What we learned

 

It’s been a really long time since I wrote a “What We Learned” post. I guess I haven’t learned anything noteworthy for a while.

Until now.

I had a banner day recently, learning a full four exciting things, followed by two more fairly exciting things in the weeks afterward.

I give you…

What We Learned This Month

1. Aerial saws are a thing.

There was a helicopter trailing a mysterious string-like item flying around within sight of our house, multiple times a day, for a week or so. After the tenth time saying “What IS that thing?” I dove deep into collaborative research with a friend and discovered how they trim trees along power lines.

Helicopter using giant saw to trim trees
byu/Markantonpeterson inoddlysatisfying

Because sometimes a chain saw, or even a bucket truck, just won’t do. We need something apocalyptically more destructive that was maybe definitely invented by an 8-year-old boy.

2. Squirrels can survive a fall from any height.

Photo by Transly Translation Agency on Unsplash

Because of physics and stuff, squirrels theoretically cannot be crushed from a fall of any height, because their terminal velocity is less than their biological vulnerability.

3. High school can be so much easier than I thought.

Getting one kid through the high-school-graduation-and-applying-to-college process took several years off my life, but a slight pivot with the second child has opened glorious vistas of possibility.

In Jeddy’s later high school years we juggled multiple online academies, enrolling him in concurrent community college classes for only some of them senior year.

Ada and I have decided that she will do only community college classes for the last two years of her high school—which means no juggling multiple academies for her. That means that she’ll only have one academic calendar to keep up with, and although hers will be different from the rest of ours, it doesn’t matter deeply to me since she can drive.

Furthermore, the community college gives you a program to follow. It is true that I homeschool because I don’t like people telling me what to do, but when you get to the cusp of transferring to a degree program and career, it’s really helpful to be able to stop trying to figure it out for myself. The community college gives us a handy little checklist. If you check the boxes, you get to move on. Simple. And if you check all the boxes, we’ll even give you an associate’s degree.

Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash

Thirdly, there is no need to register Ada for AP exams! I don’t even have to figure out how to get her into AP classes! If all goes according to plan, she will graduate from high school with one year left to earn an associate’s degree and a guaranteed admission to her preferred university—no struggling through AP exams necessary.

This goes for SATs and PSATs too! I insisted on Jeddy taking them because I wanted official scores to corroborate the high GPA his mother awarded him, and because, suspecting he would score high, I thought it would look good on an application even to a test-optional school.

Well.

If Ada completes the associate’s degree program with a reasonable GPA, she will gain automatic admission, as a junior, to the four-year school of her choice (assuming that choice remains one of the participating state schools, which it currently is). The university will only look at her community college transcript and won’t even look at her high school transcript, which means there’s no need to prove that I didn’t just give her an A because I like her. And neither the community college nor the university will care what she got or whether she even ever took the SAT, because the community college will let her in now, and the university will be legally obligated to let her in whether they like her or not.

All this means no more talking to Peanut Butter Man! Not that Peanut Butter Man isn’t very nice and extraordinarily helpful. Peanut Butter Man had a name once, that I have since forgotten. He’s a very professional official at the local high school who happened to be dressed as the peanut butter half of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich once when I went to discuss Serious Official Things with him on a day that happened to be Halloween. It’s the only time, to date, that I have sat for an hour across the desk soberly discussing my child’s future with a human-size slice of sandwich.

Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash

But since Peanut Butter Man is the official in charge of standardized testing, I will no longer need to call him up after trying to remember what time of year they’re supposed to register for which test, only to discover that I’m six months late, or that the AP subject they spent all year studying isn’t actually offered here.

No juggling multiple schedules, a handy program to follow, and no more standardized testing…but also: with the community college-to-university route, there’s no need for a full college application! Which means I will need to face no school administrator essay, no guidance counselor essay, and no helping my applicant write her own essays.

This alone might save my life.

Although it’s too late to fully enjoy this with Ada, I realized also that there’s no need to worry about getting my younger kids into the English classes at the very rigorous online academy we use. The placement tests are killer, and the older you are when you start the subject, the harder it is to get into the supposedly correct grade level. Jeddy and Ada have taken all kinds of subjects with them, and their English is the one that reduced Ada’s spirit to shreds.

I like rigor. And I like English. But I don’t particularly love how they teach writing. I welcome their rigorous and expert approach to science, Spanish, and math, but, pardon the hubris, I think I could teach high school writing better. And if I turn my kids over to the community college to start on their associate’s degree in 11th grade, I only need to make sure they get two high school English credits, which is definitely doable, especially if the high schoolers in question have no younger siblings to worry about.

Lastly, the pressure on Ada to get pristine high school grades is waaaaaaaaay lower. If she was aiming to go straight to university, with all the uncertainty and competition that entails, she would need those grades as excellent as possible and more so. As is, she only needs a reasonably decent GPA to start community college, and a reasonably decent GPA there to go on to university.

In other words, she can exhale and have a life. And I can relax a whole lot more.

Photo by Michelle on Unsplash

4. The terms cheugy, stan, sip tea, take several seats, bet, and vibe check.

You know what teenagers love? When their middle-aged parents semi-learn slang terms and then overuse them just slightly incorrectly. Oh wait, they don’t love that. But it’s my new favorite thing.

5. Thinning shears are sharp.

Lizzy somehow combined all the hair genes of all her ancestors to have the world’s thickest hair, much to her fine-haired sister’s chagrin. She finally consented to have me thin it with thinning shears, which came out impressively pretty. It basically meant cutting out gobs of hair which were then stuck to the shears. Guess whether it’s a good idea to clear that off by running your finger over the shears?

6. There’s a gluteus minimus.

The girls have been complaining of extreme sore muscles since starting their first track season a couple weeks ago, and now we know muscles that you didn’t even know you had can hurt.

What exciting things did you learn this month?