Some School Years are Like That

By my count I am finishing twenty years of homeschooling. This gives me some sort of perspective point (though I am not sure how meaningful it is). 

At the beginning of the year I bought a pack of sticky stars to mark our schooldays on the calendar. Sticky stars have motivated me ever since I was in first grade so I thought how cheerful a calendar full of stars would look. 

This is how school looks at the beginning of the year, all shiny and perfect, with everything in a row.

And now last week I looked at the sheet of stars being used. It turned out the pack that was so shiny and perfect was NOT. The machine had only cut around 3 points of them and so points tear off when you try to get them off the sheet. I am too cheap to buy a new pack when I have several hundred still unused and too obsessive to put torn stars on my calendar, so using them proved to be something of challenge. Which is so often just how the whole of life goes.

This is how school looks at the end of a year. 

And after twenty years, what I know is, that's OK.

Conquering X

Today on Scripture typer I finished off Romans 8 with verses 31-39. When I work on a passage I have a variety of thoughts go through my head, some of which certainly lack that certain spiritual je ne sais quoi.

Today I started thinking what the Homeschooling Mom's version of parts of this would look like, something like:

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall standardized tests, or book fairs, or socialization, or clutter, or algebra, or writing, or noise?

Anyhow. They won't and that is good news.

But then following that encouraging part comes the part that does not seem to me to belong, according to my frail logic. Here we have this wonderful list of things that will NOT separate us from the love of Christ, and just when I would like to hear something warm and cuddly instead we get a nasty quote, something that might happen to hapless critters like hobbits:

“For your sake we are being killed all the day long;

we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.”

And yet we are reassured that we are still more than conquerors. I do not often picture sheep as the conquering type. It is great that even silly sheep have One who makes them more than conquerors.

Even when algebra is whipping your students. :-P

C O F F E E

Our sixth grade songbook had a little ditty in it I liked (which I suspect had some stealth lesson I missed about scales), called Coffee. The lyrics were: 
C O F F E E
Coffee is no-ot fo-or me
It's a drink some people wa-ake u-up with
That it makes them nervous i-is no-o myth
Slaves to a coffee cup
They can't give coffee up.

Or maybe it was a lesson on slurs and staccato notes? 

Whatever. The point here is that I took the lesson to heart, and have never become a coffee drinker. And everywhere I go on the internet, I see references to caffeine being essential for academic success. e.g.:

I have begun to think it must have been a nearly miraculous occurrence for me to complete my education without coffee... some day, my stories to my grandchildren on my knee will start, not, "I walked two miles in the snow to school" but "I made it through college without even a sip of coffee. And that was back before power drinks had even been invented." 

Oh, the cleverness of me!