Today in homeschool gym class

Scrum!

Because Kathy asked.  And because I thought it was funny.

Come to think of it, I may have a little something to say as well.  Which is:  I signed Damian up for homeschool gym last session (Sept/Oct).  He was lukewarm about it, but I thought it would be good for him to have phys ed in his schedule, and I’d heard the teacher was good (and he is).  But I told Damian that it was entirely up to him whether to continue past the end of October, when we had to either pay for the next session or stop going.  For the past few weeks, he was convinced that he wanted to stop.  Which was fine with me. He started tennis class on Fridays in mid-September and just restarted his weekly swim class yesterday.  He doesn’t need the exercise as much as he did in early fall.  Plus, I think it’s important for a kid to have some freedom to make decisions about his life.  So if he wanted to stop, that was his call to make.

Before the final class of the Sept/Oct session, I asked again.  And he said he wanted to keep going.  So far he seems to be throwing himself into it more fully. (Literally, in this case.)

I suspect that if I’d said, “I think you should continue with the gym class,” he would have been reluctant.  Which I find interesting.  The fact of no pressure led to an unexpected choice.

Also a kid pile-up.

not exactly unschooling

This past week, I started reading online about unschooling, following an email thread to a hyperlink to a webpage, and so on.  And as often happens when I do that, I started wondering about unschooling.

It sounds so appealing: let your child follow his or her own interests, let those dictate what he or she learns, don’t restrict, require, or otherwise force your own ideas about What Should Be.  Kids learn naturally.  They learn to walk, they learn to talk, they ask a million questions about the way things work, they take objects apart and put them together differently, and so on.

Sounds awfully idealistic.  But it’s in keeping with the attachment parenting approach we began eleven years ago, consistent with eating organic, trying for a home birth, doing Floor Time therapy and, oh, everything.  The ideas behind unschooling are very attractive to me.

But also not.  You see, maybe other kids learned to talk without help.  But Damian needed some guidance.  And when it became clear that he was ready to walk but unwilling to try, we set up a row of water bottles across the living room floor so he could maneuver from one to the next without having to take more than a single step without something to hold on to.  It worked beautifully.

Sometimes Damian picks up a book and devours it.  Sometimes he gets on his computer and researches the hell out of something, and then implements his discovery, or learns how to use a program on his own and probably more thoroughly than anyone could teach him to do.  Other times, he could use a little guidance.

What we do is extremely eclectic.  No tests (except for the little BrainPop quizzes), no worksheets (so far, not even for math), no set curriculum.  But we don’t unschool.  Probably won’t unschool.  I feel better having some structure.  A list in my head or on the computer that says:  he’s learning about history in this way, with these resources; learning science that way, with these other resources; spending some time on grammar via Brain Pop; doing math on a regular basis, getting caught up up to grade level, and so on.

And then I feel guilty.  Should I give him more freedom?  Am I causing him to resent learning at home the way he resented learning in school?  Am I — as the unschoolers suggest — just swapping one environment for another?

So a few days ago, I asked Damian.  “Do you like the way we’re doing history?”

“Yup.”

“On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate it?”

He thought about it for a moment.  “Eight.”

Eight is good.

“How about Brain Pop?”

“I give it an eight.”

Okay, good.

“And the blog?  How does that rate?”

“Eight too.”

“Math I assume is lower, but is it okay?”

“Yeah, it’s fine.  I don’t mind it because it’s over quickly.”

“You might like it better once we get past calculations and onto the theoretical stuff.”

“True.”

I stopped there, but it was enough to reassure me.  If he’s giving the schooly part of his homeschool experience an eight out of ten overall, and more to the point, he’s not procrastinating wildly and protesting sitting down to do it the way he fought homework in the past, then really, I think we’re doing okay with our eclectic approach.  It may not be child-led, but it’s child-friendly.  And that counts for a lot, I think.

why we homeschool (reason #153)

We live on a steep hill.  Long steep driveway.  Long steep street heading out from the driveway.  Did I mention steep?  Yeah.

One morning after a snowstorm this past winter, I was walking with Damian to school.  Sounds so benign, no?  Except the driveway and street were covered in black ice.  We had to step carefully from one semi-chewed-up spot to the next, like stepping on slick rocks in a fast, treacherous stream.  And it’s truly a long driveway.  It felt like some kind of gauntlet, a test you have to pass in order to move on to the next level of a really tough video game, except that you can’t start over if you die.

Finally, we got all the way down the driveway.  Then we crossed the street, a tiny respite, a plateau. On the other side of the street, as the sidewalk headed down again, Damian slipped on the even blacker ice there, his feet skidding out from under him as he crashed down hard.  He wasn’t badly injured.  He was, however, deeply shaken.

We carefully, slowly walked the three blocks to school.  He was still wobbly when I left him, but I rounded up the school guidance counselor to sit with him and try and help him calm down. I felt terrible about walking away from my poor, traumatized kid.  I later found out the day had been a wash.  He was too shaken up to participate in anything, to really be there at all.

That was then.

Sunday night, Damian went out to have an imaginary gun battle with his Nerf guns.  It was a dark night, the (still long, still steep, pothole-filled) driveway was hard to see.  After some time had passed, he burst into the house, crying hard.  We hadn’t seen him cry like that in years.  He’d taken a bad fall into a deep pothole.  He’d called for help but we couldn’t hear him, nor could our neighbors, so he had to struggle up and wobble back up the hill and into the house.  It was hard to turn the doorknob with the deep cuts in his hand, and his knees both had bad scrapes too.

We tended to his wounds and talked him through his feelings, but it took him a long time to calm down; I think it wasn’t the pain so much as the memory of that moment of helplessness.

Monday is normally a full day:  Robotics and movie making classes back to back in the morning, then an out-of-town homeschool gym class in the afternoon and finally a social group to cap off the day.

Damian woke up still feeling wobbly and emotional.  We stayed home from robotics, but he decided he wanted to go to movie making class because they were shooting his big scene.  Stayed home from gym class.  Went to the social group.  We did little homeschooling, instead we hung out together and separately, and mostly just chilled.  By that evening, he was doing fine.

I stuck around during the movie making class.  Since it was just an hour, I brought my laptop and sat in the adjacent classroom.  I did some work, and eavesdropped a bit.  Damian sounded fine.  He sounded more than fine. He sounded chipper.

There you have the difference between schooling and homeschooling.  Last winter, I was worried about getting him to school because he’d already had too many absences and I’d been told he needed the continuity.  So I didn’t do what my instincts were shrieking at me to do (bring him home after he fell).  This week, it was a no brainer.  No teacher, no principal, no test to prepare for, no need to ingest facts and methodology on a specific schedule.  If he needs down time at home, he gets down time at home.  And recovers emotionally a whole lot faster as a result.

here, there, and everywhere

Okay, so here’s an unexpected homeschool dilemma: how much is too much?  Damian belongs to a homeschool discussion group that meets biweekly (the setup: discussion first, then pizza and play).  We go to “Game Day” at a nearby Panera once a month (he brings Magnetix or Legos and has a great time).  In the spring, he was in a homeschool bowling league in Boonton.  One is starting up in West Orange, much closer to home, so we’ll check that out.  He attends weekly homeschool classes for gym, robotics, and movie making, not to mention group tennis lessons and solo drum lessons and a weekly non-homeschool social group.  Soon he’ll be restarting his Sunday group swim lessons (he’s looking forward to it), and I just heard about a homeschool ice skating group class for the winter.  He loves most of it, likes all of it, seems to thrive on the variety in his life.

But that’s not all.  Thanks to my myriad local email lists, I know about monthly homeschool meetups at at least three libraries in Northern NJ, monthly art classes at the Montclair Art Museum, and numerous one-off classes given by the Newark Museum and the Jersey City Museum.  Cooking class once a month at a tiny cafe in Jersey City.  Periodic homeschool science workshops at the Liberty Science Center and at the Hall of Science (awfully far to go, but tempting for the great ethnic food exploration along the 7 train).  Upcoming or recent homeschool group tours to the United Nations and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and the Titanic exhibit and African Art at the Metropolitan and the Franklin Mineral Museum and the just-reopened Edison Historic SIte (surprisingly captivating, we’ll try to write about it later this week).  And on and on.  Someone just set up a wonderful-sounding event involving learning how seeing eye dogs are trained (Damian has a time conflict, bah).

A veritable cornucopia of educationally-related activity, no?  When I introduced myself to the most local email list last spring, I was told I’d soon find out there was more to do than any human being could handle.  I was skeptical.  Not anymore.  And much of it sounds intriguing.

Do we do everything?  Can’t possibly.  Would explode.  Collapse.  Melt down.  And I’m not just talking about Damian.

We need breathing room.  We also need to spend time to, y’know, put the home in homeschooling.  We have plenty to do right here, and some of it really needs to get done so I can feel secure that I’m helping Damian gain the skill set and knowledge he’ll need to, oh, I don’t know, get into college, get a job, have choices in life.  (Not to mention, I have a manuscript that won’t rewrite itself.)

On the other hand, if we don’t do enough outside of the house, Damian gets visibly restless and we risk getting on each other’s nerves.  He’s an only child, and we don’t live on a neighborhoody street, so he only sees other kids on play dates or at these various events.  And he’s a social guy these days. So there’s a necessary balance.

Plus, there’s this amazing city a mere thirteen miles east of us which happens to be a culturally, historically, and architecturally rich place to learn about, well, nearly everything.  So I’m tempted to grab everything that comes along that fits his interests/age range/learning needs and desires.  But I can’t.  Because, see above.  Need to be home sometimes.  Need to have chill time.  Need to do household things.

So the question remains: how much is too much?  I suspect in this, as in most everything else, it’s a very personal decision.  Our rhythm so far seems to be: stay home (more or less) two days per week.  Do stuff the other three days.  Field trip or one-off class once or twice a month.  We’ll see how that works out.

This schedule is also entirely mutable in the sense that the robotics and movie making classes will end in early December, Damian may or may not continue with the homeschool gym class after this month, and so on.  And that’s life, I guess.  Variable, changeable, subject to the whims of fate and family.

I’ll say this, though.  Homeschooling isn’t boring!

bread

A few days ago, Mom and I made what I consider to be the best bread in the world.  Today we’re going to tell you a few things about bread, as well as showing you some pictures we took of the bread making process.

From this:

to this:

Let’s just say that the thing that  makes bread rise is a fun guy (fungi) who likes to burp.  You probably know him.  His name is Mr. Yeast.  Put the sleeping form of him into warm water and flour, and the warm water will wake him up.  The flour is his food; it makes him burp.  When he burps, it makes bubbles of air (carbon dioxide).  Once he burps enough times, the air will make the bread rise.  The thing that keeps the carbon dioxide inside the bread dough is gluten.  Gluten is a protein that made of the flour and water.  (It’s actually two proteins: gliadin and glutenin.)  To make the gluten activate, we need to knead the bread dough.  It makes the gluten strong enough to be able to hold the very excited Mr. Yeast in place.

Here are the pictures of the process of making bread:

not back to school

School started around here on September ninth.  Yellow busses passing through, the shouts of the neighbor girls in the early morning as they walked down the hill to school, the crossing guard falling asleep at the corner.  All the moms of school-aged kids posting Facebook status messages like “Whoo!  They’re gone!  House to myself!”  (Followed in short order by “homework fights, yuck!”)

Damian?  Oh, he’s home.  And that feels very strange.  No beginning-of-school jitters this year, no tension about whether the teacher will understand my sweet, sensitive, quirky boy, whether he’ll enjoy the social environment, how the year will go.  No struggle to shift our internal clocks to fit the school day, but also no chance to go buy shiny new stationary with that bright promise of an exciting new year.  I’ve found myself thinking back to September 2004, remembering waving to Damian as he nervously fell into line and marched into the school yard behind the cheery kindergarten teachers, laden down with a small backpack and a whole heap of unspoken parental hopes and fears.

Even though it was never a perfect fit, Damian and school (he hated homework, felt anxious in the classroom, but usually enjoyed certain aspects of the experience), there was nevertheless a comfort in doing the normal thing, sending him to school.  Even though I knew some homeschoolers, and briefly flirted with the idea (if he’d had to go to the gulag that was our neighborhood school in Hollywood, I would have pulled him out before he ever set foot in that institution), it was hard to see myself in the role.  I’m no teacher, and I don’t want to be.  I’m a parent, which, honestly, is a whole different skill set.  But you know what?  I’ve come to realize that I’m still not a teacher. I’m a facilitator.  We choose resources for him, maybe, but for the most part, we learn it together.  And that makes it far less scary, far less of a burden.

Still, part of me feels strange to go against the grain.  Even though homeschooling is more and more accepted these days, school is still the norm.  School is our shared experience.  School just is.  Autumn leaves = settling into the classroom.  Mid-September?  Must be back-to-school night, wherein your child’s teacher tells you all the exciting things in store for him or her.  I don’t regret missing all that, believe me.  Not after seeing Damian blossom these past months.  But still… odd.

What helps — a lot — is that we’re not alone in this.  Far from it.  On Wednesday, Damian attended the first official meeting of his homeschool discussion group (they’d met a few times over the summer to play and get acquainted).  All the kids presented items representing their interests or aspects of their personalities.  Damian brought drumsticks, his toy musket, and some printouts from his favorite computer game, Spore.  I was delighted to see how articulate and poised he when it came to his turn.  On Friday, we went to a monthly homeschool gathering in the back room of a chain restaurant, and he played with other kids in his age range.  On Monday, he went to his first homeschool movie making class and got deeply involved in brainstorming the story they’re going to shoot.  He was supposed to attend a homeschool gym class after that, but it was cancelled, so he had a play date with another homeschooler instead.  Yesterday: a Not Back to School picnic.  Today:  homeschool bowling.  It’s great for Damian to be involved with and around other kids in these relaxed, fun settings.  But it’s also good for me.  We’re truly part of a community.  Other parents have made this same choice for their kids.   They’re doing it for all kinds of reasons, and they use all kinds of homeschooling approaches, but we share this singular decision.  And that makes it feel less strange.

Maybe next September, I’ll just think, “Ah yes, fall!  Leaves changing, fresh apple cider, crispness in the air!”  (well, eventually — it hovered around 80 F today)  And I’l forget all about that automatic Autumn = School association.  Maybe homeschooling will feel like the norm and school will be the oddity.  You think?

(Incidentally, I’ve tentatively decided to post more regularly here again.  Ideally, I’d like to post twice a week, have Damian post once a week.  But of course we’ll see how it goes.)

Just a quick note

To say Damian and I are not done with the blog. Just quiet right now, due to varying degrees of busyness, distraction, and summer. We’ll be back, possibly even shortly.

what it looks like

When we were first considering homeschooling this spring, and then when we began to actually do it, I read voraciously:  homeschool blogs, homeschool articles online, and books about homeschooling.  And as I read, I kept thinking, okay, all this stuff is interesting, but what do you actually DO?  What does your homeschooling day look like?  What’s the nitty gritty, brass tacks, down and dirty reality of it?

Everyone’s answer is different.  It’s one of the most thrilling aspects of this decision, that you’re no longer bound by school district scope and sequence, you don’t have to deal with someone else’s textbooks (you can choose your own or ditch them altogether), you’ve discarded the ever-looming piles of homework and worksheets (unless you feel it’s best to use them), and, best, of all, you don’t have to work toward tests and deadlines, one week on this subject and one month on that.  You can see how your child learns best and adapt your approach accordingly.

It’s also one of the scariest aspects of this decision.  How do you know if you’re covering the right things, in the right depth?  At the end of this, will your child will be equipped to go back to school, or go to college, or go out into the world?  If you don’t have someone else telling you what he or she needs to study, how can you know what to do, how to proceed, what to study?  How can you possibly know if you’re doing it right?

Of course, that all makes one huge assumption: that schools are somehow mystically doing it right.  And all doing it the same way.  Not necessarily so.  In my opinion, any attempt to make teaching identical across large school districts leads to failure.  One of the things I hated most about the LA school district, in fact, was their remedial-style Open Court reading program.  It took teaching to the lowest common denominator to a new, well, low.  But most districts only teach things in lockstep inasmuch as they have to conform to a statewide test, and then they don’t necessarily teach the subjects with verve or depth.  When a teacher hates a particular subject (say, she has math phobia), do you think she teaches it in depth, in a way that will stick?  Not to mention that standards and requirements differ from state to state.

But I digress.  The point here is:  homeschooling = rowing in a tiny boat out on a huge ocean.  How to navigate?

The first decision is whether to navigate at all.  I’ve read a fair bit about unschooling, and spoken to a few unschoolers.  There’s something incredibly enticing about the idea that a child can set his own course, seek knowledge and learn according to his interests, not your agenda.  I had a book about the Ancien Regime in France when I was in middle school, which I read several times.  I can even recall the pale tan cover with its fleur de lys, and I remember far more about the Sun King and the decline of the French monarchy from that one book than I do about any history I supposedly learned in high school.  Personal interest, internal motivation, the lust to discover, that’s far more powerful a learning tool than anything a teacher can impart.

So yes, unschooling seems delightful.  I know there are plenty of homeschoolers who just strew books and other materials around the house and let their child explore at will. It sounds idealistic and kind of fabulous.  We did something similar for a couple of months, while we were deschooling (decompressing from school stress).  But ultimately, we couldn’t keep it up.  And in fact, most unschoolers I’ve heard about don’t necessarily do it in a pure form either.  Maybe they unschool except for math.  Or they unschool but enroll their kids in select classes.  Or — well, you get the idea.  And I have no problem with any of that.  Seriously.  Remember, there are no rules.  And if your child learns best completely unfettered, that’s wonderful.

Thing is, Damian is a child who does best with a bit of structure, as long as it’s not too constraining or dogmatic.  He likes following our lead some, likes having some room to explore.  And doing some degree of leading makes us feel more confident in this endeavor.  So we’re taking an eclectic approach:  some unschooling, some parent-led, but sparked-by-child-interest work (which can be in the form of unit studies), and some things we simply think he needs to know/learn/work on.

So what does this all mean in real terms?  What does our day look like?  It’s been nearly four months since we pulled Damian out of school.  A picture of our homeschooling day is different now than it was in April, and a snapshot taken in September or October will probably look different again.

Our current homeschooling life (and yes, we’re homeschooling over the summer):

Battle of Monmouth: You Were There

Even though Damian studied the Revolutionary War in school this year, we’ve been delving into the subject at home.  As seems to be happening repeatedly with this homeschooling endeavor, we sort of fell into it.  We checked out a civil war encampment in May, which was… well, small.  About seven soldiers, fewer camp followers, a couple of tents, a single demonstration of drilling.  Interesting in its way, but unsatisfying.

So I looked around online for larger, genuine reenactments.  Well, we live in New Jersey.  The civil war didn’t exactly venture up this far north.  But you know what took place around here?  A large chunk of the American Revolution.  There are tons of “George Washington Slept Here” and “George Washington Reconnoitered With His Troops Here” and “George Washington Ate Dinner Here” and “George Washington Stopped Here to Fix his Boot Heel” historic markers.

Turns out?  There’s also a fairly large (300 plus actors) reenactment of the Battle of Monmouth at the Monmouth Battleground State Park every year on the last weekend of June.  Sounded good to us.

Our main modus operandi with homeschooling is to make it fun, make it engaging, make it as real as possible, and make it as sticky as possible (sticky = stick in your brain).  A reenactment seemed to fit the bill.  So we decided to frame a unit of study around it.

Damian and I watched the first half of a three hour Ken Burns documentary on Jefferson.  Damian read Revolting Revolutionaries, by Elizabeth Levy, and other related children’s books.  We’ve been enjoying Netflixing Liberty’s Kids, a PBS animated series about three kids who become deeply enmeshed in the events leading up to and during the revolution.  And we have, as always, watched the appropriate BrainPop videos.  It’s interesting how much I’ve either long since forgotten or possibly never knew: that the colonies saw themselves as distinct entities, not a coherent group until fairly late in the runup to the war.  That the Boston Tea Party truly was the catalyst to the war, essentially because of Britain’s response: the Intolerable Acts, solely directed against Massachusetts, but spurring other colonies to action.  Things like that.  We plan to watch the rest of Liberty’s Kids and then probably radically switch tones with a look at last year’s miniseries on John Adams (starring Paul Giamatti).

On our way to the reenactment site, I read aloud from the section about the battle in The American Revolution for Kids, by Janis Herbert.  It’s well written and engaging, and we’ll probably read it more thoroughly in the next couple of weeks.

I’ll let Damian tell you some of the highlights from our afternoon in Monmouth.

in the midst of battle

Damian:

Well, first  there were lots of these little camps and tents (one of which I bought a rifle in that I’m still earning).  Apparently the tents were called sutler tents, whatever that means.  [Ed note: sutler = vendor]

My favorite part was the reenactment itself, when the two sides were shooting each other with rifles loaded with blanks.  I liked the cannons a lot.  They made a huge amount of smoke, more than any of the muskets.  Also, they made a huge boom.

Cannon fire from the Continental Army

Not all of the people on the English side were wearing red, partly because not all of them were British, like the Hessians, who were German.  [ed note: we talked to one of the Hessians earlier in the day, before the battle; he told us they were fighting with the Brits because of their loyalty to George III, who, as a Hanover, was of German lineage.]  The Irish were wearing green instead of red, and the Scots were wearing kilts.

There was also more than one uniform on the American side.  Along with the blue uniforms, there were men who were wearing brown ones.  Also, there were black soldiers.  One of them told us that about 10% of the Colonial army were people of color.  Also, there was this guy with paint on his face and a pony tail, who was a Native American.  Up until then, I didn’t know that they were in the Revolution.

Native American warpaint dude on the march

Also, there was a Children’s Drill in which I participated.  We learned how to do different things with the muskets, such as present arms, which is basically like a salute.  We learned to load them, too.

Children's Drill

You need two teeth, one on the top and one on the bottom, to participate in the war.  They’re not used for food, they’re used as tools to help load the musket, as you need to tear the packet with gunpowder using your teeth.

Soldier tears a gunpowder packet, preparing his musket for firing in the middle of battle.

One thing that we read about the Battle of Monmouth is that it was very very very hot.  It was around 100 degrees!  If the temperature was like that now, you could fry an egg or even boil a pot on the sidewalk.  We actually saw people boiling pots.  Of course, since the day wasn’t as hot as it was originally in the war, they were using fire.

Camp for the Continental Army, complete with cooking and lounging (some men wore nightcaps).

I also know that there was a General named Charles Lee who was running the battle at first, but he wasn’t doing a good job, so George Washington took over.  General Lee was having the troops retreat, and then changing his mind and then sending them forward, and then he’d retreat again and so on and so forth.  The patriots were exhausted from the weather and having to retreat and come back and so on.  When George Washington took over, the battle went well.  At nightfall, the British snuck away to New York.

The battle was exciting.  I’m glad I went, and I’d like to come back again next year and/or go to a different one.  Because I get to see it live, rather than reading about it in boring books and listening to teachers go bla bla bla about it in school, it is quite different, and I can see some things that the books wouldn’t mention.

a patriot spies on the redcoats

science fair recap (in dialogue format)

This past week, Wednesday to Sunday, New York hosted the second annual World Science Festival.  Yeah, I’d never heard of it either.  But since we started homeschooling, I’ve kept my ears open for any events that sound both educational and fun, so off we went.  Sunday’s main event was a science street fair in Washington Square Park. We picked up sandwiches from our local deli and drove into Manhattan on a gorgeous, sunny afternoon.

Tamar:  Tell me some of what we saw at the science fair.  The booth I remember most vividly was the CSI set of booths.  There was a booth that was about gunshots, right?

Damian: Oh, yeah.  My favorite part of it was a couple of CSI booths.  In one there was a crime scene where there was a bleeding dummy holding a gun (the dummy was supposed to be the murder victim).  In the crime scene, there were also two bottles of water that the victim probably drank before he was killed. Also, there were shotgun cases lying around the crime scene indicating that the victim was probably killed by a shotgun.  There was also a cigarette butt on the ground, so the murderer was probably smoking.

Tamar:  Or the victim was.  Maybe he was waiting around for the murderer.  Maybe it was a prearranged meeting.

Damian:  Yes but the victim probably didn’t know he was going to be the victim of a murder.

Tamar: Well, yeah.

The victim in question.

Damian: Also, there was this other booth all about guns and bullets.  There was even a very big bullet there. I thought it was the bullet of a sub machine gun, but from what the person there said, it sounded like it was the kind that got fired from an RPG.

(Tamar: What’s an RPG?

Damian: Don’t you know? It’s a bazooka.)

Tamar:  Do you remember what she said about when it gets used?

Damian:  She said that it was used to shoot airplanes.  I once used an RPG with bullets like that in a video game to shoot down a helicopter, so it makes sense.

Tamar:  Do you remember the powder burns, the gunshot residue on a t-shirt?

Damian: The burns were different if they were closer or further.

Tamar: What other booths do you remember?  I remember one about microorganisms.  You got a toy microbe from that one.

Damian: Oh, yes.  There was a little game I played there where there were different products and I had to guess how microorganisms were involved.  For example, there was a bottle of mouthwash there, and I correctly guessed that the mouthwash killed germs in the mouth.

Tamar:  And what did you say about the slice of bread?

Damian:  The bread had microorganisms involved because microorganisms that were from the yeast burped gasses making the bread rise.

Tamar:  You’ve seen that at home when I make bread.  In fact, the guy in the booth got something wrong about that.

Damian:  What?

Tamar:  He said that the yeast makes the bread rise when it bakes.

Damian: But actually the bread rises before it’s baked.

Tamar:  Yes, and the heat in the oven kills the yeast.

Damian:  So even though the yeast helps make the bread rise, it isn’t that good for you?

Tamar:  No, it’s okay, I think.  It just happens to die in the oven, but you wouldn’t want to eat raw bread dough. It doesn’t taste that good, and the texture is entirely different.

Tamar: So did you enjoy the fair?

Damian:  Yes, but it was not what I expected at all.

Tamar:  What did you expect?

Damian:  I expected more of maybe a parade-like kind of thing and the BioBus would be moving along with it.  But everything was still, including the BioBus itself.  Which I could have gone on but there was a very very long line. I didn’t even get a chance to see it move.  Not even an inch.

(Editor’s note: the BioBus is a converted bus set up with microscopes and whatnot; a science lab powered by solar panels and wind turbine.  It travels to schools that lack funding for a proper science lab.  Sounded cool, but we didn’t have the stamina for the long line to get in.)

Tamar:  Would you go back there next year, or did you see enough?

Damian: I think I might go next year, but I’m not really sure.

Tamar:  If we go next year, I’d like to try to see some of the talks and discussions that take place in lecture halls, not just walk around the booths.

Damian:  Okay.