a little reading alchemy

June 29, 2009 in books, learning | 12 comments

A spectacular transformation took place in these parts last week. Mr. T became a reader.

Oh, for months he’s been reading words and phrases that he spots around him. Gas station signs. Comic book titles. Billboards. But he didn’t want to read books. I’d check out new easy-to-read books at the library each time we visited. And sometimes he’d want me to read one to him, and then he’d try to read a few pages on his own. But that was it. 

Like his older sister was, he’s a great fan of audiobooks. He likes to take in his literature through his ears–either from his CD player or from my reading aloud to him.  And listening to books has helped him develop an acute sense of story, and a vocabulary loaded with words like schism and associates and phrases like speak of the devil.

If there’s one thing you learn by the time you get to your third kid, it’s don’t push. After ruining your first child, and coming close on your second, you finally develop the faith that your kids really will learn to use a toilet, and put their faces under water at swimming lessons, and spell words in a standardized fashion. They’ll figure it out eventually, and your interference only makes it take longer–and likely obliterates all the joy and pride they’d get from doing it in their own time.

So I didn’t say much. Just kept those easy-to-read books lying around, and kept reading to him.

But last week he wandered around the kitchen chatting to me about robots or martians or something as I made dinner, and the library books we’d just checked out sat on the kitchen table. I glanced through one called, Good Night, Good Knight. Easy words. Cartoony pictures. A knight. Hmmm.

“You know, buddy,” I said. “I’ll bet you could read this book. I think you know most of these words, and if there are some you don’t know, you can just skip them.”

So he picked up the book. Read every word on the first page. Went on to the second. I stir-fried broccoli and he read aloud quietly, occasionally spelling a word aloud for me to translate. He read the whole book.

It was hard not to jump up and down and scream, “You read that whole book! I knew you could do it, I knew you could do it!” But I’ve also learned a thing or two about stealing the kids’ glow so I just looked at the glitter in his eyes, swallowed my thrill and said calmly, “Wow buddy, you read that book all by yourself!”

He was already moving on to the second book. And the next day he picked up another. And another. I find him curled up on the couch like this:

he's reading!

I find him reading in his room, reading in the car. I find him reading Wii manuals in the office. (Another notch in my Waldorf Guilt belt.) We need to get back to the library, quick, to load up on new books.

(As exciting as it is to watch your child begin reading, it’s a little sad, too. Mr. T has found a way into the wondrous world of books that doesn’t require me as his tour guide. Here I go again–getting all melancholic as I watch my youngest grow up.)

I’m not sure what magic made this happen so suddenly. I suppose that Good Night, Good Knight had just the right mix of intriguing subject matter and a not-too-frustrating reading level. I suppose that before that book, Mr. T didn’t believe he could read, and suddenly he proved to himself otherwise. He’s actually gone on to read several books that are much more challenging–propelled, I suppose, by his confidence in himself.

It would be easy to claim credit as the alchemist in all this, to assume that his reading happened because I suggested the right book at the right time. But the truth is, it would have happened eventually. Still, it does feel good after so much biting my tongue and waiting, to see my abracadabra inspire a transformation.

* * *

If you’re here via the link from Homeschool.Style.Bytes., welcome! Thanks so much for visiting! Please consider leaving a comment and introducing yourself. I love to meet new folks.

And if you missed the reference Helen gave me last week, here it is. I’ve recommended this blog before–it’s a glorious combination of words and photos from homeschoolers far and wide. And, happily, in this case the words are more than mere accessories to the images.

a post without an image

June 24, 2009 in wondering, wordlover, writing | 16 comments

“Being self-employed will always make for a precarious life; these days, it is more uncertain than ever, especially since my tools of choice, written words, are coming to seem like accessories to images.”

This line comes from a thoughtful essay by Pico Iyer called The Joy of Less.  It’s a wonderful essay on living simply, but it was the line above, which is rather tangential to the essay’s theme, that made me catch my breath, like something had appeared from nowhere around a corner.

Are words really coming to seem like accessories to images? The thought saddens and terrifies me, the same way yet another local indie bookstore closure does.

I’m constantly chiding myself, when posting to this blog, for being too long-winded. People want pretty pictures I tell myself. And they want just a little inspiring text to go with them, to take along after they click away. I read several blogs like that, and am often charmed by them. They read like poetry.

But as much as I love and admire and learn from poetry, I’m not a poet. I think of myself as an essayist. And essayists are wordy. They stalk their subjects, like Annie Dillard with her muskrats. They let paragraphs build with rhythm and surprise like Joan Didion. They circle around what’s transitory in life and try to trap it for a moment, like E.B. White.

But I worry, like Iyer, that we’re losing our patience for such carefully crafted writing. Or at least we’re setting it apart as something different, something to read in a book now and then. I worry about how the internet is changing writing. We can say so much to so many so easily. We don’t craft our words–we let them tumble out of us and then we hit publish.

The effect this is having, I fear, is that we’re becoming a society of skimmers. There’s so much blather out there that we don’t have time to linger over words. We tack across paragraphs looking for what matters and move on. And often it’s only the accompanying photograph that stops us and makes us pause. Precisely Iyer’s point.

And I’m like anyone else: I click on my blog list and I skim and I tack. I envy the blogs with pretty photos and pithy posts–and large readerships. And I kick myself for being wordy here and wish I wouldn’t care so much when the horizontal line on my blog stat graph looks more like foothills than Alps.

But then I look at the tagline at the top of my blog and I remember why I started writing here: where a mother tries to cultivate creativity and a sense of wonder in her kids–and does a whole lot of wondering herself in the process. A whole lot of wondering. That’s what I’d always planned. And wondering isn’t pithy and pretty: it’s a path with many forks and turns and a final destination not immediately visible. The hope, I suppose, is that I’ll find a few readers with the patience to wander that path with me. And those readers will talk with me as we wander, and make the trip entirely worth it.

So if you’re amongst the handful of readers who have made it down to the bottom of this post, I thank you humbly. If something stopped you from skimming and you went back and read paragraphs word-by-word, I wish I could give you a hug. There may not be many of you, but I’m deeply grateful for my little handful. And grateful that there are people in this world who think of words as more than mere accessories, more than dangly earrings or platform shoes for images.

P.S. I realize that the title of this post isn’t entirely accurate. This isn’t an image-less post, it’s a photo-less post. There are a few images here, but they’re rendered in grey font, and require the reader’s attention to animate them. If you saw them dear reader, once again, thank you.

how to homeschool

June 17, 2009 in homeschooling, wondering, writing | 10 comments

A few of you kind readers have been oh-so-gently urging me to provide a link here to the essay I wrote for Mothering last spring. I’ve finally done it. If you go to the “finally getting published” link in the right sidebar, you can click on the essay’s title and you’ll get a PDF file.

About that title…

in print

I had, cheekily, submitted the essay with the title “How to Homeschool” since the piece is written in the guise of a how-to-manual. There had been some emails back and forth with Mothering about changes to the essay; one of their suggestions was adding a subtitle to my title, something like One Mother’s Instruction Manual.

It wasn’t until I saw the published article–while shopping at Whole Foods with Mr. T–that I realized they’d changed the title altogether to “The-Never-At-Home Homeschoolers”. The title seemed a little odd to me, since never-being-at-home is only one small part of the essay. But I was too thrilled about seeing my writing in a magazine to fret about it. Plus there was another surprise: those charming illustrations, which I hadn’t known about either. Aren’t they fabulous? What amazes me is that they really look like our family, although the illustrator, Ben Hatke, had only the text of the essay to work from. (Do check out Ben’s website–his work is impressive, and his blog lets you into the intriguing life of an artist.)

The illustrations were my main reason for linking the essay as a PDF file. I’ll bet I don’t really have the rights to display the essay in this format, but I’ll give it a go. I’d like the essay to be accessible to folks who are considering homeschooling, so please feel free to pass the link along. Let me know if you have trouble opening the file.

* * *

In other news of things I’m doing that I really shouldn’t, one of my dear friends sent an email about the tadpole-collecting of my last post. She pointed out that collecting animals in California is illegal. Yikes. She also noted that if I was going to partake in illegal activities, I should probably not mention in the post the location of my illicitness. And also the concern that I might have inadvertently collected eggs of a protected species.

Oh dear. And here I was thinking it would be better to raise a local species that could be returned to the proper habitat.

Life seems so complicated these days. Oh, for the summer days of my childhood, when my brother and I could ride our bikes, unaccompanied, to the creek that ran at the edge of our housing tract and collect interesting creatures in jars without anyone caring. Kids these days seem to have fewer and fewer opportunities to interact with life as directly as we did. 

Sigh.

frog egg afternoon

June 10, 2009 in homeschooling, learning, out and about | 8 comments

I got the idea in my head that Mr. T and I needed to raise tadpoles this summer. It’s something we’ve never done before. I was already thinking about it when Lori of In Heywood’s Meadow wrote about her son finding frogs’ eggs and raising tadpoles. She recommended the book Pets In a Jar: Collecting and Caring for Small Wild Animals by Seymour Simon, which we handily found at our library. Armed with the proper know-how, we set out to a local small pond where I’d years ago seen frog eggs.

tadpoles' pond

We didn’t find any eggs in the first pond, so we moved on to a second, and lo and behold I saw a jelly-like cluster right off. We scooped it into a jar and studied it.

cluster of frog eggs

I’m not entirely sure these are frogs’ eggs. It’s definitely a cluster of some sort of egg. The dark bits you see are actually algae; I don’t see the dark spot in the egg that frogs’ eggs are supposed to have, but perhaps these were freshly laid and the dark area is still quite small.

Mr. T enjoyed the egg cluster, but he was much more interested in the small creature we’d inadvertently captured along with it.

looking at the eggs

We identified it as a backswimmer in our little pond guide.

looking up backswimmers

Mr. T wanted to keep it, until we read that backswimmers like to eat tadpoles.

We brought the cluster home, where we’ll keep our eyes on it and see what happens next. 

Being at the pond with Mr. T was a little bittersweet for me. Call me slow, but I’m finally starting to realize that once kids like my older two reach teenage-hood, they prefer to learn on their own. I’m sure that’s not true of all teens, all the time–but for the most part, my older kids aren’t so interested in exploring parks with me. Can you imagine: thirteen and seventeen-year-olds would rather hang out with friends than go to a park with their mother? Shocking! But Mr. T is still happy to explore ponds with me for an afternoon, to stalk frogs’ eggs, to read field guides. I know these times together are fleeting, so I’m relishing them like the last bites of a pint of ice cream. I’m scraping the bottom of the carton with my spoon, and I’m not going to miss a drop.

I’ll keep you posted on our mystery egg cluster.

may: notes on anne lamott

June 3, 2009 in books, my year of essayists, writing | 9 comments

Post #5 in my year-long project.

so many highlights

random notes:

I have to watch myself when I read Anne Lamott.

I only have to read a little, and suddenly I’m trying to write like her. Trying to be funny. Littering my lines with qualifiers: the merest bit jealous, or a tad overzealous. Once the tidepool metaphors start showing up in my paragraphs I recognize what’s going on and force myself to stop.

Much as I’d like to, I can’t write like Anne Lamott. She’s one of a kind. I know she drives some people batty with her gritchy neuroses, but my love for her is unabashed.

She makes me snort aloud as I read.

She writes analogies like no one else–similes and metaphors that you don’t expect, but which are apt and ridiculous and perfect. She might compare her anxieties to both Richard Nixon’s posture and a sea anemone (see: tidepools!) yet she does it in such a way that you absolutely get what she means.

She whines and grouses and worries about Robert de Niro’s mole, but then she turns around and sees unfathomable beauty in the most homely of people and situations.

And the woman knows how to end an essay. Reading her last paragraphs, I often think of what it must be like to parachute from a plane. I see the white space approaching, and I know I’m almost to the end, about to hit the ground. But then in the last few lines, she’ll throw something unexpected in–an image from earlier in the essay, maybe–and the words will come together in such astounding beauty that I’ll hit the last word feeling sucker-punched and stunned and utterly exhilarated.

I like to think of her as my own little pocket writer. I’m a little possessive of her, I’m afraid: I discovered her early, on the shelf of a local bookstore way back in the late 80’s when she was just a Bay Area writer who’d published a few novels. But then suddenly she was helping me just when I needed her: publishing Operating Instructions when my oldest was a baby; Bird by Bird when I was desperately trying to learn to write; and her books on spirituality just when I needed to be reassured that Christianity and intellect don’t have to be mutually exclusive. She’s the pebble in my pocket that I come back to for comfort and reflection, again and again and again.

But allow her to speak for herself.

a few lines to love:

These are from Bird by Bird:

“I learned to be like a ship’s rat, veined ears trembling, and I learned to scribble it all down.”

It’s the veined ears trembling that does it for me.

What can happen when you sit down to write:

“Then your mental illnesses arrive at the desk like your sickest, most secretive relatives. And they pull up chairs in a semicircle around the computer, and they try to be quiet but you know they are there with their weird coppery breath, leering at you behind your back.”

And here it’s the weird coppery breath.

or:

“Typically you may find yourself wondering how some really awful writer you know is doing, and why he is doing so much better than you, and what it will be like to be on David Letterman’s show, and whether he will mock you or laugh at all your jokes and let you be his new best friend, and what you should eat for lunch, and what it would feel like for your hair to be on fire or for someone–like a critic or something–to stick a sharp object into your eye. Not to worry. Gently bring your mind back to your work.”

Over and over in Bird by Bird–and in all her writing–she makes you feel like you can’t possibly be as insane as she is; if she can write, you can.

“My friend then mentioned apricot jam, which was even worse than raspberry. I had not thought about this in thirty years, but now it all came back with horrible clarity. Apricot jam looked too much like glue, or mucilage. But you could count on having apricot jam when your father made the lunch. Fathers loved apricot jam; I don’t know why, but I’m sure Anna Freud could have a field day with it.”

Maybe I’m the only other person whose father would make such sandwiches (if he wasn’t making peanut-butter-and-mayonnaise ones) but I think not. Somehow Lamott manages to capture the odd universalisms that no one else has bothered to notice.

Advice on finding your writing voice:

“I love for my students to want to have this effect. But their renditions never ring true, any more than they ring true a few months later when Ann Beattie’s latest book arrives and my students start submitting stories about shiny bowls and windowpanes. We do live our lives on surfaces, and Beattie does surfaces beautifully, burnishing them, bringing out the details. But when my students do Beattie, their stories tend to be lukewarm, and I say to them, Life is lukewarm enough! If I’m going to read about a bunch of people who drive Volkswagens and seem to have mostly Volkswagen-sized problems, and the writer shows them driving around on the top of the ice, I want a sense that there’s a lot of very, very cold water down below.”

and two pages later:

“And the truth of your experience can only come through in your own voice. If it is wrapped up in someone else’s voice, we readers will feel suspicious, as if you are dressed up in someone else’s clothes.” 

Or, in my case, parading around in a Lamott-y dreadlocked wig. Somehow I just can’t pull it off.

From Operating Instructions.

On breastfeeding:

“Sam does these fabulous nipple tricks now, lolling around at my nipple, pushing it in and out of his mouth with his tongue, sort of lackadaisically, like it’s a warm summer day and he doesn’t have much else to do but work over his wad of chewing tobacco.”

See what I mean about ridiculous, absolutely apt analogies? Here’s another:

“I swear Sam is a week away from walking…Yesterday I was in the bathroom, and Megan was with him in the kitchen, letting him crawl around. She went to the front door to let the kitty out, and when she got back, Sam had climbed the four steps of the ladder to the loft and, as Megan reports, was sitting on the mattress like the Buddha, very pleased with himself in the most casual possible way, like “Hey, baby, just hanging out here on my mom’s bed. Come on up and have a beer!”

Let me see if I can show you what I mean about her final paragraphs. (Of course, the paragraph is more powerful if you’ve read the entire essay.) This one comes from Traveling Mercies, in an essay about sharing a stage with Grace Paley. Lamott and Paley gave two appearances together; the first time they tried out Lamott’s idea for a format and the evening went badly. They tried a second time, and here’s her final paragraph:

     “And the evening went really well. Grace was honest and sweet and tough, and she made everyone in the audience feel like going out and fighting the great good fight. Also, she’s absolutely the only woman I know who can wear socks with fancy shoes and a dress and still look great. It’s the beauty of comfort. She shone. I was just me, which Grace said later was all anyone asked. I’d really wanted to by Cyd Charisse onstage, but as usual, if I’d gotten what I wanted, I would have shortchanged myself. What I wanted was acclaim, and what I got was Grace, lovely and plain in her faded dress and dark socks, smiling at me all night.”

Yep. I’m keeping her in my pocket always.

the plan for june:

I’ll be reading E.B. White. I have an inkling that one ought not attempt to be an essayist without spending some time with White.