artist at work

None of us knew that teenagers aren't allowed to buy spray paint anymore. What's the world coming to? George had some errands to run, and Ray went along for the express purpose of buying spray-paint. Its not like its a secret or something - he'll probably ask for help making more stencils in the next day or so. They wouldn't sell any to him. Apparently there's a big fuss over kids using it as an inhalant and someone has decided that if they're going to be doing something that dangerous they can just buy meth and get it over with.


George rolled his eyes and paid for the paint. He said it took a lot of self-control not to ask for a couple extra plastic bags.


Anyway, here's a look at Ray "doing art". Yes, he is spray painting a pair of jeans, and that's Mo in the background, who has just painted her face, although with tempera. It was a big paint-day here. In the learning plan, I have "Emphasis on visual arts as a means of personal expression with regard to real world political, social and legal issues". Ray accomplishes this mainly via spray paint. The shopping trip was a great example of how real world issues intersect with real world artists - I couldn't design a curriculum that effective! We've also had some great discussions of copyright law and intellectual property rights as a result of looking up possible stencil designs.


He's learned to make stencils and use them effectively, and coming to understand background and foreground, positive and negative space. He is experimenting with layering and fade effects and so learning to manipulate the variables of his medium. He's learning about cost-effectiveness wrt different materials and in time he's going to realize that he's learning about ratios. And he's enjoying himself. That's often not one of the priorities of "education" but its a fairly significant one in autodidacticism.

Allowance

The financial situation seems to finally be turning around, after a pretty rough winter, so George and I have started talking about the allowance issue. We hadn't considered it with Morgan at all, in part bc she's so much younger, but also bc she's right there with me, and often George, for the shopping, so talking about finances, budgets, savings, allocating funds, all that stuff is a regular part of her daily life. Ray's new to the family, and with his vampire lifestyle hasn't been awake for shopping opportunities. That's changing, but still, two kids at the store is often more than I'm up for. Either one of them is fabulous, but for some reason, the two together seem to ping off each other until I feel like I'm stuck in a popcorn popper full of bells and rubber snakes. Fantasies of duct tape.

Anyway, that has left us with a bit of a disparity, bc Mo's wants are still pretty easy to say yes to for a dollar or less, so she tends to get something whenever we go out. That's a big part of what's driving the allowance question. I want Ray to feel like he's every bit as much a member of the family as Morgan, and here she is, getting a bit of candy or a toy every day or so, while he gets... groceries. So far he hasn't said anything about that, but I'd like to head off any sense of unfairness, if possible, before it can start. Its a fair estimate that she gets twenty dollars worth of this kind of spending a month, and that's a do-able sum to give Ray, too, with our usual income.

Another issue has to do with the whole idea of finances as a way of learning about economics on a smaller scale than what he's been doing online. He can't learn about money if he doesn't have any, and he can't learn about making real world financial decisions unless he has enough to make decisions about. So the money is coming out of our "homeschool budget". Since those funds generally come out of my income, that will start next time I work at Morningside foods, and he'll get money on a monthly basis.

We're not tying allowance money to expectations of work. He has opportunities to work both here and jobs his mom sets up if he wants more money. Its possible he'll choose not to work for awhile as a result, but its not like we can afford to give him much. We're talking $20 a month, here. Still, if that's more than he's been used to getting (I honestly don't know) I wouldn't be surprised if he elected not to work for pay for a time.

I admit, my own knee-jerk first reaction to that is "that's not the way the real world works" but it doesn't take me long to see the fallacy of that kind of thinking. Sometimes it is the way the real world works. I've gotten a good bit of money that I haven't worked for and used it to buy property, build a house, renovate the barn, buy power tools. Its not that uncommon, and happens in a lot of different ways - windfalls or inheritances or a good stock portfolio or insurance money or whatever.

So that's the plan. If the family finances take another dip, we'll have to cut back, of course. That's the real life limitation to the allowance thing - its dependent on the family income.