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July 2016 Unschooling Thread

3K views 53 replies 9 participants last post by  zebra15 
#1 ·
Adventures, frustrations, questions, ponderings, anything!

Is it just the four of us? Anyone else out there?

Miranda
 
#2 · (Edited)
I miss lots of moms. @rightkindofme ; @Annaintoronto ; @littleblackdress ; @spruce ; @Daffodil ; @4evermom just to name a few. :( (and in no order:love)

Summer is in full swing here. We are outside most of the time. :surf I went to the library the other day. I wanted to "check out" the summer reading list (public school's list). Funny, we read most of them. My 10yr is far ahead.

Happy Weekend!
 
#4 ·
I'm here!! Kiddo got a new lego set "Big Ben" and its HUGE, something to keep him busy this weekend, there are plans to display this thing on a cabinet next to my TV, a i have the ferris wheel on the other side so... oh well.

I am trying to find the motivation to construct my weekly paper for class. I don't have it this week. Blah. My printer has bit the dust and going to the library weekly to print massive amounts of graduate level paper is a minor problem. - Yes there is printing, even for an online class Blah.

Sweating thru summer here. The monsoons are moving in, we had lightening and thunder the past few nights, a bit of rain up in the mountains yesterday. This is nice but means humidity with our high temps.

I almost for got, kid also got Zootopia movie the other day and says its great, hes been watching it almost non stop, kid is 15- i may need to make time for this movie
 
#5 · (Edited)
Grown unschooler stuff:

Son working on a car "for money".

Yana's doglet Trinket has been here since Thursday, when Y had an afternoon eye appointment; T was left here because she barks when left alone at Y's house and landlord Ian does not like.

Working to make sure that Zela's Rx's get to the proper place; one has to be done on short notice, but it turns out that her friends' mom, the sisters that she lived with up to a third of every year after we moved to Texas, is the camp doctor. So probably no problem with that.

My weekend is straight work, from Canada Day through the 4th. Friday: 8 hours manual labor = shuffling pets around and cleaning EVERYTHING and medicating them = not easy for me! And today not all that much better so far: morning kennels were 3:20. Because husband is doing second performance of Spamalot, we may have to improvise if afternoon kennels interfere with the time he needs car to drive to other town. And in between I am doing Basic House Maintenance and a little work for my other job, when inspiration nudges.

Our town is crawling with people for the 4th; the town fathers always put the fireworks on Saturday no matter what!

Deborah
 
#6 ·
Relatives and guests swarming in. My kids are psyched to be in the 4th of July parade, but I'm feeling bah humbug about the chaos. Might send them with another family member and spend a quiet morning low-tiding all by myself. No big fireworks here -- as it does not get dark enough this time of year. Our town does them at New Year's.

Ramping up to be gone most of July. I'm ready to get out there.
 
#7 · (Edited)
Wrote a blog post today from some ideas that have been festering. It's mostly about unschooling and adolescents, but it touches on the wider issue of how conventional wisdom doesn't apply to unconventional kids.

My thinking about this started last fall when I was having trouble explaining to the administrators at SelfDesign what Fiona wanted. I gradually realized that there's something apparently paradoxical about the changing needs of a lot of unschooled adolescents. Despite all their experience supporting younger unschoolers I don't feel like SelfDesign really understands the nature of the change.

Most schooled kids tend to push against boundaries and against adult authority more as they enter the teen years. They want more freedom and fewer rules.

And yet many always-unschooled kids, my four among them, move in the opposite direction as they go through adolescence. They become more serious about academic learning. They start setting personal goals, seeking out ways to structure their learning, signing up for courses, asking for direct teaching.

When I present my unschooler to a DL teacher or administrator and say "She's 13 and she's looking for something a bit different this year...." they assume they know what she needs. They assume she's seeking more freedom and independence, that her interest in top-down learning is waning, that she is trying to figure out who she is as distinct from parents and family, and that she is ready to begin exploring where her own unique interests and strengths lie. Only then, they assume, will her self-motivation return. Until then she needs to be given more choice and support in discovering who she is and what her reasons for learning are.

But they're wrong. She already knows who she is, she has spent years exploring her interests, already has at least some vague goals for herself and is full of plenty of motivation as she strives to move forward. The 'something different' that she's looking for is the chance to commit to some clear and challenging learning expectations under the authority of a teacher. Weird, eh?

Obviously school offers authority, structure and accountability in spades. But that's such an abrupt whole-hog shifting of gears. I wish there were ways to transition rather than surrender.

One thing I'd share with other unschooling parents is that an adolescent's desire for structure and accountability does not necessarily mean he or she wants or needs to attend school full-time, nor does it mean that unschooling is "no longer working." The teen has just decided to outsource some of the organization of their learning to someone who can do it for them. They want the focus and commitment this supports. And to schools and alternative-school programs welcoming adolescent unschoolers I'd say that while the kids may have lots learn, they don't necessarily need to be coddled with candy-coated fuzzy learning experiences: they are often there because they want the meat and potatoes.

Fssss.

I hate it when I have trouble making myself understood, especially when it affects my kids. I keep trying to explain this in the hope that I'll get better at it. Am I making any sense to any of you folks?

Miranda
 
#8 · (Edited)
You are making complete sense. People have no experience with what kids can really be like if you don't get in their early to stir the pot. We have a certain paradigm that we don't realize only exists because we've created this universe for them and they adapt to that and now we treat it as "the way kids are". That trained adults can't step out of this paradigm is depressing.

This touches, actually, on the same idea I had about the new trend in parents allowing kids to "transition" at very young ages. Hang in with me here. I won't go into details, because this is not about that. But the gist is that this new trend is beginning, but it is actually the same paradigm turned on its head and viewed in a different direction. In that case, many of those parents are still living in a binary paradigm. Education has changed as well-- that's the sugar coating and attempts to make learning more holistic and and less about facts-- but it clings to the same paradigm as the one it professes to reject: that kids still need to be coaxed to learn. Now a lot of time is spent on creating meaning and passion, and it ignores the fact that kids don't need to be groomed like that if they are left alone. Left alone, they approach something and they want the "meat", as you say, and don't want to waste their time on the fluff. (Can I pause here to think how I can get mashed potatoes and gravy into this metaphor? With lots of butter? Because that sounds really delicious to me right now, but nope. Can't fit it in. Damn.)

This is why I like college classes so much better. Why, in my day (smacks gums, stares into distance blankly, rocks in chair, falls asleep briefly, wakes disoriented, no I'm not dead, oh, yeah...) ... actually I really did lose my point. :dizzy

*****************
Coming back from our excellent trip has been rocky. Big fights. Adolescence spilling out all over the floor, and onto the walls. Oh. My. God. This is going to make me a religious woman. I'm going to be praying to any god/dess that will bother to answer me. Answer my prayers, and you will have my undying devotion.

My school is starting out nicely. I'm still lining up some ducks to shoot (metaphors are thick this morning, sorry) but I'm optimistic about this quarter. I like being older than or the same age as my instructors. It feels more casual. I can ask them questions with ease. And I think but I hope didn't, flirt with my math teacher in one of the emails. I have a crush on his voice and hands and wrists in the video lectures. I talked with him on the phone for orientation and he spent ten minutes explaining why I should just call rather than relying on email to resolve problems. Ten minutes. Aspie? Oh, I have a thing for nerdy guys. Totally, totally crushing on this one.

My youngest wants to start school. I am mixed. Worried. What will it destroy of what she has created for herself? But I try not to worry. She has a good foundation. School is a choice and will remain a choice and I will bend over backwards to honor that.
 
#9 ·
While I rarely get a chance to write I am out here. Miranda, I appreciate hearing all your thoughts as you are so much farther on this journey than I. I'm tucking these thoughts about adolescence into the back of my mind to pull out again one day. Probably all too soon!

Summer has been busy and fun. We got hooked on geocaching together and are enjoying exploring so many new places right around us. We all decided together as a family (well, the 3 year old didn't get a whole lot of say..) that June was going to be a screen free month. My hubby still had to use it for work and I had to do things like pay bills and arrange playdates but that was all. It was such a great experience for all of us. Not one of us regretted doing it and we did soooo many more things together as a family. Now we are all working on integrating back in the awesomeness that can come through a screen while keeping the positive aspects of having more time for other things. Tricky balance but I am so thankful we are all willing to experiment together and respect one another's desires.

My 8 year old is growing by leaps and bounds in every way imaginable. Wow. What an age. He has really turned the corner (not all the time of course!) on impulse control. Whew. Helps keep the 3 year old in check a bit. He is participating in a free 6 week mountain biking group and actually paying attention and repeating the skills he is learning from his instructor. He took swim lessons in the spring and can truly swim now and is in the water every chance he can get. And he just took the training at the local children's museum to be a "Guardian of WOW!" He gets to help out with the animals, play with kids who need a playmate, assist in some pick-up. That sort of thing. The man who runs it is wonderful (and has a fabulous British accent) and says "My main goal is to allow kids the opportunity to be kids!" And he role models such a respectful way of interacting and communicating with everyone around him. Gotta love that guy!

My 3 year old is an imp and loves to try my patience right now. I've taken a deep breath in the last few days and have checked my own attitude. I'm getting down on his level. Taking things slow. Staying in his play longer. Finding ways to say "yes." And things are looking up. Sometimes it's easy to forget to look to yourself first when your kiddos are frustrating you. I'm sure it's a lesson I'll have to "learn" again down the road. ;-)

I do have a question. If you've gotten this far maybe you'll have a suggestion for me. My 8 year old has now mentioned about 3 times that he wants to learn to read - with a few months in between each of these times. There has been no pressure from us, only his desire to do something he couldn't do because he couldn't read. But it never lasts more than 3 or 4 days. Is he just not ready? Are we not finding the right way to help him? We worked on the alphabet the first time because he still doesn't know all of the letters and especially the lower case ones. The second time I tried a variety of computer games. This last time his dad tried having him just do some really basic copy work and then find those words on some pages of one of his books. I do "worry" a tad bit because he really doesn't seem to remember or be able to recognize most letters. The sounds of the letters seem to mean nothing. I'm a little bit stumped. If anyone has a suggestion for a great resource for ways to teach reading I would love to dive into it. Or if anyone recognizes possible real issues on his end I'd be open to hearing that as well. I'm not stressed about it because he doesn't seem upset but I think it is time to get more prepared.

Oh, and finally (see, you shouldn't get me writing) I have been having a fantastic time going through the Kamana program with 2 homeschooling mom friends of mine and deepening my connections with nature. We are going on a 2 full day and one overnight outing later this month to have time to practice our skills, mentor each other, and start planning for a nature connection program for our kiddos and probably a few other homeschooling families. Very excited.

Cassandra
 
#11 ·
My youngest liked the Kamana books as well. It sounds like you are having an even better time with it than we did.

It could be you haven't clicked on the right format for your son. He might want to learn to read, but unless that is a burning desire he will have a hard time getting past the fact that what he has found so far has little meaning to him. Do you still get things from the library anyway? Some kids might be bothered by this (mine weren't) but I used to find books on the topics my kids were obsessing over currently, and then some tangents from that. When they were big into dinosaurs, I brought home books on crocs, for example. My kids liked charts (like dinosaurs through the ages, sizes, etc.) and they like graphic book-style books. They skipped a lot of text that wasn't interesting to them. My youngest loved field guide books. She couldn't read them, but she liked studying them and tracing the letters with her Harry Potter feather quill.

Both loved storytime. Even now, at 11.5yo, my oldest still loves being read to, and her sister still occasionally curls up with their dad to listen. We don't do it throughout the day like we used to, but it is still a treasured time.
 
#13 ·
He might want to learn to read, but unless that is a burning desire he will have a hard time getting past the fact that what he has found so far has little meaning to him.
I think you are right about this. I still want to learn some new ways to assist him if he asks again but it may just truly be a timing issue and when he is really developmentally ready to have it make it sense then things will click. We do get lots of books. We've started pouring over maps together for the nature related things we are doing and guidebooks are coming out more. He listens to audio stories for hours on end and we read before bed most nights. I really think in the long run there won't be any real issues but I want to be prepared to head off frustration on his part should it rear up.
 
#14 ·
Ok. Here is another one for you. How would YOU concisely (and in a totally friendly way to someone interested in learning more) explain why this quote shows that someone just really doesn't "get" unschooling at all?

"We homeschool which is book-learning around a table and unschool for the rest of the day, however we're not radical unschoolers."
 
#15 ·
"We homeschool which is book-learning around a table and unschool for the rest of the day, however we're not radical unschoolers."
:dizzy

Heh, well, any attempt to clarify this with the author runs the risk of being perceived as pedantic or judgmental. Whether I'd wade in would depend entirely on context and on the relationship I had with the that person, but I'd probably err on the side of leave-it-be.

But if I felt like the situation was ripe for a bit of intellectual/philosophical exploration, I might say something like ...

"Hmm, I thought unschooling was more about an overall philosophical approach to education than about whether you're using curriculum at any moment in time. The same way eating fruit and cereal for breakfast doesn't make you a morning vegetarian. Would you say that public school families are unschoolers on the weekends?"

Miranda
 
#22 ·
Oh, I totally get that it would be easy to be perceived as judgmental that's why I was gathering ideas. And in many cases I wouldn't even think of saying anything. However, these are friends who have really been asking me about unschooling (even just interviewed me about it for a podcast they host). And I had to smile about your analogy of a "morning vegetarian." Particularly apt for me since I'm a vegan! ;-) Anyway, thanks, that is exactly the type of response I was trying to form but not coming up with on my own.

Cassandra
 
#16 ·
Apparently I'm just in the mood to rejoice about how wonderfully flexible homeschooling can be and how each family makes it work for themselves. Oddly, the semantic issue isn't bothering me this morning, though it's puzzling yet I'm not even feeling puzzled. I'm either that groggy or maybe my dairy-free week is catching up with me. Food intolerances do cause strange symptoms, after all.
 
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#17 · (Edited)
We got matched with refugees! Yay!

A group in our little village of 600 has raised almost $30,000 to sponsor a refugee family for a year, the cost to shared with the government. Despite the large number of refugees coming to Canada, and the immense number of refugees sitting in camps waiting, the pipeline for community-group sponsorship has been functioning at the rate of a trickle. We would receive notification of a family needing placement and within an hour dozens of groups would have tried to 'claim' the case.

But we got our tech tools working (thank you Slack and IFTTT!) and last week came close: we were the second group to request a family. And then the first group reneged and we were in! We got matched with a family of five primary school aged kids and a preschooler, plus two adults. The dad speaks English, which is fabulous, since we have no one in the area who speaks their native tongue. We have a large house available for them in September, and interim accommodation in a vacant beautiful Euro-style hostel if they arrive before then. The timing is great: they'll probably arrive just after the start of the school year, with Canadian winter coming on gradually.

We'll need a bit more money: maybe another $10-15k. I'm sure this community will manage it. We're not a wealthy population by any stretch, but there is such a strong history of communal values here that I know it will happen. After all these months of hoping it's exciting to almost be at the stage of procuring bicycles, extra mattresses, size 3 shoes and dentist appointments!

Miranda
 
#18 ·
Sometimes when things are just a part of life you don't realize how competent your kid is getting ... until you step back, blink and couple of times and say to yourself "Wow, did she just do that?" I've had a couple of experience like this with Fiona lately, relating to the music camp administration.

This morning I had to drop eldest off at work, so I left Fiona working on the tshirt order. She pulled the graphic, exported it in .eps format, went online to the mySQL registration database of students, extracted a .csv file of tshirt orders, imported it into a spreadsheet, used the Sum function to get tallies by size, uploaded the graphic, edited it for size, entered the order numbers and requested a proof. I got home and there was nothing left to do.

A couple of weeks ago I put her in charge of assigning kids in the junior and intermediate orchestras into 1st, 2nd and 3rd violin sections, making sure that any siblings were in different sections (so that they're learning different parts at home, making things more interesting), and sections were balanced for number and strength. She scanned all the music, cropped and renamed it, uploaded it to Dropbox folders organized by ensemble. Then for each section of each orchestra she copied the template email I'd written, edited the information as appropriate, pasted the parents' email addresses into the bcc field, summoned the appropriate Dropbox links, pasted those in, double-checked everything and hit <send>.

Last year she helped out a lot, working alongside me. This year she can do so much independently. Because she's extremely attentive to detail, and understands through experience how repercussions of small things can play out, and knows so many of the kids and families, I can trust her to do a better job than I'd trust most adults.

Miranda
 
#19 ·
My kids are begging for homework. Seriously. Whether we go to school or not this year, I feel like I've let them down if I don't come up with something for them. My 11yo wants 6th grade work straight away. It's summer. My 9 and 11yo are begging for fractions and spelling. Go figure.
 
#20 ·
I'm taking a couple of web development courses right now and I completely understand the delight in progressing through assigned work!

My kids have also gone through periods of wanting assigned "homework" or "schoolwork," interestingly most often in early summer. Must be something about the long hours of daylight. As an unschooling parent it always felt a little funny, but what the heck. It was kind of fun making up math word problems that included them and their siblings as characters in odd situations, or assigning handwriting copywork from some eclectic interest-related research (in my ds's case he gradually copied out a biography of Mikko Tarmia, the Finnish video-game music composer).

One thing my kids have really enjoyed is learning extra advanced stuff, especially in math. This is remarkably easy to do if you pick the right concepts. For instance, you could teach a middle-schooler about factorials, explaining that they represent a concept that isn't usually taught until the senior years of high school. Then you start peppering their multiplication practice with factorials: 3! x 8 = ?? instead of just 6 x 8 = ?? . My kids always took delight in feeling like they'd been given early access to Very Special Knowledge ... it helped give them confidence. My eldest also loved sentence diagramming. Another approach my kids liked was acting as editor. On several occasions I actually used mothering.com posts :D ... if there was one with several spelling, grammar and punctuation mistakes I'd copy and paste it into a Word doc and let them mark it up with highlights and corrections. Even finding one such mistake allowed them to feel like they were Smarter Than a Grown-Up. Or at least to see that adults made mistakes too, so it was okay for their writing to not be perfect ... but to keep their Inner Editor working.

Miranda
 
#23 · (Edited)
Miranda's analysis of F's needs is spot on.

There are of course, many ways to skin a cat, and the great thing about home based learning is that we can expand from home based learning...maybe call it something like, well, like we already do: "interest led learning", "child centered learning", "unschooling": the point is that we're trying to create an environment that enables our children to (and because I don't presume to speak for everyone I just use a copout) to become whatever they will.

I do not remember a time when my unschooled daughters were not focused on "process" (not so much "goal"; I think that was implicit)...what worked for them as unschoolers-all-the-way-through-high-school was "the gift of time". I do not know HOW we would have fit formal school in! (The older has done quite well with "academic" courses in college...the very thought of a 15 page paper with footnotes fills me with horror, but she can do the job, given accommodations for dyslexia. She's even figured out the footnote thing,yikes, thanks to BibMe! The younger filled out her online studies of anatomy with observation of many surgeries at the vet. I've learned a bit there too...did you know that c-section kittens come in separate baggies? And that you have to squeeze and rub them for a long time to get them to breathe?)

To each his own!

Deborah

Edited to add that I reread this and because I was thinking about a lot of things and threw quite a bit of my post out (really!), I forgot to say that I think that there are many opportunities to experience structure and accountability that do not involve attending a traditional school.
 
#25 ·
I think there's hubris in assuming that just because you are part of an affluent western society, you can meet the needs of anyone less fortunate from anywhere. Refugees are human beings with needs that go beyond simple immigration. We're fortunate to have had a fair bit of lead-time, and the guidance of some great organizations, in helping us tease apart what we can best offer, and to whom we can offer it. Some of the things we decided:

Single non-English speakers would not do well here due to language and cultural isolation.
Partnered non-English speakers would need children to help pull them into the flow of community life.
Multiple school-aged children would be preferable to just one, if there's a language barrier.
For English-speakers, LGBT singles would not do well, but we'd be a great community for a couple.
From the standpoint of a first refugee sponsorship, community acceptance will be much higher if school-age children are part of the family (because everyone is always worried about school closure, and added enrolment is seen as a huge plus for the community).
Housing costs are lower here than in the cities, so we are uniquely situated to host a larger family.

We don't have support structures here per se, but we are such a tiny community that individuals and word-of-mouth take up much of that role. For example, there is a woman here who has poorly controlled Bipolar Disorder; she doesn't have an outreach mental health worker or weekly appointments with a counsellor or a support group. Instead she has people who hang out with her when she drops by the local café for coffee and who notice when her manner is "off," servers at the café who notice when she hasn't been in in a couple of days, people who know which of her friends to call to check on her, and friends who will call the right people if she's not doing well, drive her where she needs to go, stay with her overnight if need be.

Not that this informal village support would work as well if we suddenly imported a whole bunch of families and individuals, but with a strategic welcoming of one family I hope we'll do fine.

Miranda
 
#26 ·
Sorry I haven't had a chance to read through everyone's posts. It looks so fascinating, I hope I can come back to it and read in more depth!

Right now I'm in the midst of inspiration for an "educational" and practical project, but experiencing a bit of frustration in executing it.

I want to make a solar cooker, and maybe have the kids help in whatever capacity they wish, and then find out if it really works. We're moving to an off-grid home and could really use this cooker to help feed us until our facilities are more complete. Lots of sunshine, lacking in steady supply of electricity and no propane cooking at the moment. Open fires require a permit, so I want to avoid that. Solar is definitely what our new home is all about!

BUT... the kids are only 5 and 2. Not much patience for constructing this cooker, even though 5 yo DS loves the idea of making stuff. He just doesn't take direction well, and we do need to follow directions to build this thing. I found a great and simple design online, and we can re-use some materials we've got around the house. He loves the idea of recycling materials into something new.
And 2 yo DD is awesome, but definitely not ready to follow precise directions. She just wants to grab the cardboard sheets and "use" them for her own purposes.

Have any of you tried a project like this with your kids? What worked?

Gotta get back to working on it. Kids are a little distracted with their own things, so maybe I can at least start it for them and peak their curiosity!
 
#27 ·
RE: solar cooking project

I think I'd just start building it and let them join in if they like!

Here's a photo of one of our projects, way back when, ten years plus ago in Maine (the kid in the picture is 18 and 5'8" now...)

The "hay animal", built on an armature made of a crabapple that fell over in our yard, was moved around the yard by the child in the picture for a couple of years after it was completed. Inspired by the fake deer various neighbors had in their yards, this one never got ears, and looked otherwise like a low slung llama. Some people thought we bought it!

Deborah
 

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#28 ·
Yes, I agree about just building it. Learning is organic. It comes from the environment and the attitudes and models within that environment more than from specific activities. If you end up with a functional solar oven after a meandering voyage through various parental experiments, your kids will have learned a ton. I mean... they'll have a solar oven in the family, and they'll know it was made from scratch by their very own parents, and they'll see it being used, and they'll witness how it works...

If you happened to have compliant little engineers who at ages 2 and 5 willingly and diligently held the roll of heat-reflective tape out while you cut bits of it, or helped trace around the paper template on the sheet metal, I don't think they'd really learn any more of substance. They only need to be in orbit around you, or in your slipstream. At these ages, their role is mostly to play and be curious. Yours is mostly to be a model and to be willing to answer questions. Holding the tape roll is optional.

Miranda
 
#29 ·
That's pretty much the way it's working out for me. If I tried to get them too involved with the actual building of it, we'd all end up frustrated. In stead, I did most of the construction while they floated in and out, spreading a bit of glue here, spraying a bit of paint there (carefully, out of doors, wearing cloth "masks" to protect their breathing, DS's idea). When it came to showing Dad and Grandparents what we'd done so far, DS launched into an intense demonstration with DD trying to get involved with the production. It almost became too much, with the tin foil peeling off the corners where it wasn't securely glued down yet, but I was totally thrilled by their enthusiasm for the project, and impressed with DS's articulate explanation of how the cooker will work. Working on finishing it today, and hoping for enough sun to give it a try with some pasta and/or soup. If it works, we'll make a second one and take them to our new house and try to cook some actual meals in them.

OK, back to it! Thanks for the awesome advice and stories. Love the hay animal, Deborah. It's totally like how things happen in our family.
 
#30 ·
Just wrote and deleted a long whiny post...haha!

Today was going to be a work on site day, but due to circumstances beyond my control, having to do with online pharmacies and irresponsible children, I am going to town to sort things out (take two things to two different places) and maybe get some food from the natural food store.

Gotta get the big dogs out; why they would be in on a day like today is a mystery to me. Except maybe they like the soft bed?

Deborah
 
#31 ·
Fiona got hired last-minute this week as an assistant dance instructor. The local day-camp dance program ended up over-enrolled, and the instructor needed help. She's really enjoying working with the instructor, and of course she likes the kids too, most of them. The instructor, though, is so respectful and communicative with Fiona, treating her like a peer, providing confident leadership while really valuing what she is willing and able to offer. Really playing the mentor role perfectly. The instructor is the director of the other/new dance studio in Town ... and all contacts in the dance community there are wonderful for Fiona.

So the week has been a nice (and lucrative) surprise.

Miranda
 
#32 · (Edited)
Fiona got hired last-minute this week as an assistant dance instructor.
Most excellent!

I managed to get a number of errands done on the trip to town, picked up some essentials (rice vinegar needed for a curried sorghum/carrot salad, did without but maybe nice to try with), soft cat food to spin up for Urinatius, etc. It was hot in town (people in line behind me at the checkout were laughing about people who think 90 if "hot") but the thunderstorm and clouds put an end to the heat and the inside is about the same as the outside, in fact cooler at 79F. (I left the back door open when I left so the dogs could go in and out, didn't want to stir them from their soft bed (mine, that is) or let them be in the house unsupervised. (The cats come and go as they please from the clerestory that's always open except when it rains heavily, or when it gets cold. Saves a lot of trouble.)

This afternoon: basic house maintenance, maybe some reading and scripting.

Son's star party lasers from the Netherlands made the journey safely, even though they had the wrong address. Not everything we've been sent is so lucky. (PO distribution center intercepts some things that have a street address if there is no PO Box listed if the customer (like us) gets mail only at the PO. (UPS and FedEx have some relationship with the PO so we get those deliveries to the PO too sometimes; I haven't figured it out yet.)

So...dishes being washed little by little: every time I walk by, I put dry the almost drys and put away, then do a new set. It's mostly pet bowls today, and then wash a few more. Then I'll make the cat food, wash after that, and put the recyclables with the others.

Husband is waiting to get in trouble and his supervisor is very uneasy: a few years ago husband came up with an absolute position encoding scheme using magnets, bought the magnets and switches, and then got caught up with other projects. This year he realized that a better (and likely the optimal solution) required a fiber optic gyro: instead of a zillion magnets and 10 switches, it required one box with a fiber optic gyro and some associated electronics and power supply stuff in it. But as soon as he produced a working model and given the go ahead to do the project by his supervisor, the facility superintendent came up with all sorts of objections, that included withdrawing support for travel to a conference, forcing him to withdraw his paper, and a total stop to the FOG project. THEN the super told his boss that the project would be done by a different person, using a roller for position encoding. (Husband had already explained why it won't work: the system slips, thus making absolute position determination impossible.) Anyway, husband quietly dusted off the magnet project, spent nights and weekends installing them, spent two days programming and integrating the project into his control system, and it works perfectly. Only he didn't ask permission from the incredibly toxic super. His defense is that the project was approved by the earlier super, which is true. It's unfortunate that people have to sneak around to DO THEIR JOBS, but that's what's happening now. So, waiting to see what happens. (Note: Several projects were waiting on the absolute position project, and at least one had been moving forward because of the expectation that the FOG project would be installed. So if the researchers involved are men/women and not mice...)

Deborah
 
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