Alexandra was in Honors everything in public high school last year, so this IHIP surely looks like I'm not just pushing her, but drowning her in work. But she manages her workload better than my other two, turning in the most thoroughly documented labs and topnotch writing projects. And she catches her French tutor's mistakes (which is a little troubling, since the tutor is expensive...)
If only she were as polite as she is talented.
Here is her IHIP for this school year:
At last, two months after I started school, I finally completed the IHIPs (Individualized Home Instruction Plans) for all three of my kids.
It’s not that I didn’t know what I was going to teach them or was that late in writing them. I was just putting the finishing touches on them when I got news of my brother’s accident. Then his death. After that there was the funeral preparation. The dozens and dozens of calls each day. The funeral itself. The thank you notes afterward. The phone calls canceling his credit cards, magazine subscriptions, phone service... I’m still dealing with the ramifications of his death - his estate, his bills… So IHIPs fell off my radar screen - until the school district contacted me last Friday. Oops!
So here is Larissa's eighth grade IHIP, hot off the computer. As I revised this plan, I added books to her English curriculum because she read five of them before mid-October! I suspect I'll have her read even more literature, but I won't commit her to it yet. Perhaps this plan is more detailed than those submitted by others, but for me, it serves as a chart across the unknown territory of an eighth grader’s education. I consult it when I don’t know where I’m going next.
I hope I do Larissa justice, pushing her, but not overburdening her.
Yesterday Jacob and Alexandra finally took – and passed! – the test for chapter two of our Chemistry book. We’re weeks behind, but we’ve made progress!
We learned the different units with which you measure energy. We survived calculations to determine specific heat of objects. Even I could recite equations such as q = m c ΔT (where q is heat absorbed or released, m is mass, c is the specific heat, and delta T is the change in temperature), and -q (object) = q (water) + q (calorimeter), which tells us that the heat lost by the object placed in the calorimeter is gained by the water and calorimeter.
Aren’t you impressed? I certainly surprised myself by memorizing those equations!
I was solving for that mysterious specific heat of an unknown metallic object or finding out how much energy was lost or gained, working out algebraic equations better than my kids were. Perhaps now – decades after being a new girl in my school and being forced to take Algebra a second time because my new school system didn’t believe that a seventh grader could possibly have taken Algebra – the Algebra that I had so thoroughly learned in junior high was coming in handy.
I don’t know why both my kids got so mired in that chapter on energy, heat, and temperature. I understood it. It was a painful three and a half weeks as I explained and reworked problems and sat with them, handholding them through equations, reteaching them algebra so they could solve the equations.
And through it all, my son shook his head and said, “Why do I have to learn all that? I’ll never need to know the specific heat of anything!” Deep down I could see his point, but… We plodded on.
And it paid off. They both got the same grade on the test, a 93%, though each got different problems wrong. I was so relieved.
On to atoms and molecules.
Sigh. I know what tonight’s bedtime reading will be for me.
This is what Jacob came up with:
Fall is…
Fall is a season, one out of four
Comes after summer and right before snow.
The cold arrives and the warm winds pass,
When colorful leaves fall, and cover the grass.
The raking begins, more work for me.
There’s so many leaves it seems like a sea.
A new school year, eleventh grade
Can’t wait for it to pass and fade.
The wood-burning stove creates some heat
So we can come by and warm our feet
The wood that we burn, I had to chop,
Bring from the woods and pile up.
Fall brings us more cold days
To stay inside is the best way
You bundle up, but your nose turns red
You go outside, “Put a hat on your head!”
The leaves twirl and flutter down
You can hear the rustling sound
To play outside they do insist.
The poofy leaf piles they can’t resist.
I wish you could like the poem I wrote
But I’m a failure, it will not float
Just please don’t give me a big, fat F
Because I’m special, my name is Jeff.
Very intersting. Jacob certainly got into rhyming today; I was expecting prose. But I did say they could be creative in any style or format they wanted. While my son's name isn't Jeff and he said that he doesn't really want eleventh grade to speed by, he made those up just to rhyme. He certainly got silly at the end, rhyming words that made no sense. We have a Rhyming Dictionary, and it's a great way to explore words, especially words that rhyme.
I'm glad Jacob enjoyed himself - after carrying in the wood he chopped so we could light a fire in the wood-burning stove and stay warm as he writes.
I inherited a stockpile of food from my brother: noodles and dried beans, fish sauce and rice vinegar, sesame oil and popcorn, canned green beans and canned tomatoes, a shopping bag full of exotic spices — and a whole case of canned black beans.
Black beans? I’d never cooked with black beans.
Larissa came with me to the grocery store last week. When they were little, all three of my children played with a computer in the store, a computer near the meats where you type in a keyword and it provides a recipe using that item. Larissa suggested finding a recipe for – what else? – black beans.
This is what came up on the screen:
* * * * * * *
Black Bean Chili
1.5 lb. boneless pork, cut into 1/2–inch cubes
two 14.5-oz. cans black beans, drained
1 cup chopped onion
1 cup chopped bell pepper
1 cup thick and chunky salsa
one 14.5-oz. can diced tomatoes, do NOT drain
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1 tsp. chili powder
1/2 tsp. cumin
1/4 tsp. crushed red pepper
salt to taste
sour cream and shredded Cheddar cheese for garnish (optional)
Combine all ingredients except garnishes in 3.5-quart slower cooker. Cover and cook on low heat setting for 7 to 8 hours.
Garnish individual bowls with sour cream and Cheddar cheese, if desired.
Serves 4 to 6.
* * * * * * *
Sounded good. Since we had all the ingredients but the pork at home, we printed out the recipe and bought the pork. I assigned cooking “class” to Larissa the next morning.
“Looks like a salad,” commented Jacob when all the ingredients were in the crock pot.
By suppertime, the “salad” had cooked down into a fragrant chili.
While we waited for George to come home from work, a neighbor came by to greet me as I worked on my new garden – a Greg memorial garden using hostas from my deceased brother's gardens – in the front yard. As she strolled up to me, George arrived home. Since the neighbor, a nurse, lives alone and was just coming home from work, I invited her in for chili dinner.
The chili was delicious! That recipe is a keeper.
I no longer wonder what I’ll do with a case of black beans.
I dug a well in a Cambodian village. I sent care packages to inmates in Middle Eastern prisons. I educated several Sudanese children for a year.
And that’s not all.
I bought uniforms, books, and writing paper for children in India whose parents barely earn enough to put food on their table; they could never have sent their children to school without help. I delivered live rabbits and chickens to destitute Indian families so they could raise them for food. And in Africa, I gave away dozens of life-giving goats, goats that provided milk, and thus sustenance, for impoverished families on the brink of hunger.
And I did all this from the comfort of my home.
It was a single incident during a trip to Kenya that spurred me to give in this way: In a church in a mountain village two hours drive from Nairobi, I watched as the poor gave their extra clothing to the poorer in their own church. Their pastor thanked them – and challenged his parishioners to give even more, to bring in extra bedding and blankets and beds to give to others in their church who had no bed or mattress to sleep on. “They sleep on dirt floors,” he announced to the church.
I had seen poverty before, but never a home without a mattress or hammock. I asked to be taken to such a home.
We hiked down a very steep red-earth path to an equally red mud hut. In the doorway stood a widow holding an infant; inside were three young children sitting on the earthen floor. Just sitting there – not chattering, not running around, not reacting to my presence.
Something wasn’t right.
“What is wrong with the children?” I asked my travel companion, a woman who had worked in refugee camps in Africa.
“These kids are starving. Literally.”
Indeed, we saw no food in the house, other than the flour, oil, and sugar that we had just brought as a gift. For furniture, the house had but one chair. For bedding, just a few rags. The “kitchen” was a few stones on the ground where ashes marked the remains of the cooking fire. The single pot was empty.
The children, we learned, were six, four, and three. The “infant” was over a year old. The three-year-old had not yet learned to walk. She just sat dull-eyed on the uneven floor without the energy to get up.
The scene haunted me long after I was back in Nairobi. I’d never seen starvation with my own eyes. I’d never seen a house with so little in it.
“What can we do for that widow?” I pondered aloud, discussing with my fellow traveler how we could help.
“If we send her more food, it’ll run out in a while. What if we bought her chickens?” I mused. “They could eat the eggs. But I’m not sure what they would feed the chickens. Hey – how about a goat? They eat almost anything, and they produce milk. If we buy her a lactating goat, the children could have milk right away. I read about tribes in Africa that subsist on milk alone for periods of time.”
The lactating goat, purchased for $35, was delivered a few days later – right during the funeral of one of the children. For that child, it was too late. But for the others, milk from that goat would make a difference – the difference between life and death.
It’s only by God’s grace that I was born in North America into a family that never knew the kind of starvation that is all too common in other parts of the world. Maybe, I once read in a book, God is testing you by placing you in North America. Maybe He gave you the wealth you have to see what you would do with it – spend it for your own pleasures, or do as the Bible says and share it with the less fortunate. “Whoever is kind to the needy honors God” (Proverbs 14:31b).
Sometimes the issue of poverty seems so overwhelming that we are immobilized. The problem seems too immense for one person. But if we each did our part, each bought a goat to distribute instead of purchasing another change of clothing or streaking our hair or dining out, we would make a huge impact. I know that I change the fate of many families with goats and chickens and wells and medicine.
And now my children, through my teaching and my example, are making a difference, too. They’ve heard my story and have seen the pictures. Now they, too, send in their coins or part of their tithe to buy a few more goats for the children of Africa. I can imagine the joy in the faces of the recipients.
Jesus said, “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.” (Matthew 25:40).
“Someday in heaven, Jesus will thank me for all the goats I bought Him,” 12-year-old Larissa said.
Heat equals mass times specific heat times change in temperature.
Colorimetry. Calories. Joules. Atoms. Molecules.
Sigh….
My nightly ritual after work and dinner is to write up daily schedules for the next day of schooling, correct the kids’ assignments, grade tests – and then sit up and read Chemistry. Yes, Chemistry. I get out my highlighter, mark the important text, memorize the formulas, then using my paper and pencil, I figure out the examples and assigned problems.
Why am I relearning Chemistry?
We have a tutor for math. Another for French. A friend teaches them Spanish. And a music teacher gives them piano lessons. These are subjects I cannot teach my kids. But I was a science major in college – granted, in Biology, not Chemistry – and I can teach the science myself.
Oh, I thought I could hand off the book – Aplogia’s Exploring Creation With Chemistry – to the kids and have them teach themselves. I even found help on the Internet for scheduling the course. I thought they would read the small chunks of material, follow the examples, work out the problems, and learn Chemistry on their own.
But they got stuck in chapter 2. The only way to help them is to read the material myself. If I tutored Chemistry in college, I know I can relearn this stuff. So night after night, after the kids are in bed, I read my Chemistry, work out the problems, and follow along so I can explain the problems, the math, the concepts.
I hope that one day the kids will appreciate what I am going through to teach them at home because frankly, I’d rather be gardening or reading novels than relearning Chemistry. But one thing I’ll say about this: my brain is getting a workout, so I’ll be keeping Alzheimer’s at bay for a while!
It's official: I'm handicapped.
When I went in to the company office recently, the long walk from the back of the company parking lot to the building, then up the elevator and through one building, then another and another all the way to my office was too much for me. By the time I got to my cubicle, my heart was pounding and the chest pains worsened. Granted, I don't have to come in often these days; mostly I work from home. But when I do have to come in, I'd like to park close to the entrance of the building. So this week I did park there – and got a note from Security warning me not park in the handicapped spots again.
I had a doctor appointment this past week to re-evaluate my health and my ability to work. I've felt ill with my lupus for so long that it's now "normal," but there is no way I could work an 8-hour day, not even if I weren't homeschooling the kids. I'm just too fatigued and my heart hurts much of the time. I feel comfortable working my six hours per day from home, but more than that would set my health back, probably to the point where I could hardly work at all.
So the doctor extended my part-time disability for another ten weeks. Meanwhile, I've asked for part-time status at work to relieve me from the pressure of getting well and getting back to work full-time. Part-time is all I can handle, and I'd like to have that be my official status. But we shall see. This is about being handicapped.
What a strange and unwanted status: Handicapped. Impaired. Disadvantaged. These words apply to me, a "supermom" who until lately was a full-time employee, mother, wife, housekeeper, Sunday school teacher, and singer in the church choir. I was a volunteer newsletter writer and photographer, and I went on international short-time mission trips almost annually. Sometimes twice a year. And I wrote about these experiences for my company's blog on a volunteer basis. I was a mom who took on homeschooling as well (after dropping the choir and Sunday school roles). Yes, I was someone who burned the candle at both ends – and still had time to read.
And now I have a tag in my car that allows me to park as close as possible to a building so I don't exhaust myself...
My doctor had offered to fill in the paperwork so I could get a handicapped parking permit the last time I saw him. I refused. During this week’s visit, I requested it myself.
So it’s official: I'm handicapped. And I have the tag to prove it.
