Livy and I had lots of conversations about the Gilmore Girls while watching, and I think she learned a lot from the experience. Some examples:
- What is economics? (Rory's granddad is teaching it at Yale.)
- What is base diving? (Stupid, stupid Logan)
- What does it mean to have a collapsed lung? (Base diving, anyone?)
The biggest category of learning is about people and their behavior. We talked constantly about people's motivations: why did he do that? What did she mean by that? Why would a person say that? This is one of the great things about TV. Because we are not so emotionally involved as we are with out actual relationships, we can analyze people's interactions in a more dispassionate way. We ended up talking about how we can think a person did wrong and still understand their feelings and why they did it. We watched the results of bad decisions and talked about what might have been better. We talked a lot about morality because, as you know if you have seen Gilmore Girls, they make some terrible decisions.
And the best thing about the experience? It wasn't forced. I didn't ask her questions like the reading section of standardized tests. We just talked about what we thought, and I answered her questions. For a private child like Livy, I think it sometimes takes too full days of just being together at home for her to start asking and talking. It was wonderful, and it was homeschooling.
