Update

 We have been extremely busy lately.  The girls have started computer-based classes at Khan Academy, which eats up my computer access.  More importantly, Brighteyes has taken the ACT.  She got a bit confused on the math section, which lowered her grade.  She only made a 34.  Out of 36.  Nobody's complaining.  She started taking duel-enrollment classes at the community college this week.  The house is so empty in the mornings now.

A teacher in my husband's department died at the start of the spring semester, and the subsequent extra work load led to him being very overworked this year.


Owl has started piano lessons.  He may have the best ears in the family for identifying notes.  Unfortunately our piano teacher seems to have retired on us.

I tried to be a laid-back Mom and let them set their own pace, but they did nothing and then complained about not being able to sleep at night while they dragged themselves around all day.  This spring I kicked them out of bed for morning exercises and meditation.  They're sleeping better as a result.  But now that schedule has to be readjusted for morning class at the college.

After watching various local classes and fitness opportunities crash and burn over the years, I was shocked to find a tiny Shotokan karate class that had been going on for six months in a neighboring town.  The children and I signed up, and I am verypleased with it.  The teacher, whose kids are also in the class, is great with the children, who are all local homeschoolers.  It's wonderful to have someone else tell my kids what to do for a change.

Shotokan karate:  in the early 20th Century schoolteacher and karate instructor Ginchin Funakoshi stripped karate down to something that could be taught to young children in a grade school classroom.  In the process he also made it very easy for non-athletic adults to pick it up as well.  It didn't catch on in Japanese schools the way he hoped it would, but it caught on like wildfire in the rest of the world.  The teaching style is meant to reward and encourage youngsters, and it does a pretty good job with anxious grownups as well.

The karate proved helpful with Brighteyes in a most unexpected way.  When we started lessons I told my kids that learning martial arts had been on my "to-do" list for a long time, and this was the first opportunity I had had in a long time.  As the date for the ACT got nearer, Brighteyes became more and more agitated, until she exploded and accused me of trying to live vicariously through her, expecting her to do all the things I had not had a chance to do.  I told her I wanted no such thing.  While I had put my other plans on hold to homeschool them, now that they were old enough to start seeing to themselves I was beginning to pursue those plans once again.  I didn't want her to pursue my dreams, I wanted her to get out of my way so I could pursue my dreams.  Surprisingly, this statement actually calmed her down quite a bit, and she even became more empathetic afterward.

That's all for now.  More later.

ISIL and the Confederacy

It's interesting how the Obama Administration is using the Lincoln Administration's playbook to handle ISIL.  Both the Obama and the Lincoln Administrations insisted that their adversaries were rebel insurgents, not a legitimate state, in spite of the fact that they held huge swathes of territory where they functioned with at least a semblance of a government.  And the Obama Administration's plan for dealing with ISIL is an updated version of the Lincoln Administration's Anaconda Plan.

The only thing that will defeat ISIL is the majority of Muslims rejecting conservatism.  That's hard for any non-leftwing group to do.  It's going to be a long war.

Second Opinion

We had biscuits today.  My helpful six-year old starts to get the butter.  "We don't need it, we'll use this instead," I said, putting down a trial batch of honey butter I had just made, on the theory that old-fashioned snack food had to be healthier than modern commercial snack food.

"What's that?"

"It's a surprise.  Try some and I'll tell you what it is."

"I don't what that!  I want the regular!"

"Have a taste."

He licks my finger.  "I don't like that!"

He keeps protesting as the honey butter gets further down the table and more used up.  Finally he cries, "Oh, all right!", flounces to the end of the table, and gets his biscuit slathered.

By the time he's set himself back down in his seat, the biscuit is gone.  "I like that!  Can we have that all the time?"

That may be a new turnaround time for new foods.  As for the rest of the family, a three-way arm-wrestling contest nearly broke out between my husband and my teenage daughters over the last drop.  I think this one's a keeper.

The Class of 1983

My husband met an old friend from high school last week in the small Mississippi town where they'd grown up 32 years ago . They chatted about their classmates from the white, middle class private school they had attended. Slightly less than half of the men had graduated from college and gone on to get jobs in business, teaching, and civil engineering. Slightly more than half of the men had not gone on to graduate from college. They were all dead, mostly from drugs or suicide. 10% of all the men in their class had committed suicide in the last five years. His friend noted that more men had died from their class than had died so far from his parents' class -- and his parents had graduated at the height of the Vietnam War. While the women had done slightly better, there had been fewer children born to the members of their class than had been in their class. It was a sobering experience.

I think we might have a problem, folks.

Original Sin Disproven by Science

People really are good, and our first reactions are selfless:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-probe-human-nature-and-discover-we-are-good-after-all/ 

Milestone

Brighteyes finished the diagnostic tests (TABE) for the GED.  At 15, she aced every section except for writing.  She's finally starting to understand that my insistence that she write wasn't just Mommy being mean, but a skill she needs to master as well as she has the other skills.  Yay!

At 13 and 15, we decided the girls were old enough to start watching The Big Bang Theory this winter. They love it. (It doesn't hurt that we know/are people like that either.) My husband wants a copy of the Friendship Algorithm for his classroom. He says his students need the advice. I haven't got around to mentioning exactly how often it's re-run though. I don't want them watching it for 6.5 hours a week.

The Invisible History of the Human Race

I just finished The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures by Christine Kenneally.  Kenneally examines how recent advances in science have changed our understanding of history and of people.  While DNA and genetic genealogy play a prominent role, they are far from the only subjects covered in this book.  One topic that caught my attention was economists' Nathan Nunn and Leonard Wantchekon's research on how the slave culture in Africa caused a climate of distrust that had lingered for centuries and was still stifling economic development to this day.  I couldn't help remembering all the times I've heard Mississippi people say they couldn't trust someone enough to go in business with them, and I wondered if a similar study had been done on how a similar culture of mistrust might be inhibiting economic development in the South.

Lit Crit: Welty, Salinger and Lovecraft

My husband is continuing to catch up on his literature.  He thought Welty was nice, but she waited until her very last story to say anything substantive.  Salinger, while technically a better short story writer than Welty, bored both of us to tears.  Like far too many Modern writers, he assumes that his "universal" experiences will continue to be so for every future reader, when in fact neither of us knew what he was talking about half the time.

Needing a break he turned to Lovecraft's fantasies, which are flawed but more substantive than I first gave them credit for being.  The very first Lovecraft story you read tends to be intriguing, but unforuntely they're all just rewrites of the same story, and only a couple stand out.  There's many writers I can say that about, but Lovecraft is the only one I know where you could take entire paragraphs from one story, insert it into another story, and not even disturb the flow.

Lovecraft's stories always made me want to give the writer a good swift kick in the shins for the way he glorified the fear of "things man was not meant to know/do".  As a child growing up right after the Civil Rights Movement I heard my fill of "things man was not meant to know/do" before I learned to read.  The "don't do thats" always hid a deep well of racism, sexism, homophobia, or some related form of good old identity hate.  It was not worthy of the least amount of respect, let alone the histrionic levels of terror it was supposed to engender.

But I was wrong and Lovecraft was right.  Demolishing the old justifications for institutionalized hatred did indeed cause a grotesque, shambling monstrosity to crawl out of the sewers and threaten to destroy all life on Earth if we don't immediately stop all progress and worship at it's hideous feet.

It's called the Tea Party.

Odd Squad

Fans of surrealist comedies like Gilligan's Island and The Addam's Family should check out PBS's new kid show ODD SQUAD It's about a department full of diminutive detectives who handle X-Files-style cases with tons of surrealist humor and a dollop of math/cognitive thinking skill. It's like a cross between the Sarah Jane Adventures, the original Electric Company, and a 70s comedy show like Rowen & Matin's Laugh-in or early SNL. There's plenty of jokes aimed at grownups, like a recent 80's flashback episode featuring Agent Oprah and her partner Agent O'Donahue (and their big hair).

And then there's the guest stars.  Last month the Kids in the Hall showed up for a hilarious British Manor House mystery.  Yesterday Henson Studios was on hand for an insanely funny "people turned into puppets" storyline.  Just don't get between the kids and the TV when it's time for a new episode to air.

The Price of Questing

I stared angrily at the scale.  Where had all my hard work gone?

Four years ago I started an exercise program to get my body back in shape.  Two years of steady, constant exercising later, I was feeling fit and fine -- so fit, my subconcious deemed me able to handle a huge heap of repressed childhood horror.  The next two years were taken up with nothing but repairing damages done to my mind and my soul.  The work was so intense I could do nothing else.  Some days just making it out of bed was all I could manage.  In the process I've lost all the fitness progress I made over the previous two years.  My weight is back up and my stamina is nonexistant.  Physically I'm right back where I started.  I've got all this psychological stuff seen to  but -- I know the metaphor of life being a great big spiral but I don't need it to play out so literally, darn it.

At least there's nothing else hidden in the recesses of my mind.  There are still things I have trouble talking about, and one thing I can't out of respect for the privacy of another, but I doubt there's any more long-repressed unpleasantness waiting to erupt.

Unfortunately it wasn't just my body that suffered.  It was also two years out of my relationship with my children.  Now I have to sync up with them and repair that.  That  hurts.  Even the parts of it that aren't difficult still hurt.

Quests of self-discovery have a higher price tag at my age.

Lit Crit

My husband is catching up on Southern Literature right now.  He commented on the "morose nostalgia" of most of the stories.  I agreed, the glumness is one of the things that puts me off so many of them.  There's an attitude not of "can do" but "shoulda done", and the "shoulda dones" usually happened long before we were born.  It's easy to see why there was a tendency to experiment with magical realism even before Garcia Marquez invented it, and for the same reason; the fantastical elements (or in Faulkner's case, ornate verbiage) entertain you while the characters go to such great lengths to shoot themselves in the foot, and you later find out in flashbacks were doomed before they even got started.  In too many writers it's a glumness only alleviated by "dumb redneck" jokes, and how many of them does a person want to read?  A body needs a few cautionary tales to tell them what mistakes not to make, but there is a greater need for tales where problems are shown to be solvable with the right mental tool set.

Small Fritters For Small Fry

The kids were pestering me for snacks while I was deboning chicken for supper tonight, so I threw the skin in a skillet and made cracklings. First time I've done that, but the kids liked it and it can't be less healthy than the chemicals they put in junk food.

Local Color

Four years ago we moved to Scooba, MS, population 600 or so.  It's in Kemper County, next to the Alabama state line.  Not much has happened in Kemper County.  It's all farmland.  It used to be cotton and corn, owned by white farmers and worked by black sharecroppers.  When farm profits crashed, the white farmers sold their land to the timber companies and moved away.  The black sharecroppers were left with no work and no way out except for a degree from the old agricultural high school, now turned into a community college.  The farm houses were torn down and what used to be a landscape dotted with the lights of tiny family farms is now mile after mile of blank pine plantation, it's paved roads torn out and replaced with dirt to discourage traffic.  The buildings on Main Street are being torn down for bricks; there's only two left intact.  The rest are piles of rubble being wrapped in plastic and shipped out.

The biggest thing that's happened locally took place about half an hour from here, right outside Philadelphia.  Fifty years ago last Saturday night three civil rights workers were murdered in the cause of defending state's rights against those who would help the state's citizens register to vote.  It's hard to find the exact spot these days.  There's no marker.

It happened just down the road from the Neshoba County Fair, a teeny-tiny gated vacation community for second-tier rich people out in the middle of nowhere.  It's not what you usually think of when you hear the words "county fair", more like a miniature Jackson's Hole (without the scenery) than an amusement park.  You find it by looking for the tiny pastel houses enclosed in a huge, black iron fence.  Sixteen years after the murders, Ronald Reagan would kick off his first Presidential campaign with a rousing speech defending state's rights.  Not one word did he say about the blood spilled on the ground just beyond the gates.

I remember Mississippi folks being surprised, and quite a few of them disturbed, by that omission.  Some people defended him, saying he was incompetent, not amoral.  "He's an actor.  He doesn't know the context."

It was 1980.  The world did not yet know that Reagan was a supremely competent political campaigner who always knew the context.

But we would learn.

Book Pushing 2

The girls are watching Dark Shadows with their father.  He's using the opportunity to point out the structure and limits of the old daytime soap opera format.  Also, to re-watch Dark Shadows.

Last night they told me they were up to Victoria's witchcraft trial in the 18th Century.  Seizing the opportunity, I said, "Those scenes are based on a play called The Crucible.  It was written around the same time as The Mouse That Roared and was about the Salem Witch Trials.  Let's read it next week when this sequence finishes so you can see how they're alike."

"Yay!"

Whew!  I thought The Crucible was going to be a harder sell than that!

They wanted to talk about their current book, Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class.  They're up to the fashion chapter, which, alas, time has provided even more glaring examples of how conspicuous waste generates ugly clothes since Veblen's death than before the book was written.  We talked about the similarity of purpose between Leisure Class and Darwin's Origin of the Species.  I began pitching Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century as the modern update.

Not bad for the first part of the supper conversation.

Book Pushing

I found some Pyrex banana boats at an antique store (vintage kitchenwares are my therapy shopping) and served banana splits in them yesterday.  The girls wanted to know why in the world there were so many kinds of dishes and utensils.  It was the perfect opportunity to introduce them to one of my favorite books, Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class.  Today they're going around exclaiming, "Wow, that finally makes sense!" twice an hour.

Last week I snuck up on them with The Mouse That Roared, but that one didn't need ice cream.  All I had to mention was some of the sillier plot twists and they were all over me to produce a copy.

What's Wrong With Her? She's Gifted.

I was adopted anonymously by parents who wanted a normal, healthy baby.  For a while it looked like they'd got their wish, but by early elementary I started to show signs that something was wrong.  I'd had good grades briefly, then they had crashed.  I'd soon become inattentive and withdrawn.

In fourth grade, around 1975, the experts went looking for an explanation for my straight-D grades, inattentiveness, and poor social skills in school.  The suggestion that I might be gifted was made by my reading teacher, who noted that while I didn't pay attention in class and always had my head stuck in a book, it was a different book every day.

Her suggestion was met with universal derision.  How could a very smart child be such a failure?  But upon reflection it was decided that I might be retarded (the term was still used clinically at that time), and that I should be given an IQ test to see if I qualified for Special Education.  So I was abruptly pulled out of class and sat down at a bewildering exam the likes of which I'd never even imagined.

To the amazement of most, I barely squeaked in as "gifted".  Something had gone wrong!  I had cheated, or there had been a mixup involving the grading of the test.  So I was pulled out of class and given the test again, and the tester made to score the test on site in front of a committee of teachers.

But this time the test was not a complete surprise to me.  I had been through it once before, and knew what to expect.  This time I scored 20 points higher, over one standard deviation, easily clearing the "highly gifted" mark.

Oh, the consternation!  Such hooting, hollering, and carrying on you have never heard in your life!  I'm told the administration wanted to test me a third time with even more rigorous anti-cheating measures in place.  "You want to see how much higher she'll score next time?" snarked the gifted ed teacher.

(The answer, when another school system tested me four years later, was 30 points or 2 standard deviations higher than the second test.)

The testers tried to explain that only half of high-IQ students perform well in a regular classroom.  The other half become bored and disengaged.  That explanation only made the administration resent me for not being a team player.  However, with so much documentation staring them in the face it was felt that they risked a lawsuit if they didn't put in me in the gifted program (they didn't know my adoptive parents very well), so I was grudgingly allowed in on probation.


Of course, once I had access to people like myself doing things that actually interested us, school became a lot less boring and more engaging.  I paid more attention, and my grades improved.

It makes me angry that regional schools no longer have gifted ed programs.  Those schools have undiagnosed gifted children in them who are starving for the companionship of their peers and for an IQ-appropriate learning environment.  That doesn't do them any good, and by adding to their burdens instead of lightening them we take away their ability to do our country any good.

Running Up the White Flag

After almost a decade of fighting it, I finally got a Facebook account.   Y'all can friend me if you like.

Who knows, in another decade I might even make it to Twitter.

First Book

My husband and I have begun turning the material he worked up for his junior high and high school science classes into a curriculum. Here's the first e-book:

Earth and Space

This is nine weeks worth of lesson plans and quizzes. We're planning to put out something more comprehensive at a later date, but this was what we could get out right now.

If you're interested in this sort of thing, please look it over and tell me what you think.

ETA:  Fixed the link.

Progress

There's been a breakthrough on finding my biological parents.  I don't want to say anything more right now -- I'm almost afraid to breathe for fear it will all blow away -- but progress has been made.

Right now I've got a whirlwind of emotions swirling around inside me.  I'm trying to process them now so they don't get in the way later on.  Cry now, be calm later.