School on Saturday?

Man, oh man, Zachary was in rare form tonight. While walking home from school he informed me that he was very angry. A letter had just come home about 2 Saturdays that the kids are going to have to go to school to make up snow days.

I have to tell you, as a parent I much prefer this to the alternative: extending the school day. My kids are exhausted after school every day. There is no way we would survive an extension in the school day!

So, two Saturdays, they will be in school until June 24th and they are making two scheduled "late starts" a full day. If all goes well we won't need to add anymore days.

After school and homework Zachary was allowed to play on the computer. He played on his Webkinz site (if you don't know what Webkinz are, you are missing out - they are "all the rage") and then went to worldmathsday.com. His teacher introduced them to it. Essentially, it is a math competition with kids across the world. Zachary has 60 seconds to answer as many math questions as he can and try to beat his opponent.

Math is Zach's favorite subject (I know, who does this kid belong to??) but he got SO anxiety ridden over this! He started screaming at me, "MOMMY, HELP ME" because he couldn't think of the answers fast enough. This, of course, just made me giggle (which didn't help matters, by the way). He lost over and over and over again and got more and more and more upset which, in turn, only encouraged him to try over and over and over again. Eventually, he won one game and that was all he needed to keep trying. Eventually, I got so irritated with being yelled at for not helping him ("it's all your fault I lost") that he had to get off. Too funny.

While I was fighting off attacks from my math wiz I was able to finish up The Poisonwood Bible. Man, I just love that book. I read it many years ago when Oprah first announced it as part of her book club. Reading it with more mature eyes, I appreciated it even more.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I compels me to learn more about Africa and the Congo and its people. I want to understand where they live and where they come from.

Of course, the book disturbs me. To know that we ("civilized" nations) did this - we changed Africa because we wanted so much for them to be like us. We couldn't understand how they could be happy living in the jungle, without a supermarket within walking distance, without electricity and indoor plumbing. We did understand their ideas of religion (or lack there of in our eyes). So we tried to change them.

So, I will read more and do my best to learn about Africa then and now. What was it like before the wars and the fighting and before the "civilized" nations tried to change them and take their diamonds and oil? Africa is (could have been) a rich nation, but they were stolen from. What would have happened had we not found it? I wonder....