the syllabus of life
Sorry about last night. I actually did get up, believe it or not, and worked on that child's speech until 4 a.m. Which is crazy, of course. And wrong. I do realize this. But it was only a draft. She'll have to write the final draft herself.
Mostly I was reading stuff and jotting down notes. Research is not her strong suit. I need to teach them how to do it. There are literally hundreds of important things I have yet to teach my children. It's frustrating because if I manage to scrape together the time to do it, inevitably they are not interested. Or they say they are interested, except there's that thing at the place, and it's starting in fifteen minutes, so can we do it later?
Sometimes I think about making a kind of syllabus that I can refer to when I want to teach them something. The way we've been doing it is too haphazard. Like I'll spend ten minutes explaining something absurdly unimportant, such as the vogue (in my youth) for paper-bag pants, when that time could be better spent providing moral instruction and teaching library skills.
Shirl is coming tomorrow; I have to work in the morning, and my house still looks as if it could be condemned. Unless it can learn to clean itself in the next eighteen hours, it is likely to stay that way.
