It’s our last night in this funky apartment. I should be more sad, but instead I’m just — what is this feeling? I’m just sort of hanging out in space, not sad but not glad to be leaving either. We will have fun at the new place and I know it’s a good thing but this weird little caveish space has been nice to us.

Boy I bet our neighbors are glad to see us go. Graham outgrew his therrible threes just in time for the nice speech therapy lady to TEACH HIM TO SPEAK LOUDLY. Kevin hates her for what she did.

We’ve been packing and moving and packing and moving and why? Why are we so stupid? Moving was a bad idea! This apartment was FINE. Kids don’t need yards, that’s just spoiling them! We should never ever move. But it’s too late now, it would be more work to put everything back and so we have to keep going.

The boys are jittery and excited and super chatty. Nicolaus hasn’t been able to fall asleep at night, which OMG how can he not be tired? This child has worked harder than any adult who has ever helped us move. He used a little dolly thing to take a load of boxes or toys out to the truck every time Kevin made a trip out there. He helped unload. He unpacked half of the kitchen. The kid has worked almost every minute for the last two days. But then at night, he’s too keyed up to sleep and stays awake until 1:00 in the morning. He finally fell asleep tonight in our bed. Which might be why I’m having trouble getting comfortable. Kevin and I need to either lose weight, stunt the growth of our children somehow, and/or get a king-sized bed because this isn’t going to work much longer.

I might move to the couch in fact. This isn’t going to work and I’m too tired to move him back to his own bed.

In the meantime, Graham hasn’t helped much, but that’s okay. He’s littler and he has a nasty cold. We don’t want his germs all over everything anyhow.

The dog doesn’t seem worried at all. He hasn’t seen the new place yet; all he knows is that we’ve been clearing stuff out of here. Mouse used to always freak out and pace whenever we moved or packed for a trip or bought a different brand of shampoo, but Roux was brought into a house with crazy little kids in it when he was a puppy. He long ago resigned himself to the fact that a lot of the time he isn’t going to know what in the hell we are doing. He does like that we got rid of all our furniture. Wheeee! I can run around and around and around and not slide and slam into anything except maybe the refrigerator and this small pile of trash!

That was supposed to be the dog talking about running, not me.

So tomorrow, more moving. Then unpacking begins. Oh my god, I hate that part. This was a sort of spontaneous move so there are lots of boxes labeled MISC. this. Those are the worst.

The other night I saw this terrific video podcast about why people procrastinate. The idea is that when we are kids we feel that we’re being forced to do things, and the only way for a slave to take any control is to do things inefficiently. Comply, but drag your feet. Wait till the last minute. This continues on into adulthood and becomes a mental habit and so any time we feel pressured, we push back by doing a crummy job or waiting till the last minute in order to frustrate our captors.

But I have no captors. I want to move, I’m excited about the rental house. Very very very excited. I don’t think this is a matter of anything deeper than: packing blows. Why do you think I was surfing the web long enough to stumble across a video podcast about procrastinating? I don’t even watch video podcasts. I have no idea what I was searching for when that popped up. Something to do with TED maybe? A TEDx talk maybe? Something about the brain and… don’t know.

So packing.

And! We are up to Colonial times, which I swear to you I’ve learned about basic American history and I’d learned about the 13 colonies but I don’t think I ever thought much about the word Colonial and connected it to oh right! The American colonies. There are a lot of terms like that rolling around in my head, bumping into each other with no little cardboard hole metaphor to settle into. You know what I’m talking about? Those little games with the — oh never mind. I never really thought about Elizabethan era getting that name from somewhere. Or Reformation. Oh right! Because they want to reform things. Puritans want to purify. I get it now. Words mean stuff!

Which puts me right at the level of the four year old who today told me that torture should never be allowed because it’s not right to hurt people with torches.
So both Graham and I have about a first grade understanding of what words mean and all of American history with the pilgrims and the quakers and the puritans and something about the Dutch? Teaching is most exciting and works best for us when I am learning the topic right along with the boys. Which is always, of course, but especially so with history. You don’t earn Cs in third grade by paying close attention and learning the details.

Last weekend we drove up to a state park where they were doing a conveniently timed living history day. We got to make candles and saw logs and warsh clothes the old timey way. The boys got to see men hammer out iron nails and kindly women in bonnets card wool and spin it into yarn. They got to see old muskets and Civil War cannons which we aren’t close to the Civil War yet but that’s okay. And oh my holy gosh, the friendly living history people were very excited that we are homeschooling because that means I can teach my kids the real story of the civil war, wink wink and not the skimpy/hippie commie politically correct version they teach in schools. Which ties in well with my recent post about good guys vs bad guys, and how everyone always thinks they’re on the side of the good guys. Including me for teaching my kids all about moral grey areas years before their brains can comprehend that concept.

Anyway, yay pilgrims! We spent most of this morning outside, sailing on the Mayflower. It was really fun at first but after awhile I lost interest in sitting on a boat. The boys wouldn’t let me give any history lessons because that’s the FUTURE. We can’t know there will be indians and things once we get there. We are still at sea and hark! A storm is coming! We were on the boat for more than two hours before Graham spotted a bird and I declared it a sea gull. LAND A#%@!*HOY.

Then we ran around the courtyard building shelters and gathering food and making amazing discoveries about the plants and rocks and picnic tables of the New World until one of the settlers wet his pants and we had to come back inside so he could change.

We were going to do some weaving and other fun stuff but darn it all I packed most of the art supplies, so our craft projects have been pretty limited this week. The boys haven’t seemed to notice though; as long as they have paper and any sort of pencils they are happy to just draw. Lots of pictures of those bad guy pilgrims having tragic problems while the good guy indians laugh at them.

Ooh we did make weird little cornhusk dolls at the thing last Sunday. And we’ve found a few good books and flash games online. I’m trying to get my hands on the Charlie Brown American history DVDs. I think we’ll continue colonial times through next week while we move and wait until we’re settled in to start the revolution. These kids love a good revolution of any kind. Protest, revolt, coup, mutiny, hostile takeover, boycott, name it. I bet they change their minds about the colonists being the bad guys.

Any colonial America activity ideas? Something food related maybe? I want to research more about what else was going on in the rest of the world at that time. Oh and! It would be neat to do something about how English accents evolved as people moved away from England but not sure how to do that, or how detailed to make it. I wonder if I can find that on wikipedia. Because researching linguistics for several hours would be exactly the perfect thing to do right now instead of packing, don’t you think?

A minute ago I was sitting on the couch with a dog leaned against me. Scraps of paper in a little pile at my feet. It’s late, 2:30 in the morning and I was cutting out inkjet prints of 17th century art to make a deck of flash cards.

You might not have guessed this based on the way I earn a living selling flashcards, but I really am not a quiz-my-kids-with-flash card person. And art history flash cards made specifically for quizzing little kids? Oh my god that’s like the worst, most pretentious kind of flash card to have. Drilling your kids on 17th century art has to be a whole new level of ridiculous over-parenting that goes against everything that is good and right with this household.

But! The boys can’t wait for me to finish these, and I’ve got to have them ready before they wake up. Or the pre-Raphaelite fairy won’t come and I don’t know a joke about that goes here.

I did say it’s 2:30 in the morning.

So I was cutting and planning where to put the labels on the back and suddenly thought: This is weird. Why am I making flash cards?
I was getting really tired, and couldn’t articulate the exact reason for making these cards. A lot of the things we teach and do come from this kind of gut-level impulse, it’s like… like how you might decide to write a letter and have an outline what you’re going to say, but you don’t know how everything will be worded until you sit down and write. It’s a sculpture that carves itself.

That’s how every project is. We have an outline. The rest flows and the results often surprise me.

But flash cards! What in the heck? And I really plan to quiz the boys with them. Not dates and titles and artists — that’s called child abuse — but Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo. I want to add Pre-Raphaelite. Next week maybe.

So I was cutting and trying to look directly at the reasons. Why do I want them to learn the difference between these styles of painting? Why does it matter?

I stopped thinking about it and just cut pictures out. That numb kind of tired. You know? I should have had a coke with dinner.

Suddenly! WAIT. I know! It’s because of questions!

What?

Questions!

All the tiny people in my brain started jumping up and down and running around interrupting each other. The goal of education is to create kids who know how to ask meaningful questions…

Questions are the mirror that shows you what someone understands — Questions are a pull forward on the leash. Questions frame everything, and a kid whose questions are treated with respect will go far. A kid whose questions are dismissed or shushed or misunderstood will struggle because he doesn’t know that it’s okay to be the only one in the room who doesn’t know something if you know how to ask.

Questions slow things down. When you’re trying to move or think and you have a child interrupting your thoughts and saying how do they make the street? And what’s that for? Why? Who made this? And who made that? And who made these? And what’s it made out of? Until you finally swear you don’t know and you have to do all of your grocery shopping with a child in the cart who is crying because you won’t tell him what it looked like inside of the Hindenberg.

If you’d walked in the room right then, you wouldn’t have known there was a crazy person’s fire drill going on. I sat. Calmly cutting out tiny works of art and labeling each one.

So. What do questions have to do with anything? Why do I teach the exact things I teach? Why the hell are they learning this stuff?

Because context is everything. Context anchors those questions and helps the answers mean more. It’s brain gluten. So we need to understand what the whole world is like and what her people are like and what the scientists and the artists were doing because scientists and artists are the ones who ask questions for a living. And if you want to understand what humans are capable of — good and bad and exciting and awful — well you have to know where today’s questions came from. What other questions have we wondered in the past? How did we answer those questions? Did those answers satisfy the artists and scientists from that culture and that time? Why not?

That is how you can enter the conversation. Understanding that you are on an old planet surrounded on all sides by generations of people who had and will have questions, just like you have questions, that is the point and the entire purpose of education. Everything else is trade school.

That’s why I try to listen hard to every question and I look up every answer and show them how I found it. That’s why I stay up until three in the morning cutting out works of fine art that are full of violence and nudity.

If my kids can walk into an art museum and have some understanding of what they’re looking at, they gain three things:
1. the message that art is not just for a few people. It’s for all of us.
2. deeper understanding of what was going on during this time period and what people felt was important
3. the background information they need to formulate some truly kick-ass questions.

***
Follow up.
We went through the cards. I had them help me label the works of art. They didn’t get them all right, but when they made a mistake they were able to defend it. It was fun, and we talked a lot about WHY these artists were making this stuff. What were they questioning, what were they pushing back against? The boys were completely absorbed by the game.

Tonight before bed Graham came up to me and said, “Okay. I am going to say a word. The word pencil. No! The word oatmeal. And you tell me which one of these is Rococo.”

I didn’t get it at all until he started saying the word. First he said, “Oatmeal.” in a strangely adult, sort of gravelly voice.

Then he smiled sugar-sweet and said “Oatmeeeaal.” in a high, lilting sing song.

Then he scowled and made a dramatic motion with his hands and boomed, “OAT! MEAL!!!”

“Now Mama? Do you, do you, can you guess? Which one of those was Rococo?”

To anyone of my family or friends who wonders why in the living hell I am homeschooling these boys, there. This is why. I’m too greedy to miss hearing their questions and seeing those connections happen all day long.

Nicolaus is a kid who always thinks big, always wants to wave a protest flag or burn down a bank or start a scout group or… you know? Spread the word about whatever he is doing.

He freaking adores the Jamie Oliver Food Revolution show. We stumbled across it on Hulu and watched it all in one day. When the second episode was over he stood up on the couch and said, “I want to help him.”

“Jamie Oliver?”

“Yeah. Can we — is there something we can do to call him and tell him that?”

“I don’t have his number. We could probably write him a letter though.”

“Yes. Let’s do that. And!” he was bouncing on the couch, “I’m going to cook dinner! And I’m going to show every kid how to cook! And we have to convince parents to let their kids make their own healthy desserts!”

“Please stop jumping on the couch.”

“Even if kids have to use knives!”

“Seriously dude. That’s awesome. Stop jumping.”

“And! Do we have any bananas?”

He is all fired up. Normally he isn’t interested in helping us cook unless we’ll let him make sugar jubilee with sugar casserole on the side, with a bowl of honey for dessert.

It’s a well-timed revolution anyway because lately I’ve been cooking at home more and doing this crazy insane BRAVE thing of making things I’ve never cooked before. I’m always so scared of ruining food, wasting groceries, eating something gross, wasting the time that I end up making the same four meals over and over and/or eating out.

But I’m trying, and I’m starting to not completely hate cooking. And when the kids can really help and are excited about it? Well! that just brings me one step closer to the ultimate child labor utopia that inspired me to have kids in the first place.

We’ve been learning about the great Age of Discovery, the amazing period in history when Europeans suddenly discovered that the world was far more vast and rich and populated than they had ever imagined. It was an age of discovery for other civilizations too, as people living on every continent discovered that Europeans are pretty much assholes.

For the last few months of studying human history, we’ve run into great big moral grey areas. Sparta made abusive parenting their greatest source of pride, the enlightened Athenians treated women like pieces of poop (Nicolaus’ choice of words, not mine). Alexander the Great was only doing what he’d been raised to do; he loved Greece the same way that Lenny loves things that are soft. And don’t get me started on the great and powerful and morally bizarre Romans.
Noble, chivalrous medieval knights? Well. Anyone who feels the need to hire monks to spend their lives praying a thousand times a day for God to pleeease forgive their sins might not groove with our modern concept of morality.

The boys listen hard. They take it all in. And then they bring it all down to: so were they good guys or bad guys?

Now, we’ve talked about how well everyone always thinks of themselves as the good guys. I say that as often as a lot of moms say “remember a sweater.”
And I swear they’ll totally get it, but they still can’t resist taking sides in every historical conflict. Good guys or bad guys? Romans: good guys. But what about all that awful stuff they did all the time? Well yeahhh but… if they didn’t then the barbarians would kill them and take them over so… eh good guys.

Knights? Some good and some bad. Nobody was in between.

So here we are in the age of discovery. The age of colonization, of imperialism. The age of WE ARE COMING TO DESTROY ENTIRE CIVILIZATIONS. For no reason! Just because some guy had a weird lead poisoning-induced obsession with a random continent, now all of a sudden tens of thousands of people have to die. Which, all of those people weren’t good guys. But some were, to the extent that people who practice human sacrifice are ever good guys, and it’s not like they had human right’s watch groups back then. Never for long anyway.

So yeah, we veer into moral debates and general philosophy a lot. it’s fun. And Nicolaus hates Hernando Cortez.