Jenyfer Matthews

The home-schooling that is.

I greatly admire teachers for their patience in working with children – especially 20+ children at once. I know that children act differently at school but never has that been more apparent to me than now. Take the certificate my son brought home from school last week for “exemplary behavior” during carpet time? Where is that child now? Or does is his teacher some sort of child whisperer?

The homework that my son brought home isn’t all that difficult – he is only six. The most challenging part of his homework is getting him to focus and sit still to do it. My strategy is to get two pages a day done, first thing in the morning before he goes out to play. On the one hand, he’s as fresh and energetic as he’s going to be during the day. On the other hand, he’s fresh and energetic and sitting still and focusing is the last thing he is interested in doing.

The homework my daughter brought home will likely break me. A good friend of mine who has a son in the the same class was puzzled why I was freaking out so much about it. Until we figured out that 1) she thought that the work they sent covered the entire break (it doesn’t, it’s just the first few days) and 2) she was missing the instruction sheets for the two most involved assignments. I helpfully made copies for her and now she’s freaking out as well.

In addition to six math worksheets and three reading comprehension sheets, my daughters assignments include a reading book, daily mental math quizzes, writing a book report, and a research project on the life during the Tudor times. The research project will compare the rich and poor on seven points including housing, food, clothing, entertainment, women and children, and working life with each point being two pages of text and pictures and a minimum of 10 sentences each. Since she had a meltdown during one of the (EASY) reading comprehension sheets this morning, I can only imagine what happiness and joy will flow when we start on the research project.

I myself was a very good student but I’m not at all cut out for homeschooling. I’ve already told my husband that if the rumors are true and the schools remain closed until Christmas or beyond, I’m leaving and putting the kids in school in the US. It might sound extreme but I’m not the only mother here thinking the same thing!

My husband, being a little older than I am, decided that he wanted to balance the children’s musical exposure by including some 70s music in the line-up. I’m certainly enjoying it – and you haven’t seen anything funnier than a 9 year old dancing hip-hop to Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”!

We don’t need no education…
We don’t need no mind control…

My son has always been a real BOY. Since he was old enough to express an opinion, he’s preferred toys with wheels (cars) and he can get dirtier faster than my daughter, even if they are playing the same game. Few to none of his clothes survive him to be passed on to anyone else. Shoes? I’m lucky if they last a few months. It’s the rare pair that doesn’t fall apart from abuse before he outgrows them.

This summer he’s really been in his element. He got an early birthday present of a screened bug house. He collects grasshoppers, lady bugs, and anything else he can find – including garter snakes (that snake was not happy to be in the bug house!) His lack of fear is scaring me – I looked out of the window of the house and saw him walking up to a deer in the yard!

Some of his activities are pretty yucky though – and I’m not just saying that because I’m a girl. When we were having our extreme hike up the creek, he found a fairly well preserved dead frog. Did he fling it away in disgust? Nope, he raced it down the rapids like most kids would do with a paper boat or a stick. Not just once either – he followed it, retrieved it, and did it over and over again until the current finally swept the frog corpse under a large boulder. Even that didn’t discourage my son. At that point he attempted to build a dam so he could divert the water and reclaim the frog!

I’m glad he found a way to amuse himself so well, and maybe it is because I’m a girl, but I still can’t help thinking that the activity was more than a little gross!

So I brought my laptop along with me, planning on writing in the evenings after I put the children to bed. It hasn’t really worked out as well as I had hoped.

It’s hard enough for me to get started on a new story. What’s so vivid in my head evaporates as I stare at the blank page. Being here helps, because this is in fact where my next story is set, and the details of the story are growing in my mind every day. So what’s the problem?

The children aren’t cooperating with me.

I do my best to keep them busy all day long and I put them to bed at 8:30pm, but do they go to sleep? Nope. No matter how tired they are, they mess around and giggle and play for at least an hour. I usually have to go in and yell at them at least twice before they finally consent to at least whisper. It’s distracting to the writing process to say the least. They finally settle down somewhere close to 10pm, by which time I’m exhausted myself!

The only night they fell asleep easily in the last couple of weeks was after having completed a 7 mile hike up Eagle Mountain and back. Do I need to say that they weren’t the only ones who were tired that night?!

I have been making lots of notes on random thoughts that have popped into my head and I am happy to say I managed a few pages last night. I’m hoping to squeak out a few more tonight. But I don’t think I’m going to get as much done on this trip as I had hoped…

One of the things I miss living I’m in Egypt is driving. I enjoy driving, but not only that, driving was always the time when I was able to listen to music. Since I don’t drive in Egypt my music listening habits have been much curtailed. Not that I’m missing much in Cairo. The one Western music radio station I’ve heard plays a bizarre mix of old and new pop with the occasional Arabic track mixed in and certain times of the day seem to be dedicated to techno dance music or other themes – honestly, I’ve never listened long enough to discern the pattern.

Now that I’m back in the US and on vacation, I’m driving again. But I still can’t listen to the music I like. There isn’t much in the way of radio reception way back here in the woods. That doesn’t faze my children at all, however.

Way back when I was a child, my musical choices were pretty much dictated by my parents – particularly when traveling in a car. I listened to what they listened to, which given the technological limitations of the time period pretty much meant that we listened to the radio. One of the earliest songs I can remember singing along to was “Rhinestone Cowboy” by Glen Campbell. I have a vast repertoire of lyrics from Barry Manilow, Billy Joel, and Neil Diamond to name a few, and there was one memorable summer when my father tortured me on a cross country drive with tapes of Woody Guthrie. Though I might have made other choices myself – and very likely made some disparaging remarks about their choices in my adolescent years – I never managed to impose my own music on them.

Somehow, that all seems to have changed. I regularly end up listening to CDs my children select instead of things I might prefer myself. Last summer, that meant that we listened to the Grease soundtrack on an endless loop. This summer was threatening to turn into the summer of the Jonas Brothers. I don’t actually hate the Jonas Brothers but I’ve heard “The Year 3000” more than enough times, so I decided to take charge and broaden their musical horizons.

Inspired by a recent trip to a bowling alley, I bought three CDs of hits from the 1980s. The bowling alley was playing music videos from that time period and we were all enjoying the music, a rare occurrence. These CDs haven’t done anything toward introducing me to any new popular music, but they seemed like a good idea at the time.
“We Got the Beat” by the GoGos, “Walking on Sunshine” by Katrina and the Waves, and “Walk Like an Egyptian” by The Bangles were all big hits. And then I heard the lyrics to “My Angel is a Centerfold” by the J. Giles Band coming from my six year olds mouth and it put a new spin on things. And that wasn’t as half as bad as “My Sharona” or “Good Girls Don’t” by The Knack:

You’re alone with her at last,
And you’re waiting til you think the time is right.
Cause you’ve heard she’s pretty fast.
And you’re hoping that she’ll give you some tonight.
So, you start to make your play,
Cause you could’ve sworn you thought you heard her saying…

And it’s a teenage sadness
Everyone has got to taste.
An in-between age madness
That you know you can’t erase
Til she’s sitting on your face.

They haven’t asked for any interpretation of the lyrics so for now I’m just going to enjoy the music. My alternative is either more of Grease, The Jonas Brothers, or the two High School Musical CDs my daughter got for her birthday. I think I’d rather take my chances with the 80s for now…

Yesterday was the last day of school and both children arrived home weeping. I was a good student and liked my teachers well enough, but crying because school was finished for the year was never my reaction to the last day of school!

The kids seem happier today – and have kept themselves busy. The pop-up soccer goals that Santa brought haven’t seen much action in their intended capacity but they are being used today – as tents. The kids have put them side by side, covered them with a fleece blanket and dragged their pillows inside along with their flashlights. Their intention is to sleep in “the tent” tonight. We’ll see how long that lasts.

Their room is currently a disaster, but hey, it’s better than watching TV all day and I have only heard the words “I’m bored” once today so far…

More and more often lately, I’ve heard other children say to my children things like “You haven’t seen Spiderman III / The Hulk / [fill in other comic book character]?” or “You haven’t seen The Clone Wars? I’ve seen all the Star Wars movies!” – with either great surprise or something bordering on scorn in their high little voices.

My children are only 6 & 8 years old. In spite of the fact that the above mentioned movies have characters that first appeared in animated form, I don’t think they are the most appropriate movies for my children to watch. Not only are they fairly violent but they also include many adult themes. (My children find the “rodents of unusual size” from Princess Bride a bit scary!) But given the increasing frequency with which I’m hearing the above sorts of comments, I’m beginning to feel like the only parent who gives any of this a second thought.

And I’m also beginning to feel slightly sorry for my children. It’s not their fault that they are perceived as uncool by their friends. I guess this is one thing that they can totally and legitimately blame me for!

I’ve mentioned before what little jocks my children are. It’s particularly noticeable in my daughter since she’s older. She’s wonderful at soccer and tennis and this week brought home three medals from a track meet : gold in hurdles and two silvers for sprinting and high jump.

I appreciate the compliments people bestow – I have eyes in my head and I can see her too. She’s pretty phenomenal for an eight year old. But I also have ears and when people ask me so where does all this athletic talent come from? I can hear the subtext of because you’re certainly not an athlete you lazy lump. It’s true – my husband and I are more likely to be found sitting behind a computer or reading a book these days. But I wish people would think before they speak. We might have been great athletes once upon a time, or at least harbor that potential. The main thing is we aren’t eight anymore.

And if you come to my yoga class sometime, I’ll kick your butt at downward dog!

My children have been home for spring break for nearly two weeks now and I am more than ready for them to go back to school!

I’m really not sure what the difference is between today and when I was a child. I didn’t require nearly the amount of entertainment my own children do. If I ever I whined about being bored, my parents told me to go outside – though honestly I can’t remember whining that much (I can almost hear my mother laughing now) When I was the age of my youngest we lived in a neighborhood full of children. I was allowed to walk down the block and to the homes of my two best friends. I didn’t have a cell phone or even a watch and yet I knew when to go home for dinner.

When I got a little older, roller skating was my thing. I went through several pairs – actually skated the wheels off of them! My first boyfriend (age 9) lived across the street and he’d pull me around behind his bike with a jump rope. Look mom – no helmets! We spent hours doing loops around the block that way.

By the time I was a pre-teen my horizons expanded – I had a ten speed bike. I rode that bike just about everywhere. I can’t actually remember having any restrictions on how far I went – I suppose my parents just trusted me. By the time I was twelve, I rode it a couple of miles on neighborhood streets to the home of my best friend. She and I mostly just walked around and talked.

I have always been very good at entertaining myself, even when I had no friends around. I read books, I taught myself to cross stitch, I planted flowers. When I was a teenager, I spent a lot of time either on the phone or asleep One time when my mother was at worked I pulled the wallpaper off the bathroom walls and painted!

So why is it that my own children cannot entertain themselves better? My own mother worked, but I don’t think that it is entirely due to my being a stay-at-home mom – I’ve heard similar complaints from friends who work full time. Is it the fact that today there are TV channels with dedicated children’s programming around the clock? Video games? More theme parks and activity centers? If so, then I think all of this “progress” has stunted the development of the important skill of self entertainment.

Now that I’m an adult, I have several other ways to entertain myself. I still read, I write, I quilt, I cook. This weekend I’m leaving the children with Mr. Matthews, jumping on a plane, and going to Qatar to visit some dear friends who I haven’t seen in almost a year. We have no definite plans but I’m confident that we’ll find a multitude of ways to entertain ourselves!

How do two small children use more than a dozen cups in one day? I can’t wait until they are tall enough to start helping with washing dishes!