Julius Caesar, Loch Ness Monsters, Olympics, and Komodo Dragons

Wow, it's been almost a month since I've blogged! In January, we began reading Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare. We are using the "No Fear" version by Sparknotes. On one side of the page is Shakespeare's version in iambic pentameter which gives it a sing-song quality. On the other side is a more modern translation that is easier to understand. We were laughing at Act One, Scene One where they translated Flavius's words to, "Get out of here! Go home you lazy men!" I wouldn't have guessed that Shakespeare would write something like that. We also saw the play, and we're going to see the movie, or at least everyone else is. I have no intentions on seeing the bloody, tragic Julius Caesar again, not that I didn't like it. I also wrote a paper on Mark Antony's speech. I will share it with you as soon as possible.



I have been doing a lot of writing recently even though I haven't let you see it yet. I wrote a story called "My Night with the Loch Ness Monster" for my "Fantasy Fiction" class at Eagleridge. It's about a girl who finds a Loch Ness Monster egg and helps get the baby monster back into the loch it came from. I also wrote an article on Dian Fossey in my Composition class, also at Eagleridge. The next article we'll be doing in my Composition class is one on "The White House Gang," Teddy Roosevelt's children. The latest thing I did in my "Fantasy Fiction" class was write a summary on the book The Water Horse by Dick King-Smith. I'm also writing two stories right now. One is unnamed, but the other one is so far called "Terri Cooper." This blog is also one of my at-home writing projects. I want to share all of them with you. I will let you see them..... once I'm done with them.


While we have been doing all this writing, we have also been learning about the world around us. Since the earthquake in Haiti to the Vancouver Winter Olympics, our month has been filled with world geography. We even have our world thinking day celebration in Girl Scouts coming up! How do we get our answers to our questions? Well, one of the books we have been using is The Handy Geography Answer Book. It gave us answers to questions like: what is the fertility rate (average children per women) in Haiti? 4.7. What is the fertility rate in the U.S.? 2.1. What languages do they speak in Haiti? French and Creole. What about in the U.S.? English and Spanish. We can even look up populations and laugh at 4.7 of a person being born. Because of the Olympics, we looked up a lot more places than just Haiti and the U.S. We looked up just about every country that participated in the Olympics. We also decided, because we're learning about the world, to start learning German. I love it. I've been teaching it to my best friend and now we speak German(or Deutsch, pronounced doy-tch) very loudly in the car. My mom has lots of German books and just got a clearance ($2) German phrases and expressions calendar with a phrase for every day. I don't know what's more fun: teaching the phrases to my best friend Brenna, learning the phrases myself, or saying them with Brenna.

On Friday, February 19th, we went to the Phoenix Zoo to draw animals with a homeschooling art class. Even though we used only one type of pencil, we bought three different types: B, 2B, and 4B. Our teacher, Ms. Brown, sold us our special sketchbooks and gum erasers last year when we took a class with her. Some of the tips she gave us were to: look for basic shapes in the animals body, squint your eyes to see details better, look for the outline of the animal, and instead of looking at your paper, look at the animal and let your brain take control and focus on what the animal really looks like instead of what it's supposed to look like. We drew giraffes, zebras, ducks, komodo dragons, and elephants. Brenna went too. It was so much fun drawing pictures and laughing at our horrible imitations of these more realistic looking animals. It was truly a unique experience.

The Do-It-Yourself Education

I'm always amazed at the things people are willing to take on by themselves. For example: changing your own oil on your car. Why do people do this themselves? I can drive to my local oil change place and be out in about 15 minutes for less than $25. Doing this at home would require driving to the auto parts supply store (and the gas cost to get there), looking up the right parts in the book, purchasing the parts and the oil, driving home, getting the appropriate buckets for draining the oil, jacking the car up to do the draining, having the right tools on hand to remove the filter, researching how this particular filter is removed, doing the work, and then comes the big pickle: ridding yourself of the dirty oil. Yet I know people who do this procedure without question. Another favorite: remodeling your own house. I know scads of people without employment in the construction field that take on enormous home repair jobs while maintaining employment in another field. This is accepted practice. We have mega-stores like The Home Depot and Lowe's dedicated to people's desire to "do-it-yourself." Yet my desire to educate my own children while maintaining employment as a registered nurse does not warrant this level of acceptance. It's a two-part problem for me where the general public questions my do-it-yourself school, and the homeschooling community questions my working and homeschooling together.

I want to address whether or not parents have the ability to homeschool their own children. Since this is a blog, as opposed to to a research study, I will draw from my own life experiences. One of the first jobs I had in college was at the campus tutoring center. I was recommended as a tutor by my algebra teacher because I had done well in that class. When I went to the interview with the director of the tutoring center, she asked me what other classes I could tutor. Hmmm . . . I didn't really feel I was qualified to tutor anything! I ended up tutoring College Algebra and every math below that), English, ESL, German, and Psychology -- quite a cross-section! Was I an expert in all those disciplines? No. Yet I began to have people requesting me as a tutor. Later on, I branched out and took a job with a private tutoring agency that paid me more money. The clients at this agency were kids ages kindergarten through 12th grade at many different schools in San Francisco and San Mateo counties. Could I have possibly known what was going on with all those different kids in all those classes? No way! But I was busy every afternoon from 4:00-6:00PM when every parent wants a tutor. I did so well with this agency that I finally had enough clients on my own, and I was able to branch out and make some serious money. No one ever questioned my credentials with tutoring all these kids. My success was purely because I listened to the kids, analyzed their problems, and made adjustments so that they began to do better after I started working with them. Yet, homeschooling parents are put through the wringer about whether or not they possess the right credentials to teach their own kids that they know so well.

In my circle of friends, I know almost as many teachers as I do nurses. Teachers, and of course there are exceptions, can be the worst critics of homeschooling parents. I once had a teacher say to me, "I resent the fact that parents think they can do the job that I spent five years in college learning to do." As a nurse I cannot imagine saying to a patient, "You gave yourself your own pill at home? Do you know how much pharmacology I had to take in college to learn how to give you that pill? You're not qualified!" Really, do we have to be experts to figure out most things in life? When I precept new nurses at the hospital, the very first thing we do together is go to the pyxis (the computerized lockbox for drugs) and click on a program called Lexi-comp that will show you everything you need to know about all kinds of drugs: side effects, interactions, how long to infuse an IV drip, what to mix it with, etc. I use this program on a daily basis! Sure, we may have learned it, but we forget stuff and "accepted practice" changes. "Use your resources" -- that's what I tell my nurses and that's what I tell my kids. If a parent is motivated enough to remove his/her child from school, the likelihood is probably high that said parent is motivated enough to educate that child. Don't we learn things based on how meaningful they are to us?

I have to draw on my own life again because the only "D" I ever remember earning in school was my AP United States History class. I had just moved to Germany and was touring castles and cathedrals so why was everyone so surprised that I wasn't interested in writing in-depth papers about the Sugar and Stamp Acts? I'm not suggesting that as American citizens we should forgo learning American history, but I was more motivated to learn European history while in Europe. As a side note, that grade was weighted and history still remains one of my favorite subjects, but I think this is a good example of how people learn things based on their desire -- whether that be a child's desire to learn or a parent's desire to learn how to homeschool. That same year of school, I was made to finish a fourth year of Spanish because why would I want to learn German when I was living in a country where . . . oh I don't know . . . everyone spoke German? How is it that teenagers inevitably end up passing drivers' ed when the rest of their classes may be suffering? Could it be that they have a burning desire to drive?

Which also brings me to the question: how do adults learn things when they are no longer in school? Does the machine shut down? Don't people read the newspaper, watch the news, or research things in Wikipedia? Learning is lifelong. We put far too much sanctity in the walls of the schoolhouse.