first of all, just to mix things up a bit around here, the duke came in to my room at the same ungodly hour this morning and asked
"can wingman watch t.v."
then i heard wingman, who has previously not participated in this pre-dawn fun, ask
"can i have a popsicle?"
good morning...
then, during spelling, wingman and i came back into the room and the duke of fun was doing a kinda of a broadway dance/soft shoe complete with cane (well, he was using his pencil as a cane)
"um, what are you doing"
"dancing like the fish in my book"
and i look down and in his spelling workbook there is indeed and fish with a top hat and a cane next to the scrambled words exercise...
what's scarier is that he was really good at the dancing and was enjoying it quite a bit...sigh, am i going to have to add tap and jazz dance to chess club and stamp collecting?...this kid will never get a date!...
then during math he says
"wow...this sure went easier than that math fiasco from yesterday"
okay...he used the word "fiasco"....which is bad enough...but yesterday i was trying to explain double digit multiplication...he did the problem and when i saw the work and the answer it was really really weird and really wrong...
"what happened here?...where did you get lost"
"i didn't get lost...this is how you showed me to do it"
indeed...i had shown him the WRONG way to do it...a way that could have only sprung from my math phobic brain...a way that took 14x16 and yielded BY MY INSTRUCTION an answer of 1484...which was right BY MY INSTRUCTION, but is in no way close to the actual right answer...which is 224, by the way...
then i spent the next 20 minutes trying to figure out how i did it so wrong, and the right way to do it...
which is embarrassing...very embarrassing...but we worked through it and figured it out...and considering i try to make it a point to let the duke know that i don't know everything, that nobody does, this ended up being a good lesson in action...embarrassing nonetheless...
but don't worry, his actual math curriculum will be started in september...and no, i didn't come up with it, i am ordering it from a highly respectable company...there is hope yet...
and actually we made good progress on it today...he now knows how to do it the right way, and, um, so do i...
then we get to grammar...wherein we were learning about state of being verbs being used as linking verbs...and the duke said
"hey, we did this the other day"
"when?"
"when you told me about dropping a state of being verb and it sounding like a toddler or how a person just learning a new language sounds"
"i remember that...but we were talking about state of being verbs...and now we are talking about them being used as linking verbs...that's probably why it sounds familiar"
"no mama, it's familiar because we did it already"
then i looked at my book and my paper and the exercise and realized that he was right...i had taught him state of being verbs being used as linking verbs just the few days before...only i had taught them as state of being verbs only...which is okay because they are all the same words being used in two different ways, but which is technically wrong...
then we read some of the canterbury tales and had a discussion about death...and how it is portrayed in movies and literature, and how chaucer portrayed it differently than how you usually see it...
and although it was a very insightful conversation and the duke really did grasp the concept and was able to expand on it, i did think to myself at one point that if anyone asked the duke what he was learning in school there would be a very good chance they'd get the following response
"we learned about death, and that 14x16 is 1484, and that foreigners sound like toddlers!"
all of which makes me glad that our school week ends TODAY!...
one more day and i fear i might just be compelled by the apparently large amount of misinformation in my brain to convince the poor kid that the world is flat!...
apparently i should have made that pilgrimage to finish college...
x.
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