The $50,000 love seat

“Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work, driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for, in order to get to a job that you need so you can pay for the clothes, car and the house that you leave empty all day in order to afford to live in it.�?
-Ellen Goodman

There are those who never give a thought to simple living but still complain about having way too much stuff. There are several common solutions:

You can buy a book or 10 on how to organize your life. Probably one will do as well as 10 since the solutions are variations on a theme. (Why add to your problem by having to organize nine extra books?) These books explain how to organize papers (buy color-coded labels) handle books (buy shelves), store your clothes (buy closet thingies), and deal with magazines (buy baskets), and so on. Notice how organizing too much stuff is solved by buying more stuff.

You can hire a professional organizer — someone who charges a lot of money to put color-coded labels on folders.

You can rent storage. Move your overflow of clothing, furniture, kitchen appliances, exercise toys, electronic entertainment devices, and old software and forget about it — except at the beginning of each month when you pay the bill.

These approaches to dealing with your abundance have one common advantage: you don’t have to admit to yourself that you have bought a bunch of useless (to you) junk that will never be used. You can hold on to the — recalling some of our treasures — roller blades, croquet set, power tools, air mattress, ice cream maker, sweaters, rowing machine, tent, boots, and other goodies and maintain the fantasy that some day they will get used, that you didn’t really waste your money. Of course, everyone knows, if they’re willing to consider it for half a minute, that anything that doesn’t get used immediately and regularly, won’t ever get used. The real ghost of Christmas past is the ball and chain of barely-used gifts.

Above, I mentioned three fairly inexpensive ways that people use to deal with their overflow. But is it really inexpensive? You’ll think I’m nuts, but I propose that hanging on to the extra tvs and unused treadmills can cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars. When children arrive, whether by stork or adoption agency, parents inevitably crave more space. That’s sensible, children need room to sleep and play. Is it sensible, however, to double or triple your living space to accommodate two or three kids? You still need only one kitchen, one dining room, one laundry area, and one living room, but families buy homes that go far beyond providing even a generous amount of room for the humans. The extra space goes to accomodate extra tvs and unused treadmills. In the Seattle area, a couple of extra rooms can easily increase the cost of your home $50,000 or more. And homeowners know the real cost of $50,000 over a 30-year mortgage. Gives a new perspective on the ten-dollar love seat you scored at the garage sale.

Most of us who hoard unused stuff hold on to it out of a sense of thriftiness, but as I’ve pointed out, that sense is nonsense. The best way to simplify your life is to get rid of your unused stuff. Rather than buying a new house, rather than renting a storage unit, rather than paying someone to organize your stuff, rather than buying a book on how to buy more stuff so you can organize your stuff, buy a book on how to get rid of your stuff.

You might think that getting rid of stuff doesn’t need instruction, only a decision, but you may be surprised at how difficult it is. Enter Don Aslett, who took a job as a janitor to pay his way through college and wound up a cleaning and de-junking mogul. (I didn’t know there was such a thing either.) By the time he left college, he was running an office cleaning business that grew into a very large office cleaning business, and later became an author of books on cleaning and de-junking.

Don Aslett has a enough books on getting rid of stuff to require another book on how to get rid of Don Aslett books. Fortunately, you need only one. My favorite is Clutter’s last stand.

Homeschooling Styles

If you have dinner at six sharp, vacuum regularly, have your 401K plan in order, and helped Mussolini get the trains to run on time, then I wouldn’t be surprised to see the same level of Swiss watch precision in your homeschooling. If, on the contrary, you take most of your meals at the Costco sample tables, think dust bunnies make the best pets, your retirement plan consists of retrieving loose change from between the couch cushions, and hope the train is late since then you’d have a chance of catching it, homeschooling at your house probably reflects a similar form of nonchalance. If you’re not a homeschooling family, or have yet to dive off that cliff, you may have fallen for either cliche´of homeschooling. Here are the two most common:

The structured family holds “classes” from 9:AM to 2:PM. Subjects are divided into precise 45-minute increments using “official” textbooks and purchased curriculum. The focus is on the three Rs along with traditional school elements such as handwriting practice. Break and lunch times are also strictly scheduled.

In contrast to the structured homeschooling family, nonchalant family members spend their time frolicking in nature and trekking to museums, carefully avoiding any designated moments for learning because they’re learning all the time. Reading is learned through reading (anything you wish), arithmetic is acquired by lemonade-stand bookkeeping, and writing is practiced by writing in journals with a quill.

In the last decade, a third homeschooling cliche´ has been added: the cyberlearner. By day, the children are situated in front of their cathode ray tubes, acquiring knowledge through the modern magic of educational software: they’re shooting the correct verb, blasting the right equation, and tracking down the ever elusive Carmen Sandiego. By night, same children earn video game money by consulting for IBM

I can’t imagine any family clinging strictly to any of the above models unless, in the first case, you’re a grandchild of General George Patton; in the second case, had too many acid trips in the 60s; in the third case, you…ahh…are my son (who, to be accurate, spends much of his life in front of a computer but none of it shooting verbs, chasing Carmen, or consulting for IBM.

I’m willing to wager that, while they may start at one extreme, most homeschooling families eventually incorporate ideas from all of the above approaches. To not would be to ignore the greatest advantage of homeschooling, the ability to adapt to the individual learning styles of each child. By paying attention to those styles, I have little doubt that my children will acquire whatever they need. It’s me I’m worried about. (My defects will be made clear below.)

Learning styles

My son learned to read by having one of his Calvin and Hobbes books read to him daily for two years. One day (and why that day), when he was six, he grabbed one of the Calvin and Hobbes books and read it through. He realized that he had been recognizing most of the words for some time.

If we had just our firstborn, I would have written the decisive book on learning to read: Learning to Read the Calvin and Hobbes Way. It would have covered, with lots of filler and a large typeface, two or three pages. (It still would have been twice the size of one of Spencer Johnson’s mega-selling One Minute Manager books.)

When my reading public clamored for a sequel, I would have churned out another page-turner: Learning Outstanding Reading Comprehension, the Warhammer Manual Way. As our son was approaching eight, I thought he might enjoy the fantasy-based game, Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). I didn’t know much about the game but, from what I did know, it was the sort of game I would have enjoyed (if it had existed) when I was young. When I went to the hobby store, however, I discovered another world of fantasy games. I settled on Warhammer, “a tabletop wargame of fantasy battles.” The Warhammer box included an instruction manual of combat and, unlike D&D, dozens of plastic toy soldiers. I reasoned, even if he didn’t like the game, he could play with the plastic soldiers.

On his eighth birthday, we presented our son with the box stuffed with Warhammer goodies. His reading comprehension lesson, and my subsequent new theory, began when I opened the manual. Hmm, I had always assumed every Brit could write. Not this Brit. After struggling with the details of Warhammer battles, I threw up my hands (actually, it was the manual, I threw), and told Adam that he would have to figure out how to play. And he did. Motivation will do that. Hence: Learning Outstanding Reading Comprehension, the Warhammer Manual Way.

Double X

Then we had a girl, a girl not so interested in the adventures of an imaginary six-year-old boy and his imaginary tiger. This girl wasn’t going to learn to read the Calvin and Hobbes Way. While I don’t hang out in nature, except to mow the lawn (and now my son does that), and while I don’t like museums, and while I never inhaled acid, I always subscribed primariy to the nonchalant family approach to learning. One of the chief tennants of the nonchant approach was my belief that if you read to your children, they would know how to read. The experience with my firstborn did nothing to dispel that belief but, as it turned out, I would need two theories of learning to read. I was at a loss. The Calvin and Hobbes and Warhammer approaches were cases of accidental tutelage. I never had to actually devise a learning strategy.

In fact, when it came to homeschooling, I never devised anything. I am not a planner. In writing, counseling, making a career, cooking, designing a web site, raising my children, or gift shopping (yeah, it’s that time of year), I just start with a theme and work from there. In this case the theme was learning without school. Suddenly, I needed one of them there plans.

I lookled hither and yon for a plan. (“Hither” was the library and “yon” was the Internet.) I even bought a book that promised that my child will learn to read in “100 Easy Lessons” and investigated software that claimed far more. But the books and software taught with fauniques and I’ve always disliked phonicks. While many educators and parents swear by fawnixs, I have never liked any approach to learning that is context free because it is hard to not come to detest anything learned by rote. (Even given my concern, I regarded learning to read as a lesser issue than learning to like to read.)

My apprehension, obviously, was getting to me. I went to see Cassie Compton, at the time, my daughter’s American Sign Language Teacher at Cyberschool (currently known as Edmonds Homeschool Resource Center) as well as an expert on visual learning. She confirmed what I hoped to hear, that phonics wasn’t right for Bria. I felt relieved to not stumble down that path.

By this time, most of you are (or should be) wondering: For Pete’s sake, why didn’t you just find some age-level appropriate books that aren’t phonics-based and have her read with you? I’m still trying to figure that out. Probably, because it didn’t occur to me. At the time, nothing approximating the traditional school approach occurred to me. I was stuck in the cliche´ in which I began homeschooling: I took a little from column B (the nonchalant family) and a little from column C (the cyberlearners). Nothing from column A (the structured family) entered my mind. It’s not that I was against it, it just didn’t enter my mind.

Eventually, the obvious became obvious. We decided that Bria would read to me, daily — except, I hadn’t a clue as to which books to use. I wouldn’t choose the books used in schools because they’re chosen by committees for whom their only virtue is their lack of offense to any interest group. Conveniently, a new friend of ours, Delia O’Malley, was a special education teacher. Delia explained that most young children’s books had reading level ratings (that go by grade level). She brought a pile of books to our home, had my daughter go through them, and determined which ones were appropriate. (It turned out that Bria was already close to the average reading level for her age.) Bria read from these books daily and learned to read well enough to read on her own after a few months.

Leaning styles for old people (me)

So, did I learn that traditional methods of learning are best? Not at all, rather, I learned I need to shelve my preconceived notions as best I can and respond to the individual needs and learning styles of each of my children.

Postscript

I did not want to make this article an argument on approaches to learning to read. I think we’ll all agree on the correct approach to learning to read right after we all agree on whether it was Bush or Gore who really won Florida. If you wish to pursue the information regarding the phonics versus whole language debate, below are some links:

• A web site that looks at both sides: Whole Language vs. Phonetic Reading Instruction.
• Anti-phonics but not look/say. A third way: Understanding Reading: A Psycholinguistic Analysis of Reading and Learning to Read.
• A method based on the above book: Modelled Oral Reading.
• Pro-phonics; from John Taylor Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education Contains an amusing anecdote by Theodor Giesel (Dr. Seuess) on how The Cat in the Hat was created.
• Possibly the best (and assuredly the most expensive) phonics software program: The Literacy Connection.