Needing to write

I've decided that I need to get back to writing here. I need the mental outlet. I need the spot to say what I want to say. And writing keeps me sane.

Right now I'm sitting here with my oldest son. I am listening to him as he does his reading for his American history class. He is about to lose it as he reads the textbook overflowing with Marxist pap. He's reading it for the class that is being taught by a professor who characterized the KKK as a "far-right" group. Uh-huh. You mean the KKK that basically served as a paramilitary arm of the Democratic party?

I love it that he KNOWS and understands enough about history, political philosophy, and the world that he can recognize what he's reading and hearing for what it is. I love it that he has been reading critically, both things he agrees with and things that he doesn't, for years. He recognizes strong arguments and can eviscerate weak ones. I love it. I really do.

The college experience

More encouragement for you homeschool moms of younger kids. Especially those of you who have challenges. Here is my late reader, writing on his blog, about having to dumb down his writing for his freshman comp class.

I love it. So much.

Another book list

This is a list of books that the College Board says that college-bound high school students should read. After being in honors English classes in high school and minoring in English in college, followed by homeschooling and reading tons for the past 13 years, this list makes me feel slightly inadequate.

Those in red are those that I've read. I am italicizing those that I'd like to read.

Beowulf
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
A Death in the Family by James Agee
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Go Tell It on the Mountain, by James Baldwin
Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett
The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
The Stranger by Albert Camus
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer
The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
Inferno by Dante
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Selected Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Tess of the d’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
The Iliad by Homer
The Odyssey by Homer
The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
The Call of the Wild by Jack London
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
The Crucible by Arthur Miller
Beloved by Toni Morrison
A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor
Long Day’s Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neill
Animal Farm, by George Orwell
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Selected Tales by Edgar Allen Poe
Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand
Call it Sleep by Henry Roth
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Antigone by Sophocles
Oedipus Rex by Sophocles
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (read 1/2)
Vanity Fair by William Thackeray
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Candide by Voltaire
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
Collected Stories by Eudora Welty
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Native Son by Richard Wright

I've read 49 of the 101. Of those I really only think about 25 are important to read. It seems to me that many of these are best read later, and for pleasure. I am so glad that I did not first encounter Pride and Prejudice as a book to be dissected in class.

I also think that one of the benefits of homeschooling--especially the way we do it--is that my kids have encountered literature as they were ready for it and as it suited their mood and taste. Bethany commented, on hearing this list, "No wonder so many kids think they don't like literature."

We also found the list of Poetry and Cultural and Historical Texts to be dismal. "You should read these three poems by this poet." How about picking up a book of poems and reading?

Check that off thelist

I have had one item on my to-do list that I have avoided mentioning because I have been feeling really guilty that it wasn't done. Today I crossed it off.

Patrick has a transcript and has applied to college.

For me, this is the hardest part of homeschooling. If we used a school-in-a-box curriculum it would be easy. If what we do from day to day looked more like traditional school, this would not be such an ordeal. But what we do looks nothing like school, so I have to take my kids' lives and their learning and quantify it. It's hard. I want to be accurate, neither overstating nor understating what the kids have learned.

But it's done. Although I would like to have had it done sooner, there really was no hurry. Patrick will be attending IPFW, and they take applications into the summer. We aren't filling out the Financial Aid Form, because we wouldn't qualify, so that was not a consideration. He will be living at home, so we don't need to worry about housing.

Now I just need to worry about paying for it.

And Jonathan is next.