Category: Parenting

How do we get by? Homeschooling families talk about how to make ends meet

Posted on by Suki

From the outside, homeschooling sometimes seems like a luxury to families who think they can’t afford to have one spouse “not working.” But homeschooling families say that no matter what their finances or their family structure, they find a way to make it work.

Probably the commonest scenario is that the primary homeschooler has to cut her (or his) work down to part-time. Substitute teacher Maricela Sandoval did just that, and she loves the flexibility.

“I enjoy my job because if we decide it’s a beautiful day to go to the beach, we go,” Maricela explains. “I don’t have to call off work.  I just don’t take any assignments for that day.  Yes, I don’t get paid, but sometimes that doesn’t compare to family time.”

Other homeschooling parents might run a business out of their homes that they can do when the kids are busy. Or they might offer a homeschooling related service, such as teaching or childcare.

Homeschooling mom Jaime Smith moonlights as G3 instructor Headmistress Guinevere at the online homeschooling academy she created at first to fulfill the needs of her daughter and her friends (see OnlineG3.com). At this point, Jaime admits, “If I added up all the hours I would probably frighten myself!”

Some parents are able to share the homeschooling and the work, which can lead to a rich homeschooling life for the parents and kids alike.

“We both work about 75% of a job, allowing us to each have time to homeschool the kids and all of us to have family time together,” says high school and college instructor Jennifer Henderson. “We are tied to the school calendar, which is often disappointing, but we know how fortunate we are to have the jobs that we do.”

Other careers that work on shifts, such as nursing, can work well with homeschooling, as do careers that can be done at unusual hours, such as bookkeeping.

Henderson points out that when you can do some of your work off-site, the bits of time when your kids are occupied can be used to chip away at work. “We are able to do a lot of the work at night, while we are watching the kids take classes, or in small chunks of time throughout the day as the kids allow.”

Homeschoolers are also ingenious about finding cheap and free ways to educate their kids. Aside from the obvious – the public library, the Internet – there are all those ways you can avoid buying expensive curriculum by making it up yourself.

“99% of my son’s schooling is done via TV, Xbox 360, and the Internet,” says Carrie Courter, a single mom who started homeschooling her teenage son this year. “I’m forever recording programs that we’ll both find interesting, and we watch some of them together, pausing to discuss things, look things up on the Internet, etc.  Usually most games have something in them that is historical.  So he researches to see if it’s accurate or not.  He started this on his own, but what he’s learned is mind-boggling to me.”

Local parks can be a free or cheap way to learn as well. “We went to Joshua Tree National Park,” Sandoval remembers. “This activity cost only $15 for admission into the park and entertained us all day, not including gas.”

Previous editions of The California HomeSchooler have included lists of free services provided by your public libraries. Book clubs, math clubs, and drama clubs can all bring homeschoolers together while costing  literally nothing. If three homeschooling families get together and share their skills, homeschooling can be enriching and allow the parents to have some time off for making money or recharging their homeschooling drive.

“We also try to take advantage of freebie activities like going to the museum on free days or  discounted rates to zoos or amusement parks,” Sandoval adds. “In addition, I try to take advantage of activities with other homeschooling families whenever possible.”

Homeschoolers show that the key to getting by is being creative with what you’ve got… and remembering to enjoy it.

This article was originally published in The California HomeSchooler.

From scratch

Posted on by Suki

Things are going a little overboard these days at my house. Something’s growing in my kitchen.

No, we haven’t had an invasion of ants (though that has happened) or mold (ditto). It’s not that we’ve found a new unusual cuisine to pursue (though my husband is always on the lookout for that).

What's more beautiful than radish sprouts greening up on the windowsill?

I have started to realize that I can make pretty much anything better than it’ll be coming from a package. And if there is someone making a good version of something, I bet I can make it cheaper at home.

It started with the granola. My husband and I got into granola in a big way, and started to try out all the various types we could find. The stuff in the bulk bins varies in quality depending on how long it’s been sitting there. The packaged granolas that say “low fat” are too sweet. The high fat one we liked was unbelievably expensive. Finally, one day I cracked open the amazing and wonderful “Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone” by Deborah Madison, which everyone should have even if they are rabid meat-eaters. I love VCE the way my mom loved the old Betty Crocker (which you can’t get anymore; the new one is so wimpy). Madison, of course, had a recipe for granola. I tried it out.

Granola is unbelievably easy and cheap to make. And when you make it, you get to choose the ingredients. I love cardamom, for example, so my recipe has cardamom in it. I want it to be relatively low-fat but not too sweet. I love nuts.

So, OK, I had to make granola approximately every week and a half. I can handle that.

I eat my granola over yogurt, and soon I was noticing the stacks of yogurt containers that I was keeping, not wanting to recycle them because who knows when you’ll need a yogurt container? So I started making my own yogurt.

Yogurt is a little easier to mess up than granola. At first, I tried to make it in my crockpot. I screwed up too many times, forgetting to turn off the pot and killing off the yogurt culture. So I bought a yogurt maker. It’s pretty fool-proof, though I haven’t found one that makes quite enough yogurt to last me a week. Now I have to make yogurt approximately 1.2 times per week.

OK, I can handle that.

I will take a moment to say that I already make most of what we eat. We aren’t fans of packaged food (well, OK, we’re not fans of all packaged food though Indian Fare and TJ’s mini pizzas do creep in). I grew up in a house where we made our own desserts, so when we have dessert, unless it’s ice cream, I make it. (Please, don’t tell me I need to get an ice cream maker! Our freezer is too darn small.)

But what I’ve gotten into doing is making even our most basic foods. Not just things we eat occasionally, but things we depend on.

My latest is pickling in brine. In the summer time, I usually get around to making a few batches of half-sour pickles, which are great and easy to make. And I make preserved lemons. And we usually do some jam. But then the sauerkraut guys started coming to the farmer’s market and selling their excellent, expensive, hand-made sauerkraut. We saw our farmer’s market outlay go up an appreciable amount.

If you’ve only had it from a bag or a can, don’t think you know what sauerkraut is. Sauerkraut is one of a family of brine-aged vegetables that cultures all over the world make. In fact, the recipe I found was for “sauerkraut or kim chee.” The only big difference is in the flavorings. The new bible of the live culture vegetable set is “Wild Fermentation” by Sandor Katz. These pickles are supposed to be excellent for stressing out your immune system and making it flex its muscles.

The amazing thing is how our kids can scarf it down. So a few weeks ago, I joined the craze by starting to make my own sauerkraut. The first batch was too salty and too mushy. The second is actually quite nice, though I broke my crockpot’s crock in the process of making it. Oops. Good thing I have a yogurt maker.

But really, at this point I’m starting to feel like a slave to my family’s bottomless stomachs. I haven’t even mentioned my longer-running tasks: making the family bread and weekly challah (though the wonderful Heather’s Bakery sells cheap and excellent challah, I have found a way to make it with whole wheat and wheat germ). What else? Periodic vinegar-pickled vegetables (sorry Sandor, we actually like these, too, even though they aren’t full of immune-boosting super-bugs). Last summer I couldn’t bear to throw away the amazing bounty from our tomatillo plant, so I made gallons of salsa and canned it. I make most of the cookies we eat and all of the cakes.

This summer we’re going on a three-week roadtrip and I already had a panic attack about fulfilling my gastronomic duties for our family: How am I going to make enough granola for a three-week trip? Where can we stop so I can make bread?

I imagine myself out on the mesa in New Mexico, rising bread on a flat stone like my children’s ancestors fleeing Egypt.

No time for challah this week, kids. Roadtrips are what matzoh was invented for.

Then I wake up and remember: I’ve been making my own sprouts, too.

Oh, boy. Something is going to have to give.

Getting ready for life

Posted on by Suki

My kids’ homeschool program is putting on their annual play this week. It’s a lot of work. One by one, kids and adults are melting down. At our house, we haven’t done much in the way of academics this week. I ask my daughter to do math and she says she needs to make a sign for the teacher’s director’s chair. I throw up my hands and make muffins.

It’s the lot of the homeschooler always to second-guess her performance as a teacher of her children. We all accept that someone with a degree can walk into a classroom and teach the children of strangers, but we question whether a mom who’s known her kids her whole life, who is, herself, a well-educated person, can really do a good job.

And in weeks like this, it’s very easy to start wondering: Am I doing the right thing? Are my kids learning anything?

And then I remembered the lessons I learned when my son was at a parent-participation charter school. This is a great school. They get great test scores, if you care about such things. The teachers are dedicated, the parents passionate.

But if you’ve never taught in elementary school before, getting involved in a school on a regular basis can be a real eye-opener. There were so many things I hadn’t remembered from my own schooling.

First was the amount of time spent transitioning from one activity to another. Frankly, if schools could just do one thing all day, they’d get a whole lot more done. But every time you need kids to open a book, change positions in the room, or — god forbid — move to another location on the school campus, you lose enormous amounts of time. When I started working at the school, I was used to the self-employed life. When the kids were gone, I would work with intense concentration. But when I was “working” at school, I felt a whole lot more like a shepherd than a teacher.

Next was the amount of class time spent on what teacher training calls “classroom management.” You know, Johnny just can’t stop talking and it keeps disrupting the class and how is the teacher going to deal with this? This is one part of school that I know my son detested. Some days I’d pick him up and say, “How was school today?” and he’d reply, “Well, it would have been OK but we had to have yet another class meeting about so-and-so’s behavior.” In my day, they used to just send them to the principal’s office. That may have not solved anything for the kid, but it sure did make the teacher’s job easier!

Another thing I hadn’t considered as a student myself was the amount of time I spent “learning” things I already knew. Part of what I’ve learned in my research about gifted kids is that most enter school already having mastered most of what is taught in the first few years of elementary school. That’s a lot of waiting! And even many children who aren’t particularly ahead are going to master some tasks and then have to wait for the others to catch up. This waiting game, for an academically inclined child, probably takes up a good 75% of the time at school actually spent on academics (which you can see from the previous two paragraphs is much less than you might assume).

Finally, there’s everything else that school is about. Like the school play! I remember some teacher of my son’s remarking to me one day, “Oh, I don’t expect we’ll actually get much educating done this week. The kids are too excited.” Teachers learn how to coast through days and sometimes weeks when other goals eclipse their daily attempts to keep to the standards. Field trips, performances, visits by notable people — all sorts of things can send a classroom into a fever of preparation. Yes, in these testing-happy days, these sorts of weeks are perhaps less common in many schools. But still, they are an integral part of the educational experience.

What teachers know, and what homeschoolers like me who second-guess themselves on a daily basis try to remind ourselves, is that these times are also times of learning. In fact, many teachers will tell you that all the other stuff — learning math skills, working on phonics, memorizing the parts of a plant — would come to nothing without these distractions. The distractions are the punctuation in a paragraph, the scenery in a nature film — not just the icing but the very stuff that makes the cake a cake!

Kids learn to sound out words and then practice reading, but it’s the school play that brings it all together and makes reading important. Kids do a worksheet on the parts of a fish but helping a scientist on a fieldtrip dissect a ten-foot squid on a picnic table is what makes it real. Learning the names of the planets is all well and fine, but it’s the day that a real astronaut comes to his school and talks about what it feels like to be weightless that sends a young boy on his path to science.

So what are we doing this week? Not much of anything. This morning my daughter and I worked in the garden and made muffins for the cast of the play. We did a little math, too, but who knows if it’s going to stick? My son, well, I’m not really sure that he did anything you might call academics today.

But what we are doing this week is intense preparation for the sort of learning that makes it all stick. The goal of a performance in front of our families is what is making everything else real, important, and worth slogging through. No, we’re not doing much of anything this week. Just getting ready for life.

I am a Cat Mother

Posted on by Suki

At first, I didn’t really want to believe it. I tried to ignore it, but it didn’t go away.

I suspected it had something to do with Tom’s visits. He comes by occasionally when I have an itch that needs scratching. Sometimes he just comes for companionship, which to him means arguing over the end of a can of tuna.

It figured he would be the cause of this.

I wasn’t one of those expectant mamas who do everything for their kittens: I didn’t get plenty of exercise and fresh vegetables. For me, it was lollygagging and munching on putrid mouse meat the whole way through.

But when they were born… Ah, that was something I didn’t expect. There they were, two little sticky, stinky warm bundles squirming and nosing at me.

I fell in love.

Who wouldn’t? Flesh of my flesh, right? I’d known some cat mamas who loved that smell so much they ate them, but I resisted the temptation. I knew that you can’t have your chopped liver and eat it, too.

I did what any good mother does: I groomed them and fed them and loved them more than I’d thought possible.

As they grew, they became more fun. I’d playfully bat them off me when they climbed on my back, and join in when they were having a tussle.

It would have been idyllic if it hadn’t been for our next door neighbors, the Tigers.

Tiger Mom had two girls of her own, and every time I saw them, I couldn’t help feeling a little guilty. The little Tigers had piano lessons, tap dancing lessons, and school every day. Tiger Mom groomed them perfectly so there never was a whisker out of place. She had perfect little kittens, but how she complained about them!

Of course, as soon as the kittens came, Tom scatted off to greener pastures. Who could blame him? Raising kittens took a lot of energy, and cut into his sun-bathing time. I was OK with being a single mom, but the site of Mr. Tiger returning home every evening from his gainful employment rankled me. I felt like his very presence was accusing me of being a bad mother.

Oh, I have to admit not everything made me jealous. I would never make my little rascals wear those restrictive bell collars. I wanted them to grow up free and beautiful, to enjoy their kittenhood as kittens, not as little, stressed-out adult cats, always searching for the best hunting-grounds.

I also really liked my kittens. Little Tom was just a perfect little version of his daddy, but without the confusing stripes. Mittens was not some simpering girl-kitten. I knew she’d always be able to hold her own. When we were alone, living our homeschooling lifestyle, everything seemed just fine.

But when they invited me over, oh, it was hard. Mrs. Tiger would always tell her girls to perform for us. The piano, the tapping, the perfect mouse pies. Even if they were bought at the pet food store, they were just perfect. My kittens? Well, I can say this. They are happy. Tiger girl #1 would play the piano; Tom would dance on it.  Tiger girl #2 would tap-dance. Mittens would play with her toes and trip her. Mrs. Tiger was never happy with her girls, but I thought mine were just about all right.

Mrs. Tiger always wanted to know my opinion about schools, as if I knew anything about that. “We homeschool,” I’d remind her, and she’d look at me with those crossed eyes like she was about to pass out, and not from bliss. She’d ask me, “But what about their future? How will they get into college? How will they get to the top of their profession?”

I told her I figured that Mittens would do OK. Her mom (a.k.a. me) could teach her everything she needed to know about living off the land (a.k.a. hunting for our food, as the Great Cat in the Sky intended us to do). I told her that I figured Tom would be a scoundrel like his father, but if I loved his father, well, I guess I could love him, too.

Then Mrs. Tiger pulled out her best argument: “What about retirement?”

I swear I probably must have gone cross-eyed myself then. Retirement? Since when did Mr. and Mrs. Tiger know anything about retirement? I have to say that my lifestyle of lying in the dappled sunshine under a bush made me better-prepared for that eventuality.

“Well, Mrs. Tiger,” I said, not wanting any bad blood between me and my neighbor. “I figure I’ll depend on the old cat’s maxim: Wherever you go, that’s where you are.”

Mrs. Tiger looked fit to bust her belly flap. (Not that she had a belly flap; cats like her never do.)

“I guess this is why housecats will never dominate the new economy,” she sniffed.

Then she turned and yowled at her girls, who had joined mine in playing the piano by dancing on the keys. Her girls immediately jumped to the floor, sat, and folded their tails neatly around their front paws. My two continued to make their joyful noise.

Good parenting is all in the eye of the beholder, I guess.

Ding, dong, the witch is dead…

Posted on by Suki

Oh, bless the man who wrote that song. (Harold Arlen, by the way.) It serves as a theme song for so many days in my life.

My kids and an unknown sailer in front of bookshop, Halloween probably 6 years ago. They were in costume, but I don't think he was!

The first time was when Richard Nixon’s obituary appeared in the paper. I didn’t mean to think ill of the dead, but I went around unconsciously singing that song until at some point, I wondered, Why do I keep thinking of that song? Oh.

Today it’s for the announcement that Border’s is going into Chapter 11, and they are closing their Santa Cruz shop.

Now, Border’s was my hometown bookstore when I was a kid. We lived rather far on icy Michigan roads from Ann Arbor, where Border’s had its one and only store, which had a three-legged dog named Tripod as its sentinel. However, not having anything like Border’s in our town, we adopted it, and Ann Arbor, as our own.

The original Border’s was very much like Bookshop Santa Cruz is now. It had two levels, with the upstairs open to the downstairs like a very large porch. I remember leaning over the banister, looking down at all the people who loved books. In my small town, I was weird. At Border’s, I was one of the book-loving crowd.

Fast-forward to the 21st century and Border’s was the second chain to move onto Pacific Avenue and take on our venerable Bookshop Santa Cruz. The first chain had been Crown, which opened a Super Crown directly across the street from Bookshop with a public declaration that they were there to kill our thriving local store. I remember walking down Pacific Ave. on a Friday night and peering into the fluorescent, metal and plastic interior of Super Crown. Occasionally a tourist or two would be in there, but otherwise, it was dead. The entire chain went belly up, and left Bookshop a thriving local store.

Border’s was more of a threat. Based on the original Border’s, the chain version had everything but the three-legged dog. Friendly, low-key lighting, wooden shelves, lots of books for intellectuals. It was designed to draw people like me away from Bookshop. I didn’t go. Apparently a lot of other people didn’t, too.

But a lot did. In responding to an e-mail from someone who will miss Border’s big selection, I laid out my reasons for not missing Border’s. Here they are:

Hi everybody — Just want to point out that you can order any book you want from Bookshop’s info desk or online on their website: http://www.bookshopsantacruz.com/NASApp/store/IndexJsp . The website is pretty cool in that when you get to the shipping screen you can choose “in store pickup” — you get the convenience of Amazon.com married to the fun of going to your local bookstore.

From a publisher’s POV (I used to publish poetry books), I’ll tell you something about these big chain stores where “you can find everything you want.” Here’s how they do it: They put in huge orders from publishers whose books they know they won’t sell. They do it to pack the shelves and so that if someone is looking for something obscure, they’ll be so impressed that they found it. However, the books are not actually going to sell, and in their agreement with the publishers is the agreement that the publishers have to take back *all* of the books, no matter what condition they’re in, and refund *all* of the money! So publishers get these huge orders, have to fulfill them in order to keep up the relationship with the chain bookstores, and then end up getting most of the books back, often in unsellable condition.

Local bookstores can’t do this. All they can do is stock the books that they know will sell, plus some that they hope will sell, plus supporting their local authors and publishers even though they know they might not make their investment back in dollars. Then they can make ordering easy and convenient. But they simply can’t buy every book that you might want. Neither can Amazon.com. The way Amazon does it (as in, the way they screw publishers) is that they make publishers *pay* to have their books stocked with Amazon. No, the publishers of best-sellers don’t pay, but everyone else does. That makes Amazon look great, because they can ship anything within 24 hours. But it’s a false economy: the publishers sometimes don’t even make enough on Amazon to pay the storage fees.

One of the reasons that chains are failing is that they overstepped their bounds. They targeted thriving local bookstores like Bookshop and tried to put them out of business by investing in having lots of books at dirt-cheap prices. Both the lots of books and the dirt cheap prices would have stopped immediately had Bookshop gone out of business. First Crown tried it, and they went belly-up. Now Border’s tried it and they are going belly-up. They were trying to compete dishonestly in a market that, thankfully, more often than not (at least in places like Santa Cruz), rewards honest old salesmanship.

No, I’m not the least bit sad that Border’s is going away. But I’m not sure that this spells success for Bookshop. In an economy like this we all need to be vigilant about supporting those businesses we don’t want to lose. So many of us are pinching pennies and wondering where that extra bit of money we pay our local store goes. Why can’t they have the same prices Border’s did?

I hope my little rant above answers that question. If you want to read a more in-depth rant about why we need to pay a little more to keep businesses in our community, visit a previous blog entry, Talking the Talk, Clicking the Click.

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