Part of the homeschooling set up in Alberta includes twice-a-year visits from your school board’s facilitator. We’re registered with the main public school board in Calgary, and the facilitator from CBE visits us in the fall to discuss our plans for the year, and then again in June to go over what we’ve done. This post is an abbreviated report of the 2011 June visit. Its purpose? A glimpse into what Cinder considers important right now. Take from that what you will.

About as late in the year as you can get, but it went so well. I loved it that what Cinder most wanted to show our facilitator was his Tang Soo Do uniform, and Flora her bone collection—and Mary Anne got it, she was great with them. Cinder also showed her the MineCraft (video game) interface and his Slave I Lego model. On my request, Flora read her a book, and Cinder spelled two phrases I dictated. Then “ass pit,” “shit,” and he started to spell fuck. I told him to change it to fish if he ever wanted to eat sushi again. Everyone howled. (I was just a bit red-faced. Just a bit. Yeah.)

Ever notice how all English swear words are perfectly phonetic? Very interesting.

We set up an agenda for the visit — and we check it off as we go. If we didn’t do that, Cinder would hide in his room the whole visit. So, on Cinder’s agenda was showing her the Tang Soo Do uniform, MineCraft, the garden, the trampoline, and one of his Lego sets. (Note the complete absence of… well, anything even remotely academics-related.) On Flora’s agenda was showing the facilitator Flora’s Museum of Natural Mysteries, a trick on the trapeze bar, and her book of drawings. On my agenda, negotiated at the cost of a celebratory sushi dinner, was Flora choosing a book to read, and Cinder doing the spelling. In retrospect, I’ve got to say, the last was a mistake—Flora loved performing, and Cinder does not, and he got extremely stressed and wound up even though he did what he had intended to do. I regret putting him in that position: I didn’t need to. If I’m brutally honest, I wanted to show off how far he’d come from last year, and I’m the only one who really cared about showcasing that—it wasn’t important enough to him to demonstrate, and our facilitator didn’t need to see it either—she had other “proofs.” Oh, well.

The way to hell is paved with good intentions, and the path of motherhood is littered with well-intentioned disasters.