This won’t be a digest. Life is not focused enough for that. And won’t be for the next week. By next Monday (or even Sunday), we’ll be able to breath – and then take deep breaths for the Next Thing.
So, maybe be September 1, I’ll be in a less-distracted space.
So, just bullet points today:
- Today’s feasts noted here.
- Also, today’s Gospel is one of the accounts of the multiplication of the loaves. I hope, if you go to Mass, you don’t get subjected to the Miracle of Sharing.
- Today is the first day of high school for the school M would be going to if he were going to school. Most of his friends are, as we speak, in their uniforms in homeroom or something. Not all – a few are going to other schools that begin later, and one girl from his 8th grade class is also homeschooling.
- So in honor- he’s sleeping. But then he’ll get up, do some Latin and math and have a piano lesson.
- Math News: We ditched Saxon. This was my own personal Saturday Night Massacre. Yes, you all told me, and yes, I wasn’t a fan from the minute I opened it, but hey, I figured – with a tutor it will work as a framework. It will be fine. Well, it wasn’t. I think the problem is that Saxon is a very specific approach. If you’ve been doing Saxon all along, it probably makes sense. But plunging into at the Algebra II level was, in retrospect, ridiculous. My son was experiencing the whole thing as a random collection of data being thrown at him, with no deep background or cohesiveness. We hadn’t even met with the tutor yet – she had asked that he cover a certain amount of review before the course began – but I could see that this was not going to work. It wasn’t, in the end, the way I wanted and hoped for him to experience math.
- So….Hey, Richard! We’re back!
- Yes, we’re back to the Art of Problem Solving. He’s going to spend the next couple of weeks working on some random pre-Geometry summer packets I pulled from various high school sites. We’ll make sure he’s up on all that he should know from Algebra I. Then we’re going to do the AOPS Counting and Probability – a one semester course – then do the second part of Introduction to Algebra (which is basically Algebra II) and Geometry in tandem. We’ll do this for two years, and then have him take a local ACT or SAT prep course to see how he’s doing and fill in the gaps from there.
- And at this point – no classes. We’ll just do this on our own, with assistance from AOPS videos, Kahn Academy and other sources, and another local tutor whom he knows and has worked with in a school setting before.
- I have been hesitant to do this for obvious reasons. I’m perfectly comfortable “teaching” and facilitating learning at home in the humanities, but not in science, math and foreign languages beyond the first level. Science is being taught in a class by a local Ph.D. Latin is being tutored by a high school teacher. I am not mathy, but I’m not phobic either – even so, I do think being in a math class would be optimal…but the whole thing just didn’t match up and hit me wrong, and as not the place he needed to be.
- So we’re going to try this.
First Day of School Update: Latin and Math knocked off. Walked to lunch with a neighborhood friend who doesn’t start school for another week. Piano lesson in a couple of hours. Decent!
On other notes:
- Rod Dreher was at the Chesterton conference in Kansas City this past weekend and wrote about visiting the excellent Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and eating “burnt ends” – And I immediately wrote him echoing his praise. The museum really is excellent and burnt ends are amazing – as I wrote about here (the museum) and here (the food and some other points of interest).
I told him, though, that he’d missed the best piece in the museum and perhaps the greatest work of art ever created – as I noted upon seeing it a couple of years ago. I mean – what can surpass Central Asian Caravan Woman Rousing her Camel While Nursing?
Nothing.
Eh, there’s more. I just can’t think.