Completing elementary school

Last spring, Wanda finished the 5th grade, and started the 6th grade. In our corner of the world, that means she's in middle school now.

Even though we don't put too much focus on aligning with grade level expectations—Wanda has always been too far out of sync with those expectations for that to be practical (2e life!), that's why we homeschool—it has actually lined up with a transition point in our learning. It has felt like the end of one phase and the beginning of another, in a more natural way than I'd expected.

The most noticeable transition has been in our math curriculum, Beast Academy. We finished the final level of Beast Academy! Oh, it was beautiful. When we read the last of the guides, we sobbed, big messy sobs, snuggled up next to each other on the couch, where we had read every guide together since the very first day we started homeschooling. When we finished the last problems in the workbook, we had a celebration with cupcakes, and Wanda surprised me with a Winnie doll she had made for me.

I was worried about what we would do next for math. Beast Academy left a gaping crater in our life. The creators of Beast Academy, Art of Problem Solving (AoPS), have more curricula that could potentially take us all the way through the high school years, the next step being Prealgebra. But it's dry. No pictures, just a lot of wall-of-text wordy explanations and math problems in a thick book. It sure looks like a high school textbook to my eyes, and an abrupt switch for my easily bored, forever young-at-heart kid.

But it's been going far better than I could have imagined. Wanda and I are doing Prealgebra together, side by side, as fellow students. Her idea. This kid, she knows what she's doing. Math has actually become more fun, more interesting, more engaging.

And that's what homeschooling has been like this year, across the board. New depths. New abilities. It's awesome.

We're at a point with her education where the homeschooling choices we're making feel much more tailored to my kid, and thus more personal, and I'm less comfortable broadcasting them to the world. They're solid choices, and honestly nothing too oddball, still quite academic, and I would love to crow about how well it's going! But if I were to keep writing about our schoolwork, it would become less "here are some broadly-applicable things I've learned that I'm using for homeschool" and it would become more "here are the specific cool things that Wanda is doing." Twelve-year-old Wanda is into that, but it's 22-year-old Wanda I have to think about.

Wanda loves this blog, and has always had the ability to give a thumbs up or a thumbs down about anything I share here. But it feels natural and right to draw the curtains closed a bit now.

I'm not totally done posting to this blog, not quite yet. I have some retrospectives to share about materials we used in the elementary years; now that they're in our rearview mirror I'm able to give a more full assessment of what worked and what didn't. We don't have any plans to stop homeschooling any time soon, and it seems likely I could have something to share about homeschooling at some point that isn't too Wanda-specific. And this blog will definitely remain up so it can continue to help anyone who is just getting started with homeschooling.

I have started my own personal blog, though! It's not about homeschooling, though I'm sure it'll come up. It's a place to pour out whatever is going through my head, which is a lot of baking, cooking, and whatever I'm finding interesting, while trying to do my part to build a better world. It's called I Have Doubt! and you're welcome to follow me there, if you'd like.

Okay, I will crow about one last thing, though, because dang, this kid, I'm proud of her. At the tail end of fifth grade last spring, we started a deep dive on A Midsummer Night's Dream, including reading Shakespeare's actual script for the play. We used Stacey Lloyd's excellent materials, I highly recommend them. (If you've been reading this blog for a while, you may recall we used Stacey Lloyd's materials when we read Animal Farm, too.)

It took us a loooong while to finish reading the play; we really took our time with the text. I was sure that by the end she was going to be SO. DONE. WITH. IT. But she wasn't! She said she loved studying the play, right to the end, and she wants to read more Shakespeare. (But I called uncle; I was ready for us to dive into the Epic of Gilgamesh for level G of Exploring the World through Story!)

Anyway, near the start of our Midsummer learning, at the end of reading Act I, the Lloyd materials had an assignment to write an essay.

This is the essay she wrote. This is all her; the only feedback I had for her was to add some of the paragraph breaks.

Gender (In)equality in A Midsummer Night's Dream

by Wanda Trott, age 11

At first glance, everything appears equal in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Every powerful male has a powerful female counterpart. But the males dominate, control, and objectify the females. To some extent, Shakespeare seems to be criticizing this unfair treatment, but for the most part, it seems as though we are meant to feel sympathy for Hermia rather than anger at the sexism at hand here, and so it feels like Shakespeare’s message is that the system is slightly problematic, but it’s the way of the world and that it’s ultimately okay. Even though Shakespeare is usually heralded as a literary genius, and while I myself enjoy his works and enjoy A Midsummer Night’s Dream the most, I feel as though it is not reasonable to be sympathetic for someone in a bad and frankly downright atrocious scenario without even ONCE complaining about the root issue.

In his defense, Shakespeare came from a time where there wasn’t really much criticism of this sort of thing, so it’s not surprising that he would have this worldview. And let’s not lose sight of the criticism he DOES offer. In Act 1, Scene 1, Line 42, Egeus says sexist and ageist things about his daughter Hermia, a statement which is criticized throughout the play. The four main characters (except for Demetrius at the beginning) live in defiance of Athenian law throughout the play, with Hermia (who was supposed to marry Demetrius) running away with Lysander, and Helena who, while not technically breaking the law, constantly courts Demetrius, even though he loves and is supposed to marry Hermia. The law at the time in Athens was that a daughter HAD to marry who her father wanted her to, die, or spend the rest of her life in a cloister honoring the goddess Diana (her followers banned themselves from marriage in her honor). 

However, for the most part, there seems to be a lot of objectification that, unlike the law, never gets resolved. And it’s NOT just the men being sexist. Act 1, Scene 1, Lines 184-197 are Helena lamenting that since her love, Demetrius, only loves her friend Hermia (even though he once loved Helena) , Helena must not be pretty enough. Thus, Helena gets angry when Hermia calls her “fair”. Helena is being sexist to herself in that she thinks that beauty=worth and that she needs a man to decide her beauty, A.K.A., her worth. 

But I’m going to explore a different side of this interaction that isn’t often talked about. Helena isn’t just being sexist to herself. If you’re confused, I GET IT. But think about it. Helena is expecting Demetrius to love her just because he once did. Later in the play, in Act 1, Scene 1, Lines 230-255, Helena reveals that, to put it simply, Demetrius promised to love her, so he must.

 Many lovers will promise to love eachother forever. Not surprisingly, these relationships often don’t work out. A promise is not legally binding. Feelings change. Demetrius doesn’t owe Helena a relationship. So why is Demetrius often framed as being an awful womanizer and Helena as an innocent victim? A few reasons:

1. Demetrius is a man, Helena is a woman. One of the few societal advantages to being thought of as delicate and fragile is that you get off the hook easier. And if a man breaks a woman’s heart, he is often framed as fickle at best and evil at worst. Now, if a woman did the same thing, she would maybe be thought of as a man’s possession, and thus “not be justified” in dumping him. But as much as we don’t want it to be this way, society is STILL SEXIST. We are STILL SEXIST. We’ve come a long way since the Tudors and the Ancient Greeks, and sexism is still NOT OKAY, but we can’t escape the fact that each and every one of us (yes, even those of us who are not men) probably do something sexist AT LEAST once a day. For instance, things like forgetting to use Singular They or subconsciously thinking lower of women then we do of men. It doesn’t matter how hard you try. Does this mean that we give up? No. Does this mean that we are INHERENTLY sexist? No. It’s JUST THE WAY THE SYSTEM IS STRUCTURED. So of course we’re going to think of Helena not as controlling but as an innocent victim.
2. Demetrius is cruel to Hermia. Demetrius doesn’t let Hermia love Lysander. Since that’s the first thing we see him do, of course that’s going to be our first impression of him. And humans naturally care a lot about first impressions.
3. That’s the way Shakespeare intended it. Nothing else to say here.

So, may I just say, if the oppressed are discriminating, that is the true hallmark of an unequal society. Does the world HAVE to be this way FOREVER? Depends. Will you put in the work?

See? It's time for this kid to dive deeper into the world, and I'm so excited to see where she goes.

As I said, I'll be back here to post some retrospectives at some point, and in the meantime you can catch me at I Have Doubt!, and I've also been hanging out over at Bluesky lately. Feel free to comment here if you have any specific requests for retrospectives or similar. And thank you so much for being here.