Could AI Cheating Save Liberal Education?

 When I was in college (starting almost 30 years ago -- there's an odd thought) it seemed like colleges were already at a "things can't go on like this" point: Tuitions were sky high.  Many students were there to just a degree they thought would guarantee them a job and so didn't seem to care much how they got through so long as they got the degree.  The number of administrators was growing while the track to tenure was increasingly tenuous.  Some people were starting to write think pieces about how maybe college wasn't the right track for everyone.

It seemed like things couldn't go on, but of course they have gone on.  Every one of those trends has become far more extreme since the mid '90s.  Now even more people are saying, "This can't go on!" but is it any more true than before?

One argument for why it won't is that AI has now made cheating vastly cheaper than it was even in the days of the online term paper mills of the early internet.  Arguably, a lot of students could plug all their assignments into one of the big AI models and get a result out which is better than the average 20-year-old can produce unaided.

At the same time, many universities themselves seem to project the impression that learning doesn't matter much to them.

One of our elder daughters just finished up her degree at a large (and generally well regarded) state university, and she had a number of frustrating cases where classes had 300+ students and were taught by a constellation of TAs with tenuous English skills; where there was no textbook and the content provided to students was a set of second hand PowerPoints.

Those kind of classes did not seem much focused on actually teaching, and with many of the students only showing up half the time and ostentatiously playing games on their phones when they were there, there sounded like there was a "they pretend to teach us and we pretend to learn" ethic which surely just confirmed cheaters in the idea that using AI to do your assignments was the correct solution.  Otherwise, it was up to study groups to go find their own resources to learn the topics well enough on their own to somehow pass tests.

All of this seems pretty broken and not very focused on learning.  You can't help wondering if there's a point where with tuitions constantly increasing and the increasing assumption that many of the degrees are actually being earned by Claude and ChatGPT -- and, of course, employers increasingly using those same models for basic office work in preference to replacement-level new graduates -- employers will stop seeing university degrees as uniquely valuable and people who only want a degree in order to guarantee an income will stop paying the exorbitant prices.  (Note: I've been over-using em dashes since long before our robot overlords arrived, and I do not expect to stop now.  You'll just have to take my word for it that no word on this blog will ever be AI generated.)

This combined with the demographic shift which means that there are simply going to be fewer eighteen year olds in coming years than in past ones, seems like it's set up to hit a lot of colleges hard.  Not the prestigious ones, I would imagine.  It seems like a Harvard or Haverford degree will always say something.  But for colleges which have made "just get a degree" their business, it seems like the bottom might finally fall out of the market.

I do wonder, though, if there could be some hope buried in all this.  If the high-priced-diploma-mill business model may break, and those who only want a certification which promises an upper middle class job will have to either find some other path or learn to live with less security, perhaps that could leave some small colleges to embrace the model of truly providing an education.

Reduce the number of admins, increase the number of professors, and focus on small classes whose purpose is actually to teach and read and discuss and write and learn the way that humans have been doing for centuries. 

Perhaps if the model in which a college degree is the government and debt subsidized pipeline to middle class stability breaks, the model in which college is an opportunity for those who love learning to spend a few years focused full time on learning a field deeply can return.

Homer and the Decisions of a Translator

 Sing, Muse, of how dribs and drabs of news have trickled out regarding casting decisions in Christopher Nolan's upcoming movie of the Odyssey, and as a result Twitter exploded into long discussions of whether reading Emily Wilson's "woke" translation of the Odyssey ruined Nolan's chances of making a good movie.

The root of the conversations were often stupid, but it has actually been really fun reading some of the intelligent people discussing Homer and how the work of translation is done.

While many of the Twitter objections have been overwrought, I actually would not necessarily recommend Emily Wilson's recent translation of the Odyssey, due to the critiques which John Kuhner (classicist and proprietor of the Bookmarx bookstore in Steubenville) discusses in this piece from when the translation came out.

The thing to recommend Wilson's translation is that she writes in well turned iambic pentameter, which compared to many of the less structured verse choices made by modern translators is refreshing.  The two key problems, however, are first that she committed to having a line-for-line translation of the Greek despite having much shorter lines:

The best way to get a sense of how pervasive Wilson’s reductive approach is simply to calculate the kind of constraint she set herself. The Odyssey consists of 12,110 lines of dactylic hexameter, with lines between thirteen and seventeen syllables and averaging about fifteen. Wilson also has 12,110 lines, but her line averages ten syllables. And this is the reason why her work reads so much more quickly than any other version: her poem is shorter than the original by a third. This is felt everywhere, first of all as an increase in the poem’s velocity—which I appreciate—and second as a kind of stripping away of everything but the book’s plot—which I felt with increasing distress as I proceeded. In almost every line some kind of nuance is shed. In many ways, her work should be counted as an abridgement of the Odyssey more than a translation per se.

And second that she has some fairly strong viewpoints on what it means to do a feminist and anti-colonialist translation which result in some odd choices.  The oddest choice in this regard seems to be her decision to regard the cyclopses as having been victims of colonialism:

Homer describes Polyphemus, who eats six of Odysseus’s men raw, as “athemistos”—literally something like “without a sense of divine right or wrong,” but “lawless” usually does the job in English. Lack of respect for themis, true right and wrong, is posited by Homer’s contemporary Hesiod as the cause of all human evil. Wilson, however, decides in her introduction that the story of the Cyclops is really a story about colonialism (“the Polyphemus episode seems to meditate uneasily on the processes of colonization”), and hence it is her duty to resist any tendency to dehumanize the sixty-foot-tall, one-eyed, flesh-eating son of the sea-god. She translates athemistos as “maverick,” an offense not only against sensibility, but also against the aesthetics of her poem—the word leaps off the page, wildly inappropriate to Wilson’s typical register. Needless to say I just about fell over laughing. And huperphialos, which she is happy to render “insolent” and “arrogant” when it comes to the suitors, she changes to “highminded” for Polyphemus. The sight of drunk Polyphemus vomiting up wine and chunks of human flesh in his cave was not enough to get Wilson to shy away from calling him “highminded.” I suppose ideology is not dead. She also uses the odd circumlocution “the Cyclopic people” for the Greek plural Cyclopes, which also jars. The shame of all this is that it subverts her own thesis: she claims the passage has some relevance to colonization. It’s much easier for a student to see the resonance between this episode and Kipling’s “lesser breeds without the Law” if athemistos is translated “lawless.” But as I have said, it is very hard to do any kind of close reading of Homer using Wilson’s translation alone. It simply is not faithful enough.

These strike me as good reasons to go with another translation of the Odyssey, of which there are several good ones.  MrsDarwin recently read (and I have in my reading pile) the translation by Daniel Mendelsohn, and he both offers a more structured verse form and also does not radically shorten the poem. Mendelsohn has also been one of those who has contributed some fascinating thoughts on translating Homer on Twitter lately:

However, although I would not recommend Wilson's Odyssey, she seems to have taken the issue of length to heart when producing her Iliad (which came out after her Odyssey -- perhaps in part because while the publisher could trumpet Wilson's Odyssey as the first major translation by a woman, Caroline Alexander had just put out a well received translation of the Iliad in 2015.)  When Wilson did her translation of the Iliad, she did not limit herself to the same number of lines as the Greek original, and so she did not have the radical shortening which the Odyssey suffered from.

I'm reading Wilson's Iliad now, and it's a very good read, as John Kuhner noted in his review of that volume when it came out.

Wilson does, of course, still have her point of view.  But since she's not radically shortening the poem, her choices as to exactly which of the possible range of meanings from the Greek she chooses to use in her translation is less of a bias.

To give a sense of how three different translators take a passage which can be interpreted in slightly different ways, I picked a passage in Iliad, Book 6 where Hector confronts his brother, Paris, who has just ducked out of a duel with Menelaus (admittedly due to the interference of Aphrodite, but Paris is a heel) and then has a brief exchange with Helen, who is in the awkward position of being the bone of contention in this war which has already stretch on for ten years.

Here is Helen's self deprecating speech to Hector in the classic (and fairly literal) translation by Richard Lattimore from 1951:

but Helen spoke to him in words of endearment: ‘Brother 

by marriage to me, who am a nasty bitch evil-intriguing,

how I wish that on that day when my mother first bore me

the foul whirlwind of the storm had caught me away and swept me

to the mountain, or into the wash of the sea deep-thundering

where the waves would have swept me away before all these things had

    happened.

Yet since the gods had brought it about that these vile things must be,

I wish I had been the wife of a better man than this is,

one who knew modesty and all things of shame that men say.

But this man’s heart is no steadfast thing, nor yet will it be so

ever hereafter; for that I think he shall take the consequence.

But come now, come in and rest on this chair, my brother,

since it is on your heart beyond all that the hard work has fallen

for the sake of dishonoured me and the blind act of Alexandros,

us two, on whom Zeus set a vile destiny, so that hereafter

we shall be made into things of song for the men of the future.’

In Caroline Alexander's translation, the term of abuse "kunos" which is connected to the word for dog (and thus Lattimore's translation as "bitch" which is an abusive term for a woman derived from the term for a female dog) is translated more literally, though if one is used to how some cultures view dogs negatively it's not hard to see what's going on.

But Helen addressed him softly:

“Brother-in-law of me, an evil-thinking dog that strikes cold fear,

would that on the day when first my mother gave me birth,

some foul-weather storm of wind carrying me had borne me

to a mountain or a swelling wave of the tumultuous sea,

where the wave would have swept me away before these deeds had

    happened.

But since the gods have so decreed these evils,

then would I were the wife of a better man,

a man who knew what righteous blame was and the many reproaches

    that men make.

But the wits of this man here are not steady now, nor will they be

hereafter; and I think that he will reap the fruit of this.

But come now, come in and take your seat upon this stool,

brother-in-law, since the toil of fighting has mostly stood astride your heart

because of me, a dog, and Alexandros’ infatuation,

we on whom Zeus has laid this evil fate, so that even after this

there will be songs of us for men to come.”

And then finally, here's is Emily Wilson's translation:

Then Helen spoke and tried to make him stay.

“Brother-in-law, I am a source of fear

and source of evil strategy—a dog.

I wish that at the start, right when my mother

gave birth to me, a cruel gust of wind

had borne me to the mountains, or the waves

of loud-resounding sea, and swept me off,

before all this could happen. But the gods

ordained these troubles as they came to pass.

I wish I shared a bed with someone better,

a man who understood the condemnation

his actions would incur from other people.

This man has no good sense, no self-control,

and no capacity to change. One day

he surely will receive his retribution.

But come now, brother, sit down here with me.

You have endured the greatest pain and grief

because of us—because of me, a dog,

and Paris with his folly and delusion.

Zeus set an evil lot upon us all,

to make us topics of a singer’s tale

for people in the future still unborn.”

What I'd note here is:

If you're trying to really get a feel for a Greek (or if you've trying to check your schoolboy translation) the Lattimore approach gives you something close to a word by word or phrase by phrase translation, which still has feeling and pungency.  He's not just translating mechanically, there's art to it, but there is an alien feel to the Lattimore translation which feels like (and often is) the Greek peeking through at you.

Caroline Alexander takes the concepts and produces a translation which is in English, not that Greek-peeking-through feel of Lattimore.  It's a more readable translation, but it still feels translation-ish.

Wilson has a drive and power of its own which is fully English but also puts through the meaning of the original.  Yes, she (like Alexander) chooses not to go from "dog" to "bitch" even though in some idiomatic sense that might convey abuse better.  Wilson does not want to use phrases she sees as misogynist.  But you're not really missing any meaning and there is a clarity and drive to her verse which is missing in the other two.

I'm very much enjoying my progress through Wilson's Iliad, and if you're looking for a translation of that specifically it's a solid modern verse choice.

Visiting Verdun

 Longtime readers know that World War One is a topic on which I've extended considerable time and energy, though also one in which I have allowed projects to lay fallow for far too long.

I don't want to leave The Great War permanently unfinished.  Like so many other areas of life, at a certain point my efforts were swamped by other things, but it remains a major life goal of mine to finish it.

All of which is to say that when I realized that I had a good chance of being able to piggyback on a business trip to spend a day visiting the battlefield at Verdun, I leapt at the chance.  

Books

I've read a lot about WW1 books, but Verdun is a massive and challenging topic.  I wanted to make sure that I both refreshed my memory on the events and also had a good guide to the battlefield itself.  I read three books to prepare myself:

Walking Verdun: A Guide to the Battlefield is a combined tour guide and military history.  It's broken down into ten walks, each visiting parts of the battlefield.  Each chapter first recounts the events that took place in that particular area, then provides a map of the walk showing the sites you'll see on it, and a step-by-step narration of how the walk proceeds and the significance of what you'll be seeing.

The Price of Glory by Alistair Horne is a history of the battle originally published in 1962, which puts it well within living memory of the battle.  Horne talks about how veterans from both sides contacted him to confirm or expand on accounts that Horne provided in the first edition.  While there are more modern histories to read of the battle, this one is the best foundational one to read because it follows the battle linearly from beginning to end.  I'd read it before 10+ years ago, but listened to it this time on audiobook, finishing the last half hour while walking some of the trails around the battlefield.

Verdun: The Longest Battle of the Great War by Paul Jankowski is a much more recent work of scholarship, published in 2014.  It provides a lot of good analysis of different aspects of the battle and how it has been discussed since, but because it's broken up by theme rather than chronologically, it's better as a second book to read about the battle than a first.  I had a physical copy of it (as well as Walking Verdun) with me me on the trip, and am finishing off the last pages of it this Memorial Day weekend.

Getting There

After wrapping up my week of business work, I took one of those cheap flights which are so plentiful in Europe over to Charles de Gaul airport and picked up a rental car.  I'd worried a bit about driving in France, which I've only done once before, but Verdun is in a rural area in the northeast corner of the country, and CDG is on the northeast side of Paris, so you actually do not have to navigate any complicated Parisian driving to get from CDG to Verdun.  I was glad my little European car was a hybrid, because gas in France (or "sans plomb" as unleaded gas is called) is over 2.00 Euro per liter or about $8/gal.

I stayed at a little hotel in the cobbled street heart of old Verdun.  The car was useful not only for getting to Verdun from CDG (a 2.5 hour drive) but also so I could drive to different points around the battlefield before parking and walking around.  The Poilus may have walked on foot up the Voi Sacre through Verdun and up to the front lines, but if you're wanting to see the battlefield in 1-2 days, you need to supplement with some wheeled transportation.  (If you were to visit with a bicycle, there are some great bike trails around the various sites, and it would be a great way to see things.)

Comprehending a Battlefield

Some years ago, we made a family trip to visit the Gettysburg battlefield.  Even that three day battle was large enough geographically that it it was a little challenging to follow the full sweep, but individual parts of it like Little Round Top and Picket's Charge were very clearly comprehensible because you could stand at a key place and look across the whole sweep of it.

Verdun is challenging because it was so large in both place and time.  The battlefield is (depending on your definition) about fifteen miles wide and about 10 miles deep.  And the battle (again depending on where you draw lines) ran for at least ten months.

The Germans originally attacked just on the east side of the Meuse river on Feb 21, 1916, but then as the battle continued on different sectors would fall semi-quiet as either side made new attacks or counter-attacks, both on East and West sides of the river.

The battlefield as a whole remains something which is best contemplated with a map rather than in person, though there is a great 3D topographical map and video combination at the battlefield museum. However, as you visit the individual sites you can usually see why each individual area because a point of conflict.  The importance of ground and visibility is very obvious.  In a battle in which artillery was the predominant force (40-60 million artillery shells were fired during the course of the battle, and books recount something on the order of 80% of battlefield casualties being caused by shells) having the high points both for observation and for siting your guns was essential.

What you do get a strong sense for in walking the battlefield is first how the only protection from the constant shelling was getting into the ground: trenches, buried forts and shelters, even shell holes.  For a soldier on the battlefield the only means of survival was getting down into the only thing big and solid enough to absorb the punishment of constant shelling: the ground.  You can still see the remains of trenches and shelters and forts, and the bizarre rolling topography of shelled ground is very striking in person.  I took multiple pictures trying to capture it, but although some get it some some extent, I really think you can't get the full sense without being there in person.  This is ground which has taken a huge amount of punishment from shelling.  It looks like a storm whipped sea which suddenly froze in mid-frothing motion.

Shell-churned ground in the destroyed village of Fleury

Shelled ground on the wooded hill called Morte Homme

Douaumont destroyed village

The other thing you realize very clearly is how important high ground is.  The reason why the hill called Morte Homme (a name going back to before the war, and based on the hill's shape) was fought over so long and so hard by both sides was that it provided good artillery observation and gun emplacement positions for shelling the center of the battlefield.

Heavily overgrown because it was declared a "red zone" and left to be claimed by forest after the war, you can still see a bit from there the vista from Morte Homme which made it so desirable for artillery

The view north (toward what were German lines before Feb 21, 1916) from the top of Fort Douaumont

The view from near Fort Souville

Walking the Trenches

There remain trench lines in various stages of repair. One of the better preserved ones was called London Trench (Tranchée de Londres) which was built by the French late in 1916 to serve as a supply and wounded evacuation route back from the re-captured Fort Douaumont.  They built it using vertical posts made of concrete reinforced with steel rebar and also cement slabs between the posts.  Many of the posts are still there and some of the slabs still stand.  In one place, they've built a reconstruction with wood siding such as was there in 1916.

Scattered through the landscape are concrete shelters which provided soldiers with a place to escape the threat of shells for a short time -- though sometimes not enough shelter from the larger shells, as some of these are badly wrecked.

Infantry shelter TD3 south of Douaumont near London Trench

Infantry Shelter DV1 south of Fort Douaumont

The destroyed Command Post 118 shelter near Thiaumont

There are also artillery battery sites with storage emplacements dug into the hillside where the shells could be kept out of danger of being set off by incoming counter-battery fire.

Battery emplacements near Fort Souville

And there are fortified machine gun emplacements, like this one outside Fort Souville which looks like the most threatening elephant head ever.

The Forts Underground

If trenches dug into the earth were one level of safety, the next level were forts that were buried under 6-10 foot thick slabs of cement and then earth piled on top of the cement and stone.

Fort Douaumont and Fort Vaux were the two major forts of Verdun, but the latter is currently closed for reconstruction and so I wasn't able to see it.

Fort Douoaumont was captured early in the battle (Feb 25, 1916) by the Germans (it had been left almost unmanned by the French, who at that point were working on the theory that forts were an outdated relic of the 19th century).  However, it soon became clear that buried forts were incredibly useful in a war of artillery.  While the Germans held Fort Douaumont, thousands of German soldiers sheltered there.  And once the French re-took the fort on Oct 24, 1916, it once again became a French strongpoint.

The fort had been built of stone and brick, then had a massive reinforced concrete slab poured on top of it for protection and then been buried.

From the south (French) side of the fort, you can see the construction of stone with concrete poured on top

Sitting on top, the buried fort looks like a shell-pocked hill

Rotating gun turrets that moved up and down provided firepower that could be retracted to safety inside

This mechanism raised and lowered the gun turrets

Underneath were multiple levels of underground passages and galleries

A massive explosion and fire underground while the Germans were occupying the fort killed 679 German soldiers who are buried in this sealed off tunnel.

The Dead Surround Us

Lasting some ten months, Verdun consumed about 300,000 dead (roughly half French and half German.)

In the constantly shelled battlefield, evacuating dead for burial was almost impossible, and so many soldiers (if they were buried at all) received informal burials on the battlefield, which were often churned up again by additional shellfire and excavations.

As a result, the battlefield was a source of many thousands of "unknown soldiers" as the battlefield yielded up the remains of unidentified men who had died fighting in the shell swept hellscape.

The bishop of Verdun led the building of an ossuary, as the resting place of the bones of men known only to God.

The ossuary is divided into niches for each region of the geography of the battlefield, but within each section the bones of French and German soldiers are mixed, as often only their humanity and not their nationality could be known.

The Ossuary

The National Cemetery next to the Ossuary.  There is an Islamic section where men recruited from Islamic regions of Africa into French colonial units lie, their headstones facing towards Mecca.

Among the many moving sights in the Ossuary was a side alcove in the chapel where damaged items from the churches in destroyed villages were collects: twisted candlesticks, a battered monstrance, several alter crosses slowing signs of battering and melting.  The churches in the nine villages that "died for France", villages wiped off the map by shelling and within the "red zone" which was not rebuilt but turned over to forrest after the war, had not been fully evacuated before the battle, and these were the remains rescued from those churches.  (Photos were not permitted within the ossuary, so I do not have any from there.)

I spent twelve hours and 30,000 steps covering the battlefield, but I could easily have spent another day or two.  It was fascinating to see a place that I'd read so much about, and the visit gave me insights I hope to use when writing.

One thing that's harder to get a sense of is what the region looked like before the war. Most of the area was farmland of one sort or another.  It was after the war, when the area was so devastated by rubble and ordinance and the remains of the dead that the government declared much of the battlefield to be a "red zone" and forbad people to resettle or resume agriculture.

The forestry service planted tens of thousands of trees across the battlefield in the 1920, and trees have gradually claimed much of the battlefield.  But underneath the trees, you can still see the churning scars of shellfire.  And to this day, I read, both human remains and relics of the battle continue to be found amid the churned up shell holes of the battlefield.

The Market for Journalism

The Washington Post recently announced that they are laying off a significant portion of their staff, including whole departments such as the Sports section and the Books section.

I have nothing but sympathy for those personally affected by this.  Being laid off is an intensely unpleasant and unsettling experience which I would not wish on anyone which not only leaves you worried about your financial future but also about your professional effectiveness and self worth.

One thing that's been surprising to me in the discourse around this announcement is that a number of the people who have been talking about the shrinking of the Washington Post as a threat to the free press and the First Amendment are in the same circles (and in some cases the same people) who were loudly advocating that everyone cancel their subscriptions to the paper back in 2024 when they announced that they would not be making an official endorsement of a presidential candidate in the election.

Since the Post is privately held (by Amazon founder Jeff  Bezos) it doesn't formally publish financials, but as Nate Silver wrote in a recent post by looking at how often users link to WaPo articles one can get a pretty good idea of how much it is being read.  That data would suggest that the WaPo is now doing almost as badly as it was prior to Bezos buying the paper.

This means that the "boycott the Washington Post" people have largely been successful in hurting the paper.  Why some of those people are now unhappy with the success of their work I'm less sure.  

Another thing the graph shows is that how much people read and link to newspapers has become subject to a partisan cycle.

When Trump was first elected, both the NY Times and WaPo saw significant surges in attention and  subscribers.  This was, after all, the original "Democracy Dies In Darkness" era of the Washington Post, when it was getting attention by being even more steadfast in its opposition to Trump than the NY Times. 

There was some loyalty carry-over after the first Trump presidency, but as you can see from the graph the trend was downwards.  And as the Biden presidency slumped towards its ignominious conclusion, the references to both papers declined precipitously.  Arguably, this is because their readership had become strongly linked to a particular partisan alignment, and people with that partisan alignment were not enjoying the news much in 2023 and 2024.

With the second Trump presidency, the NY Times is once again getting huge amounts of attention, but there has been no benefit to the Washington Post.  Arguably this is because the WaPo offended its partisan readership by not officially endorsing a candidate in 2024.  This resulted in about 10% of the paper's digital subscribers cancelling, a reduction of about 250,000 subscribers.

What do companies do when they see a significant decline in revenue?  Often they cut costs, and for a newspaper, a lot of those costs are people.  It's probably not surprising that the successful push to literally decimate (reduce by 10%) the WaPo subscription base ended up resulting in layoffs.

Perhaps the surprising thing is that there's a fair amount of overlap between the people who encouraged people to cancel subscriptions to the WaPo back in 2024 and the people who are upset to see it laying off employees now.  I even saw a few posts in which people tried to blame the layoffs on the Trump administration attacking journalism as an industry and institution.

The actual narrative here, I think, is first that in an environment where many newspapers were losing subscribers in the 2000s, the WaPo successfully made itself a national brand (arguably at the expense of local papers which continued to die) by making itself a nationally known source of opposition to Trump and the Right more generally.

However, taking on this brand meant that when the WaPo did something which offended the customer niche it had tied itself to (partisan supporters of the Left) it found its readership significantly reduced and was losing money rapidly.  (Reportedly, the paper had a roughly $100M loss in 2024.)  A lot of people are blaming Jeff Bezos for not subsidizing the paper despite its losses, and it's true that keeping the paper going would cost Bezos less than producing another excruciatingly bad season of Rings of Power, but while it's true that a determined billionaire could keep pounding money down the budget whole, it is in the nature of money losing organizations to cut expenses.

Maybe a better question is: why was the fury against a paper not explicitly endorsing a candidate which it was clear to everyone the vast majority of its staff supported sufficient reason for angry subscribers deal such painful financial blows to a paper which in retrospect many people broadly on the left seem to consider a valuable thing to have in existence?

Darwiniana 2026

I feel like Mr. Hat here all the time.

Last night my 8yo son read me Green Eggs and Ham, all the way through, without stopping.

Not a milestone at your house, perhaps: your child did this at age 4, probably. Some of my other children did this at age 4. But this child, my seventh and my youngest, has dyslexia, and we have been working through a reading program designed for dyslexic brains. This is my second time through this program, and we started earlier with this child than we did with his older sister. I'd taught four children to read without more than the usual fuss, and couldn't understand why #5 was having such difficulty doing the things that worked before. With #7, I recognized the same signs earlier (and fortunately, hadn't resold my expensive dyslexia curriculum).

My mantra, in regards to teaching this one to read, is, "If it was easy, he'd be doing it already." It's tempting to compare progress with other children -- someone else's 8yo has beautiful neat even handwriting; his cousin is reading novels; other homeschoolers his age can read directions well enough to compete in a math tournament. I believe strongly in reading, and I want all my children to have a firm foundation of literacy. This guy needs some extra help and support, and this is a reason I continue to homeschool: I want to provide that support in a way that builds lifelong mastery and confidence, not just quick testable results which are forgotten as soon as they're documented. 

What that means in practice is a lot of me reading aloud books or instructions that other children his age could read themselves, and lots of what would be considered tutoring, I guess: one-on-one work at the table in various subjects instead of me sitting him down with a book or worksheet or paper for independent work. Is this the best way to do things? I don't know, but it's what seems to work for us.

I read recently an article about stages of brain development, which cited research about major developmental changes at ages 9, 33, 66, and 82 or 83. I'm trying to lay the foundation for some solid age-nine growth in my 8.5yo. Laying the foundation seems like the bulk of our parenting right now. My dad used to say, "I'm raising you kids to be adults," and that's something I think about a lot. Several of my children are legal adults, and others are fast approaching that age. I pray that their foundation is solid enough that they can continue to build on it themselves, and in turn, support new relationships and provide stability for future generations.

I don't write much these days partly because I feel like I've forgotten how to write, but also because as the kids take up working on their own foundations, their stories become their own, and I owe them the privacy of being able to do that work without Mom putting it out there for the world to discuss. Our last year was chaotic to an unprecedented extent for our family -- not bad, mind you, not evil, but challenging for everyone. The beginning of 2026 looks very different from the beginning of 2025, and our plans are different than we thought they would be. We're not prepping for a wedding, for one thing. Two daughters ended relationships; one has started a new one. Educational plans have changed for a few people. People are moving out, and moving back in. The younger ones live through these changes in a way that the older ones didn't have to (since it's the older ones making the big life shifts), and that leads to stresses and adjustments that didn't have to be made when all the kids were young. I don't know exactly how this works, but everyone feels like they're the middle child, falling through the cracks while everyone around causes drama. I literally, at this very moment, have a cat in the walls of my house. 

This is my wall, but this isn't even my cat.

Life feels all-consuming -- good, but all-consuming. My prayer life seems to consist mostly of the name of Jesus with each breath.

But we don't stop having small milestones because we have big milestones. And reading Green Eggs and Ham is definitely a cause for celebration. My 8yo wanted a blue camo hat, and as a reward for reading his book, we went to Amazon and picked out one he liked, because his developments are no less momentous than his older siblings'. What's one more hat, or one more cat, in a house and a life that's already so full? The foundation, I think, can take it.