Boat school!

After a few days of being hot and not getting much done (a time during which Mel upped “universal air conditioning” on her priorities to cure society’s ills, now falling in fourth place after clean water, birth control, and education for women) the family decided it was time to start school! So this Monday was the official launch of BOAT SCHOOL! No, this is not, “Write an essay about the big crab you saw today,” which one can only stretch so far. Unless the big crab can tell you how to generate algebraic expressions, describe the difference between the cryosphere and the hydrosphere, or avoid split infinitives. If so, I want that crab! Hell, who needs school when you have the most INTELLIGENT CRAB IN THE UNIVERSE at your fingertips?

I digress…

Our school consists of Singapore Math, Harcourt Horizons Social Studies, Michael Clay Thompson English, Science Fusion. We throw in art, oceanography, Spanish, philosophy, critical thinking, music, and travel of course at random intervals. That’s the plan, anyway. The first day of school took 4 hours, a bit longer than desirable, but Tommy and Allie gave it high ratings. Greg teaches Math and Social Studies, and Mel does English, Science, and the random bits. Allie was so excited to start school that art class lasted an additional 4 hours. Here is the result. Her assignment: dress up your doll in traditional Colombian dancewear. Not bad!

Tommy’s assignment was to make a comic about Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote the first book of his English class, Treasure Island. Of course, Tommy’s take-home from his biography was not the chronology of his life or his literary resume, but rather how many different medical ailments the poor man suffered from:

This is all a bit apropos as both kids are now on antibiotics for impetigo, a nasty skin infection, which might have felled the both of them way back when. But then again, we wouldn’t be doing this way back when. I mean, not without air conditioning! Geez!