"I not am nervous about it, if you say it not happen."

Great! Then they can walk home again, this time without the detour.

Evelyn is visibly in a good mood! Walks are nice, errands are nice, spending time with her foster (not)-children is always nice, and the combination of all three is lovely. She should really do this more often. 

Evelyn is a very puzzling person but a consistent one, and that's very important. "Study more English?" They're going to need to read to make any major decisions about what they're doing here.

That's a great idea! They should maybe take a break from reading books together for vocabulary, and work more on writing? Practicing writing seems like a good way to get the alphabet and common word spellings more solidly in their heads.

(And they're less advanced at it, which means Evelyn can print off some more worksheets and then give them simple challenges, which is less exhausting than trying to explain stuff from the science book and much less exhausting than reading the Bible. ...She really should tell Iomedae that she's happy to do some Bible reading every day, it's clearly important to her, but maybe that can be an evening activity after Lily is in bed tonight.)  

Iomedae is not planning to ask about the Bible again. She's happy to work on writing. It is obviously closely related to reading and useful in its own right. 

Writing is an important skill for a wizard and Alfirin will study diligently.

Writing is important! They'll be expected to do a lot of it at school. 

Evelyn has to stop herself from offering over-the-top praise for every worksheet completed; they'll probably just find it uncomfortable, they're not six. 

"Maybe you could work with Lily when she does her homework tonight," she suggests cheerfully. "She's a little ahead of you in reading, probably, but not hugely, and I think she might find it very motivational to work on it together." 

"Lily is seven made like four! Seven is small for a girl to read and write and four is so small."

"It's important to start early! She does struggle with it more than a lot of kids, Jeremy could read when he was five - well, picture books - but that only makes it more important to be working on it now, so she has as much time as possible to catch up. Kids start properly learning to read in first grade, which is age six or seven, though kindergarten - that's for younger kids - usually does the alphabet and stuff, so they come in knowing their letters." 

"America is so rich, all the boys and all the girls get teachers when they are six?"

"Yeah! School is really important. You need it for basically any good job, right, and it's also important to be able to read so you can understand things in the news and vote and stuff." 

"Do the teachers not have papers?"

"Hmm? No, teaching is a job you definitely need papers for, and college. It's not that well paid - people complain about it a lot, especially because it ends up being a lot more than the usual forty hours a week for a full time job - but they earn a bit more than me. The government just thinks this is really important." 

"But, there are as many childs as adults, yes? And Lily go to school all day. If all childs need a teacher from when they are six to when they are eighteen, then even if two boys study together, half of all the people are being teachers."

That is a...confusing way to talk about it...but Evelyn isn't totally sure yet what she's confused about. 

"No, no, it's not one-on-one tutoring. Kids learn in a classroom with one teacher and usually twenty or thirty students." 

"- how do you see if the students learned, if there are thirty of them? If every student speak for ten minutes, that is near the whole day gone, and you only know they learned ten minutes."

"Honestly, one of my friends who's a teacher would know more! But I think normally they have a lesson plan that the whole class does together - the kids in a class are all the same age and have been in school the same number of years - so they all read the same book together, or learn about how, oh, rain works or something. And then they have homework to do at home - you'll see Lily's tonight, but I also kept all of Jeremy's school assignments," definitely not to let future foster kids CHEAT but, well, possibly to let Evelyn cheat at homework-help, "and they bring it in and the teacher reads through it and checks how many answers they got right. And sometimes there are tests in class, where everyone has a paper with questions and they write in the answers, and at the end of the day the teacher reads them."

Slight smile. "Having to grade homework and tests at home after work is one of the things teachers complain about. Though I think mostly people only study to be teachers if they love teaching."

"That does not sound like it would work but maybe it does. So when we go to school, they will give us the same work as twenty eight American girls, and see if we do it right?"

"...Girls and boys, public schools don't have separate classes. I guess some private or religious schools do but it's pretty rare now." 

"They teach same things to girls and boys?"

"But girls and boys need to know not same things."

...Oh, right, low-income very religious background, obviously there's weird gender stuff. 

"Girls and boys need to know more or less the same things in America!" Evelyn says, perhaps a little too brightly. "Reading and writing is just as important either way, and women work the same kinds of jobs as men. - I guess I sort of wish they still had home ec - er, doing stuff for your household, cooking and cleaning and budgeting for groceries and stuff - or parenting classes at schools now. They mostly took that out of the regular classes in the last few decades, and so many young people have no idea how to run a household. But I think the boys would benefit from that too." 

"The girls go to school, and do not learn how to care for babies, or to cook or fix clothes or run a house or hire people or clean or be good with money?" This really explains why everyone says Americans are so helpless. 

" - if America go to war, the President call the states call the mayors call the boys to fight?"

"...do the mayors call the girls to fight also?" Alfirin is skeptical of this idea but it sounds like the sort of thing America might do and it fits with teaching all the same things.

"When I went to school there were classes on running a household, and I think some schools still have classes on babies? But I think the thought ended up being that girls could learn that from their parents at home, or - I don't know, figure it out from parenting books - and also a lot of women don't even want to have children." 

To Alfirin, "- back when we had the draft - the President getting all the states and cities to send men for the army - it was only men. We haven't had a draft since - man, forty years ago for Vietnam? The current army is volunteers. It's still more men than women who join, but some women do."