Birthdays. Home schooling. Where are all of you?

2021 10 07

Marianna celebrated her first birthday by taking her first steps. She had been standing up for a few weeks but dropped to her knees to crawl when she wanted to go anyplace. She finally decided it was the time.

Crawling was pretty effective. She came on like a Mack truck. But walking is going to make her even more of a threat. We are putting the child locks back on everything in the kitchen. She has a special fascination with anything that she shouldn't have. Topping that list are Daddy's eyeglasses, watch and telephone. Whenever she gets an opportunity she will grab them and give them back only very reluctantly.

Zoriana at four is kind of the same way. As I have mentioned, she tries to spend every night with me. Making her sleep in her own bed is the worst kind of punishment. And as she is there, she fiddles with my watch and glasses. This morning she emptied the staples out of my stapler. Yesterday she and Marianna got into Oksana and my business cards and scattered them all over the place.

Eddie is a pretty useful citizen at four days shy of 10 years old. Oksana bought him a big desk and an armoire as he moved into the corner bedroom. Eddie and I spent most of Tuesday trying to assemble the armoire. He is pretty handy with tools. We have it all except for the doors. And here we have a religious difference. The women of the household believe that the doors are essential to keep dust out. Eddie and I believe that the doors are a hindrance, getting in the way when you want to get something quickly and an opportunity to bump your head. We will install them sometime, but not before it has been suggested a half dozen times. You can't do these things too quickly – there is surely some other unpleasant drudge work to be mentioned as soon as this bit is done.

For the time being Eddie and I are pretty much in control of his schooling. We have fended off suggestions of curriculum inclusions such as Ukrainian literature, science from the standard fifth grade book, and culture. It's not that I don't believe in these things, but one of the advantages of homeschooling is that you can take things one at a time.

I have seen several places in books on homeschooling that the logic of splitting the school day into seven or eight periods and stretching instruction out over nine months is 100% to satisfy the administrative needs of school and has nothing to do with kids. Eddie and I are focusing on three things that the moment: reading in English, his Ukrainian math book, and keyboarding/dictation skills. This keeps him busy throughout the day.

The next addition, which I have been pushing for four months without success, is writing. I want him to write in English. My observation is that the challenge for any kid is not which particular language to write in, but the process of writing itself. Gathering and organizing the ideas, putting them into sentences, and getting them into written form. I am sure that once he masters these, the question of English or Ukrainian will be secondary. Since English is my language we will start there.

Oksana just bought a standard fifth grade Ukrainian language textbook. I like it. Comparable books for American kids are compilations of simple paragraphs, cartoons and jokes. This is a serious book. The first chapter has him read a history of Kharkiv, informing him that that oblast has two watersheds draining into the Dnieper and the Don Rivers, and that it was the site of some famous battles eight centuries back. The textbook asks the kids to recount the history to each other, then to split in pairs and talk about it, and then to answer relevant questions.

Among the relevant questions are to choose the correct way of expressing an idea, observing the rules of Ukrainian grammar with regard to verb conjugations, cases of nouns and adjectives, and gender. I told Oksana that I could understand the story and talk to Eddie about the story in English, but I certainly can't do it in Ukrainian and I am in no position to correct his Ukrainian grammar. She said it would be a challenge even for her. Well and good, when I am done with English in a month or two we should engage a Ukrainian teacher to come in and work with him five days a week on Ukrainian.

Eddie is doing well with English. We finished Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach. Eddie and I agreed that it was not as good as his other books. It required too many stretches of the imagination, including imagining a peach the size of a house being carried across the Atlantic Ocean by 500 seagulls. More than that, it included a lot of colorful adjectives that people don't use in real life. Although it is included in a list of 100 books suggested for fifth graders, I don't think it was vastly useful.

Our present book is entitled "Smithsonian Geography – a visual encyclopedia". It is obviously nonfiction. It discusses the kind of questions that occupy a 10-year-old mind. How was the solar system formed? How was the earth formed? What are meteors? How was the moon formed? This is useful information. Eddie and I go off on tangents. The atmosphere of Uranus and Neptune consists largely of methane. Methane is CH4. What are the other hydrocarbon chain gases? Ethane, propane and butane have two, three, and four carbon atoms respectively, surrounded by hydrogens. What about the alcohols? Yes, substitute an oxygen–hydrogen combination for one of the hydrogens and you get alcohols. Where does the oxygen go? That introduces the topic of isomers.

"But, Eddie, we are here to read, not to plumb daddy's shallow knowledge of chemistry." We keep going back to reading. This book is organized in long paragraphs, which I read first and then he reads back to me. More and more he is simply reading on his own. That's where we want to get.

When it comes to Ukrainian, I think we will do better tackling history than geology. Eddie is so far resisting learning Ukrainian history. If I have to do it, I hope to find a history of Ukraine in Ukrainian as good as the Russian book I bought 10 years ago. The challenge will be to get him interested in reading it.

Speaking of which, I'm in the midst of reading "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language," a history of the Indo-European peoples which seems to have its genesis right here in Ukraine. I hope this will be a hook. Eddie may not be interested in which king fought which war in what year; but the taming of the horse, the origins of sheep and cattle herding, the beginnings of farming, the discovery of metals and the invention of the wheel on the wagon may be more interesting to him. Let's see if we can find this in a fifth grade text.

Covid has been described as the most significant disruption to society since World War II.  I'm not sure about the disease, but the reaction certainly is. Ukraine is on the tail end. We have only 17% vaccinated to date. People do it because the European Union demands it for travel. Rhymes with I were 'spectin is fairly widely used here. 50% of the population fairly adamantly do not want to be injected. On the other hand, we are seeing a third wave of infection, the first two having crested in November and April. We will have to see how it plays out.

Watching how it plays out in the United States is also interesting. Robert F Kennedy Jr and Alex Berenson have books coming out shortly about the deep state and American oligarchical involvement in this pandemic. From what I read they document the paranoid suspicions of the movie Plandemic that came out a year and half ago.  I've got my popcorn, and I thank my God that I don't have a job to lose or any place to travel.

All that said, the scope of world madness has had an effect. Fewer and fewer of you write to me anymore. You and the whole world are hunkered down. Increasingly suspicious of people not like yourselves – and I am obviously quite different in outlook from the liberals among you. Mass communications and the Internet had a unifying effect up until recently. I suspect it is going the other way. We are becoming more isolated. My sense is that in my isolation I should look for people who think more or less the way I do, and I am more likely to find them here in Ukraine than elsewhere.

That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the men are strong, the women are good looking and not hesitant to point out that fact, and the children will not soon be perforated.