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| Me, thrilled about summer. |
As soon
as school let out for summer was when our lessons began. Yep, school all summer long. We were all taught an instrument. A useful skill to be sure. Slugweirta had a big black leather box of
different random instruments. Like
maracas and tambourines. She had several
hand held drums and a few magnificent sets of xylophones. And a random animal horn that we hit with a
mallet. I’m sure the noise we made could
be heard for miles.
Next we
practiced calligraphy. That’s right,
calligraphy. Ink, quill, fancy flowers
on letters, calligraphy. In a world that
largely communicates via text, this has become a lost art.
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| Standard Wedding Invite 2015 |
We were
required to memorize all our math facts up to twelve, we were tested with flash
cards. If we couldn’t do the whole deck
in 3 minutes, we had to do extra worksheets. Slugweirta also gave us math workbooks for the next grade, so we would be one grade level ahead at the start of the school year.
I’m not complaining, this has truly come in handy and is the one thing I
wish I could pass on to my kids. Well
that and my astonishing cow bell skills.
However, they are very resistant.
Lastly
we had to give book reports. One book a
week. When was the last time you read 12
books in a summer? I love to read. But required reading is something else. Every Saturday we would go to the library and
check out the books we were going to read.
The next Friday afternoon, we would get up and tell everyone about what
we learned from our books. If you couldn’t
find an acceptable book, my mom or dad would assign you one. Because of this, by the time I was thirteen, I
had read Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings Series, Watership Down, Ender’s Game, I
Never Promised You a Rose Garden, The Bell Jar, To Kill a Mockingbird, Dune,
Wuthering Heights, A Tale of Two Cities, Asimov’s Foundation and A Hitchhiker’s
Guide to the Galaxy. I’ll let you guess
which parent assigned which books. As a
side note, last week I took a Facebook quiz that claimed the BBC figures most
Americans had read 6 books on their list of 100. I have read 42 of them. So at least I’m not an average American as defined
by the BBC. I guess my parents would be
thrilled, not by the number of books, but by the fact that I can’t call myself
normal. One week, in an act of defiance
(I was attempting to bore them into banning book reports (my fear of breaking
the rules really thwarts my acts of rebellion)) I selected the A
Encyclopedia. Yes, I read the entire
thing. It took me two weeks. No, they did not ban book reports. It was worth a shot.
