very helpful in reviewing or studying chemistry before you start the biology course. It's called An Introduction to Chemistry for Biology Students, Ninth Edition, by George I. Sackheim, and I have a minireview here.

Literature Study

2009-07-27T16:27:00.000-07:00

Continuing our literature study as part of our new discussion group, we've launched into Beowulf and Grendel. There are so many supplementary things I want to do to support our study of Beowulf that I started yet another "class" Web site just to help me communicate resources to Miss C and to help us stay organized. It also serves as documentation for what we did, later on.

I love using Google Sites for this. I am adept at using Dreamweaver for custom-built sites, but it's just not needed when you basically want to quickly knock out the organization for studying a body of material. Our latest site is "Liberty Lyceum Literature Study" (very alliterative!).

At this point, I have quite a lot of background material I've reviewed for Beowulf, available for Miss C's perusal when she's done with summer camps. Next up, reading John Gardner's Grendel. Hey, this is fun!

Classics: Electra Festival at Stanford University

2009-07-11T12:22:00.000-07:00

Miss C and I finished our study of The Iliad and found the whole thing exhausting. However, now that we're reading some later Greek plays, we're glad we have that background and context!

We joined a group of homeschoolers for a literature club that is starting up this summer by reading Euripides' Iphigeneia at Aulis, Sophocles' Electra, and Aeschylus's Oresteia. Then we're seeing some live performances as well as some filmed versions of these and other Greek plays at Stanford University's Electra Festival this summer. It's quite an intriguing project!

As usual, we're wrapping some culture, history, and geography around the literature and theater. We watched Michael Wood's video series, "In Search of the Trojan War," are now watching the PBS documentary series "Greeks: Crucible of Civilization," and picked up The Teaching Company's audio course "Greece and Rome: An Integrated History of the Ancient Mediterranean" to listen to in the car. I'm expecting that will mostly happen on our twice-weekly trips to Berkeley for her Latin class this fall. We are enjoying our peek into the classical world!

Book: The New Global Student

2009-07-06T09:46:00.001-07:00

My 4th of July weekend reading was The New Global Student: Skip the SAT, Save Thousands on Tuition, and Get a Truly International Education, by Maya Frost. Very interesting!

The tone is often over-bubbly for my taste and it is broken up into too many small visual bites (boxes/sidebars, quotations, and underlined "smart moves" in case you missed the point described in body text), but I learned to overlook these to get to the good parts. Those good parts were the many first-person case histories of young students (or formerly young students) who took non-traditional routes through high school and college education, usually with at least a year spent abroad on their own, and most often finishing college at younger-than-usual ages.

One idea occurred to me repeatedly while reading this book -- how odd that Frost's family did not homeschool! So many of the family's values would be right at home in the homeschool world: creativity over fill-in-the-blank "achievement," spending lots of time together as a family, accelerating past the boring parts, and so on. Frost does include the story of one homeschooling family that sailed the Caribbean for four-and-a-half years, but all the other examples involve school (often high school, sometimes college courses) in another country. The family's favorite recommendation is for high school juniors to spend a year abroad alone through the Rotary Foundation, a long-established and low-cost program. Frost's husband, Tom Frost, participated in that program as a teenager himself, so it's not surprising the parents would want their daughters to try it.

Besides sending their teenage daughters on solo programs abroad, the family also spent a year living in Mexico, and then moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where they live now. Besides providing a creative route to educating their daughters, all of whom are bilingual or multilingual and graduated college early, the Frosts claim that their overseas living has saved the family a lot of money that they've been able to use to send their four daughters to college.

In our seven years of homeschooling, we've been able to travel a lot and to experience many of the benefits the Frosts describe by being unplugged from institutional education. But we're still just getting into the years they discuss. Their emphasis is on rejecting the "four-by-four" plan of 4 years of high school and 4 years of college as the best route for educating America's young people. They claim travel is "not enough," that at least a year of living abroad as a teenager without her family delivers the best and longest-lasting impact on a maturing young person, one which will enable her to not only become a true global citizen but a well-qualified member of the "creative class." They tell a pretty convincing story.

Frost's book is not just about education in other countries. She touts the benefits of community college education for teens and sharply criticizes the amount of time high schoolers spend preparing for the SAT, taking AP courses and tests, and the like, in a mad scramble for the finite number of spaces at America's most selective universities. She says all ambitious students are doing the same thing, so they don't differentiate themselves. By taking an alternative route, living in another country before college age, becoming bilingual or multilingual as well as preparing for college, a student stands a better chance of distinguishing herself not only for college admissions but beyond that, for jobs and a career.

My favorite example of the many students who told their stories is a young man who is surely destined to become U.S. Surgeon General or head of the World Health Organization or something like that. He graduated from a Texas high school, and Vanderbilt University deferred his scholarship for a year while he went to Argentina to learn Spanish and study the culture. He arrived there, he said, with little more than a cowboy hat and a grin, and everyone laughed at his poor Spanish and his accent. But by the end of the year he was fluent, and they called him "just another Argentine." He went on to learn several more languages while studying biomedical engineering at Vanderbilt. After college, he received a scholarship that allowed him to study in Australia and earn a master's in public health; then he studied French in Senegal. At the writing, he had just graduated from medical school at Johns Hopkins University.

I can't say we'd be willing to let my daughter skip the SAT and AP courses, but since she's so advanced at a young age, she should have time both for that sort of thing and adventurous learning abroad. I'm very intrigued about investigating the programs Frost describes.

Frost's Web site introduces us to the twenty students profiled in the book. They have each taken a different path; that's the whole point. Lots of food for thought.

Pre-reading Biology

2009-06-22T16:37:00.000-07:00

One of the moms on the Homeschool to College (hs2coll) list said that Pennsylvania Homeschoolers' AP Biology course requires the students to pre-read Campbell's Biology over the summer, before class starts in the fall. Wow! Only 1,267 pages. We're running behind already and we haven't even started. (smile)

Buy Your Campbell's Biology from Pearson, or Else...

2009-06-22T10:08:00.000-07:00

...Or else you will not be able to get the online access for teachers that "goes with" the book (published by Pearson).

I bought Campbell's Biology, 8th Edition, through Amazon.com for $135, and also the Student Study Guide for it and the Investigating Biology Laboratory Manual. But when I requested online access for teachers, I received the message from Pearson Customer Service:

"We are sorry but to qualify for online password protected support you must purchase the textbook directly from Pearson."

This is even though I sent them the Amazon receipts for all I purchased of their products. I wish I had known earlier that I could buy the book directly from Pearson; once I got clearance to see their prices, they want $114 for it (it's now $140 at Amazon.com). So, I paid more for it, and am also denied the online access I should have with it.

Don't make the same mistake as I did!

UPDATE: Pearson Education reconsidered my case, and granted an exception (thank you!), but advised, "Please note that any future requests for online support will require that the purchase be made from Pearson." Good to know! If you want to order Campbell's Biology for an AP class, and/or any of the supplementary products in the program, see Pearson's product page.

The Chemistry of Biology

2009-06-21T18:40:00.000-07:00

Continuing preparation for AP Biology... The amount of chemistry in a biology-for-majors college course today, or in an AP Biology course, is astonishing. I majored in biology, graduating almost 30 years ago, and I still have my (large) general biology book. It's a very different book than Campbell's Biology, 8th edition, the one we are using for AP Biology. I literally did not get to most of the chemistry included in Campbell until I took biochemistry as a junior in college.

Since I'm just starting out in organizing our course, I'll point you to the more-experienced words of "Jane in NC" on a "Well Trained Mind Forum" from 2008. She wrote, "I am a member of the AP Biology teachers listserv where teachers regularly comment that they were not exposed to all of this biochemistry, molecular biology, genetics, etc. until later in college, grad school or at all!"

Glad to know we aren't the only ones.

The Evolution of Our AP Biology Course

2009-06-20T16:00:00.000-07:00

As I wrote earlier, I'm planning an AP Biology course for the fall, to homeschool the subject with my daughter. From what I gather, this is an unusual choice; most homeschoolers seem to use one of the online or video courses available as a base for their study. I'd love to hear from others who are homeschooling AP Biology.

Of course, we too will make use of (free) online and video content and the complementary Web site to Campbell's Biology. I've started a Web site for our course, and this is where I'll plan and schedule our course of study. So far, I have a pretty great Links page (I think!) with many great resources available online. And, I've discussed my purchase of a compound microscope with an adapter for my Nikon D70 digital camera.

Between this blog and the course Web site, I'll discuss the "evolution" of our course. This summer, while Miss C is in a completely different world (mostly, performing arts camps), I'm preparing for the biology course. Almost 30 years ago, I graduated college with a degree in biology and was certified to teach high school science, but I never used it in my professional life. Yet I have always loved biology. I have been an avid birder through the years, and when I needed to research my thyroid disease and learn how to get well, I was happy I could understand what I was reading.

But am I up to the task of facilitating an AP Biology course for my daughter, all these years later? I guess we'll soon find out!

7 years...where did they go?

2009-05-30T16:22:00.000-07:00

The first of June marks 7 full years of homeschooling for Miss C and me. It's been an amazing experience that has gone by all too fast. I was an "accidental homeschooler," backing into it when I couldn't get her into a "good" private school for kindergarten. But if I had it to do over again, knowing everything I do now, I would do it again with even more enthusiasm, if possible, than I did the first time.

We're still homeschooling, but with Miss C turning 12, having passed the CHSPE, taking the SAT next week, and planning to take two community college classes in the fall, I feel like the "basic" phase of her education is complete. And I'm very, very satisfied with all we've been able to accomplish. I'm especially happy that we have the great relationship we have, and so many wonderful shared learning experiences in our memories!

I'll still be her mom and I'll still be guiding her learning and teaching her a couple of subjects, going forward. But significantly, she has asked me not to audit the CC classes she'll take this fall (accompanying her in the class). I had thought I would do so until she was, oh, 14 or so. But Miss C is so independent and so confident that she apparently doesn't need me.

I assume I will still be useful as a driver for a few more years. So I will be working on my laptop in the library while she's in classes -- I guess I don't have any further excuse not to write my first book!

Visiting/honoring the Roosevelts

2009-04-13T19:00:00.000-07:00

Our family reveres Eleanor Roosevelt and her husband, President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Their values, both personal and political, are guideposts for us. And my husband's uncle was a good friend to Eleanor, an immigration lawyer who assisted her in her advocacy of displaced Europeans after World War II. We love the lady.

We were happy to visit the home, presidential library, and museum of FDR in Hyde Park, New York this week. But we were even happier to stand within the realm of Val-Kill, Eleanor's very own home, her personal space carved out in which she did her work as ambassador to the United Nations, birthmother to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and, as Harry Truman called her, "First Lady of the World." We are in awe.

With all due respect, Eleanor Roosevelt, we honor you.

Planning an AP Biology Course

2009-04-05T17:13:00.000-07:00

I'm planning an AP Biology class for Miss C for the fall, and it's causing me to look back on what we have done with science in the past few years. We've been very disorderly about our science learning in a way, never going through any specific curriculum from start to finish. But as I've looked through all we'll be covering, I think of how much of it we've already touched on in some way.

We've spent a lot of time on evolution -- the foundation of modern biology. We've studied the monarch butterfly life cycle and migration, did tagging of monarchs and have planted milkweed to create a waystation for them in our yard. We've had frogs. We've done gardening and composting. We went through an 11-session training course to become state park docents who give tidepool tours, and learned a lot of marine biology along the way. We know a bit about the birds and native plants of the beautiful Bay area, where we live.

Now it's time to get serious about chemistry and cellular biology. We're delving into Thinkwell Chemistry and we'll just have to fill in as we go. We'll take a systematic approach from here on out, but I am happy for the memories of all the time we've spent in nature, and I'm glad we've experienced science as we have so far. It's just been part of life, rather than chapters in a book!

Test-taking practice

2009-04-01T08:51:00.000-07:00

Now that Miss C's taken the CHSPE (California High School Proficiency Exam), we're prepping her for the SAT in June. Unlike the CHSPE, which she took so she'd have access to community college classes, the SAT is part of a talent search program (in her case, Johns Hopkins University's Center for Talented Youth, or CTY) for 7th/8th graders. I always have hated specifying grade levels, but Miss C has enjoyed CTY camps, so it's worth filling in that bubble so she'll also have access to them (and distance learning classes) in her teens.

SAT test prep does not involve her learning content so much as practicing taking the tests. The world of standardized tests is an entirely new one to someone who's always homeschooled, but not really a big deal. It's challenging to work within a timed limit, when we've always been able to allow her the luxury of time for deep thoughts, rather than quick answers. But, test-taking is a skill that can be learned, and she's doing a great job of it so far.

Accuracy on math has also been a challenge for her. When we're working together, it's not really a big deal. She shows me she understands the concepts, even explains them to me beautifully, in algebra or geometry. But on these tests, you have to make sure you also get the right answer at the end! No arithmetic or sign errors allowed. That's been a new experience for her.

We also discovered in the process of her preparing for the CHSPE that she experienced math anxiety, or rather, performance anxiety when taking math tests. We saw a fantastic clinical psychologist about it, who is on the editorial board of SENG (Social and Emotional Needs of the Gifted).

In just a couple of sessions, he helped her so much, explaining how fear sends messages to the amygdala (part of the brain), which triggers the fight-or-flight mechanism. Bursts of adrenalin are released, and importantly, blood flow is cut off to the frontal lobe (and diverted to the extremities so you can run or fight). Then, executive function is impaired, which is why she felt "I can't think." Literally, she couldn't! He helped her so much in understanding how to counter her negative thoughts (which caused the "fear") with positive ones, to take deep breaths, etc. We saw a complete turnaround on her math practice test performance after that.

A great life lesson... not just useful for test-taking!

Swan Lake

2009-03-01T07:05:00.000-08:00

Miss C and I had a date to go see San Francisco Ballet's production of "Swan Lake." Suddenly, it was Swan Lake Week.

I started it by getting the 2005 video of American Ballet Theatre's Swan Lake for us to watch in advance. This was really one of the most outstanding ballets I've seen on video, particularly considering the virtuosity of both Angel Corella and Gillian Murphy, the male and female leads, respectively (Siegfried and Odette/Odiel). Murphy very neatly did 32 forte turns in a row, and that was after we were already in awe of her. Both Miss C and I loved the ballet.

Actually, even before we watched it, we got out Miss C's old Ballet Stories book, to review details of the story. This was really helpful. We never would have understood, without it, that when the queen points at her ring finger, she is telling her son that he must marry. There were many other helpful pointers in that book as well.

Then we watched a video of "Billy Elliot," a movie I loved when it first came out. We're going to see the Broadway musical version in April and it was a prerequisite for Miss C to watch it. And of course, Swan Lake figures into "Billy Elliot" in a major way, when at the end, the powerful-looking 25-year-old Billy leaps memorably into the air in a production of that ballet (it was a role dancer Adam Cooper, who played Billy, originated for Swan Lake).

By the time we got to the San Francisco Ballet production, we were psyched. Sadly, we found this performance disappointing... I think the ABT production "ruined it" for us. Critics in San Francisco didn't like it either, but that doesn't normally dissuade us. Still, we were happy to see it in person, even if it didn't live up to the vivid ABT version.

As if that weren't enough, Miss C, who is a student of Broadway musicals, was adding to her collection of shows that she knows last night, watching Barbra Streisand in "Funny Girl." And there it was again, Swan Lake, starring Fanny Brice, within that musical.

We certainly could recognize Tchaikovsky's score anywhere now. I'm so glad we were able to learn about this cultural touchstone together. Considering the number of times we've seen "The Nutcracker," it was about time.

Advocating Homeschooling for the Gifted?

2009-02-21T15:07:00.000-08:00

With a friend of mine, I founded a regional gifted homeschooling group a year and a half ago that is now a dynamic, growing collection of families. We don't seek out new members. In fact, we are intentionally hard to find. It's difficult to find us through homeschooling sources; we tend to be found either through the gifted network or through personal recommendations. That's because we're all terrified of seeing the group get watered down by people who think "all children are gifted," and who won't understand that those who are truly intellectually gifted have different needs and developmental journeys.

And, there is big confusion all around about the difference between "gifted" learners and "high achievers." There is overlap between the two, but they are not the same. So I always hesitate to push homeschooling too hard, even among people who join our group who say they are "thinking about homeschooling."

Homeschooling is not for everybody. I feel that if it speaks to you and you want it, then we can help you. But we don't want to talk you into it.

That said, anyone who takes the leap will most likely evolve in their thoughts about it over time. For example, we started homeschooling our daughter at age 5 largely for academic reasons... we didn't feel she would be challenged in kindergarten. We tried to get her into a school for the gifted and some other top tier private schools, but when she wasn't accepted, due to too many kids applying for too few spots, we thought we'd homeschool for K and then reapply to those top schools for first grade.

But that never happened. Not only did the academic reason for homeschooling seem all the more pressing as time went on, but we began to accumulate many more reasons to continue homeschooling. How about the joy and excitement our daughter radiated every day, compared to her having told me she was "bored" with her Montessori preschool almost every day for the last 6 months she attended when she was 4? What about the deep conversations we have any time and all the time, as my daughter needs to process what she is learning and thinking about? How about the joy of being "co-learners," discovering something new together the parent hasn't experienced either? How about "cuddling sessions" throughout the day (and we still do that, and she's going on 12), versus having your child in a formal environment all day where she will not be hugged or kissed? What about the close, loving relationship we have because of all that? Oh, this is just the top of a very long list of reasons... reasons I never, ever thought about before we started homeschooling. So how could I know they were reasons to homeschool?

How can you 'tell a stranger about rock 'n' roll,' to quote John Sebastian of the Lovin' Spoonful? How can you explain the rich, full life ahead for both the child and the parent to a potential homeschooler, especially if he or she is still clinging to school constructs and expectations? You really can't -- you can only answer questions about how one teaches math or how homeschooled kids find friends, and the like. All of the really good stuff is something they haven't yet considered, especially if they have had their child in school, and want to make a break with that.

So even though I am so happy when I see the light in a gifted child's eyes who has now been set free through homeschooling, I can't advocate it unless someone is asking me to advocate it for them. But if they do, all my enthusiasm and happiness that has come from the joyful path we have taken is likely to wash all over them.

Happy Birthday, Charles Darwin!

2009-02-12T08:03:00.000-08:00

We've been in a frenzy of attending "Darwin" events in the time leading up to the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin. That would be today!

We had the pleasure of hearing Keith Thomson speak at an evolution workshop at UC Berkeley this past weekend, and are now reading his new book, The Young Charles Darwin. It reads just like he speaks: in a manner both erudite and highly entertaining. We're even going to go hear him again today at a presentation at the California Academy of Sciences here in San Francisco. A great way to spend Darwin's birthday.

For those who would like to study evolution with their homeschooled kids, I highly recommend a PBS documentary series, Evolution, and its extensive companion Web site. We went through that about a year and a half ago and found it excellent.

Recently, we also viewed NOVA's "Judgement Day" documentary (you can watch the whole thing online, in 7- to 10-minute segments) and went through their excellent Web-based supporting materials, and that was particularly scary. This video was about the Dover, Pennsylvania trial over "intelligent design" being taught in the schools, that happened as recently as 2004, for crying out loud. One completely normal-looking woman from that town said, on the video, "The Bible says 'God created.' That's all I need to know."

There are lots of people who think like that in this country. That's all I need to know to take on the responsibility of educating my daughter about evolution and its detractors, so she'll be ready to play an educated role in our society in the future.

Teachable Moments: Hawks

2009-02-05T16:42:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, Miss C and I were doing our 4-mile run/walk on the Great Highway path, next to the Pacific Ocean. Twice along the way we were graced with a hawk on a light pole, right close to us.

The first was a red-tailed hawk. Look how big he is! I said. He was a dark morph... we have those on the West Coast. He let us get a good, long look at his stocky, hunched-up form before he finally took off and gave us a view of his rust-colored tail, all fanned out.

Not a mile down the road we saw a much smaller, clearly different hawk on another light pole -- a red-shouldered hawk. Again there is a unique California sub-species.

When we came home we checked out The Sibley Guide to Birds and compared the birds we had seen on our walk. Noting that the red-tailed hawk is 19 inches long and the red-shouldered is 17, but that the former seemed so much larger than the latter, we decided there might be a gender difference between them as well (females are larger than males in both species).

I love that we live in the city and still have the chance to feel close to wild nature here, and I love that I have the time to notice it, wonder about it, and talk about it with my daughter.

New mailing list - Familes of Early College Students - Bay Area

2009-02-04T09:01:00.000-08:00

I recently started a new mailing list, Families of Early College Students - Bay Area (FECSBA). So far the young students whose parents are represented on the list range from ages 9 to 16. It's been fascinating to hear some of the stories parents have shared about how their kids got started taking college classes, and how their paths have evolved.

Miss C hasn't yet started a college class on her own, but we are planning for that this coming fall. She'll be taking the California High School Proficiency Exam (CHSPE) in March and the SAT in June.

It's a new and exciting phase in our homeschooling journey!

Proportion and creativity

2008-12-09T15:17:00.000-08:00

Miss C has been working on a Sculpey sculpture as a Christmas gift for one of her grandmas. It's a model of her Grandma's dog, a chihuahua mix, which her Grandma loves a lot.

Today Miss C was explaining to me how she got the overall shape of the dog sculpture right. She said she had measured his head and it was the same length as his tail; that his torso was twice that; and so on. She was using these comparisons to make the sculpture's proportions look right.

"You got that from Leonardo da Vinci," I said.

"Yes," she shrugged, as if guilty.

"Great, he's a fantastic source for learning about proportion!" I assured her.

We recently spent 3 hours immersed in the da Vinci exhibit at The Tech Museum in San Jose, "Leonardo: 500 Years into the Future." What a wonderful experience it was: science, art, math, and engineering, and more than a little bit of magic, in one fantastic exhibit.

The combination of low-tech and high-tech exhibit elements was excellent. For example, some of da Vinci's actual notebooks were on display in a glass case. We gazed at them in awe. But they were also completely digitized, and many large computer screens showed images of pages from them, along with commentary and analysis.

Another amazing use of technology was a large digitized version of da Vinci's painting, "The Last Supper," projected onto a wall. It had white outlines around each of the figures in the painting, along with animation to show how da Vinci positioned each of the disciples in the scene, then "moved" them to the position they would be in when reacting to Jesus' saying, "One of you will betray me." It was amazing and convincing. How could da Vinci have done this without a computer? I guess his brain was a computer, with built-in "imaging" abilities.

There were also many displays and interactive materials that showed how he studied anatomy and the proportions of human anatomy (and that of horses). One long series of animations of his "Vitruvian Man" was astonishing, in both the anatomical facts of human proportion it elucidated and in da Vinci's explorations of those proportions as both a scientist and artist.

Who knew such inspiration would soon be the essential guiding principle for creating such a miniature sculpture. We never know what is absorbed, what will be remembered, what will be applied from the many topics we study with our children. Once in a while we receive the gift of knowing just a little about the impact of our experiences.

PowerPoint Presentations

2008-11-25T15:28:00.000-08:00

Last week our homeschool group held its regular monthly gathering. Once a month, I haul in my Mac laptop and a digital projector, and several of the kids in our group (7 this time) give presentations on a variety of topics. It's a great way to get together around a somewhat academic program (well, one presentation was on "Calvin & Hobbes," and it was hugely popular, but most are on more serious topics).

Miss C knocked herself out this month, with the most extensive research project she's done yet, on Louisa May Alcott. She'd read all of her books for young people at least 3 times each, and for this project she read one of her novels for adults as well as Hospital Sketches (about Alcott's time as a Civil War army nurse), a collection of short stories, and her journals as well. Then I read aloud to her the lengthy and dense Eden's Outcasts, about Louisa May Alcott and her father Bronson Alcott, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for biography. In addition, she read multiple Web pages, including biographical pieces on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau; all about transcendentalism; and she sourced dozens of photos online of Louisa May Alcott and her family as well as book covers and posters and stills from the 1933 and 1994 movie versions of Little Women.

I love PowerPoint presentations as a method of organizing and presenting research work. It beats writing a research paper for many reasons. First, it's more fun. It's visual (at least the way my daughter does it, with almost all photo slides, never much text). It's geeky (there is always a fun transition or two, although in general she is admirably restrained about this). And there is a lot of writing involved.

In fact, her presentation last month, about monarch butterflies, had so much good writing already done in the Notes fields, that she later took the notes and stitched them together into an article about monarchs for her bi-monthly zine. In this way, computer-based presentations are an excellent training ground for longer, more formal written work, and in many cases are fine end products in themselves.

I didn't really learn how to do a good research paper until I hit English composition in college. In contrast, Miss C and her homeschooled peers already have a major leg up by working on these computer-based presentations and then sharing them with each other and the parents in our community.

Back to Whatever We Do Instead of School

2008-08-23T16:55:00.000-07:00

We must have had a busy summer, since I haven't posted here the whole time. In fact, it's been a whirlwind.

In June, we cleared out our guest room and my husband's mom moved in with us. Expanding our household from 3 to 4 after 11 years in that configuration was definitely momentous for us. At this point, I think it's going to work out fine, but we had a serious feeling of upheaval for a while there.

Miss C had some great summer camps. She really enjoyed "Web Page Design and Flash Animation" for a week, but the big hit was Yunasa, a camp for highly gifted kids in Michigan. But it is actually much more than that -- a community of people that spreads out over many states and over many years. We were all charmed and delighted by the experience, especially Miss C.

Then, there was Shakespeare in Wisconsin (American Players Theater, so amazing), canoeing in Wisconsin and Michigan, a ferry boat ride across Lake Michigan, and then Chicago, and visiting with several old friends there. We visited The Art Institute of Chicago and the Field Museum. Millennium Park there was fantastic. Then it was off to North Carolina to visit my mom and my sister's family. Miss C is still there, spending a week hanging out with cousins and her Grandma, and having a wonderful time.

Meanwhile, I'm back in San Francisco and a week into second year Spanish at City College. Miss C will have to catch up with me when she gets back!

We have such a busy fall planned for her. Besides Spanish, there will be geometry and algebra; Latin; Roman history & culture; CyberEd physical science; ballet; jazz dance; piano; voice; musical theater; and then rehearsals all fall for Christmas Revels (with 11 shows in December). Oh, yes, and we are continuing to work on her writing using a CTY course in book form; and she has ZigZagZine, her own bi-monthly newsletter; and monthly presentations to do for SFBAGHS. Not to mention that I've ordered tickets for three operas this fall.

I continue to feel ambivalent about continuing this blog. Now that Miss C is so much a full-fledged person in her own right, I don't feel I can just write about her here, yet I have no interest in writing about homeschooling generally. I imagine at some point, I'll transition out of writing this blog, but for now, I'm still here... if sporadically.

Summer reflections

2008-06-08T08:36:00.000-07:00

Miss C and I both have June birthdays, so the natural end to the "school year" always feels like a new year to us. Going into summer, I feel our natural segue into different kinds of activities and look back on the past year in wonder.

We started homeschooling six years ago, when Miss C finished her second year of preschool. Each of those six years since then has been different. We started out unschooling and have gradually built up a capacity for more extended academic work and projects. It feels good, as if we are always working at the level(s) and in the ways appropriate for Miss C at the given moment.

This has been a particularly excellent year, with new relationships and community growing out of the homeschool support group I co-founded, San Francisco Bay Area Gifted Homeschoolers. It has been wonderful to find some local peers for Miss C and to share many experiences with other families homeschooling gifted children.

This year had two distinct parts for us. Fall was relatively structured (by our standards), with us attending a regular Spanish class together at a community college; Miss C had outside classes in piano and dance and did a research project and computer-based presentation each month; we studied California and Mexico history; and we worked on beginning algebra together. And Miss C had a fairly intense rehearsal schedule for Christmas Revels, with 11 shows in December.

We both dislike having a heavy regular schedule, despite our interest in all we learn through classes. By the time the Revels season was over, we were both ready for a break.

So this spring semester, we've been more free-form in our approach. We kept only her weekly piano lesson and even that got a 2-month break while her teacher was overseas. During that time we took a trip to Mexico and participated in a Spanish immersion program. We also took a trip to New York for a week to see shows and a trip to Big Sur for a week to see redwoods and dramatic rocky shores and waterfalls. In between we've had many wonderful hikes and other outdoors experiences, so that we are both now very tan.

Classes creep back in. We found a wonderful voice teacher and added weekly lessons with her. Miss C had the opportunity to join in a weekly Latin class and has enjoyed that immensely. But the best things have come about because she didn't have so many regular classes scheduled.

On our own we've continued with algebra, American history, Spanish, and lots of marine biology. Due to our copious free time, we stumbled into a wonderful docent training program at a state park, and after completing it, we've given tidepool tours at a state park for the rest of the spring. We joined the Monterey Bay Aquarium and have happily immersed in all it has to offer. Tidepooling has led Miss C to an interest in geology and we've begun to explore that, too.

In looking ahead to next fall (busy homeschool moms we know are already planning group classes), it looks like we may take a similar tack in the coming year. A heavily scheduled fall, and then a spring semester in which we break free, travel, and leave ourselves open to serendipity. It seems a good way to have some of each lifestyle... since we seem to want to have it all.

Self-Directed Learning

2008-05-27T07:58:00.000-07:00

Today I will include without comment an excerpt from John Holt's 1969 book, The Underachieving School.

QUESTION
(from the editors of Education News, New York City)
If America's schools were to take one giant step forward this year toward a better tomorrow, what should it be?

ANSWER
(from John Holt)
It would be to let every child be the planner, director, and assessor of his own education, to allow and encourage him, with the inspiration and guidance of more experienced and expert people, and as much help as he asks for, to decide what he is to learn, when he is to learn it. How he is to learn it, and how well he is learning it. It would be to make our schools, instead of what they are, which is jails for children, into a resource for free and independent learning, which everyone in the community, of whatever age, could use as much or as little as he wanted.

Reading Aloud

2008-05-17T12:01:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite homeschooling strategies is reading aloud to my daughter. She is almost 11, and I still do this, though not as much as before. Now, it is generally non-fiction at a high level that I read to her, not fiction.

For example, this month she did research on Rachel Carson for a PowerPoint presentation. She read a children's biography of Carson, a middle-school level biography of her, and a bunch of Web sites, and we watched a documentary about her. She had read some of Carson's book The Edge of the Sea in our tidepool study. But I also read aloud to a her a relatively short new adult book called The Gentle Subversive (about Carson) and parts of Linda Lear's authoritative biography, Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature.

Although she reads at a high level and could read these books herself, when I read aloud, she and I take turns interrupting the reading so that I can define terms, elaborate on what was going on in society at the time, and so on, to provide context and a fuller understanding of the information.

We also listen to audio in the car together and stop the CD constantly to define words, discuss the meaning of concepts, etc. We've been listening to California: A History, by longtime state historian Kevin Starr. In the last couple of days I stopped to define (and spell) "coup d'etat;" to explain "Marxist philosophy" as it arose in the 1870s as a response to the abuses of the industrial revolution (this was just tossed off in the book as if everyone understood what it meant, in the context of rowdy 1870s San Francisco); and some more interesting stuff I can't remember right this minute.

When she was little I read aloud to her a lot. We started homeschooling when she was 5, and I read non-fiction to her as well as fiction. At first, I also often had her read aloud to me. Both my reading to her and her reading to me helped her with pronunciation. Many kids who read a lot have a much larger reading vocabulary than spoken vocabulary. With our wacky language, there are plenty of words you wouldn't know how to pronounce correctly unless you'd heard them first, or had someone gently correct an initial mispronunciation.

However, sometime that year she got impatient with me and preferred to read fiction to herself. I'd get up to go get a cup of tea, and come back to find she had already read 20 pages ahead. So I stopped reading aloud for a while, as she zoomed ahead in her reading level, plowing through many books.

Sometime later, when she was 6, I discovered she had taught herself how to speed-read. I asked her to read something aloud, and not only did she read way too fast, but she was skipping all the articles and prepositions! So we worked on her "re-learning" how to read aloud, including enunciating all those words she skims past when she reads to herself.

I also believe that hearing information read aloud stimulates audio learning, which is not my daughter's first preference -- she is extremely visual-spatial, and prefers to see to learn.

I had a good lesson in this myself when, for two years, Miss C and I participated in a family singing get-together called Sing Thing. Sing Thing leader Sandi Morey did not believe in lyric sheets; she expected us to learn folk songs, songs in other languages, and any other songs she taught by listening. Wow, was that hard for me, a strong visual learner myself. It was definitely an experience outside my comfort zone. But I really did begin to learn songs more easily this way as time went on. It was helpfully fine-tuning some alternate neural pathways for me, to have the experience of learning in a way I wouldn't have normally chosen.

Years ago, I was very inspired, in reading many of the Little House on the Prairie books to Miss C, including the biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, to learn that she attributed her storytelling skills to frequent reading aloud in her home. Not only were there no distractions like computers, radio, or TV, but her sister had contracted an illness that left her blind as a teenager. Wilder read aloud frequently to her sister, often from the serialized fiction in newspapers of the day.

In the nineteenth century, many educated and intellectual families read aloud among the family in the evenings. I can just imagine the scenes in front of a crackling fire. It seems like a tradition worth holding onto, or resurrecting, in this technological age.

Gadget by Geek Girl

2008-05-11T16:31:00.000-07:00

I've received a link to a Google Gadget by email from Miss C. Added to my Web browser startup page, iGoogle.com, it shows me a picture of a birthday cake along with a helpful countdown of days until Miss C's birthday.

(It's a bit anticlimactic, since she's been rounding her age up to the next year ever since 6 months past her last birthday.)

If you (or your geeky child) would like to make your own Gadget, you can do so here.

A 10yo State Park Docent

2008-04-25T09:07:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Miss C and I gave our first school-group tour of the tidepools at Natural Bridges State Park. We had 25 third-graders, seven parents, and a teacher. Whew!

After our 30-minute presentation about tidepools in the nature center, the teacher asked me if Miss C was out of school on spring break. "No," I said, "she's homeschooled." "Ohhhhh," she said, as she nodded knowingly, "no wonder she knows so much about this."

We then took our group out to the tidepools for an hour and a half. It was pretty exhausting! Knowledge and interpretation of the tidepools was the easy part. It was crowd management that was tiring. We had a great group, but still, moving that number of people on a trail down to the beach, across the beach, climbing up the rocky side of the hill, and then moving them quietly through a senior citizens' community to get to the tidepools was a challenge. It struck me that this is the life of a schoolteacher, managing the group more than imparting knowledge.

Miss C and I had completed a docent training program at Natural Bridges that was intended for adults. Another homeschool mom, who was already a docent at Fitzgerald Marine Reserve near Half Moon Bay, had finagled a spot in the training program for her son, who would then be a "co-docent" with her in leading tours. She told me about it and Miss C and I were able to enroll as a co-docent team as well.

The training program was interesting. Besides the two homeschool moms and two 10yos, there were a couple of retirees. However, the bulk of the class was college students from UC Santa Cruz, who were doing an internship as part of an environmental studies class. We really appreciated the opportunity for Miss C to be a part of a program that wasn't diluted for kids. That opportunity was due to the open mind and creative thinking of the wonderful head ranger there, Martha Nitzberg, and just a bit to me being a pushy mom who said she could do it.

After our first tour yesterday, I told Martha what a great opportunity it was for Miss C. When Miss C was 5, she wanted to read to preschoolers, and we did get her one opportunity to do so at her former preschool. Since then she has continually looked for ways that she could tutor, teach, or guide younger kids. She was inspired by examples like Isadora Duncan, who first started giving dance lessons to neighborhood children when she was 7. This past fall, she had a weekly tutoring gig, helping a younger fellow homeschooler learn how to read. But this docent program is what she had in mind all along -- the opportunity to be knowledgeable and to share her knowledge and passion for learning with others in a structured situation.

"If you want to learn something, teach it," it is said. This program has inspired an intense interest in marine biology in Miss C. What a fantastic "curriculum" for science.

Theater/Theatre/Going to a Show

2008-04-19T18:23:00.000-07:00

My daughter is seriously interested in the performing arts. She loves to perform, but she has also aspired to be a director, for example, as in a director of Broadway shows. She loves musicals, Shakespeare, ballet, the symphony, opera -- many forms involving a stage, careful and elaborate production, and dazzling performance.

Thus, I have a happy job as director and facilitator of learning opportunities for her. This week we've been in New York to catch four very different kinds of Broadway shows. Three were musicals and one a serious drama, but even the musicals were different from each other. They were A Chorus Line (almost a historical piece at this point, with references to being gay as if that were a big deal), a much-touted revival of South Pacific (racism themes that unfortunately are not as dated in many places in this country, I'm afraid), and Sunday in the Park with George. We enjoyed them all, but I'd say South Pacific was the standout by far. Miss C knew it well from the DVD and listening and singing along to the music on CD and iPod.

Today, however, was the crowning experience of the week, when we saw an amazing drama, Thurgood, about Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, starring Laurence Fishburne. A one-man show, it kept us riveted for the entire 90-minute performance without intermission. We have studied the civil rights movement and so Miss C was familiar with Brown vs. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 case overturning segregation that Marshall argued before the Supreme Court. But all of us (her dad included) learned a lot today about the realities of "using the law as a weapon," as Marshall did in the fight for civil rights for African-Americans. Fishburne was incredible, channeling Marshall from his college days in the 1930s along with classmate Langston Hughes to his final days on the Supreme Court. In the latter part of the show Fishburne's body language had subtly changed, and he had become an old man in front of our eyes.

Another unique aspect of this theater experience was the large number of African-Americans in the audience, which I have not seen at other Broadway shows (except at The Color Purple, which I also enjoyed). I got a kick out of the many murmurs in the crowd when Marshall/Fishburne announced some critical benchmark in the struggle for civil rights. It was almost as if they wanted to say, "Amen," or "Tell it, brother," the kind of interactivity you get in a lively African-American church. It was wonderful, and really added to the experience for me.

So often my husband and I joke about our homeschooling activities, and the way they defy easy categorization into subjects. Today was such a day. Was it history? Or social studies? Or theater and drama study? Or civics? Or a living biography? Or inspiration? The answer to all of these questions is yes. And like so many of our activities, it was integrated with real life, the real world, in a very wonderful way.

Book: The Homeschooling Option

2008-04-04T08:52:00.001-07:00

For those who are "thinking about homeschooling," a new book by Lisa Rivero provides a wonderful overview of all the relevant issues and has suggestions and resources aplenty to address them. The Homeschooling Option: How to Decide When it's Right for Your Family is Rivero's third book about homeschooling, and the most general of the three.

Rivero's earlier book, Creative Home Schooling for Smart Families (originally titled Creative Home Schooling for Gifted Children) is an essential guide for families homeschooling gifted children. Full of creative ideas and resources, it's one we turn to again and again.

This new book is for any family considering homeschooling, but since Rivero homeschools her own gifted son, there are plenty of mentions of the special interests families with gifted children may have, such as discussion of distance learning, community college classes, and so on.

This book is a great way to get started on a homeschooling journey.

CHSPE - What does it mean?

2008-03-31T20:38:00.000-07:00

I've just registered my daughter to take the CHSPE (California High School Proficiency Exam) in June and I am wondering what it all means. I don't have any doubt that she can pass the test. But really, it gives me pause. It's not equivalent to having finished a rigorous high school curriculum. It's more of a "get out of jail free" pass. For many purposes, it is considered equivalent to a high school diploma, so you can move on with your life.

Why do I want her to take the test? Quite simply, so we can have unfettered access to community college classes for her. We want her to be able to register along with regular students, rather than having the leftovers of classes and time slots available. And I will register along with her, on an audit basis -- for now.

I expect the flap about homeschooling being illegal in California to die down, deservedly. But still, I mobilized for the CHSPE partly on the basis of extracting my daughter from the clutches of government schools. Thank you, anyway -- we don't need your stinkin' supervision by a certified teacher. Look at the wonders wrought by a child learning mostly "unsupervised." Rather -- facilitated, guided, celebrated by her mother who loves her (er, homeschool teacher).

More about this to come as we clear this benchmark.

Tech Training

2008-03-22T19:24:00.000-07:00

I've been a little too busy to post lately, what with the brouhaha over homeschooling here in California, on top of all our usual projects. I've been writing letters to legislators and emails to our homeschool group and concerned homeschool friends in other states, etc. I hope this will blow over soon as it is a very icky experience.

But back to something really important -- trying to help facilitate my daughter's learning. We have several fantastic irons in the fire right now, more than I can touch on just now. So I'll just mention one aspect, Miss C's urgent need to know everything about Web publishing *right now.*

She already publishes a fantastic zine using InDesign, posted to a blog-based Web site. I won't link to it here as she uses her real name. But now she really wants to know Dreamweaver better, beyond just messing around with it on her own (in my opinion, the best way to learn any software).

We signed her up for an ID Tech camp in June, in which she'll be working with Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and Flash. But that's a long way away, so we have put Dreamweaver into our daily schedule of "homeschooling," the work we do at home during the day when we're not out gadding about or on a field trip. (Homework at night? What is that, pray tell?)

I gave her an overview of Dreamweaver, and then asked her to go through the Lynda.com video tutorials (trying to buy myself some time to finish up other projects). Boom, just like that, she is done with them. Okay. She's started a development site for practice, and already it is more complex than what I would have started her with. "I'm trying to get the hang of these navigator menu bars," she said. Okay, no need to spend too much time on the basics when you could get right into that.

I love how quick she is but it makes everything so intense. The idea that I, as the "teacher," can give her something to work on for a while, so I can do lesson plans or schedule our next attendance at a play or something, is a joke. She goes so fast and skips over things but knows them anyway. I will be on my toes for this next phase, until she surpasses me, the person who's been building Web sites for 13 years, and then I really hope she will show me some cool things she discovers.

Book Review: High IQ Kids

2008-02-29T21:30:00.000-08:00

I've just published a review of the book High IQ Kids: Collected Insights, Information, and Personal Stories from the Experts here on our homeschool Web site. The book is about exceptionally and profoundly gifted children, and was compiled and edited by Kiesa Kay, Deborah Robson, and Judy Fort Brenneman for parents and teachers.

I find the book a valuable addition to my giftedness and learning library. It's published by Free Spirit Publishing, which specializes in giftedness as well as self-help for kids, social and emotional needs of kids, etc. I've raved about the company in this space before.

Read the review of High IQ Kids here.

Facebook Group for Gifted Homeschooling Families

2008-02-25T20:52:00.000-08:00

Are you on Facebook? If so, and you homeschool your gifted children, please join us in the Facebook group "Gifted Homeschoolers Worldwide." Here's a link to a Web page that will connect you to the Facebook group page:

http://giftedhomeschoolersworldwide.com

There are two families in the group already who are homeschooling as they travel around the world. Most of us are planted here in the U.S., but this could change over time!

A Facebook account is free and you can specify privacy settings so that you share any personal information only with your "Friends" (whom you choose), but you can still participate in a public group like this one, and learn from those who gather there, as well as connecting with people who have similar interests!

Hope to see you there.

Imagine Magazine Revisited

2008-02-11T08:45:00.001-08:00

I raved about Imagine magazine, from Johns Hopkins University's Center for Talented Youth (CTY), in this space a year and a half ago. Since then the magazine has improved so much I felt the need to write about it again.

Please see my article for details.

Beautiful Bay Area Wilderness

2008-02-07T08:30:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite aspects of homeschooling is to be able to take a weekday hike on one of the glorious mountains surrounding our beautiful Bay Area. My friend Kris Konrad organizes hikes for homeschoolers in some of the most beautiful spots, (see Nature Explorers of the East Bay).

This week we climbed trails beside a rushing creek on Mount Diablo. After a month's worth of heavy rain, everything is green, green, green, and it was a glorious sunny day.

Miss C complains about steep trails, all the more reason I insist she climb them. It reminds me of Katherine Hepburn's admonishment to Jane Fonda about "not being soggy." She insisted that a person must keep challenging herself, and she always did so. Thanks for the inspiration, Ms. Hepburn.

Everything smelled great out there, freshly washed by all the rain and creeks following both their official paths as well as cutting new ruts in the trail. Yes, it was very muddy and that was okay.

I wish more of our homeschool friends enjoyed the freedom of an unscheduled day (so many of them are booked with umpty-dozen classes) and the privilege of climbing trees and poking sticks in a rushing creek all day. Miss C and I feel exhilarated when we are in the woods together. This is a value I learned from my parents and I so, so hope she will always cherish wilderness as I do.

I see no contradiction in my love of nature and my love of technology. I always needed the "high touch" to balance the "high tech." Already Miss C is a geek girl extraordinaire. It's my moral obligation to help her know the joys of nature to an equal extent.

Gosh, I love my job.

XTimeline - Collaborative Timelines for Anything

2008-02-02T07:44:00.000-08:00

XTimeline is a cool Web 2.0 application that should be a fun resource for homeschoolers. You can view timelines created by others, you can create your own timelines, or you can add to timelines created by others.

For example, here's a timeline on the history of New York City, with 58 entries. You can view the multimedia timeline, scrolling through the years chronologically, or you can jump around in time as you wish. Click on any event or marker to see details. The details posted can include media such as text, photos, videos, etc. linked from other sources. You can also view events as a list. Events are "tagged" so that if you search on any of these keywords you will find the timeline.

There are Groups of timelines, such as "U.S. Presidents" -- one timeline for all of them and individual ones for specific presidents -- only a few so far. Maybe your child will make one for one of the missing presidents. Or, your children, or your children and their friends -- the terrific thing is that this can be collaborative. You can have multiple creators.

XTimeline is still in beta so be patient. It's slow to respond to requests and sometimes you have to reload/refresh to see a timeline. But this could be a powerful learning tool because it lets your child create something, something that can be shared with the world, about a topic he or she is studying.

The act of creating such a timeline involves a child interactively with the information... sure beats just reading and answering questions on a test. And the pride of creation is a powerful incentive. Plus, we'll all benefit from what each of us creates!

Language Immersion

2008-01-28T07:56:00.000-08:00

We've just returned from two weeks of Spanish immersion in Veracruz, Mexico. Except for both my daughter and me getting sick, it was a fantastic learning experience.

Immersion is highly recommended as a means for gifted, visual-spatial learners to learn a new language. I'd read this and understood this, but having experienced it, I am now a true believer.

Miss C and I had done a first-semester Spanish course at our nearby community college. Compared to that, the immersion experience was lightning-fast. Although it was intense, we both liked the rapid pace so much better. And we were talking! We were having actual conversations in Spanish with some wonderful young people, "charlantes" who are native speakers.

Our two favorites, with whom we spent the most time, had each just graduated from the University of Veracruz in communications, at the top of their class. They were so intelligent and fun to be with, too. I had great discussions with them about politics, in Mexico, the U.S., and the world; about philosophy of life; about women's issues. Because I was engaged in the conversations, and wanted to express myself, I would search for the words and they would help me find them. And I won't forget those words I needed to express my thoughts!

Miss C had her best conversational experiences when we were out on field trips, and shopping for this and that in the mercados. I am "shopping-challenged" so it was fun for her to be able to chat with these lively young women as we toured the stalls.

I wish we had had a longer time there, but being sick, I was glad to come back home. My next plan is to visit Baja California to watch the baby whales, and speak Spanish along the way. ¡Viva la inmersión!

Internet "Literacies" for Homeschoolers

2007-11-12T06:53:00.000-08:00

I'm too busy to post regularly on this blog. But I still want to hold on to it for a "place to put things." Here's one.

I've posted previously about using Wikispaces for collaborative learning. I'm loving using Google groups, with its shared Web pages, for our local gifted homeschoolers group. Along those lines, here's a lovely wiki site that discusses "New Internet Literacies for Educators: Blogs, Wikis, RSS, Online Bookmarking"... and much more...Weblogged.

What I like about this site by Will Richardson is that he doesn't just recommend lots of sources for Internet collaboration -- he really explains why you need them, and it's not just for "getting organized." He explains the larger social implications of how our kids (and we) will be collaborating and communicating virtually in the years ahead. It's nice to see this applied to "educators" (that would be us homeschoolers). His insights that "The new world of learning requires us to teach students to be independent learners," not dependent on teachers, but "self-directing, self-selecting, self-editing, self-organizing, self-reflecting, self-publishing" are very welcome.

-- Weblogged is a set of lecture notes from Will Richardson's presentations
-- Will Richardson's Blog - "Weblogg-ed -- Learning with the Read/Write Web" (really great stuff on all manner of virtual collaboration for learning)

Book: Early Entrance to College

2007-10-28T16:24:00.000-07:00

Our homeschool group's recent "Early College Workshop" was a success, providing over 50 parents and potential young college students with information and inspiration. One of the handouts I prepared for the workshop was a book review of Michelle Muratori's Early Entrance to College: A Guide to Success. You can download the pdf of my review.

Sally Ride Science Festival

2007-09-30T06:34:00.000-07:00

We attended a Sally Ride Science Festival yesterday, which Miss C really enjoyed. This is a great event held in several cities on the West and East Coasts, designed to encourage "middle school" age girls to maintain an interest in science.

It's not so much the science learning that's important at this event as it is the deep cultural affirmation of girls and women doing science. There is a festival-type atmosphere with balloons, and music over loudspeakers, which makes it all very cool. There were 5th to 8th grade girls all over the place, very into the experience, which also contributed to the positive reinforcement. There were many experiments to try at a couple dozen booths around a grassy outdoor area.

Hip Google women wearing t-shirts with the female symbol instead of one of the "Os" in "Google" handed out lip balm with the same logo. Miss C really enjoyed their workshop on the new version of Google Earth, which includes an exploration of the sky. (Here's a fun video of Sally Ride introducing it.)

Besides visiting all the booths, girls get two hands-on workshops at the event. It was very difficult for Miss C to choose from all the interesting offerings.

Sally Ride herself was wonderful, and tirelessly answered dozens of the girls' questions after her talk. Ride was the first American woman in space, and at the time, the youngest astronaut. She'd just finished her Ph.D. in physics at Stanford when she joined NASA, and then trained for 5 years before her first space flight.

There is still a shortage of women in science and math careers and it's great that Sally Ride and her organization are helping to encourage girls at this critical age. Girls' interest in science falls off dramatically during these years, with few pursuing high school and college courses. Ms. Ride said that even though she herself had always been interested in science, and had always made good grades in it, that in high school she wondered if she were smart enough to continue with it in college, to have a career in science. Encouragement by a valued mentor made all the difference to her then. Clearly her career in science has been illustrious, and she is now an excellent role model for these young girls.

Sally Ride Science publishes books and other materials about women in science careers as well as producing the Festivals and one-week summer science camps for girls.

Video: Evolution

2007-09-23T16:51:00.000-07:00

We've just finished up the 8-hour PBS Series Evolution (link to Amazon, but we rented it from Netflix). This is an outstanding piece of science education.

Before I go any further in my praise of this excellent production, I want to say that it is incomplete without the companion Web site at pbs.org. The critical lessons the Web site offers -- the difference between "theory" and "fact" in science (the former is much stronger than the latter... just the opposite of common usage), and the true understanding of what science is -- are necessary to get the full benefit of the series.

This comes into focus very critically in the very last episode, "What About God?," in which evangelical Christians arguing against evolution clearly do not understand the nature of science or terms like "theory" and "fact" in scientific usage. Yet we are rewarded by hearing from eloquent Christian college students in biochemistry and geology who do understand science, and who have reconciled their faith with their passion for science, and do not see them in conflict.

But first, the previous seven episodes take us on a multidimensional tour of evolutionary evidence. My favorite episodes showed the study of evolution in "real time," today. One episode showed how AIDS virus researchers study the rapid evolution of the AIDS virus in human patients, the reason they continually develop resistance to formerly effective anti-viral drugs. Another equally fascinating episode studied the same phenomenon in tuberculosis patients in Russian prisons (who were thus an isolated study group).

But other episodes showed us the big picture, with geologists pointing out layers of evolutionary time in hills over African deserts, formerly underwater. We saw the skeletons of intermediate forms between whales and land mammals discovered through study of fossil skeletons.

Miss C became fascinated with paleontology during the course of the series, but was given equally compelling peeks into genetics labs, into medical research labs, and onto a Western ranch where knowledge of evolution allows ranchers to fight invasive weeds that choke out grasses needed for cattle.

Through the various episodes, the understanding that the theory of evolution underlies all of biology, as well as being a critical component of geology and most other sciences, was developed fully and completely.

Watch this excellent series, but don't miss the companion textbook and interactive lessons available for free on the wonderful PBS Web site.

Book/Audio: A Patriot's Handbook

2007-09-08T11:41:00.000-07:00

Miss C and I have really been enjoying the audio version of Caroline Kennedy's A Patriot's Handbook: Poems, Stories, and Speeches Celebrating the Land We Love. We have the book version as well, and both are very valuable. To go back and read the printed words, not missing a detail, is very helpful. But the stirring oratory in the audio version, from speeches to poetry to passages from important books in our culture, is tremendously inspiring.

We have the three-CD set in the car and listen to a few speeches and other selections at a time, on the way to one destination or another. For pieces from the past 70 or so years, it's thrilling to be able to hear the actual recorded voices of great people from American history. To hear Neil Armstrong's words as he first set foot on the moon, Franklin Delano Roosevelt telling us that "...the only thing we have to fear is fear itself," John F. Kennedy admonishing "...ask not what your country can do for you," or to hear Martin Luther King, Jr. calling out "I have a dream" is to feel the impact these words must have had when they were first delivered, and to appreciate their brilliance and importance.

But Miss C and I have also been stunned by the words of inspirational leaders from an earlier time, words read aloud by actors like James Earl Jones and others with powerful voices. It has been amazing to hear Sojourner Truth crying out "Ain't I a Woman?" and Langston Hughes' defiant "Merry-Go-Round" ("On the bus we're put in the back --/ But there ain't no back/ To a merry-go-round!/ Where's the horse/ For a kid that's black?), both voiced by outstanding readers. I had never heard of Chief Red Jacket, but his 1805 "Speech Against Missionaries' Efforts to Baptize Members of the Seneca Tribe" was an outstanding piece of scholarship as well as one of the best persuasive speeches I have heard.

Yesterday we heard Abigail Adams' letter to John Adams in which she reminds him to "Remember the ladies," or if not, "...we are determined to foment a Rebelion [sic], and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation." Astonishingly, it took almost 200 years for Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique to arrive after Abigail Adams' words of warning. Still, listening to a powerful passage from Friedan's book, 47 years after its publication, added further emphasis to the historical lesson represented by both womens' words. On a different CD, we heard Susan B. Anthony (voiced by an actress) defend herself in court, when arrested for voting. I have long respected and admired Anthony's work, but I now also understand how truly brilliant she was. Not to mention courageous!

This is a strong, balanced collection, including not only the words of progressives and reformers (like those who founded this country, and those who fought to make it truer to its creed), but also those of conservatives like Ronald Reagan, John McCain, and Richard Nixon (upon returning from his trip to China). Between the printed book and the audio recordings, this is to me an essential addition to the study of American history, civics, and our culture.

Going to College

2007-08-30T07:06:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking a lot about my daughter attending college classes, as I've been organizing a workshop on Early College for our gifted homeschoolers group. It's exciting to learn of others who have started taking community college classes early and then gone on to excellent 4-year college experiences as well as grad school.

Miss C and I have been doing a trial run, of sorts, at our local community college, this fall (starting two weeks ago). I'm enrolled in a Spanish course and she has been coming to class with me. The professor doesn't mind if she comes with me, but doesn't call on her or include her in the class. That's just fine with us -- we are sharing a book and handouts, and doing all the homework and practicing speaking at home. Plus, we're including my husband in our home study, as we plan for a 3-week Spanish immersion program in Mexico in January.

It's interesting to see how Miss C is doing in the class. She is following everything, taking it all in, and her pronunciation is so much better than mine. But she has a hard time taking written notes fast enough. Since I'm taking notes, it's not a problem, we have mine -- but each class she tries harder to get it all down. As I said... this is a trial run. What a great incentive for her to learn the value of writing quickly by hand, to get down notes in a class, and to have practice at doing so.

We tried enrolling her in a homeschool Spanish class that was just too babyish. She's worked with Rosetta Stone and other online materials to learn Spanish, but we haven't been consistent enough about it, and haven't made that much progress. The pace of this class is so much faster, very interactive, lots of speaking -- it's just right. Miss C has always done so much better when challenged, and we really need a knowledgeable teacher to take us where we want to go.

Besides the content of the class, just being in and around this community college has been enlightening for Miss C. For example, we're learning to use the library's Library of Congress cataloging system (instead of the familiar Dewey Decimal System).

Then there is the cultural experience of being among the other students. Miss C can now easily tell the difference between a serious student and a "Grade 13er" (the ones who still don't have a book after two weeks in class, and ask if they can borrow a pen to take notes, or who have already dropped the class). She's extremely critical of the students who hang around outside the buildings, smoking. I suggest that we pity the poor fools their addictions, and cut a wide swath around them.

Then there are the interesting, serious students like the one we encountered on her work-study job at the Diego Rivera Theater yesterday. We had sought it out after our class, wanting to see the huge Rivera mural in the lobby of the theater building (painted there in 1940). It is so in keeping with our Mexico and California study this fall, in preparation for our trip, as well as an important piece of art history. The mural includes a life-size portrait of Rivero's wife, Frida Kahlo. The young woman watching over this treasure was happy to chat about the mural, Rivera, and Kahlo. She told us to go check out the small collection of Kahlo's work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It was a lovely encounter and encouraging about what can be found within the community college environment, if you seek it out.

Video: The Future We Will Create: Inside the World of TED

2007-08-21T17:03:00.000-07:00

As a person who founded a technology magazine and edited it for 9 years — a magazine at the confluence of technology, design, and media — of course I think these are fundamental topics to be included in a young person’s education today. We have a joyfully geeky household. Making Web pages, spinning out a pdf from a page layout, creating a computer-based presentation, writing a blog, animating a story – these are activities that are as worthy of homeschooling time as learning about more traditional subjects.

So it was that we sat down to watch a documentary together on the annual TED conference, an exclusive annual gathering for leaders in Technology, Entertainment, and Design. “The Future We Will Create: Inside the World of TED,” a 2007 documentary, takes us behind the scenes and into the audience of the 2006 happening. The technology is whiz-bang stuff. For example: An incredible touch-screen monitor system, recently developed, lets you interact with computer-based data using not only two hands, but all ten fingers… individually. Stretching a graphic by moving your fingers on the screen. [Video here.] Seeing this demonstration was reminiscent of the early glory days at Macworld Expos. Whooee!

But TED has really developed an extraordinary conscience in recent years, and the technology is seen as a tool to solve the world’s problems and make it a better place. So it was that at last year’s conference, Al Gore was one of the stars of the show, giving the presentation that ultimately became the basis for his documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Tech leaders in Silicon Valley as well as entertainment and design gurus were impressed and motivated to become involved. But perhaps even more impressive was a presentation by Majora Carter, an environmental activist from the Bronx who has made amazing things happen within an area of extreme urban blight.

Other really big problems took center stage and received promises of assistance from moneyed leaders of the tech world — addressing the Asian bird flu epidemic, sustainable housing for people in developing African countries, and more.

The video is a great introduction to the world of TED — very accessible and inspiring for bright, tech-savvy young people. Then, you can see individual presentations on YouTube (search for “TEDtalks”). One of my absolute favorites for homeschoolers is on Creativity by Sir Ken Robinson. [Video here.] Let’s just say he is not a fan of our educational system and that he is brilliant and funny in deriding it.

There is also a TED blog which is excellent and filled with lots of great ideas, video clips and more. A recent favorite resource: “100 Websites You Should Know and Use.” Great stuff!

[The video "The Future We Will Create: Inside the World of TED" is available through Netflix.]

Acceleration for the Highly to Profoundly Gifted

2007-08-19T07:09:00.000-07:00

"Are We Failing Our Geniuses?" -- a new article in Time (Aug. 16, 2007) -- really "gets" the gifted issue, especially as it relates to exceptionally and profoundly gifted kids, better than I have usually seen in mainstream media.

The article features The Davidson Academy in Reno, Nevada, the new public high school for PG kids, but it goes beyond just another profile of that school and its precocious students. The author, John Cloud, cites Miraca Gross's excellent work with this kind of population (above 160 IQ) in Australia. And he leaps beyond the need for a specialized school for a few willing to move to Reno, and strongly advocates acceleration within individual communities.

It can be puzzling to those who don't have a child like this to understand that sometimes 2 or 3 grade skips are necessary and that college classes in individual subjects may also be necessary long before the student is ready to "go away to college." It's very encouraging to have this sort of discussion in a mainstream publication, because this perception needs to be diffuse. In every school in which there is even one kid who is sitting there miserable with boredom, wasting his abilities for lack of challenge and losing the precious opportunity to develop them to their potential, this need for acceleration must be understood. It's good to see this out there.

Central Children's Room, Donnell Library Center, NYC

2007-08-09T08:17:00.000-07:00

If you live near New York City or have chance to visit there, a special place your kids will enjoy is the Central Children's Room at the Donnell Library Center, a branch of the New York Public Library. Filled with history, the Central Children's Room holds both the NYPL's largest children's book collection and a spectacular research library for children's book authors and illustrators.

The Central Children's Room has so many fairy tales and and folk tales in its collection that they are are in a separate section, instead of filed where the "398s" would normally be. A special room holds treasures which may only be seen by appointment, a rich collection of 18th and 19th century children's books.

For visiting kids, the must-see attractions are the original Winnie-the-Pooh toys, donated by author A.A. Milne -- Pooh, Tigger, Eeyore, Kanga, Owl -- and Mary Poppins' umbrella and other related objects, donated by author P.L. Travers.

Pooh and friends were originally given to young Christopher Robin Milne between 1920 and 1922. Pooh Bear was bought at Harrod's in London for Christopher's first birthday. All the stuffed animals have the worn appearance of well-loved animals, and don't look a thing like the Disney characters. They will remind you of the line art illustrations in the Pooh books.

The Central Children's Room holds wonderful original paintings by N.C. Wyeth (father of artist Andrew Wyeth) which were used as illustrations in a 1917 edition of Robin Hood. Frequent special exhibitions showcase the original work of current children's book illustrators.

Other special exhibitions are a treat as well. In May we enjoyed a display of winning work in the 2007 Ezra Jack Keats Bookmaking Competition for middle schoolers and high schoolers in New York City. Miss C read book after book written by these young students, and oohed and aahed over the illustrations and book designs, including pop-up books and many other creative forms.

The Donnell Library Center is in the heart of Manhattan, right across the street from the Museum of Modern Art. It's well worth a look if you have a chance.

Baseball, Dad, and History

2007-08-08T07:58:00.000-07:00

When considering a homeschooling curriculum, there is much more to include than math, science, reading, writing, and so on. There is also baseball.

Last night, Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants broke Hank Aaron's home run record with his 756th. Today my husband Neil, Miss C’s dad, steps in as guest blogger with a report.

-----

We saw history last night.

The atmosphere was electric from the minute we got near AT&T Park, with far more TV trucks than usual, more boats and police in McCovey Cove than usual, and everyone talking about how this would be the night.

"Than usual" makes it sound like we go to games every night. We don't. But we've been going occasionally since Miss C was 3 or 4, and she loves her Giants. She carried with her last night the orange foam #1 finger that she got at the same ballpark many years ago and pointed out with pride that, while other kids had shiny new ones, hers was the well worn finger of a veteran fan.

Each time Barry Bonds came up to bat, all 43,000 people stood up. And it seemed like each of them had a camera or cameraphone with a flash -- the world's biggest disco ball. Miss C had to stand up on her seat to be able to see. We had great seats, near third base with a perfect view of home plate.

We watched the game intently, keeping track of it on a baseball scorecard that's modified to be easier for kids to use, with Miss C asking tons of questions as she hones her knowledge of baseball.

When Bonds hit number 756, I'm sure the happy look on my face was just as big as the huge one I could see on hers. As everyone went nuts, we watched the ball go out to the bleachers, then turned our attention to Bonds as he rounded second base and came toward us on his way around third. We saw him hug his son at the plate, point upward in a gesture that everyone knew was about his deceased father, and begin the celebration.

And then the surprise: A video message from Hank Aaron that had everyone visibly moved. As Bonds talked to the crowd and thanked the fans, he was almost directly in front of us. (OK, so we were 37 rows back, but that's still pretty close.) Just an awesome moment.

Then we watched the "Bonds Squad" in the left-field bleachers go nuts as he took the field for the resumption of the game. He went out there to get the ovation from his most loyal fans, then left the game for the night.

After the game, he was again right in front of us, doing TV interviews, and we got down to about Row 10 to watch. We'll see how my photos of Miss C came out, with him in the background being interviewed.

As we left the stadium, walking around the long way to soak up the atmosphere and let her see the Coke-bottle slide that had been her favorite part of a Giants game in the early years, we bought a souvenir "756" baseball that she said she'll show to her grandchildren, to tell them she was there that night.

Hank Aaron's record stood for 34 years. Before 1974, Babe Ruth held the record for 53 years. This one might not last as long, but it'll be around for a while, and we'll always remember the moment and the night.

Book: Life of Fred: Beginning Algebra

2007-08-03T07:43:00.000-07:00

As I wrote in my post about The Phantom X, I am preparing to start algebra with my daughter this fall. On the way to reviewing Jacobs’ Elementary Algebra, I found myself on another delightful detour, through a very unusual math book, Life of Fred: Beginning Algebra (as serious as it needs to be).

I am in love with Life of Fred. I feel that it will be our main introduction to algebra and that we’ll use Jacobs as a supplement.

Life of Fred: Beginning Algebra uses the continuing story of a profoundly gifted (to the extreme) child named Fred, age 5 as the book begins and already a college math teacher, to introduce the concepts of algebra, and why you would “need” algebra at all. The author, Stanley Schmidt, an experienced math professor (now retired) whose daughter was homeschooled, seems to be all too familiar with the whiny complaint of students in traditional school algebra classes: “But why do we need this?”

I was a compliant student in algebra, and solved the problems and learned the formulas without much trouble. “Word problems,” too, were just a matter of pulling out the relevant information and plugging in the formula. But in reading this book, I have been astounded by the beauty of Schmidt’s method. He tells a compelling story that involves you in what is happening to the characters. And in the course of this compelling story, situations continually come up that require the use of algebra to figure something out. And seamlessly, we are introduced to one algebra concept after another, real-life problems are solved, and the story continues. There would never be a reason to ask, “Why do we need this?” because the need, in the midst of an interesting situation, arises before any explanation of formulas or principles.

My daughter and I often scoff at school-based terminology like “vocabulary words.” What other kind of words are there? In the same way, the concept of a “word problem” in math is such a school construct. A more natural way to think about it might be, there are situations in life that you need to figure out, and you might use words to describe them, and you might use math as a tool to solve them. The latter would seem to be Dr. Schmidt’s approach. I have found myself, a former A student through college calculus and linear algebra, understanding the application of algebraic concepts in ways I never did before.

I must admit I am tickled by Dr. Schmidt’s disrespect of traditional educational methods. He seems to loathe repetition as much as I (and my daughter) do. Early in the book, he explains his approach vs. traditional ones: “In many banal beginning algebra books, the problems the authors hand you look too much like elementary school math books. They give you one or more examples and then assign you forty identical ones to do. That gets boring in a hurry. You race through those forty problems so that you can slam the banal textbook closed and go do something more engaging.”

This text is accompanied by an illustration of a math page with the example “ ½ + 1/3”, and then a long list of nearly identical problems filling the page. A caption at problem number 6 reads “boredom sets in here” and at number 14, there is “brain death occurs here.”

As much as we love the Singapore Math series, boredom always set in for my daughter long before the sixth repetitive problem, and she never got close to brain death because we simply skipped most of the problems.

LoF: Beginning Algebra doesn’t waste the extra paper on repetitive problems, although it gives you plenty of them to explore the concepts introduced in the story. But even these have lots of words in them. More explanations are given within the problem sets, rather than them being just an obligatory set of numerical problems to wade through at the end of the real conceptual stuff.

Schmidt writes, “…in Life of Fred the hope is that they’ll be problems that are more like puzzles to solve than tasks to be repeated over and over again like the job of baking 400 dozen cookies.” In fact, in most cases, you find yourself anxious to see the answer almost as a punch line to the story.

Some of the problem sets are immediately followed by sets of answers (and thorough explanations). I enjoyed these even on problems in which the answer is obvious or could be solved quickly. Having answers to problem sets is perfect for allowing your child to work through the book on her own or to self-correct as she moves through the material.

I find LoF compelling to read, and already, my daughter does too. I’ve had it lying around over the last couple of weeks as I’ve gone through it, and she has picked it up several times and read long sections of it. She can’t wait to start using it to learn algebra.

I think Dr. Schmidt’s book is perfect for a humanities lover like my daughter. He’s witty, and he fills the book with references to all manner of ideas beyond the world of algebra. As he writes in the introduction, “Life is unlivable if it is confined to algebra. Life is incomplete without it.” And so we have references to Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, a definition of banal when he uses it to disparagingly describe many textbooks, functions of sets as they relate to Bach and Stravinsky, and so on.

Some conservative Christians have complained online about his occasional (funny) references that reflect an awareness of pop culture. My feeling is, fine, don’t buy it if this bothers you. There is certainly nothing here that I would be concerned about my 10-year-old daughter reading. Instead, I am so grateful for a witty, compelling algebra book for her. But then, I live in San Francisco.

But how is the actual algebra? Does he get enough “real” math in there with all the fun stuff? I have to say, absolutely yes. And not only does he, but he presents it in such a way that the student will gain a real conceptual understanding of the material, instead of just regurgitating formulas on demand.

I can’t wait to start using this book and will most likely move on to geometry, advanced algebra, trig, and calculus with dear little Fred.

-- Life of Fred Web site

A Gifted Homeschooling Blog

2007-07-31T18:09:00.000-07:00

I'm experimenting with the idea of a making this blog into more of a gifted homeschooling blog. That is, one that is more than me talking about what I do with my daughter (although plenty of personal examples will undoubtedly still find their way in).

The first thing I did was to stick an ad at the top of this page. I'm not sure how I'm going to like that. My idea is that over time it will help me pay for some of the Web projects I always seem to end up donating here and there. I'll probably re-do the layout at some point, so I can fit in a few more ads.

Next, let me introduce myself and my credentials as your blog columnist. I've been homeschooling my gifted daughter for 5 years, since she turned 5. I've read widely on learning, homeschooling, and giftedness, and have been one of the people creating the current world in which they all meet, for those of us lucky enough, and energetic enough, to homeschool our gifted children.

I enjoy community building and using technology for that purpose. I've built Web sites for San Francisco Homeschoolers, Gifted Homeschoolers Forum, and PG Retreat, among others, and have started several mailing lists as well. With my good friend Lisa, I currently manage the San Francisco Bay Area Gifted Homeschooling list. That list is a Google group, and we are having fun creating collaborative Web pages within the group (love that feature).

My current project is organizing an "Early College Workshop" for our group, to be held in the Bay area. There are quite a few of us who would like our kids to have the benefit of community college classes earlier than even the traditional "concurrent enrollment" age for high school students.

In my former life, I started a magazine called "Mac/Chicago" in 1989. I was a computer consultant helping clients with then-new desktop publishing technology, and I felt that a magazine packed with local resources and local information would be valuable to the desktop publishing community. It was exciting to be part of the desktop publishing revolution and to be editor and publisher of my own magazine.

In 1995, I built my first Web site, for the magazine. And a year later, I changed the name of the magazine to "Digital Chicago," partly in response to the growth of Windows in publishing markets, but more so, in response to the Web revolution that was upon us. I published articles about "digital convergence" and the like, and it was a lot of fun.

In January 1998, with a 6-month-old daughter, I sold the magazine to the Chicago Sun-Times. It took me six months to get over the loss of my first baby, my magazine. But I've enjoyed every minute of being with my daughter and have no regrets.

In the years since, I’ve had a boutique Web hosting business and done some Web development here and there, especially when my daughter was watching PBS animated TV shows or was at her Montessori preschool as a 3- and 4-year-old. These days I do only some volunteer Web projects, and that feels like plenty as I take my daughter through high-school level material.

Besides my geeky love for technology and my corny love for community, I seem to learn by creating. I don't really know a subject until I write about it, and so here I am, sharing with you what I am learning by doing in the world of gifted homeschooling.

In the old days, my articles about Macintosh and software and innovators on the Chicago technology scene were always personal, with lots of "me" in them. That style is even more at home in the blog world, and in the homeschooling world as well. I hope to bring a professional approach and presentation to what is deeply personal to me – a world-class educational experience for my daughter before she leaves me for college. It’s my hope that others can benefit from some of the resources and experiences we discover.

If you're homeschooling a gifted child, please bookmark my site, or capture my RSS feed. And if you like what you get here, please spread the word about my site to others who might also benefit.

Museum Immersion

2007-07-29T06:43:00.000-07:00

Another week of camp down, one more to go. After Miss C's 9-to-4 day on Monday, I picked her up and we drove directly into D.C. She then spent two hours immersed in paleontology at the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History. Thank goodness they closed at 7. I was exhausted and ready for my glass of wine and Asian food at Ten Penh (yum).

It's this need she has to "immerse" that pressures me to find her intellectual challenges for the months ahead. Anybody who can spend two hours intensely studying and taking notes about trilobites just can't get what she needs in the usual homeschool class.

Yesterday, a Saturday, we spent the whole day in Washington museums. First was the National Gallery of Art. We started in the East building (last year we'd spent almost a full day in the main, West building), which holds mostly modern art. Then we got lunch and went to the West building to find the sculpture room. She wanted to find Degas' Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, which we learned is the only sculpture Degas exhibited during his lifetime. Miss C's cousin had given her a miniature reproduction of the sculpture, and now it's really personal to her. They had two versions there, a plaster and a bronze one. In the next room, full of bronze sculptures Degas' heirs had cast posthumously from his wax and plasticine models, they had fold-out stools, pencils, and sketchpads. The room seemed to be full of young girls who loved dance and/or horses (Degas' favorite subjects), sketching all the models. Miss C happily joined them.

She was mightily disappointed when we had to leave. We had purchased timed tickets for the International Spy Museum, so regretfully we left Degas' dancers and horses behind. The Spy Museum was fascinating, really well done, but very hard to take for me as it was so jam-packed with tourists. That didn't seem to affect Miss C all that much. (She is enthusiastically describing the Cold War exhibit to her dad as I write this.) We spent two hours reading and looking at everything. I'd love to go back sometime when there is a relatively slower day. Maybe during the week, during the school year? I think the place pretty much packs people in all the time.

We took a break for food and drink, then loped across the street to the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery and American Art Museum, spending almost 2 hours until time for it (and our parking garage) to close at 7. What a fabulous place. You could spend a week going through all the rooms full of masterpieces.

Miss C and I really enjoyed an exhibit called "Bravo," portraits of twentieth century performers. She is an enthusiastic student of musicals and there were wonderful portraits of George Gershwin, Ethel Merman, Lena Horne, Leonard Bernstein, and many more greats. There was another room full of portraits of civil rights leaders, and they extended that to include the portraits of activists for womens' rights... my hero, Gloria Steinem, and Kate Millett were both pictured. These are great because each portrait was done in a different style, most very much suiting the subject, and have short written pieces about the significance of each person beside the portraits.

Racing against the clock, we sought out the special exhibit on "Great Britons." We just had to see the 400-year-old painting of William Shakespeare, by John Taylor. It is supposedly the only one done in Shakespeare's lifetime, and all others are modeled on this one. We stood and stared at it, soaking it up as much as you ever can a painting like that.

Also amazing in that exhibit was a huge, lifesize portrait of Elizabeth I from 1592. I could only feel awe and respect.

As we finished our day, I resolved not to sign Miss C up for any other outside classes this fall. Instead, we need many days of museum visits. Taking this child to a museum, whether science, history, or art, is the best kind of education I can imagine. For both of us.

Acceleration

2007-07-26T17:29:00.000-07:00

I have just grade-skipped my daughter. She is now a seventh grader. As her teacher, and as principal of our private school, I have just waved my hand and said, "Make it so." And it is so.

The biggest significance of this to me is some kind of acquiescence on my part to any existence of "grades." We've been homeschooling since Miss C turned 5, and I've tried at every turn to answer the inevitable, tedious question from people we meet with "We homeschool -- we don't use grades."

We've never used curriculum at all in our homeschooling, much less graded curriculum. The closest we came was in starting formal math with Singapore Math's Level 3 books... but that certainly never made either of us think she was "a third grader."

When Miss C was 5 years old, in her second year of dance classes, she became disgusted by the bad behavior of some of the other girls, and the time that was wasted in class while the teacher dealt with them. I spoke to the owner of the school, and she moved her up one year in their classes. Last year, as a 9-year-old, she was in a modern dance and choreography class for 5th to 8th graders. That was a really nice fit. Her homeschool playwriting class that year was for 10- to 14-year-olds. It all worked out fine.

But now I am feeling a bigger gap... and a bigger problem with her being accepted in classes intended for older kids (don't get me started). So there is only one solution -- acceleration.

I signed her up for the Sally Ride Science Festival day this fall as a 7th grader. I signed her up for her dance and choreography classes at a new dance school as a 7th grader. Any time they give me one of those little blanks to fill in this year, I will write "7th." If anyone asks me the inevitable, tedious question, I will answer "7th grade."

I skipped 2nd grade myself a zillion years ago... and I never felt younger than my class, never had a single adjustment problem. The year I skipped 2nd, I did all the work of both the 3rd and 4th grade in a mixed-grade class of a Christian school. But when we moved, I got to do 4th grade again anyway in a public school (due to my age). At least I was one year ahead.

And then I went to college via "Early Admissions" at 16, skipping 12th grade. It seemed completely normal to me.

But Miss C is much smarter than I am. And she's much more mature, and much more socially aware than I was at her age. And she's had the advantage of 5 years of quality homeschooling... and you know what that does. So we'll go ahead and skip her two grades now... we can always do more later.

Book: Algebra: The Phantom X

2007-07-20T04:14:00.000-07:00

I'm preparing to start algebra with Miss C in August and re-learning everything about it while she's in day camp. First up: a Murderous Maths book called Algebra: The Phantom X, by Kjartan Poskitt.

What a hoot. I've bought Miss C stacks of Murderous Maths (and Horrible Histories, Horrible Science, Dead Famous, and The Knowledge) books, but this is the first time I personally have read one cover to cover.

I actually taught algebra and other middle school math for one year as 23-year-old. But that was so long ago, that in reading this, I was reminded that the number that multiplies the variable in an algebraic expression is called a "coefficient." Oh, yeah! Now I remember.

What a fun re-introduction to the subject. Miss C has already read the book, too, but said she didn't understand all the math. No problem, I told her, we'll go back through it as we learn algebra, and all the jokes will be even more fun to you then. (Example: After introducing the concept of a variable by letting "c" represent the unknown number of legs on a caterpillar, Poskitt wraps up the discussion with, "When you come across 'c' at another time it may represent something completely different such as the cost of cheese or the speed of light.")

I think that even if a reader doesn't "understand all the math" the first time, it does such a great job of getting across the concept of what the heck algebra is. Poskitt spends a lot of time on number tricks and card tricks and explains why they work using algebra. I'm sure that would appeal to lots of kids. Miss C enjoys magic tricks and I think we'll spend some happy time going through these.

Next up: Harold Jacobs' Elementary Algebra. I like his work and it comes highly recommended for gifted kids. It won't be as much fun as The Phantom X, but it does have cartoons.

By the way, my favorite place to get Murderous Maths and Horrible Histories books is from Ray at Del Sol Books, dad to a gifted, homeschooled daughter. Great prices and wonderful service. Here is his Horrible Books site.

A Gathering of Peers

2007-07-01T15:21:00.000-07:00

Miss C and I are at PG Retreat in Denver, a gathering for families with profoundly gifted children. It's our first time here but somehow I don't think it will be the last. Miss C is having a fabulous time, falling in with various kids and activities as if she's been coming here for years.

It's been so delightful to see the way the kids, from ages 3 to 15, are so comfortable with each other and among the families. They are instantly familiar with anyone wearing a retreat badge.

I was just stopped in an open area by an eleven-year-old girl who wanted to know about my camera (a Nikon D70). She complained that her mother has the same one, and she loves to use it, but that she'd been given a small pocket digital camera to use instead. She took it out and showed it to me, giving me a feature-by-feature complaint of why it doesn't compare to the D70. Then she showed me her PDA which, though it plays MP3s, is not comparable to an iPod; again she offered a detailed comparison. Then she wanted to know what I thought about the iPhone. After that, she said, Okay, I need to go meet someone, and off she went. (No problem, happy to geek out with you for a while.)

In one of the presentations for parents, it was mentioned that even PG kids who don't make friends easily in their everyday lives can do so when they meet an actual peer. That's one of the main reasons for this gathering, and it sure does seem to be true, based on the way the clusters of kids enthusiastically pursue activities and just hang out together.

Miss C doesn't usually have trouble making friends, but this still feels different... she is engaged in a rich, full way, and is soooooo happy.

I'm very glad we came and will explore more such opportunites on her behalf.

Kandinsky Again

2007-06-11T20:03:00.000-07:00

Today Miss C and I bought an art print for the living room, for a crucial spot over the fireplace. Browsing a shop in the Castro, I was flipping through posters as she eyed the beaded jewelry. I saw a Wassily (Vasily) Kandinksy painting (as a poster) that I loved, but the color was all wrong. The owner noticed, and directed me over to an area where he had several more Kandinskys.

Miss C came over and said, "Oh! I've seen that!" about a poster of his Composition 8, which we had seen at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. But then another of his works, Im Blau, was there as a silkscreen print on art paper, not a poster, and the colors were so much more vivid. We both loved it.

Having been entranced by Kandinskys at both the Guggenheim and at MoMA in New York, we are thrilled to have a print of his work at home. It's the first modern art I've ever purchased. Such is Miss C's influence over me. Now to paint the living room to complement the palette...

Shakespeare and Leaping Through Time

2007-06-07T07:28:00.000-07:00

We played "Shakespeare: The Bard Game" last night, and as I watched Miss C "busk," or act out a soliloquy from one of his plays to earn shillings, I felt yet another strange sense of time advancing in leaps, rather than seconds or minutes. "Where did you come from?" I asked her, as both my husband and I sat stunned after her delivery of a speech by Hamlet.

Rather than brush off my rhetorical question, she then proceeded to explain the relationship between the characters and the significance of the scene, and why she had interpreted it the way she did. Good grief.

I've got to get that child into a theater class, I thought later... no, specifically Shakespeare. And is she really only turning ten this weekend? And I guess I can give up on her ever loving math and science the way I did, because how can she not pursue her destiny in the world of the humanities? And is it "predestination"? Because, how can she know so much, how can she be the way she is, so much of it seemingly innate?

If you love Shakespeare, I highly recommend this game. If you have advice about how I can best guide my daughter's old soul, please write.

We Got Our Hearts Back in San Francisco

2007-05-31T10:39:00.000-07:00

How sweet it is to be home. I can't count the ways San Francisco is better for us than the Northeast, there are so many.

Our neighbors have been as warm and welcoming as always (we lived here for 5 years before moving to the NYC metro area 2 years ago). Miss C is in her element renewing all her acquaintances in the neighborhood.

Two days ago I put a note on Craigslist advertising free moving boxes and packing material. Within 3 hours a lovely woman came to get them, bringing her almost-3-year-old son along for the ride. Miss C entertained him while his mom and I loaded boxes into her car. The mom and I hit it off... they are moving to Oregon, but if not I imagine we would be friends here... and the little boy didn't want to leave Miss C when it was time to go. Consequently, the offer of a babysitting job was made, and today I dropped Miss C off at her house for 4 hours, to play with the boy while his mom packs for moving.

New Jersey was a disaster for us with regard to making friends, with a couple of notable exceptions (one of those exceptions was someone I knew virtually from California before we moved). Our next-door neighbors did invite us over once, but what with the Ann Coulter book displayed proudly in their kitchen, the multiple garbage cans they used (and no recycling bin), and many other differences between us, we had no wish to pursue any relationship there. Here, we really fit in, seeing and feeling people "like us" all around, and it is as sweet as it was to me when we first moved here 7 years ago.

I'm thrilled that our shopping street now has a fabulous new independent book store. On the way back from dropping Miss C off at her babysitting job, I indulged myself with a luxurious stroll through the store, doing some birthday shopping for Miss C. I had a great conversation with the owner... Amazon.com and Borders will feel the lack of my usual heavy business with them, as I'll try to direct as much of our business as possible to this new store.

We have a 15-minute walk from our house in a quiet (but friendly!) neighborhood to this wonderful bookstore, along with so many other useful things along a few blocks on the same street: library, post office, drugstore, train station, about 12 restaurants, independent hardware store, our bank, and much more. The only chain among them is the drugstore (Walgreen's).

I feel myself returning to a better version of myself. Having left my heart here, I am so much more whole again now.

The Need for Practice

2007-05-23T04:07:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about the need for practice in getting to be good at anything, and how neither Miss C nor I are inclined to practice in general.

This first came up in a formal homeschooling context when she was 5 and, in my naivete, I got some little handwriting practice books for her. She had no interest in these, while she filled reams of paper with drawings, paper constructions, and so on. Later, I took in the advice on the homeschooling lists and got her the "Handwriting Without Tears" workbooks. She shed no tears, but that's because I don't believe in coercion. When she was "all done" with it after 15 minutes and didn't want to do it anymore, I gave up on it. So she never really did "practice" handwriting... now, at almost 10, she prints quite legibly but her use of cursive is pretty much restricted to her signature. However, she touch types very well. Ho hum on that topic.

But other endeavors that require practice engender more respect from us -- learning different languages, or playing the piano, for example. Still, the self-discipline of practice is difficult to acquire in a family that celebrates freedom and individuality. And when so many things come easily to us, in at least basic functionality.

I recently read a great article in The Week magazine, "How to Be Great at Anything," that particularly piqued my interest. It was reprinted from a New York Times sports article with a different title, "How to Grow a Super Athlete." I thought the reprint title was better, because the implications go far beyond sports. But the article did emphasize sports examples, and tied the extreme success of young Russian tennis players, for example, to the quantity and quality of their practice. But it also tied their resulting skill to the development of large amounts of myelin, the fatty substance that surrounds nerve fibers.

The author, Daniel Coyle, quotes , a lab director at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland: "In neurology, myelin is being seen as an epiphany. This is a new dimension that may help us understand a great deal about how the brain works, especially about how we gain skills."

Okay, anyone can understand the old joke, "How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice." But this is verification of the role of practice at the neurological level.

Myelin is like an insulating substance for neurons. Neurons are responsible for every mental experience. But scientists are beginning to understand how much interaction there is between neurons and myelin. Coyle explains that research published in the journal Neuron in 2006 showed that "...the little sausages of myelin [surrounding neurons] get thicker when the nerve is repeatedly stimulated. The thicker the myelin gets, the better it insulates and the faster and more accurately the signals travel."

This finding is important beyond sports because the myelin also thickens in the brain, not just in the large muscles. Fields predicts that successful South Korean women golfers, for example, have more myelin, on average, than players from other countries. "They've got more in the right parts of the brain and for the right muscle groups, and that's what allows them to optimize their circuitry," Fields said. "The same would be true for any group like that."

All this reminds me of my previous post about an article in SEED magazine that connected "learning with doing." That article excited me because of its confirmation of the value of experiential learning. [Having trouble making the link to my post now, but it was in Aug. 2006; here is the article, "How We Know."]

I'm convinced... now how to build the habit of repeated practice so that we can start building up some myelin around the relevant circuitry? For that, I may need to find some different research.

Creeking and Sluicing

2007-05-17T05:38:00.000-07:00

It's only been a short time since my daughter kept me in the gem rooms at New York's American Museum of Natural History for almost 2 hours. Not to mention the time we spent in its "Gold" exhibit. Gazing at those colorful beauties behind a case is cool. But what if you could find some gems yourself, in a creek bed or sifting through mined material?

That's just what Miss C and my nephews got to do yesterday, at "Emerald Hollow," a mining site in Hiddenite, North Carolina. This was terrific fun for all of them, in a lush, wooded setting.

"Creeking" means climbing around in a rocky creek, sifting through the sandy bottom for rocks (er, gems) and collecting them in a small container. Here is the start of Miss C's haul:

Then you have to announce and discuss what you have found. In the area, they have hiddenite, emeralds, smoky quartz, tourmaline, rutile, garnets, clear quartz, sapphires, sillimanite, aquamarine, monazite, and more. This requires lots of analysis.

After two out of four kids had slipped and soaked their shorts in the creek, they happily moved on to "sluicing." This is where you take a bucket of mined material, and sift through it in a tray of running water, to remove the dirt and sand, and recover any gems buried in the bucket.

As my sister helped her four-year-old, perhaps the most enthusiastic sluicer, sift through his bucket, we laughed at how much kid fun was included in the process. It had water play, sand play, getting muddy, and lots of rocks... er, gems.

Miss C and her cousins later worked to clean all their gems at home. Today's plan: swapping and trading, to make sure everyone has a good collection.

Playing School

2007-05-16T04:44:00.000-07:00

My sister here in North Carolina homeschools her three boys. What do homeschooled kids like to do for fun? Among other things, "play school."

The night before last, at bedtime, Miss C's 6yo cousin asked his mom if Miss C could help him with his "schoolwork" the next day. So yesterday, he packed up his workbooks and pencils in a backpack, along with a snack, and headed next door to Grandma's house (where we are staying). He said he was "going to school."

Miss C was ready for him, having organized a workspace at the table. She took her role as teacher/tutor very seriously. They stayed at it intensely for 2 hours until interrupted by the other cousins spilling loudly into the house.

I think theirs was a very cool school. I overheard their discussion about telling time on an analog clock. It was very much give and take, with Miss C agreeing that it can be confusing. I think of all the similar discussions she and I have had over the years, in our very interactive learning style. And I know she's been learning far more than the "subject" at hand.

Bare Feet and Dragons

2007-05-15T05:48:00.000-07:00

And now for something completely different. After leaving our 2-year adventure in the New York City metro area, we're spending two weeks with my sister's family and my mom, who lives next door, "out in the country" in Charlotte, North Carolina. What a wonderful and relaxing change of pace it is.

My sister has three boys (4, 6, and almost 10) growing up on three wooded acres... similar to the way life was for us as kids. Miss C dearly loves her cousins, and is especially tight with the oldest boy, just 2 months younger than her. They yack on the phone endlessly about imaginary worlds, from Neopets to Pokemon to their own inventions (Miss C often takes on the role of an eccentric scientist). They can talk for two hours (thank goodness for cheap long distance), staying "in character" the whole time. None of the rest of us in the family has the patience to play along for more than 5 minutes.

Miss C has been having, she says, "the time of her life," luxuriating in running around outside in bare feet 'til 9 at night. It's the kind of freedom I had, and loved, as a child, very different from Miss C's life in big cities, despite the fact that we venture out into wilderness regularly... it's just not the same as spilling out the back door at will.

Yesterday, the kids were playing "dragons" outside for a very long time. This involved choosing a particular kind of dragon to have from a library book they had checked out, How to Raise and Keep a Dragon, and then enacting that world. My mom and I had sat on lawn chairs under a shade tree watching my oldest nephew read the entire book while walking, swinging, and climbing on a jungle gym. A kinesthetic learner, for sure! He then chose a Standard Western Dragon, but purple rather than the usual green.

Miss C then helped her younger cousins choose their breeds. The 6yo could not find an acceptable choice, so he ran outside calling to his older brother, Can I be a baby Western Dragon? Apparently this idea was accepted, and "play" began.

And after outside imaginative play... it's always fun to play with Neopets.

New Victory Theater - New York

2007-05-12T17:47:00.000-07:00

Our last night in New York was a dance performance at the New Victory Theater at 42nd and Broadway... which gives me an opportunity to rave about the existence of this venue in the heart of the Broadway district that specializes in performances for families with kids.

Back in the bad old days, say 15 to 20 years ago, I understand, historic 42nd Street had become a really crummy place. As part of its revitalization, besides Disney putting on its shows there, a group of people who really cared about theater, historic buildings, children, and families, decided to restore the beautiful New Victory Theater, and to produce quality shows there for families with kids.

It's a really small theater, by Broadway standards... "intimate." A mezzanine or balcony seat is not a bad thing there. And it has the kind of classic architectural touches -- gilded ceiling and ornamental flourishes -- only a truly historic theater building can have. Purple and gold lettering and old-fashioned black lightposts on the outside appeal to children and promise a grand spectacle inside.

Our latest, and last (for now) performance there was "Ragamala," an incredible dance and music performance from a dance company based in Minnesota, but with heart, soul, and heritage in India. A mother and daughter, Ranee and Aparna Ramaswamy, are both performers and directors of the company, which begins with the dance traditions of Bharatanatyam, rooted in Indian spirituality, and branches from there into various modern dance styles and cross-cultural mixes. For example, this performance included Japanese Taiko drummers, and then a combined Indian dance with Taiko drumming accompaniment. Both the creative choreography and disciplined technique of the dancers were impressive, along with wonderful musical interludes featuring sitar, drums, and chanting. We were on the edge of our seats for the whole performance, engaged and excited.

New Victory Theater performances may be appealing to children, but they offer high quality entertainment for adults as well. Our previous attendance there a month earlier was to see Macbeth -- performed with marionettes. This was no puppet show for children, however. I mean, it was Macbeth. And that content was appropriate for the incredibly detailed marionettes handcrafted by an Italian company that has been making them since the 1830s. These master puppeteers were paired with the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, providing eight classical Shakespearean actors who voiced the marionettes. In the lobby, we were given the opportunity to examine antique marionettes the Italian company had made in the 1800s, right up close, with no glass or case barrier. A video next to that display showed how they make them (amazing).

We've seen several other different kinds of performances at the New Victory, with the one common feature being quality. Check it out if you have the chance.

MOMA - New York

2007-05-10T05:09:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, we made one last visit to the Museum of Modern Art before we leave New York. We hadn't previously made it to the fifth floor paintings and sculpture, and I knew there were some masterpieces there that I really wanted Miss C to see.

This time Miss C wasn't only absorbed in abstract paintings, although we saw some more by Vasily Kandinsky that we both loved. But she spent a lot of time studying and taking notes about Van Gogh's The Starry Night (the Web view is such an injustice), Rousseau's The Sleeping Gypsy, Gaugin's The Moon and the Earth, and three Seurats hung together. Then in the next room, she went abstract again.

Adults, it seems, are sometimes enchanted by her attention to the art, and her sketching and note-taking. One woman discussed the Rousseau painting with her. "She told me he had never been to the desert," Miss C related, "so he was painting Africa as he imagined it would look." Later, as she was looking at Picasso's Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which apparently was voted by some influential body as one of the two most influential paintings in modern art, two different adults came up to her to comment on her focus and attention. It was really weird. Perhaps they feel free to do so because I'm not standing next to her. I was a short distance away when one man asked if she had a parent there with her.

As I came up and claimed her, he gushed about her notetaking and careful attention to the art. How old was she? What grade was she in? Did I make her take notes? He was there with an art history group, he said, and he can't get his daughters, ages 8, 12, and 14, to pay any attention to art at all. He had been looking over her shoulder previously, apparently, since he asked to see what she'd been sketching... and those sketches were from a previous visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art! He then explained to her the significance of the Picasso painting.

She enjoyed that... she likes people as well as art. Different from her mom, who loves to quote Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia: "I don't like people. I like trees."

United Nations Tour

2007-05-09T05:21:00.000-07:00

Miss C and I took a tour of the United Nations yesterday, a very worthwhile experience.

As usual, we prepared before going. The UN Web site has some great resources for kids. Miss C was especially taken by the "Food Force" video game, which is a simulation of trying to get food supplies to victims in a war zone, one which is also plagued by drought. Very compelling. She also enjoyed "Flag Tag," which quizzes you on flags of various countries.

The physical tour of the UN was a great experience. Among our group of 20, there were people from Peru, Chile, England, Australia, Japan, Sri Lanka, and Norway as well as the U.S. That was a tour given in English, while just ahead of us was another tour being given in French. Our tour guide, a young man from Peru, was very knowledgeable, especially evident in the followup questions... nothing he couldn't handle.

We were touched by the discussions of UN goals, including peacekeeping, defending human rights, reducing world hunger, and economic development, and thrilled to hear that "promoting gender equality and empowering women" is one of the UN's eight "Millenium Development Goals." Seeing actual landmines, which kill and maim mostly women and children, and learning that although each one costs only $3 to make, it costs $1,000 to find and remove just one, really made an impact on both of us. Miss C and I visualized Eleanor Roosevelt as a delegate in the Security Council room as we absorbed its atmosphere. There was so much more to the tour, and we were very glad we went.

We also toured the sculptures in the adjacent "Peace Park," each a gift of a different country to the UN, and they were each powerful in their own right. The UN site has information about guided tours as well as a Virtual Tour.

Wicked

2007-05-08T19:24:00.000-07:00

Miss C and I went to see "Wicked" tonight. What a fantastic show. She loved it and so did I.

She'd been given the music CD from the show a year ago, so she knew all the songs by heart, but it's been sold out for so long on Broadway, it was hard to get tickets. I'm so glad we finally got a chance to go.

I haven't read the book. My sister tells me there is some material in it she'd consider inappropriate for my daughter, but the show didn't have anything like that. The show is recommended for ages 8 and up and I think that's about right.

I used to have a miniature toy figure of the Evil Queen from Snow White on top of my computer... I felt that was my persona sometimes. Now I understand I'm Elphaba instead. I can rub people the wrong way even though I mean well, but I'm intense and must "Defy Gravity" even if I'm not "Popular." (Songs from the show.)

I'd recommend this show to anyone who gets a chance to see it!

Wikispaces - A Great Tool for Collaborations

2007-05-08T06:54:00.000-07:00

I'm really excited about the possibilities for homeschoolers in using wiki software -- which you use through the Web just by editing text -- to work on projects collaboratively.

One challenge many homeschoolers face is finding the opportunity for their kids to work cooperatively within a group. Especially if they have only one child, as I do! I think wiki technology can provide an excellent solution by providing the means for homeschoolers in different geographical locations to work together on projects.

Some simple examples of the way I have used my favorite wiki source -- wikispaces.com -- so far:

I've used it for a homeschool geography study group, so that each kid can post his or her upcoming presentation topic on a shared Web space. I've also used it for our homeschool Roots & Shoots group, so that pages can be updated and maintained by people who aren't technical or familiar with Web editing software.

But the coolest use I've seen is where students in one country work on projects with students in another country. Wikispaces.com often highlights such groups. Here are two.

Flat Classroom Project was a two-week collaboration between an American high school class and one in Bangladesh. Pairing an American student with one from Bangladesh, the students together explored and discussed ideas from Thomas Friedman's book, The World is Flat.

Flatplanet pairs students from a Canadian high school with a high school class in the UK, to discuss the Catholic moral perspective on international environmental issues.

I think these efforts are inspirational and can't wait to see how we'll be able to apply this to connect with other kids internationally.

New Moon Magazine

2007-05-07T07:20:00.000-07:00

We're big print magazine fans here, despite the fact that we also "live online." Having edited and published my own magazine for 9 years, it got into my blood, maybe.

Miss C started out chewing on Baby Bug long before she could walk (all her board books had chewed corners, and this is a periodical with thin cardboard pages), and she also studied every speck of ink on the issues' pages. She then proceeded through the same company's other magazines: Ladybug, Spider (only briefly, then jumped to Cricket), Click, Ask, Muse. I'm thinking of upgrading her to Odyssey, but she still loves Muse. She gets other mags as well, but that's for another time.

Today I wanted to rave about New Moon magazine, "The Magazine for Girls and Their Dreams." This is pitched for ages 8 to 14, I believe, but Miss C started getting it, and loving it, at 7. She still loves it at almost 10. She also gets American Girl, which is pitched much younger and is far more mainstream... I don't think I'd let her have that one if she didn't also get New Moon.

New Moon has a feminist outlook, if feminist means that it is empowering to girls. Its content is also by girls, whether it's profiles of "beautiful girls" as in the current issue (in the broadest and best sense of the word beautiful) or in stories and articles by them. It has covered issues facing the mature end of its range, such as menstruation, but everything it covers is something my daughter has wanted to know about now rather than later. It's extremely tasteful and real in all its coverage.

I started reading Ms. magazine at 14, with its very first issue (my mom's copy). My daughter will pick up my Ms. now and read certain things... she recently got very angry about the "No Comment" section, showing examples of how women are exploited and treated as objects in advertising images. She then fired off an email to one of the advertisers. But oh, what a wonderful transition into that adult view of the world New Moon is. In the current issue, an 11-year-old girl is quoted as saying, "I'd like to tell advertisers to stop using women in ads for cleaning and cooking products and men for cars and grills. Advertisers should use an even mix of both."

You go, girls.

NYC Parks & Art Museums

2007-05-05T16:20:00.000-07:00

This is one of the most beautiful springs I can remember. We've been experiencing the glorious emergence of flowers and leaves on trees in Central Park and all around Manhattan, and are delirious with joy. We're living just a block and a half from Central Park, about midway up. We have spent a part of almost every day in the park and it's been wonderful.

Yesterday was such a day, shooting video for our podcast series for kids. Then we meandered across the park to the Guggenheim Museum, and had a delightful tour of it. The Guggenheim building is a piece of art itself, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and built in the late 1950s. Futuristic then, it still is today, with concentric rings that rise higher and wider around a central lobby. It's the perfect venue for abstract art, which makes up much of its collections.

Miss C has always been a big fan of abstract art. In our tour of the Guggenheim, she immersed in abstract paintings and went right on by some lesser Van Goghs, a Renoir, a Pisarro. However, she didn't like the Picassos much at all. I liked what she liked, but had a wider range... perhaps hers will widen in the future. But above all I trust her to know what she likes, and she is absolutely sure herself, and describes what she likes articulately. She's extremely visual-spatial... far be it from me to tell her what to like. One of our favorite pieces: Vasily Kandinsky's Composition 8.

We loved how the works of art were integrated into the open and artistically shaped spaces of the Guggenheim. Very enjoyable.

Then today we headed up to Fort Tryon Park at the very northern tip of Manhattan. Like Central Park, it is a beautiful urban park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted that had fallen into disrepair, and was rescued and rehabilitated by private money (this one by Bette Midler's New York Restoration Project).

Up on a rocky perch of Manhattan schist rock, Fort Tryon is the highest point in Manhattan and looks across the Hudson River at the Palisades in New Jersey. The Palisades land was bought and handed to New Jersey as a gift by John D. Rockefeller, to preserve the open space, and hence the view from Fort Tryon. We ate at the New Leaf Cafe in the park (gorgeous setting, incredibly slow service), gazed at the Hudson River from the lofty stone-walled patios and walks, and headed over to The Cloisters, our main destination for the day.

The Cloisters is part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a unique repository for medieval art. It is constructed like a series of connected medieval, monastic cloisters using doorways, walls, columns and other pieces of actual medieval buildings, largely from France. Inside its stone rooms are tapestries, paintings, carved wood sculptures, gold chalices and other objects for ceremony and worship, and much more.

The gardens are heavenly, with medieval fountains as the centerpieces of open courtyards filled with flowers and herbs, surrounded by covered stone walkways. The herb gardens are planted with the kinds of plants monks would have grown in medieval times, for medicinal and culinary purposes, and some even for their pigments, for use by artists.

Among the famous holdings of The Cloisters are the 15th century "Unicorn Tapestries," which I thought Miss C would enjoy due to reading about unicorns in many fantasy novels. But these tapestries -- huge, intricately detailed, and amazing in every way -- show the hunting, capture, and killing of unicorns, which she found upsetting.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art's explanations of the symbolism of the tapestries, relating to both Christianity and a marriage, are confusing by today's values, to say the least. Miss C is currently researching this further, via the Web of course. She has a 3-week writing camp in "Modern Fantasy" this summer, and I think looking at this kind of medieval symbolism is very relevant! I was entranced by the flowers and plants on these tapestries more than anything else. They are also apparently full of symbolism.

Other than the disturbing concept of unicorn killing, though, Miss C very much enjoyed the day. I think we all (her dad and I as well) might have liked the sarcophagi with knights on them best of all. They made me think of some of the final settings of The Da Vinci Code, not so much for the plot of the book, but just the vivid scene. No, Miss C tells me, the garden courtyards were her favorite part.

Comic Life - Adventures of Beatrice Bear

2007-05-04T07:35:00.000-07:00

My husband came home with a new MacBook last week that had the very cool Comic Life software preinstalled. The 'Book also has a built-in video camera.

Miss C, comic and graphic novel fan extraordinaire, pounced on it and immediately started building a comic. Her dearly beloved bear, Beatrice, was called upon to star in the show. Here's her first effort.

When it comes to creative use of technology, she is a natural, and she just loves it.

She also made her first DVD a couple of nights ago. We had spent the day at the Bronx Zoo with friends, and her digital camera's batteries died fairly quickly. I handed her my Nikon D70 (love that baby) and she shot 170 photos. That night she came home, downloaded them to iPhoto, and announced she was making a DVD. A bit later she came to me where I was engrossed in a novel, and asked a couple of questions about iDVD. I put her off. "I'll help you in the morning," I said. Did that slow her down? Ha. She went back and figured it out herself, making one copy of the DVD before she retired (late) that night.

Uh, yeah, just like I used to stay up late with the old Mac Plus so many years ago. Why would she need my help, when it's all there for her?

History of New York City on Video

2007-05-04T06:35:00.000-07:00

We're almost ready to leave Manhattan, and finishing up the last of eight videos on the history of New York City. New York, a PBS documentary series by Ric Burns, has been a great complement to our actual experience of the city (linking here to the Amazon page for it, though we rented it from Netflix).

Besides learning about such diverse aspects as Walt Whitman's experience of the city, amazing feats like the construction of the Empire State Building during the Depression, and legendary figures such as Al Smith, Robert Moses, and Fiorello La Guardia, we've seen how the history of the city is a huge part of the history of our country. Immigration, unionization and workers' rights, poverty and wealth, cultural innovation, the rise of the New Deal, and so many other parts of the American experiment have played out dramatically here.

Connecting actual experience to the history makes it so much more meaningful. Just as one tiny example, we've gone by the King Jagiello monument in Central Park many times, and admired his armor and mighty horse. He was a 15th century king of Poland and Lithuania, a hero to Poles. We were especially aware of him due to the visit of some friends from Poland. We read in information about Central Park that he was brought here for the World's Fair in 1939, and was slated to go to Poland afterward, but couldn't be taken there due to Hitler's invasion of Poland. So he was installed in Central Park and has been there ever since. In one of the New York videos, which showed us the 1939 World's Fair, we saw the statue in the footage of the fair.

There have been many such examples, from the design and building of Central Park, to life on the Lower East Side, and more. It's a great series. In general, we really appreciate the perspective an excellent documentary series adds to our understanding.

Metropolitan Opera

2007-05-02T06:47:00.000-07:00

We've done many wonderful activities over the past few months that I haven't had time to write about. One of those was attending Miss C's first opera, at New York's Metropolitan Opera. It was an incomparable experience.

We saw Strauss's Die Aegyptische Helena, which follows Helen of Troy and husband Menelaus after the Trojan War ends. Miss C knew the background from The Children's Homer, and we also went through all the excellent background material the Met provides online, which complements their live radio broadcast of Saturday matinees (Internet-accessible).

Attending the opera was wonderful. Each seat is raised one seat level above the one in front of it, so every seat has an excellent view of the stage. In front of each seat is an unobtrusive LED display that can be seen only by the person directly in front of it, in which you can see the lyrics displayed as they are sung. Helena was sung in German, but you can choose to view any opera's lyrics in English, German, Italian, or Spanish. After a few moments, you completely forget about this and scan the lyrics even as you view all the action on the stage; listen to the voices even as your brain takes in the lyrics almost seamlessly.

We've been disappointed in some Broadway show experiences... in some venues, people noisily crunch popcorn behind you even if you paid over $100 per seat. (It really depends on the venue; the best are not like that.) But the Metropolitan Opera is the real thing -- people dressed nicely, absolutely quiet as the first note is struck, no making noise during the performance. Besides the opera itself, what a wonderful experience in refinement, when our culture overall seems to have lost all sense of it.

The most amazing thing to us is that the singers do not use microphones (even hidden ones), and the area in which their voices must project is really large. There is such a pure sound to a loud and beautiful, but unamplified voice.

For anyone who'd like to introduce their kids to opera, we have enjoyed Joan Sutherland's "Who's Afraid of Opera" videos which incorporate puppets and relatively short excerpts of famous operas. For example, volume 1 features Faust and Rigoletto. Despite the puppet introductions, due to the themes and content of the operas, I think these are best for older children.

The Metropolitan Opera also has a lot of great information on their Web site, including a "Stories of the Operas" archive and a searchable database.

Garbage (or NOT Garbage)

2007-04-29T19:35:00.000-07:00

I complained here recently about how hard it was to live in New Jersey after having lived in San Francisco, due, among other things, to how hard it is to recycle in NJ. Then I finally got around to reading an article stacked on my bedside table, in a March Fortune magazine, and understood why I've been so out of sorts, in so many ways.

San Francisco recycles 68 percent of its "waste," far more than any other municipality in the country. And this isn't reported by an environmental magazine, it's from a business magazine, telling why many of the most progressive businesses are scrambling to be greener than their rivals, as fast as they can: see "The End of Garbage," in Fortune's March 19, 2007 issue.

Miss C has grown up recycling, and just as I told her about proteins, carbohydrates, and fats when she was 2 years old, so she would understand nutrition from the start, so have I systematically built an intolerance for waste in my child. In New Jersey, we were forced to take on even more responsibility for our waste. (We had composted in a backyard bin in San Francisco, but all our overflow compostables went into a "green bin" for curbside pickup. San Francisco turns this into pricey "Four Course Compost" purchased and used, for example, by vineyards producing $42 bottles of wine, as they describe in the above article.) In New Jersey, with no "green bin," we set up a worm bin in our basement (such as fascinating process! our bin is now packed for SF), a spinnable compost bin for less desirable kitchen scraps outside the back door, and a big leaf compost pile way in the back. We bought a leaf shredder to shred the many leaves from our huge backyard trees for that pile.

I've composted for many years, but the best compost I ever made was in the spinnable bin in San Francisco -- with its amenable temperature year round -- until I got the worm bin in New Jersey. Those worms make black gold, in gardening terms! The richness of the worm castings is unbelievable to someone used to more ordinary compost, relying largely on bacteria to break down the goods.

The Fortune article, though it touts San Francisco's programs, goes far beyond compost. They tackle high tech waste, and the progress HP and Dell, for example, have made in recycling computer components. (My husband and I have been sending tech waste -- floppy disks, then SyQuest cartridges, then Zip disks, now CDs and DVDs, and all the peripheral stuff -- to GreenDisk for years.)

There is much more in this article, and I urge everyone to read it, and start following the three Rs -- Reduce, Reuse, and Recyle -- as soon as possible -- as living that way is no longer a crunchy or California choice, but a cultural imperative we all must heed.

DNA & Evolution

2007-04-22T06:01:00.000-07:00

The American Museum of Natural History has a fabulous new permanent exhibit about DNA and evolution... they call it the "Hall of Human Origins."

Miss C and I immersed in it last week, and while there, saw a flyer for a class in which you extract your own DNA, which we attended yesterday. What a hit. Designed for a parent and a child, the class was taught by a biologist who works with Dr. James Watson at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. They have a separate "DNA Learning Center" offering workshops and camps for kids.

It's a pretty simple experiment to extract DNA from saliva cells, but the integration with lecture and discussion was nicely done. Miss C read a science book, Genes and DNA, before we attended and together, it made for a nice introduction.

Looking forward to more science this fall, and she is very excited about it.

Podcasting

2007-04-19T08:43:00.000-07:00

Miss C and I are about to launch a new venture, a series of video podcasts for children ages 8-12.

She's a big podcast fan herself, but most of what is currently available for kids is audio only. We think the videocasts will stand out, and Miss C is most anxious to star in them as host.

She wants a hand in every other aspect as well, from research to scriptwriting to producing and publishing. Last week, she made her first iMovie, with no help from mom or dad... typically, just dove in and experimented until she found what to do. It was fabulous except for her jerky camera footage (typical first time mistake). I figure if I do the filming, she can be in front of the camera as host, and then she can edit it all in iMovie afterward.

I love working with her creatively and technically. We are well matched in that we are both quick studies and love visual elements, good design, and good writing.

We have registered a domain name and started developing a Web site, and are developing our first video project. We have several subjects in mind based in Manhattan, and then we'll take up San Francisco and California subjects when we move back home in June.

More here as we proceed with the project and get ready for launch...