Getting schooled
How can you feel like you have too much homework when you're not even in school anymore?
Lots of firsts at our house:
- The Boy started his first year of middle school
- TwoBoo started first grade
- I'm no longer driving anyone to a day care center -- for the first time in ten years
Every trip is taking maybe ten minutes more because I keep missing turns. Both schools sent home stacks of paperwork for ME to fill out. And my job, that art thing?
I'm up to my ears in meetings about art. Applications about art exhibitions. Other computer-related stuff about art. Art stuff, but not making art. Which is sometimes part of the job.
Art business consultant Alyson Stanfield has some useful suggestions on how to deal with overwhelm, which I really need to work on this month. So I'm going to spend a long weekend in planning mode... and somehow, making something.
MLK Day: Teach your children...
At first I thought this Martin Luther King Jr. holiday would come and go for our family like it usually does: I... um... don't do much to teach my kids about The Struggle. (Bad black person. Go to your room and repent your thoughtless, privileged ways.)
Page colored by TwoBoo. Design credit: abcteach.com
But then I remembered... I'm actually helping a bit to educate TwoBoo and his kindergarten class about the 1960s-era civil rights movement. They're reading our family copy of the Ruby Bridges story. Ruby was the first African American child to integrate an all-white elementary school in the South -- she was only six years old at the time.
Credit: Amazon.com, Bettman/CORBIS, Lerner Publishing
I also loaned the teacher two other books by the same publisher. Some of the kids are learning about Matthew Henson (first black man to reach the North Pole, with Robert Peary). Others are reading the story of Nat Love (African American cowboy and rodeo performer, also known as "Deadwood Dick").
If I'm brave enough (or foolhardy enough... same thing, really) maybe I'll volunteer to present some of my own historical work to one of The Boy's classes. I don't know, though... he enters middle school, and kids that age are a tough crowd. Wish me luck...
The month of gratitude: day 28
Day 28
I'm grateful for my ever-faithful friends, books, especially the works of Sir Terry Pratchett.
Sidebar: I'm also grateful TwoBoo is learning to eat up books as well, everything from Benjamin Bunny...
... to Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach. And yes, TwoBoo just turned six this month. (#sorrynotsorry for the mommy brag.)