Nicolaus Copernicus offers wisdom about wisdom

I'm back (belatedly, today - LONG office day!) with the next installment as part of the iHomeschool Network's new series called Quotable Wisdom.

Each Tuesday, we're all posting thoughts from topics or authors of interest. I'm sharing quotes from famous mathematicians and scientists for your pinning and Facebooking pleasure, but my biggest goal is that I hope something will spark you or your family to dig deeper into a particular area or a particular person's life.

This week, our quotable person comes at Sarah's request. It was actually this famous astronomer, jurist and physician's 540th birthday LAST week on quote day, but since I'd planned in advance, I wasn't able to adapt on the fly! And, of course, she found out about this via the Google Doodle in his honor.

To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.
~ Nicolaus Copernicus

Learn more about Copernicus

• Nicolaus Copernicus on Wikipedia
• Read about the Copernicus Google Doodle
• The Nicolaus Copernicus Thorunensis project (a project organized by Copernicus' childhood town of Torun, Poland)

More awesome quotes

• Check out the rest of the Quotable Wisdom bloggers
• See my entire series of great math and science quotes
• Follow me on Pinterest for more quotes

What's it like to homeschool as a night owl?

So... it's 10:24 p.m. and I'm sitting down to write this blog post. In fact, I'm sitting down to do a bunch of tasks, of which this post is an early entry on the list.

I have always been a night person. In high school, it wasn't uncommon for me to be up until 2 or 3 a.m., watching movies with friends in my living room, then rolling out half-functional at 7:30 a.m. in my neighbor's truck, headed for school and downing enough iced tea to get me coherent along the way.

During my worst semesters of college, I worked a full-time job from 5 p.m. to 1 a.m. or later. I'd come home, wake up Sarah, who was an infant, and hang out with her for a few hours before dozing off around 3 a.m., and heading back to school around 8:30 a.m. I was tired, but I got to see my girl!

I met my husband working on the night desk at our local newspaper. We were often the last pair standing - heading out the door around 2 or 3 a.m.

Sarah has always needed a lot of sleep. When she needed to be up for school at 7:30 a.m., she'd go to bed around 8 p.m. - and when middle school started and she needed to be up at 6:30 a.m., she was crashing at 8:30 p.m., barely having time to do more than cram in her homework and wolf down dinner after getting home. And let's not mention how Chris and I looked, walking her to the bus after (still) getting done work overnight.

So among all the other reasons that homeschooling sounded like the right fit for us, getting out of that cycle was a great bonus!

It's definitely been a huge relief for us to be able to adapt much more to our "night owl" schedule. At the same time, we've come face-to-face with a lot of misconceptions. Most are the same misconceptions I faced when I worked night shifts. And most come from people who know us, and know our schedule.

I can tell you that I've never been upset when someone we don't know calls us at 9 a.m. Yep, it wakes me up, but if you don't know otherwise, I accept that. Those are "business hours," and I'm fine with that.

I can also tell you that when people who KNOW us get upset when I don't answer my phone at 8:30 a.m., that's frustrating. When someone asks us what time is convenient to get together, and we say "any time between 1 p.m. and midnight," and they laugh and suggest an 11 a.m. lunch, that kind of hurts.

Sometimes, it's easy to want to be snappish. To want the world to operate on our schedule. That'd be awesome. (Museums open at midnight? YEAH!) But that's not actually my goal.

Really, what I'd love is simply to have "night-owldom" recognized as a legitimate and viable personality trait, the same as a preference for lima beans or hot weather - maybe not common, but totally OK.

• We're not lazy when we're in bed at 10 a.m., just like you're not lazy when you go to bed at 9 p.m.
• We're not antisocial when we opt out of 9 a.m. group trips, just like you're not antisocial if you don't join us for an 11:30 p.m. movie.
• We don't find midnight science experiments at all unusual, just like you don't find 8 a.m. art projects at the breakfast table uncommon.
• We're not hurting our daughter's chances at getting a "real job" someday. (This was probably the most hurtful comment I've received.) If Sarah wants to, she can and will get up. If she prefers, which she probably will, she'll get a job that has her starting at 5 or 10 p.m. Hey, it worked for me and for her dad! By the same token, we know that not everyone can work second or third shift, so if your kids are getting up at 7 a.m., that's fine too - just please, trust them to know their bodies and know the times they're most productive.

Most of all, please know that our night-owl family isn't judging your early-bird one. Maybe we're even a little jealous, because you get to go to museums fully conscious! (If we do that, we're only there 2 hours before they close!)

In return, though, let it be OK that we love nighttime. There's plenty of daylight - or starlight - for all of us.

And if you're a fellow night-owl homeschooler, feel free to share our nocturnal friend above. I'd love to start a tribe of "night-schoolers!"

Many thanks to Flickr user Michelle Wright for the base night-owl image!

Kicking off a fun new series: Quotes by great mathematicians and scientists

OK, the internet is good for a lot of things - more than cat videos and, yes, even more than having anything in the whole world shipped to my door via Amazon.

One of my favorite things? My Pinterest boards and Facebook page attest to it all the time - I love quotes. I especially love quotes formatted all pretty-like for sharing.

Starting this week, I'm joining with the ladies of the iHomeschool Network as part of a new series called Quotable Wisdom.

Each Tuesday, from now until whenever we run out of fun quotes, we're all posting thoughts from topics or authors of interest. I've decided to share quotes from famous mathematicians and scientists for your pinning and Facebooking pleasure, but my biggest goal is that I hope something will spark you or your family to dig deeper into a particular area or a particular person's life.

This week, I thought, where better to start than with a quote from one of my heroes about beginnings? This man was Christian, homeschooled, and a great mathematician, scientist and philosopher.

Things are always at their best in their beginning.
~ Blaise Pascal

Learn more about Pascal

• Blaise Pascal on Wikipedia
• The Project Gutenberg free edition of Pascal's Pensees
• More free Pascal works at OpenLibrary

More awesome quotes

• Check out the rest of the Quotable Wisdom bloggers
• See my entire series of great math and science quotes
• Follow me on Pinterest for more quotes

We've got a family business!

Last week on Christian Unschooling, I shared a post called How We Fund Our Unschooling Life, where I talked about homeschooling as a working mom and specifically how Sarah fits into the work I do from home.

Well, since last week, we've done something crazy and cool. We've added a new family business to the mix!

We're now the proud owners of a space at a local antique mall. There, we'll be taking our formerly digital-only business into the bricks-and-mortar world, selling used books, ephemera, postcards and more under the name of Papergreat.

We've had, for several years, an online bookstore through Amazon where we've sold used books. And for the past two and a half years, my husband, Chris, has blogged about ephemera and old books at Papergreat. This is our chance to bring those efforts together - and get our feet wet in the realm of local selling, which we've only done intermittently until this point.

And it's our chance to truly have a family business, one that Sarah can be as involved in as the rest of us. Tonight, we started pricing and labeling our books. Sarah's job was to look up the book in our Amazon listings and tell us what we had it listed for; mine was to label it accordingly in pencil and update it in our inventory spreadsheet; and Chris's was to carry all the books and be the final price arbiter. We got about 100 of them done as a team! (And, as you can see in the photo with today's post, even Mitts the Cat helped. Less willingly.)

Tomorrow, we're hopefully going to start filling our space, and I'll be able to share photos. We officially open for business on March 1, so we'll have a busy couple of weeks ahead! Wish us luck...

Mom learns, too: How I've gone back to college (sort of) to study astrobiology

Unschooling isn't just about what Sarah is learning.

One of my friends, Karen Lee of A Radical Path, was recently talking in an online group of radical unschoolers I'm part of, and she described the role of the parent in unschooling like this.

"Be interested (in her and what she is doing and loves and in bringing new, fresh opportunities to her but without expectation, and be interestING. Be someone who is interested in life and learning yourself, pursue your hobbies, look stuff up yourself because *you* want to know something, and just naturally share it with her as you would with someone else."

Can I just say what a HUGE impact Karen's message made on me? I've been kind of "blah" lately. I don't feel like doing anything, I'm not particularly energetic, and... yeah, I'm not particularly interestED or interestING.

So I'm kind of not shocked, when I think about it, that Sarah has also been kind of in an "uninterested" phase lately. It happens - and we're fine with that. But at the same time, I started thinking that I certainly wasn't doing anything to get myself out of my funk, and that one, I could certainly address!

So, meet Dr. Cockell.

Dr. Cockell, or Professor Charles, as I call him in my head, is an instructor at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. I signed up for a free five-week online course he's teaching through Coursera called Astrobiology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life.

And for the past three weekends, I've spend about two and a half hours split between Friday and Saturday nights watching his video lectures and taking quizzes.

I love it! I have often said that if perennial college student was a job option, I might take it. Not because I'm much into degrees (and boy am I NOT into student loans), but I love learning. What I don't love is learning what someone else tells me I need to learn, or being forced to pay ridiculous sums of money in the interest of supporting an institution, not the acquisition of information.

So for me, Coursera is great - its courses are free, but rigorous. You get a certificate of completion - but ONLY if you do well enough on any in-course quizzes, exams, or assignments, and only if they're done on time.

The interesting thing is, there are about 139,000 people taking this class with me. The discussion forums and Facebook group are actually too much to keep up with most of the time, and my fellow students range from gifted 12-year-olds to 70-year-old Ph.D.s and everyone in between, which makes it a MUCH more diverse experience than traditional college was for me.

So far, it's been great. I've actually decided to take some other courses via Coursera in the coming months - like Modern European Mysticism and Psychological Thought, and Fundamentals of Pharmacology - so I'm sure I'll be writing more about them.

The thing is, I really want to re-invigorate my own joy in learning. I truly believe that the best way to be a good learning role model for Sarah is to love it myself. That's the great thing my parents did for me, and I want to be able to do half as good of a job for my own daughter.

So I'm hoping to make this an occasional series - Mom learns, too. I hope you'll comment and share what YOU are interested in right now, and maybe we can spark some ideas for each other!

Many thanks to Flickr user John Williams for the base photo that's part of our the "Mom learns, too" logo, and again to Karen Lee of A Radical Path for sharing the brilliant reminder to be interested and be interesting!

Our scrapbook: A trip to the Reading Public Museum (with Legos!)

We took a completely impromptu family field trip Sunday afternoon to the Reading Public Museum, just a little over an hour from our house.

(Tip for non-Pennsylvanians here: That's pronounced "Red-ding," not "Reed-ding." Just to help inform your reading of the rest of this post in your head.)

Anyway, I owe Hubby, aka Chris, all the credit for pointing out this destination; I didn't know Reading had a museum, let alone that they had...

Wait for it...

A Lego Castle Adventure exhibit. And, uh, we like Legos. So we went, and we saw a bunch of them, done up awesomely, but we also found some other surprises as well. Here's a look in photos at some of our favorite parts of this highly-recommended hands-on museum!

The first thing we saw was a gigantic LEGO dragon. He ate Sarah's hand. Uh, sort of...

Here, Sarah's showing Chris some evidence in support of her answer to the question, "How did they get this exhibit here without it falling apart?" She found a glue mark!

Here are my two Lego-loving family members with the dragon!

We saw a whole bunch of neat stuff throughout the exhibit (and got a chance to build our OWN creation, complete with spider, Cerberus and "OTTO" spelled out in Lego topiary!) Among the coolest parts, though, were the larger-than-life-sized Lego soldiers, and several Lego castles, including one of Sarah's favorites, Neuschwanstein!

Our last Lego exhibit photo was taken by Sarah - of Chris and I sitting in the gigantic Lego throne with the Lego stained-glass window behind us! If you're wondering, the weird thing Chris is doing with his hand is because he was trying to make it look like a Lego minifigure hand!

After the Legos, we checked out several other cool exhibits. There was a section involving the intersection of art and science, and part of that focused on origami. Not only was there fold-your-own instructions, there was a set of Tangrams there to build with! Sarah created a dog of her own design...

And Chris and I worked together to build this. Can you tell what it is?

Obviously, Lego Godzilla, right?

After that, we headed in to several of the history exhibits. I've talked recently about Sarah's interest in ancient history, especially Egyptology and Grecian myths, and while we didn't expect to find it, it was AWESOME to see some of the things we'd been reading about up close!

Like this cartouche, a shape in which names were written in ancient Egypt (we brought home a sheet where you can write YOUR OWN name in heiroglyphs)...

This urn depicting Herakles (Hercules) fighting the Nemean lion, one of the 12 great labors he had to complete...

These lions (guardians) that protected the way to a Pharoah's tomb, much like the Sphinx...

And this funeral mask, which was on the mummy of Nefrina, who is on display at the museum!

Finally, we let Chris get eaten by a giant ant in the parking lot.

 Isn't that how you end your field trips?

Things we've learned so far today

I mentioned earlier this year that I want to write about more of the "everyday" learning that goes on in our family, in addition to sharing posts on the "big stuff" like resource guides and five-day series.

There are so many of these "odds and ends" that they're easy to miss. For example, today...

• Sarah was reading her box of Sucrets (she's got a cough and sore throat), and she said, "Mom, what's  Z-I-N-C spell, and what is that?") So we talked about it as a metallic element, and about elements in general, and she wondered if we had any books about the periodic table.
• We don't (currently) - though it's now made our library list - but we pulled out Sarah's 2013 World Almanac for Kids and read about the periodic table in general, as well as some specific elements and compounds. 
• As we read that, we learned that sugar and vinegar are made up of the same elements, just arranged differently and in different proportions. So are chalk and granite! Isn't that awesome?
• Then we somehow flipped to the money portion of the almanac, where we started talking about the unfinished pyramid and the all-seeing eye on the U.S. dollar, which we had just seen in the National Treasure movies!
• Chris and I got into a completely joking argument about the atomic number of beryllium in which we were both absolutely just guessing and acting like we knew what we were talking about. Chris's guess was, like, 37, and mine was 84. It turns out it's 4. Parent learning win, or silliness fail? Maybe both.
• Sarah got a HUGE compliment on the Our School at Home Facebook page from the mom of a fellow  Minecrafter on the unschooling server we've joined. She noticed another "Tourist," or newbie, and, it turns out, helped him out a little bit as he was coming on board. A few people had done the same for her, so it was cool to hear she paid it forward!

Here's Sarah, Minecraftin' away!

So what has your family learned today?