Moving in circles

Some of my favorite circles!

Today was the last day of homeschooling in the old house.

Tomorrow is moving day.  If you've been following our adventures in England, you know that this is a big deal.  The house we're in now seemed so pretty from the viewing, but after we moved in we quickly got a crash course in the dreaded rising damp.

This damp house has been the source of so much stress for me.  It's an old house, and moisture is not only rising from the ground, it's creeping in through the walls because of poorly constructed gutters, and creeping in through the roof because of, well, too much rain and poor construction.  Flat roofs belong in the desert, not in England!

For the better part of the last month I have been cleaning mold off all the wooden toys in the house, off all the wooden furniture, off picture frames and nature tables.  I have been cleaning it off windows and walls, ceilings and floors.  It's more than disgusting.  It's heartbreaking and it's wrong!

So moving day is finally here!  I'm so thrilled to be leaving this house behind, but I am still wary.  I have no idea if the new house will be any better.  Surely, it can't be any worse.  Other English people have assured me that most houses here do not have such problems, and I hope they are right!  When you move to a new country, you just never know what "normal" is supposed to look like.

So tomorrow we will embark on a new adventure.  Perhaps a less than perfect one, but hopefully much better than this.  There really is no perfect when it comes to homes*... or well, anything, is there?  Life isn't perfect.  Homeschooling is certainly not perfect.  Not even circles are perfect.

How fitting that part of today's homeschooling involved talking about our perceived perfections in the natural world and the reality of their imperfections.  To ice the cake of imperfection, we spent some time calculating the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, a.k.a. pi.

Sunburst and I have been playing with irrational numbers quite a bit lately, and she is completely undaunted.  In the last couple of years her love of all things mathematical has really bloomed, and I am absolutely thrilled.  Having a 13yo girl who excels in and is excited about mathematical processes is something I consider one of the greater successes of our homeschooling.

As a bit of fun, Sunburst got to enjoy Vi Hart's hysterically funny and smart math video on irrational numbers and the Pythagorean Theorem.

I've been admiring Vi Hart's math videos for quite some time, and I plan to show each one of them to the kids as they come up in our lessons.  Not only are they wonderfully clever, but they're done by a female who so obviously embodies the passion for mathematics that I want to instill in all my children.  The underlying message is clear: Girls can (and DO) excel at math.  It's an imperative message to give our daughters, but I think sharing this message with our sons is equally important.

  *Gaudi's Casa Batllo in Barcelona seems pretty perfect to me.  When I think circles, I can't help but envision the front rooms of Casa Batllo, one of my most favorite buildings on earth.  Can't we just live there? (smile)