So on the principal that a long journey begins with a single step, I have been listening to a few poems while cooking dinner. Apart from the annoyance of having to walk across the room to choose the next one, or pause it when the phone rings, it is rather a pleasant discipline.

The Poetry Archive has lots of recordings of poems read by the poets themselves. Always nice to see how they meant that to sound. And possibly one of my issues with reading it. I can never work out how the rhythm is supposed to go or if there is supposed to be one. (Does the line break have any aural function? Or is it merely visual? How does punctuation relate to the line breaks?) The trickiest part is figuring out where to start. Once you’ve listened to one, there seems to be a “where to next” link at the bottom of the page for something related somehow.

I’m also up to my neck in canning. Mat did a bunch of tomatoes this weekend (I helped with some of them). He bought a bushel of roma tomatoes at the market and we’ve mostly done passata and crushed tomatoes because that’s what we prefer to use for pasta sauces and the like through the year. This morning I put some chutney on as we’ve found that quite useful and it incorporates eggplant and zucchini. The former have just started fruiting because it’s been a bit cool this summer but the latter we have way too much of. I also shredded and froze quite a lot of zucchini yesterday. I freeze it in 1.5 cup quantities because that’s what my zucchini bread recipe takes but we also use shredded zucchini in potato pancakes.

We also canned peaches the other day. I need to go and get about 3 more baskets of those and do them this week because they’re almost done. We’ll wait until after they get back to do pears.

I also now have a dishwasher. It looks very pretty but I have no idea what it runs like. We thought we had it all hooked up on Saturday but it wouldn’t work. So I called an electrician this morning. They’ve just left. After much searching for the problem, including opening up the ceiling downstairs to see if the plumbers had nicked the wire, they replaced the whole wire. And discovered that Mat must have nicked the neutral wire when he was stripping the ends and then snapped it when he tightened the strain relief nut. This is another reason to have “contingency” funds in every project budget. So the lights now go on. Later on I will check that the water intake and the drain are all working properly and not leaking anywhere and then we’re away.

We have also recently laid floor in that part of the kitchen. We went with Marmoleum in the 3′ x 1′ click panels, with an underlay made from recycled tires. This stuff is pretty easy to lay and looks great. That section with all the new cabinets has the most cutting of panels of the whole room so now we just need to find the time and energy to clear the rest of the room and finish laying it. It looks pretty good so far though.

Yesterday AnimalGirl came around to tackle this problem with Tigger, which I blogged about a couple of weeks ago. I thought I’d provide some detail of how they worked on it because I know some folks are interested. First go look at the problem. The girls read through the problem and then focused on the map. They weren’t sure where to start but one of them suggested working out what all the possibilities were and going from there. This was probably the best thing to do and they worked out what all the possibilities were pretty quickly and made a decision about where the princess should go. I thought that looked like a reasonable solution but something was bugging me that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I know that there is a solution provided on the nRICH site, so I went and got that for them. (There is a link at the top of the page I linked above.) Their solution was somewhat different from what the girls had come up with so the 3 of us tried to work out how and why they differed. In the end, they agreed that the other one was probably a better solution (and thought they should change their view of which room the princess should go in).

I pointed out that the difference between the two rooms wasn’t that great and talked a bit about how probability problems often come up with answers that require some judgement. Whichever room you choose, there is still a pretty good chance that the poor peasant is going to get eaten by the lions. This problem didn’t take them very long but they enjoyed it and it did make them think.

For those who want to know what their solution was and how we differed from the published solution, I’ve got that after the break.
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Literature is one of those subjects that I never “got” in school. You know how some folks say that they got good marks in math but feel like they don’t know anything about it? That’s me with literature. I read voraciously. But I never understood what was going on with literature class. Still don’t. I love Deconstructing Penguins but have absolutely no confidence I could guide that kind of a discussion about a book that isn’t already in there. (Seems I was going on about similar concerns this time last year.)

So. Poetry. Not sure how I didn’t get clued into it. I read a lot of A.A.Milne as a child and enjoyed it. I remember enjoying Dennis Lee as well. But I never really moved beyond kids poetry. I’ve had occasional forays into contemporary poetry — Jackie Kay, for example. And Mat got me interested in Attila the Stockbroker. But mostly I don’t know where to start and find that reminder that I haven’t got a clue to be kind of paralyzing.

One of the things I like about homeschooling is the ability to learn along with your kid. I didn’t know anything about art until Tigger got interested in it, either. So I figure this is my opportunity to figure out poetry. Or at least learn to be comfortable with it. I love Julie’s idea of teatimes. But having a teatime when you have only one child feels a bit weird. I’ve hosted one before with a few of Tigger’s friends and everyone loved it but that never became a regular thing.

No more. Our homeschool group has just had a meeting to work out what we’re going to do this term. I said, I’d like to do a teatime about once a month. So that’s what I’m doing. We each host 3 sessions between mid-September and mid-December and mine are pretty evenly spaced (and in the calendar). My plan is to go to the library and stock up on poetry books from the kids section so that I have a selection of things on hand when the kids get here. And bake. And make sure we have some nice drinks in (even for those who don’t want tea). And then we’ll just see what happens.

My first teatime is September 23. I might get some fall themed stuff. And I need something that our one lone boy might like (he brought a hockey poem the last time) so he isn’t overwhelmed by fairies or something. And I need to think of something to read to them while they have their tea…

But Tigger is also a really social child. She loves being with other kids. And she loves learning from other people. So I like to sign her up for things that get organized on topics that interest her. Back in May/June she did a science class. It was loosely based on the Grade 9 curriculum and advertised as for 12-15 year olds. I knew the mom that organized it and talked to her about it. She wasn’t sure what the teacher would think but thought Tigger was probably at that level (from previous interaction) and said that if everyone who signed up was at the top end of the age range maybe not but we’d see who else was interested. In the end it was pretty hard to get the minimum number together and there was an 11 year old also interested and Tigger did it. She was fine. I had to find alternative readings a couple of times or go through the reading with her but she grasped the concepts well and did great in this lab based class.

At the end of that class the teacher had said that there was another class he planned to offer in the fall if the kids were interested — cell biology with lots of microscope work (Grade 9 level again). Even though Tigger and this other kid were younger than his usual target age range he made a point of saying to me and the other mom that they were both easily capable of doing that class and he’d welcome them. So this fall, I contacted him and then took it upon myself to organize some people.

Of course it is easier to get enough kids in September than in May So I had more than enough and did it on a first-come first-served kind of basis. I sent an e-mail to those that were in and the teacher (so he could take over) and listed what I knew about the participants at the end. Some I didn’t know ages and those I did seemed to be several 12 year olds and Tigger. One 14 year old boy then told his mom that he didn’t want to do a class for 10 - 12 year olds. AAACK!

I dealt with it all but I felt personally really awful. Here I am trying to get an activity at a good level for Tigger and because she is younger it gives the impression to others that the class isn’t really Grade 9 level as advertised. The teacher by then had more information about some of the kids and we confirmed with this kid’s mom that there were older kids in the group and that the level was right for him and that he wasn’t going to dumb it down for younger kids. He’s back in. Thank goodness.

But I ended up feeling like you can’t win. The age to level culture runs so deep that even homeschooled kids (and this kid is unschooled so I don’t think he does a lot of workbooks with levels printed on them either) immediately think that younger kids must be doing lower level work. Or maybe that it would be “normal” for a class to have kids all about the same age rather than having kids from 11 to 16 (as this class will). I’m sure he didn’t mean anything bad by it but it does seem to be an indication of how deep those assumptions go.

Which gets me back to my complaint that we, as a society, need a better understanding of statistics and probability. Because the variation in ability (all kinds of abilities) around the mean is significant for most things. Somehow we have a society that thinks “average” is where everyone should be and that both “below average” and “above average” are somehow “abnormal” in a way that needs to be corrected or reined in or something. This starts to happen from when we are measuring our babies’ progress in terms of “developmental milestones”. I have even met moms who misunderstand those growth charts thinking that if their kids in the 15th (or 85th) percentile there is a problem with their growth. Somewhere along the line we’ve lost the distinction between characteristics of a population and characteristics of an individual  member of that population. And it causes real problems.

My kid is well within the normal range of ability for a kid her age. But she’s 11 and capable of Grade 9 science. Her understanding of history and history of art is way beyond what anyone would expect of an 11 year old. But she still plays imaginative games with Playmobil toys and dolls and other “normal” 11 year old stuff. That’s probably normal too. Somehow we need to be able to recognize all of our normal kids, in all their variation, and help them learn. I would hope that classes with kids ranging in age from 11 to 16 were actually more common.

Loosely based on the history of the village of Eyam in Derbyshire and set in 1665-66, the year plague hit that village, Brooks does a masterful job of bringing the characters and relationships in this time and place to life. The story is told from the point of view of Anna, a young widow who is a part-time servant at the rectory. We experience how the inhabitants of this village lived through a very trying time, imposing a quarantine on themselves to contain this horrible disease. The complexities of religious differences, class, gender, and education are all subtly conveyed in a gripping story. Brooks has mastered the language of this time and place, drawing you into life in the village.

I’ve already said that I seem to enjoy novels with rich characterization and this is another. Several of the characters are deeply and subtly drawn. And known facts of that period, such as the ways some individuals would blame witchcraft and scapegoat particular women in an attempt to eradicate the disease, are well described to give a sense of how people can be caught up in mob violence in stressful circumstances and yet others do not get drawn in. The main character is sympathetic and easy to identify with, at least for me.

The author’s note at the end of the book teases out the relationship to the historical facts in more detail. This is a fascinating addition to a book that stands on its own as just a good story. The insight into the author’s inspiration and process are very interesting.

Highly recommended.

“Probabilistic thinking” is a phrase Sarah used in her comment on my last post. (She also provided a link to a cool simulation so you might want to check that out.) I had been talking about how my general goal for math is to develop the skills needed to spend time working on tough problems and at least move towards a solution. But because the stuff we’ve been working on recently has been probability her response made me recognize a reasonable objective for the probability stuff: shifting to probabilistic thinking instead of “one right answer” thinking.

This ties in really well with the physics stuff I’d been reading because so much of physics relies on this way of looking at the world. As does so much of life, as I have also pointed out.

So now I have a clearer sense of what we’re doing and why. For now, anyway.

There has been some shouting, crying, and other frustrated behaviour. But we are making progress. We’ve talked about the importance of the process. About how math isn’t necessarily about solving easy problems in large numbers and getting all the answers right. We’ve talked about the ice-cream problem, how tough it was, the wrong alleys, and how we got to the answer. Also how good it felt when we figured out that formula after all those frustrating attempts.

Yesterday we said we’d put the problem away for the day and come back to it tomorrow. When she said “We’ll finish it tomorrow.”, I corrected her and pointed out that we might not finish it but we’d work on it some more.

Today, we worked on it some more. Together. She started falling into letting me do lots of the work and that led to some more serious discussion and frustration on my part. We talked it through a bit, went over the discussion of what the goals were, etc. We switched to playing the game the problem is based on. With dad instead of me.

Tomorrow, we’ll work on it some more but we might call it quits even if it isn’t “finished”.

Her friend is going to come over sometime next week to work on the Lady or the Lions. I am so glad she has a friend who thinks that coming over to do math together sounds like fun.

In the meantime we might work on the Birthday problem*. When I mentioned that just now, she said “But we know the answer.” and I reminded her that we don’t know why that is the answer. She thought for a moment and agreed that maybe it would be a good one to work on. Maybe we are making progress, slowly.

* How many people do you need to have in a room for the probability of 2 of them having the same birthday to be 1 in 2? The answer is 23.

I think most of those that I would award it to are already on someone else’s list. There are lots of brilliant blogs out there. To keep my sidebar a bit less cluttered, those I read are listed in pages. So in case you haven’t found those blogrolls, I’ll link them here: homeschooling blogs & knitting blogs are listed separately (though I know a lot of folks do both).  I note that I haven’t updated either list lately. Apologies for broken links and the like.