Bending the Twigs

"The Well-Trained Mind" Then vs. Now Pt. I

2011-07-12T07:18:00.000-07:00

I first read The Well-Trained Mind when my oldest, Miss Scarlet, was 4 1/2. Being the Type A personality that I was (and still am, albeit to lesser extent), I read the entire 764-page first edition cover-to-cover. That's right, I read not only the "grammar" (elementary) section, but also the "logic" (jr. high) and "rhetoric" (sr. high) ones as well.

In retrospect, that probably wasn't the best idea because I felt rather overwhelmed and intimidated. My oldest wasn't even starting Kindergarten for several months, and I was reading about classical rhetoric; studying the Great Books (only some of which I had read myself); algebra, trigonometry, and calculus; high school science including reading original sources like Hippocrates, Archimedes, Copernicus, Kepler, Gallileo, Harvey, Darwin, Newton, Einstein, etc.; and studying both a classical and a modern foreign language. Yikes! It was akin to a couch potato reading about a training regimen for a double Ironman ultra-triathlon. Very inspiring, but completely intimidating.

It didn't help that in the first edition of TWTM, the authors listed a 6 hour daily schedule for 1st grade. I have since learned that it was the publisher's idea to include the schedule; in the 2nd and 3rd editions of the book, it has been replaced by more general guidelines.

I sat there having just finished TWTM, thinking to myself simultaneously "WOW! What an amazing educational philosophy!" and "How on Earth am I going to be able to pull this off?"

To be continued...

My Journey to "The Well-Trained Mind"

2011-07-11T17:09:00.000-07:00

This month marks the 5th anniversary of when our family began homeschooling. Five years ago, we had no plans to homeschool beyond pre-k, and we weren't even sure we'd do that as we were on the waiting list at several preschools. Miss Scarlet's name never did get off the waitlist anywhere, and by February it had become clear that our search for an elementary school was going very poorly while homeschooling was going very well.

One of the books that I read while trying to find a school for Miss Scarlet was former Secretary of Education William Bennett's The Educated Child. I came across it at my local library and found his vision of the "Core Knowledge" model of schooling very inspiring. It had all the elements I wanted in a curriculum for my children- classic literature, phonics, old-school grammar, mastery of math facts & traditional algorithms, real history with an eye towards cultural literacy rather than political correctness, and so on. I came away from the book very much wanting a Core Knowledge school for my child- and feeling dismay at how far short of that the options we had available to us were.

I was seriously considering enrolling Miss Scarlet in the local K12 online school, the California Virtual Academy, for the following year because it offered a Core Knowledge-based curriculum and Mr. Bennett sat on its board. Then a veteran homeschooler I had met at a local park day suggested that I read The Well-Trained Mind. I requested the book through the inter-library loan, and read the whole thing through.

I was both awe-inspired and totally intimidated.

To be continued...

The Case for (Ugly) Cursive

2011-05-03T06:44:00.000-07:00

I'll admit that I do not have great penmanship. It was one of the few areas in elementary school where I consistently got a "needs improvement" grade. Most of the time these days, I type or print, though I do still use cursive upon occasion when writing a letter or a card.

I do believe that cursive is an important thing to learn, however, since it's faster than printing and even with the widespread use of computers, my kids will still be required to hand-write certain things like the essay portions of standardized tests. The New York Times had an interesting recent article on the subject.

I'm not 100% certain which style of cursive I learned growing up, but the one I've seen that's the closest is Peterson Directed Handwriting. It is a very "pretty" font IMHO with lots of loops but more legible than something like Spencerian (which is gorgeous but harder to read).

Last spring, I got Miss Scarlett the 2nd grade Peterson kit. However, every time I tried to do it with her, it was like pulling teeth. She went into meltdown mode and I ended up shelving it within a few weeks.

Going into the spring semester of 3rd grade and with the 4th grade California STAR writing test looming next year, I decided to resort to bribery. I promised to buy her a game for her Nintendo DS if she learned cursive. I thought that would be incentive enough, but she still resisted. It was getting to the point where I was seriously considering taking her to an occupational therapist for a dysgraphia assessment.

Last week, I had to go to Sacramento on an errand for DH, and while I was there, I stopped by A Brighter Child Homeschool Supply store. They had a copy of the level one workbook of Memoria Press' New American Cursive. Miss Scarlett's biggest complaints about Peterson cursive were "there are too many loops" and "it's too slanty". NAC has only a slight slant and has simplified the letters.

I *DETEST* the look of NAC. But by this point, I was willing to give it a try as an ugly cursive is better than no cursive.

Miss Scarlett loves, loves, *LOVES* NAC. She has cheerfully completed at least 30 minutes penmanship practice per day, and can now write all the letters in her full name (10 different ones) both capital and lowercase. At this rate, she'll have earned the DS game by the end of the month.

I am insisting she learn a more traditional capital F, Q, T, and Z. I can live with the ugliness of NAC but put my foot down on their print-like versions of those particular letters.

Lesson learned- if a student really complains that much about a particular program, it might just be a bad "fit" rather than a "needs more time to mature" thing.

Spring Semester Update

2011-03-06T05:05:00.000-08:00

We're now a couple months in to our spring semester, so I thought it would be a good time to reflect on how things are going. For the most part, we're cruising right along.

In math, I decided to continue on with MEP Yr. 1 for "Rusty", my Kindergartner. He loves the puzzle aspect of MEP but finds all the workbook exercises challenging from a fine motor skills standpoint. So we're going slowly, alternating the formal MEP lessons with "hands-on" activities and lots of "living books" like the Sebastian Pig series from Jill Anderson and Stuart J. Murphy's Math Start series. He just turned 5 in November, so in most places he would be pre-k this year. So I'm fine with taking a longer time to finish a K math program (MEP follows the British system so Yr. 1 is equivalent to U.S. Kindergarten, Yr. 2 would be U.S. 1st, etc).

"Miss Scarlet" has one chapter left in Singapore 4A (area and perimeter) but I've decided to re-arrange the sequence to hit the decimals chapters in 4B prior to her having to take the STAR test in April. I don't put a lot of stock in the STAR as an assessment, but at the same time, I don't want her to score below her potential because of something like not knowing how to properly read decimals. I got her Life of Fred: Decimals, which she loves; however, it does not seem to be enough by itself to get her to answer the practice STAR questions correctly. So I figured it made sense to do the first 2 chapters of 4B before finishing the last chapter of 4A.

In terms of language arts, "Rusty" is making fantastic progress. The biggest relief is that he has finally made a breakthrough in his writing. He went from not being able to print his name to writing multi-page "books" with full sentences. His lower case letters are still hit-or-miss and his legibility could be better, but I'm thrilled with how far he's come over the past couple of months.

He has 4 lessons left in All About Spelling Level 1 and should start Level 2 soon. I wish Marie Rippel would hurry up and complete the higher levels of the new All About Reading program because the first level looks great! Sure would've been nice to have had on hand last summer when "Rusty" was at that stage. I'll definitely be interested in giving it a try when Princess P. is ready. And no, I have no affiliation with the company other than being a satisfied customer :-)

"Rusty" has also started First Language Lessons for the Well-Trained Mind Level 1. It's going okay, but he seems to have better retention with "living books" and watching old Grammar Rock clips on YouTube. C'mon everybody, sing with me: "Conjunction junction, what's your function? Hooking up words and phrases and clauses."

"Miss Scarlet" is loving Killgallon Grammar for Middle School, Figuratively Speaking, and surprisingly she also likes that Drawing Inferences reading comprehension test prep booklet that looked pretty dull to me. Go figure!

I haven't gotten a handle on how to implement the Adventures in Fantasy book, so I signed her up for a creative writing class about which I've heard raves. Personally, I tend to agree more with Susan Wise Bauer's approach to writing but DH feels strongly about wanting "Miss Scarlet" to do this. He read in either Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers or Daniel Coyle's The Talent Code (I forget which) about the Bronte sisters writing massive amounts as young girls and thinks that starting early is the key to developing the talent he's convinced that DD has. No pressure or anything :-p

In history, we're having fun studying the American Revolution and the Founding Fathers. "Rusty" loves that so many of them had red hair like he does (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Patrick Henry, etc.) LOL! "Miss Scarlet" loves hearing about the heroines- Margaret "Molly Pitcher" Corbin, Deborah Sampson, Sybil Ludington (known as the "female Paul Revere"), Betsy Zane (who smuggled gunpowder into a fort under siege), Patience Wright (an artist in London who spied on the British and sent her dispatches hidden in her sculptures), Phoebe Fraunces (George Washington's African-American housekeeper who saved him from assassination by discovering a poisoning plot), and Abigail Adams.

In science, we are currently doing a unit on sound, and the kids have been enjoying making musical instruments out of household objects. DH, who has been working from home doing consulting projects and writing a book, is less than thrilled about this particular unit ;-)

The kids are also going to be starting art classes at the end of the month. Art is just one of those subjects that doesn't really get done in any kind of formal way unless we outsource. "Rusty" especially could use the fine motor practice. I signed him up for a clay class since I've heard that is one of the more helpful media for improving hand strength and coordination. "Miss Scarlet" is going to be doing nature art class, which is done in coordination with the local Wildlife museum. She has talked about possibly wanting to be a veterinarian when she grows up (if her first choice of fashion design doesn't pan out), so I thought she might like it.

Princess P. has been diagnosed with a speech and language delay like her big brother had (fortunately he seems to have outgrown it but he spent a year in speech therapy). She just started attending a developmental preschool through Early Intervention 4 morning per week that includes 2 sessions per week of speech therapy. She seems to enjoy it and I've noticed that she has been using more words even after just one week in preschool. She still has a long way to go, but the improvement makes me feel better about putting her into the preschool at only 25 months old. There is a 3:1 student-teacher ratio so that is really isn't that different than being here with her two siblings and me.

Build a Stronger Vocabulary with Two Excellent Word Roots Programs

2011-01-20T09:20:00.000-08:00

One regret I have about my own schooling growing up is that I didn't begin my study of Latin until my sophomore year of high school. By that point, I was already taking my PSAT's. While I am glad that I decided to study Latin at all (my parents were not particularly gung ho about it), I think I would have benefited from starting earlier had that been an option. My alma mater normally allowed 9th graders & above to enroll; in retrospect, I wish that I had tried to petition my way in as a 7th grader.

While I don't start my kids on Latin as young as some homeschoolers choose to (Miss Scarlet will probably begin in 5th grade), I do start them learning Latin roots by the time they are working at a mid-elementary level. Miss Scarlet has been working her way through Caesar's English 1 from Michael Clay Thompson. It's an excellent book- one that is engaging and intellectually challenging at the same time. One can really tell that Mr. Thompson loves words. The one drawback is that CE does not really have that much in the way of practice exercises. To beef up that aspect of word study, Miss Scarlet has been supplementing with the Red Hot Root Words workbook from Prufrock Press.

Yesterday, our second semester materials arrived. Among those were the second volumes of the Ceasar's English and Red Hot Root Words series. I was a bit disappointed to discover that virtually all of the roots covered in RHRW1 are repeated in RHRW2. The main difference between the two books is that in Vol. 1, each exercise covers only 1-2 roots vs. 3-4 in Vol. 2. Had I known this, I would've skipped the first RHRW book and just purchased the second.

I went through and made up a list of which lessons in CE1 and CE2 correlate with which practice exercises in RHRW2. Of the 101 roots covered in the two CE volumes, 45 are also in RHRW2. There are 125 additional roots in RHRW2 not covered in the CE series. Therefore, a student who completes all 3 books will have learned a grand total of 226 roots. There are 20 chapters in each of the CE volumes (the odd ones cover roots) and 54 lessons in RHRW2. Here are the correlations:

Caesar's English 1/Red Hot Root Words 2
Chapter 1- lesson 12, lesson 1, lesson 15, lesson 3, lesson 2
Chapter 3- lesson 14, lesson 17, lesson 9
Chapter 5- lesson 5, lesson 3
Chapter 7- lesson 27, lesson 33, lesson 20, lesson 39
Chapter 9- lesson 37
Chapter 11- lesson 31, lesson 6, lesson 8
Chapter 13- lesson 33
Chapter 15- lesson 23
Chapter 17- lesson 28, lesson 36, lesson 13
Chapter 19- lesson 27, lesson 11, lesson 16

Caesar's English 2/Red Hot Root Words 2
Chapter 1- lesson 9, lesson 6
Chapter 3- lesson 26, lesson 22, lesson 43
Chapter 5- lesson 2, lesson 11
Chapter 7- lesson 41
Chapter 9- lesson 27, lesson 36
Chapter 11- lesson 30, lesson 1, lesson 39
Chapter 13- lesson 6
Chapter 15- n/a
Chapter 17- lesson 7, lesson 37
Chapter 19- lesson 24, lesson 34

Fall Semester Recap and Looking Ahead to Spring Semester

2010-12-20T05:29:00.000-08:00

I have been very neglectful of this blog and have no idea if anybody is still reading it. I'm probably just rambling to myself at this point, LOL! Having a very active toddler in the house plus starting formal homeschooling with my 2nd child kept me very busy in 2010 and regular posting fell by the wayside. But if I want to keep Google from considering this blog "abandoned" and at risk of deletion, I do need to occasionally post. So here goes :-)

As California has a kindergarten cutoff of 12/2 and my DS "Rusty" has a birthday at the beginning of November, I had been unsure whether to start him this year or wait until fall 2011. Then in July, he started showing readiness for and a strong motivation to learn to read. So I decided to go ahead and start K5 this year. As his fine motor skills are lagging (can't even write his name yet), he'll most likely need a "transition" year next year between K & 1st but I won't need to make a decision on that for a while.

I had used Romalda Spalding's The Writing Road to Reading with my oldest mostly because we were flat-broke at the time and it was the most appealing-looking option that our local library had. WRTR worked well but it wasn't all that user-friendly so this time around I decided to give Hooked on Phonics a try. I got a great closeout deal on the older version and the whole K-2 kit cost me about $30. Good thing I didn't pay the regular price as he flew through the entire HOP program in 3 months. He went from S-L-O-W-L-Y sounding out BOB books word by word in August to fluently reading Henry and Mudge type books now. I started him in the All About Spelling program at the beginning of November after he finished HOP, and he's flying through Level 1. Next semester, he'll do Level 2 and possibly start Level 3.

In math, I tried starting Rusty on Right Start A. However, while he seemed to like the secondary topics, he experienced difficulty with the main thing of visualizing numbers as 5 + some quantity. He could say the words to the "Yellow is the Sun" rhyme but it was clear that he didn't grasp the underlying concept. So after a month, I decided to shelve RS A and switch to MEP Reception. It's a pre-k program and much of it is a bit on the easy side for Rusty but he absolutely *LOVES* it. I think he's a visual learner and does much better with all the colorful pictures in MEP than he did with the minimal black & white ones of RS. He's just about done with MEP Reception so I have to decide what to do for the spring semester. Rusty seems to be doing great with MEP but I have heard from other homeschoolers that Yr. 1 gets pretty advanced. I also really love the RS program plus DH paid a good chunk of money last summer to buy level A (my oldest had started RS at level B). Decisions, decisions.

The other things I'll be doing with Rusty in the spring semester are:

Handwriting Without Tears Pre-K. I'm hoping to get him started on HWOT K by the end but we'll have to see.
Start First Language Lessons for the Well-Trained Mind minus the copywork/dictation exercises.
Follow along with his big sister in her unit studies in American History and physics.

Miss Scarlett is now in 3rd grade and is cruising along. She participated in an online literature class through Johns Hopkins' CTY program this fall, which was a fantastic opportunity. She's always been a very strong reader and writer and I've struggled to challenge her appropriately. This class did just that and it really helped her grow as a student. I hope that we will have the financial resources to do another one this spring but that's a bit TBD at the moment. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that we'll be in a position to afford the pricey tuition ><

She has completed the "town" level of the Michael Clay Thompson Language Arts program with the exception of Caesar's English. She'll complete that next semester and start the sequel, Caesar's English II. The rest of the "voyage" level books I'm going to wait on until she's ready to handle the writing in Essay Voyage. In the interim, she'll use Grammar for Middle School, the next book in Don Killgallon's applied grammar/sentence-writing series. She'll also be using Figuratively Speaking to learn about literary terms, Evan-Moor Daily Paragraph Editing Grade 4 for practice on grammar/usage/mechanics, Curriculum Associates Drawing Conclusions & Making Inferences workbook for reading comprehension (since this is the area where she tends to have the most difficulty on the Iowa and similar standardized tests), and the Adventures in Fantasy creative-writing curriculum.

The last one is at DH's insistence. He has delusions of grandeur about Miss Scarlett's writing (cue visions of her being the next Christopher Paolini). He really wanted her to use the One Year Adventure Novel curriculum but as that's high school level not to mention $200, I convinced him to have her work through the Adventures in Fantasy program first.

In math, she's continuing on with Singapore Primary Math with the Intensive Practice and Challenging Word Problems books supplemented in places with the Math Mammoth single-topic "blue" worktexts. She's 2/5 of the way through 4A, which is great progress considering she only started 3A last January. My goal is to have her finish 4A and 4B plus Life of Fred: Fractions by the time she starts 4th grade this coming August. Ideally, I'd like to have her finish up the Singapore Primary Math series by the end of 5th grade so that she can do pre-algebra in 6th (probably online through Stanford's EPGY) and Algebra I in 7th.

In history, I made the decision to switch our focus from world history to American history. As we got to the Reformation era last spring, I decided that world history was getting rather darker and more complex than I'd prefer in the elementary years. Also, I feel that whereas my own history education was far too-U.S. centric (basically the entire thing except for 6th grade when we studied ancient & medieval times; 7th grade when my teacher decided that the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, the first Persian Gulf war, and other then-current events were much more interesting than whatever was normally covered; and 10th grade when we studied world geography), the Well-Trained Mind/Story of the World cycle IMHO doesn't have enough American History. So we'll be doing 2 years of U.S. history before starting the next time through the cycle.

As "spine" for American History, I decided to go with From Sea to Shining Sea: The Story of America from the Catholic Schools Textbook Project. It's a textbook but is written like a narrative and I like how it is generally optimistic without glossing over the areas where America has fallen short of our ideals. The one complaint I have about it is that since it has a Catholic focus, it spends too much time discussing the Spanish and French colonies in North America and not enough time talking about the English ones. Jamestown and Plymouth get short shrift IMHO while the book goes on and on about Mexico and Canada. Fortunately, I was able to find plenty of library resources to beef up our study of early Virginia and the Pilgrims.

In science, we are at physics in the 4 year WTM cycle. We're doing a "unit studies" approach, with Miss Scarlett using relevant chapters from the Prentice Hall Science Explorer and Singapore My Pals are Here Science 5/6 series as her "spine" and Rusty using Singapore Earlybird Start Up Science Vol. 2. They're both loving the Young Scientist Club experiment kits, watching DVD's of Bill Nye the Science Guy and other documentaries, and reading library books including the Max Axiom, Super Scientist graphic novels, Let's Read and Find Out Science series, and The Magic School Bus series.

Even though I am somewhat following The Well-Trained Mind, I have decided to hold off for now on Latin. My plan is to have Miss Scarlett get a thorough grounding in English grammar first and then use The Latin Road to English Grammar in lieu of further English grammar study. I know that many homeschoolers don't feel that LRtEG is enough for both English and Latin but Miss Scarlett is the type of kid for whom I believe it could probably suffice. After completing Michael Clay Thompson's elementary LA series, the Killgallon series, and the Warriner's book I have on my shelf, she ought to have the basics down. I personally learned more about the English language through studying French and Latin in high school than I did in my "English" courses (which were mostly literature). If it turns out that LRtEG isn't enough, I can easily add back in formal English grammar. Perhaps something with a "structural"/linguistics approach like Rhetorical Grammar by Martha Kolln & Loretta Gray.

Good Site for Free Language Arts Worksheets

2010-06-14T10:04:00.000-07:00

When my DD took the Iowa Test of Basic Skills this spring, one of the sections where she scored a bit lower (though still very respectably) was on capitalization. The grammar programs we've used haven't really gotten into this topic all that much beyond the basics (i.e. proper nouns, the pronoun "I", the first word of a sentence, etc). So I went looking on the 'net for some capitalization worksheets. I came across a great site with lots of different free Language Arts worksheets. Be forewarned that the answer keys are NOT included, but I personally found I didn't really need a key for the worksheets I have used so far.

Thanks Mrs. Hatzigeorgiou, whoever you are! :-)

A Salute to Those Who've Paid the Ultimate Price for our Freedom

2010-05-31T21:29:00.000-07:00

I heard the following at the county Memorial Day observance we attended today, and thought it was a great reminder for all of us:

It is the Soldier, not the minister
Who has given us freedom of religion.

It is the Soldier, not the reporter
Who has given us freedom of the press.

It is the Soldier, not the poet
Who has given us freedom of speech.

It is the Soldier, not the campus organizer
Who has given us freedom to protest.

It is the Soldier, not the lawyer
Who has given us the right to a fair trial.

It is the Soldier, not the politician
Who has given us the right to vote.

It is the Soldier who salutes the flag,
Who serves beneath the flag,
And whose coffin is draped by the flag,
Who allows the protester to burn the flag.

by Charles M. Province

Brief Update

2010-05-16T10:30:00.000-07:00

We've been on the East Coast visiting DH's and my relatives for the past few weeks. It's been fun but a bit chaotic, hence the lack of blog updates.

Miss Scarlett's 25 year old uncle, who makes a good living as an IT administrator, has helped her to create her own blog. She blogs at "Balderdash and Things Like That". I tried to set her up as a separate author but got an error message (and this was after my brother had left so I didn't have the tech support, LOL!) So if you see my name on a post that appears to have been written by a 7 1/2 year old girl, that's why :-)

"Thinking Through Grammar" by Dr. Arthur Whimbey

2010-03-19T13:23:00.000-07:00

I mentioned earlier that I've made some changes for the 2nd semester in our homeschool. One area where I've made some changes is in Language Arts. Miss Scarlet has finished Story Grammar for Elementary Students and has started the "town" level of the Michael Clay Thompson (MCT) program. We're loving the vocabulary and poetry components of the program but the jury is still out on the grammar & writing portions. That's a post for another day, however.

As Miss Scarlet was doing an exercise in one of her MCT books today, I noticed she was struggling with a prepositional phrase. So I decided to have her work through a chapter in Thinking Through Grammar: 5th and 6th Grade by Dr. Arthur Whimbey. This is the book I'm planning on having her do once she's done with MCT. I had taken a chance on ordering it sight unseen as I wasn't able to find any samples on the web of the middle school level book.

Thinking Through Grammar is a solid, no-nonsense consumable work-text. It is designed to be self-teaching. Because Miss Scarlet is much further ahead cognitively than her physical writing skills, I allowed her to dictate the answers orally while I transcribed. You can see one of the pages she did today here.

Sample page from "Thinking Through Grammar" -

Required Reading for Toyota Owners!

2010-03-09T16:50:00.000-08:00

My mom owns a Prius so you can imagine how nervous the story of the runaway Prius in San Diego made me :-0

We also own a Toyota and while it hasn't shown up on any of the recall lists so far, we keep hearing rumors that the true problem may date back well before 2004 when we bought our car.

If you or anybody you know drive a Toyota, make sure you read this article on how to stop your car in the event the throttle gets stuck.

Are the Doubters Right about Homeschooling for High School?

2010-03-04T19:22:00.000-08:00

Critics of homeschooling often question the ability of parents to effectively teach their high school aged children: "It's one thing to be teaching addition and subtraction but what about Algebra II and Trigonometry?"

I've never really worried about this issue since I'm familiar with the multitude of options for teaching high school level math. Everything from DVD/CD-ROM courses like Teaching Textbooks or Chalk Dust to online courses through Stanford EPGY or Johns Hopkins CTY to enrolling in classes at the community college, etc.

But today I came across some numbers that gave me pause & made me wonder if perhaps the doubters might actually have a point. For various reasons that are outside the scope of this blog post, I was looking at the CA Dept. of Ed's Standardized Testing and Reporting website for a local virtual charter school. What leaped out at me was how poorly the high school students did on the state tests relative to the performance in earlier grades. While few of the elementary and middle school students in the charter scored in the "below basic" or "far below basic" categories, a large percentage of the high school students did- and the percentage increased dramatically from 9th to 10th to 11th.

I wondered if this was a problem at the other virtual charter schools in the area so I checked the results for those. Here's what I found:

English	% Below Basic or Far Below Basic
	Grade 9	Grade 10	Grade 11
School A	21%	37%	52%
School B	20%	28%	31%
School C	14%	25%	45%
School D	12%	12%	35%
Average	17%	26%	41%

Math	% Below Basic or Far Below Basic
	Grade 9	Grade 10	Grade 11
School A	54%	80%	94%
School B	61%	78%	71%
School C	74%	94%	92%
School D	47%	63%	*
Average	59%	79%	86%

*Too few students to report.

At first glance, I found these numbers pretty disturbing. It appeared that the longer the children homeschooled, the worse they did, especially in math. By the time they reached 11th grade, between roughly a third and half were scoring low in English and the overwhelming majority were scoring low in math.

When I came across the asterisk in the results for the 4th school, I suddenly realized that the numbers of students enrolled in the charter school decreased pretty significantly each grade from 8th-onward:

Number of Students	8th	9th	10th	11th
School A	711	497	299	136
School B	197	161	138	122
School C	111	102	72	63
School D	93	58	46	23
Average	278	205	139	86

Suddenly it all made sense- there is adverse selection going on. In the area where I live, it is common for homeschooling families to enroll their teens in either a brick-and-mortar high school or to just go straight to community college. I was aware of this, but didn't make the connection with the lower test scores at first.

It makes sense that the higher-achieving students are the ones more likely to move on from homeschooling to another option. The ones left behind in the charter are disproportionately the ones who are either behind academically or just from families with different educational priorities than standardized tests & Ivy League admissions.

Should we as a society worry about these kids? That's a tough question. To me, it depends on the reason for the low score. If the student just has different priorities I'm not really concerned. After all, not every kid is destined for college. A teen who wants to be a mechanic may be perfectly successful in life even if he never manages to pass the CA state algebra test.

The homeschooled children I worry about are those whose parents are failing in their responsibility to provide an adequate education. Is this a widespread problem? Probably not as much as critics of homeschooling fear. And it is almost certainly dwarfed by the number of children failed by government-run schools. Still, those of us who support homeschooling need to acknowledge that it isn't always the best option for every single child.

Spring Semester Update Pt. 1

2010-02-21T17:03:00.000-08:00

It's been forever since I did an update on how our homeschooling is going, so I figured now would be a good time. We've made some curriculum changes for the new semester, which I'll be detailing in a series of posts.

The biggest change has been switching Miss Scarlett's math curriculum from Right Start to Singapore. Both programs are based on the Asian way of teaching math, to which I've always been drawn because of the combo of stressing both the underlying concepts AND mastering traditional algorithms. I'd originally been a bit intimidated by Singapore as a new home educator who didn't have a strong background in the subject. By contrast, I found the scripted lessons of RS very appealing. Also, Miss Scarlett was only 4 yrs 10 mos. when we started and I thought the "hands-on" nature of RS would be a better "fit" than the workbook-heavy Singapore.

I loved, loved, loved RS Level B. I think it laid an excellent foundation for Miss Scarlett in math. The challenge level was good, too. It did take her 13 months to get through it because we had to "sit" on certain concepts for a while. But on the whole, I felt the pace was appropriate.

When we finished RS B midway through the fall semester of 1st grade, I was in my 3rd trimester of pregnancy. So rather than starting up Level C right away, I took a relaxed approach to math for a few months. Not exactly "unschooling" since I did require Miss Scarlett to do math every day, but I allowed her to choose what she wanted to do from among the various supplementary workbooks & games we had on our shelf.

We started RS C last March. It was just okay. Somewhere in the middle of the book, I noticed Miss Scarlett had started to prefer pencil-and-paper work to using the manipulatives. Her eyes lit up when she learned the algorithm to do subtraction with borrowing rather than physically trading the beads on the abacus. When we took a break from RS to do Hands-on Equations, she figured out all on her own how to solve the algebraic equations on paper rather than using the little pawns, dice, and "scale".

She also seemed like she would benefit for a greater challenge level than what RS C was offering. I found myself compacting the RS lessons and using the extra time to work on more challenging problems related to the topic studied from the Singapore Challenging Word Problems series and Edward Zaccaro's Primary Grade Challenge Math book.

I looked over the final 2 levels in the RS elementary series and it just seemed like there was too much review and not enough new material for her. It struck me as having about a year's worth of material spread out over the 2 books. I understand that many students do need lots of repetition and a gentler pace, but she's not one of them.

So after Miss Scarlett finished RS C, I switched her to Singapore. She's using the 3A textbook with the Intensive Practice book rather than the regular workbook. She'll also complete the portions of the CWP books that she has not already done.

I've been fairly impressed by what I've seen of Singapore so far. For example, here's a problem from the Intensive Practice 3A book that I suspect many adults in this country would have difficulty solving: The sum of A & B is 4215 greater than C. C is 1833 less than A. What is B? I don't think I saw problems like that until my jr. high algebra class!

I do think that Miss Scarlett may need a more thorough explanation of multi-digit multiplication & division than what's in the Singapore textbook and my Home Instructor's Guide. So I downloaded the Math Mammoth single-topic workbooks on those. I like the way Maria Miller walks the student through the concepts explicitly step-by-step-by-step whereas Singapore assumes the child can make the leaps in logic. Even if Miss Scarlett doesn't turn out to need the extra explanation, she may benefit from having additional practice problems on those particular topics. The MM downloads were cheaper than buying the regular Singapore workbook and focused exclusively on only the areas where I suspect she may need the extra help.

I'm planning to start "Rusty" in RS, probably with Level A some time next year. I really do like the program for the primary grades. If that turns out not to be a good "fit" for him, I'll try Singapore or possibly the full Math Mammoth curriculum. Stay tuned!

Tell CBS You Support Focus on the Family Tim Tebow Ad!

2010-01-29T17:06:00.000-08:00

As you probably already know, CBS has come under fire from pro-abortion groups for agreeing to run a Focus on the Family ad during next week's Super Bowl featuring the story of homeschool graduate and Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow. Tebow's mother had received pressure from her doctor to abort but her Christian faith led her to continue her pregnancy. It's a heartwarming story, and one so compelling that it's really frightened the pro-abortion lobby.

The folks over at Catholicvote.org have put together a petition to CBS in support of their decision to run the ad. Please consider signing it to let the network know you stand with the Tebows and Focus on the Family in defense of those innocent unborn babies whose very lives are at stake.

Prayers for the People of Haiti

2010-01-14T07:43:00.000-08:00

A bit late I know, but I just wanted to throw my appeal out there to pray for the people of Haiti. If you haven't already heard the news, Archbishop Serge Miot was among the tens of thousands killed in Tuesday's devastating earthquake. I know that January is a lean month financially for many families, but please donate as generously as you can to Catholic Relief Services or another disaster relief agency. A list of some of the earthquake relief efforts can be found here.

Thank Goodness for Blogging

2010-01-12T14:45:00.000-08:00

I'm a voracious reader and typically read 2-3 dozen books per year. It can be difficult at times for me to remember exactly which books I have read vs. which ones I've only heard about. On occasion, I've requested a book through the inter-library loan program only to discover I've already read it.

I almost did this again just now, but then I had this nagging suspicion I'd read the book in question. Sure enough, a quick check of my blog revealed that I had. Not even 6 months ago!

Is this a sign of getting old(er) or just that all this homebuying & moving nonsense has taken its toll on me?

We'll Officially Be Homeowners Tomorrow!

2009-12-29T19:52:00.000-08:00

The short version of a long, long, long story is that while we came very close to walking away from the deal (to the point where we had formally signed a cancellation notice), we did finally come to agreement with the seller on the price. All the paperwork has been signed, the money is in the escrow account, and the sale will be formally recorded tomorrow. We're picking up the keys on Thursday and will be moving on Sunday. Yeah, I know it's supposed to be a day of rest but we'll attend Saturday evening Mass. DH has to go back to work on Monday & really wanted to get moved before then.

A Dollop of Politically Incorrect Humor for the Season

2009-12-24T10:16:00.000-08:00

This came through on our local Catholic homeschooling support group e-list and I thought it was too funny not to share.

"To All My Liberal Friends:

Please accept with no obligation, implied or explicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low-stress, non-addictive, gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice/Chanukkah/ Kwanzaa/etc. holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasion and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all.

I also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2010, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America great. Not to imply that America is necessarily greater than any other country nor the only America in the Western Hemisphere.

Also, this wish is made without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith, or sexual preference of the wishee, not to exclude joint tax-payers filing singly.

To All My Christian Friends:

Blessed Advent, Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year!"

I've Not Suffered Death by Paperwork (Yet)

2009-12-12T21:07:00.000-08:00

Buying a home has turned out to be a bigger pain-in-the-rear than I had imagined. Our offer was accepted on November 30th. The inspection, however, revealed problems with the roof, siding, and foundation. The good news is that the structural engineering inspection found that the foundation issues are minor. The bad news is that the roof and the siding need to be replaced. During our initial negotiations, the seller had forwarded an appraisal done in mid-September claiming that the roof, siding, and foundation were all in "good" condition. Since this turns out NOT to be the case, we're attempting to negotiate a fairly hefty price cut. We're willing to eat a certain amount of the cost of the needed repairs but not all of it. It remains to be seen whether we'll be able to come to agreement on a fair price for this home given its current condition.

Happy Thanksgiving!

2009-11-26T10:04:00.000-08:00

Sorry to be so quiet here lately, we've been bogged down in negotiations on a house purchase. We've been going back & forth with the seller for a week & a half. We almost walked away from the deal twice now but submitted our "final, final, did we mention- final?" offer yesterday at the same price as our 2 most recent counters. Ugh, what a pain! The seller has been stuck on the price the home was appraised at back in August. We told them that we were not bidding on what it was worth last summer but rather where we feel the market is heading in the near future. If the seller truly believes that they can find another buyer willing to pay a higher price than us, by all means tell us no. But the home has been on the market for 45 days already so I really don't think they've got folks beating down their door. They need to sell the home more than we need to buy it (it's an estate sale). We're not trying to take advantage of the situation, we just don't want to overpay given the very real risk of a further market decline. But enough real estate venting!

Hope you all are enjoying a nice holiday!

Funny Response to Writing by Formula Assignment

2009-11-11T08:38:00.000-08:00

I wish I could claim credit for this but it's one of Miss Scarlet's little friends. The girl is 8 and is enrolled in 3rd grade through a virtual charter school.

Her assignment was to write a 3+ paragraph persuasive letter using the following formula: first paragraph states the position and 3 reasons supporting it, the middle paragraph(s) provide at least one detail for each reason and acknowledges/counters the reader's concern, and the last paragraph restates the position/reasons and calls for action.

Her father is the one overseeing her work for the charter school and apparently he was getting a bit frustrated by how long it was taking the girl to complete the practice letters. For the last practice letter, he asked her to write a persuasive letter on whether she should have to do any more practice letters to be scored on a 4 point scale. Here's what she came up with:

"Dear Daddy,

I see that you are frustrated with me, but I think this should be the last
one. My reasons for feeling this way include, I am giving three reasons, my
details will support my reasons, and my reasons support my position.

First, I am giving three reasons. Because I gave three reasons, I believe I
should get a four. Moving on, my details support my reasons. For example,
I believe I should get a four because I gave three reasons. Last but not
least, my reasons support my position. Here is an example of a reason that
does not support my position: I love puppies. If you thought that I would
forget to acknowledge your concern, look here I did it!

I saw that you were a little upset with me, but I think this should be the
last one. This is why: my reasons supported my position, my details
supported my reasons, and I gave three reasons. Please make my score a
four.

Love,
[name]"

Isn't that a hoot? I'm so glad that her father gave permission for sharing it!

Why Does this Not Surprise Me?

2009-10-23T12:16:00.000-07:00

One of the subject areas I feel was majorly lacking in my own formal education is economics. My high school offered an elective course in economics my senior year but I did not have room for it in my schedule. My college alma mater had a well-respected economics program but again I did not take any of its courses. So whatever I know about the topic comes from what I've learned on my own or from my parents, both of whom were economics majors undergrad and pursued graduate studies in business administration.

So I was interested to see a thread on the Well-Trained Mind bulletin board about materials to teach kids basic economics. Several of the books recommended have been ones I've used with Miss Scarlet- The Everything Kids Money Book by Diane Mayr, The Story of Money by Betsy Maestro, and If You Made a Million by David Schwartz.

There was one title mentioned in the thread that looked really intriguing: Capitalism for Kids: Growing Up to Be Your Own Boss by Karl Hess. I read a review of the book that made me think it would provide a great counterbalance to all the negative "spin" that we've been hearing in the elite media (e.g. the media blitz promoting Michael Moore's new movie).

Since I'm the frugal type, I checked the availability of the book at libraries in my area. First I checked the county inter-library loan system. Nope. Then I widened my search to the San Francisco public library since I drop my DH off in the city every weekday morning. Nada. Then I checked the Santa Clara county system even though that would be a bit of a schlep down the peninsula. Zilch. Turns out that the closest library that carries the book is 20 miles away, across the bay down in southern Alameda county.

Sadly, I'm less than shocked that none of the libraries in San Francisco, San Mateo, or Santa Clara counties carry a kids' economics book with a pro-capitalism message...

P.S. I'm most likely going to purchase the "Business, Economics, and Entrepreneurship" course from Bluestocking Press that includes Capitalism for Kids plus 2 other titles & a teachers' guide.

Not Everything That's Wrong Should Be Illegal

2009-10-16T12:59:00.000-07:00

A Louisiana justice of the peace is in hot water after declining to perform a civil wedding for an interracial couple and referring the couple to a colleague.

While I totally disagree with Keith Bardwell's refusal, I'm leery of the government forcing justices of the peace to perform weddings to which they object & not allowing them to refer the couples to a colleague. What if the situation were not an interracial couple but a homosexual one? Should the government force a Christian justice of the peace to officiate against his/her deeply held religious beliefs? At least 11 justices in Massachusetts resigned after that state legalized homosexual marriage and then-Governor Mitt Romney told justices they could not refuse to perform them.

What's so wrong about allowing a justice to say, "sorry, I can't help you but you can go to my colleague so-and-so"? The inconvenience of the couple having to go elsewhere should not outweigh the conscience right of the justice of the peace.

Do I think Keith Bardwell is flat-out wrong in his stance on interracial marriage? Absolutely. But he and other justices of the peace should have the right to refuse to marry a couple for whatever reason so long as another justice can be found to perform the marriage. Otherwise, Christian justices may very well have to choose between keeping their job and following their religion.

Look Beyond the Hype to the Actual Data

2009-10-14T11:30:00.000-07:00

How's this for a headline:

"99.6% of homeschoolers studied have had no involvement whatsoever with the child welfare authorities and 97.8% of homeschool graduates are employed or pursuing higher education/training"

Not going to sell very many papers, is it? Nor will it do much to support the governmental push in the U.K. to dramatically increase regulation of homeschooling in that country.

But what's the actual headline found in The Guardian?

"Children educated at home at severe disadvantage, study shows."

I wish that the above were a joke, but unfortunately it's real.

Graham Badman, the former education director of the town of Kent, recently provided a report to the U.K. Parliament committee for children, schools, and families on home education in Britain. The review looked at the status of 1,220 children (out of an estimated 40,000-60,000+ U.K. homeschoolers) from 74 local authorities (no info on how those were chosen).

The report claimed that:

"while 0.2% of children in the UK population were known to social services, the figure was 0.4% among those who were educated at home....The percentage of home-educated children who are not in employment, education or training [NEET] is more than four times the proportion in the national population".

First of all, the Financial Times in August quoted a report from the Department for Children, Schools and Families saying that the "NEET" rate in the U.K. is 16%. That would be almost EIGHT TIMES the rate found for homeschool graduates. I find it incredibly hard to believe that the NEET rate would plummet from 16% down to 0.5% over the past 2 months. The most plausible explanation is that at least one of the two government reports has an incorrect number. If I had to estimate the true rate, I'd say it has got to be closer to the 16% than the 0.5%.

But let's suppose for the moment that the claims made in the Badman report were accurate. Does a 0.4% rate of involvement with CPS (note that it includes the numerous investigations in which the parents are ultimately declared innocent) and a 2.2% NEET rate actually warrant the term "severe"?

To put the numbers into context, the teen pregnancy rate in the U.K. is TEN TIMES higher than the rate given for CPS involvement among homeschoolers. That number is nearly double what it was in 1990 (unlike the U.S. where the rate has declined 45% over the same time frame). Government ministers called the teen pregnancy rate "disappointing".

I would personally argue that the government has its adjectives backwards...

Awesome Chemistry Resources Link

2009-09-25T20:38:00.000-07:00

Our Rainbow Resource order finally came the other day and we got started on our study of chemistry. Miss Scarlet has been enjoying The Elements by Ellen McHenry. She's also been having fun doing experiments from the Thoms & Kosmos Chem 2000 chemistry set. We started off with simple "kitchen chemistry" ones- writing "invisible ink" messages using lemon juice & vinegar. Next week we're planning to try a more ambitious "invisible ink" involving Prussian Blue. Wish us luck!

While I was surfing the web, I came across an awesome page from another homeschooling mom with lots of great chemistry resources. Thanks, Jimmie!

We Appreciate Your Husband's Sacrifice, Ma'am, But You'll Need to Leave the Country

2009-09-17T11:37:00.000-07:00

A young Marine sergeant stationed in Okinawa fell in love with a Japanese woman, dated her for a year, proposed, and then got deployed to Iraq. Two weeks after he left, they learned she was pregnant and arranged to marry by proxy. Their marriage was legal in Japan and recognized by the Marine Corps. However, one month after the proxy marriage and before he had a chance to see his new bride again in person, he died in the line of duty. His widow wants to immigrate to the U.S. so that her in-laws can help her raise the baby. U.S. immigration law, however, considers the proxy marriage invalid because they never saw each other after the ceremony to consummate the marriage.

Sometimes our legal system can be really stupid. She was pregnant with his kid when they married but the marriage was "unconsummated"? Regardless of whether one believes the couple ought to have had sex prior to being legally married, the baby is living proof they did. There is no reason to believe that the couple would not have engaged in it again after his return had they been given the opportunity. The fact that he got killed before they had the chance should not invalidate the marriage. The family has sacrificed enough without being put into legal limbo because of a technicality...

When Good News Really Isn't

2009-09-14T17:28:00.000-07:00

I'm currently reading a fascinating book by Dr. Daniel Koretz, a psychometrician at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, called Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us. In the book, Dr. Koretz talks a lot about the pitfalls of high-stakes standardized testing schemes such as those required by the No Child Left Behind Act. He devotes an entire chapter to the topic of score inflation.

I was reminded of this book today when I read an article in the New York Times about how New York State has reduced the passing score for its math test from 60% correct in 2006 to a mere 44% today. An investigation by the NYT found that a student who randomly guesses on all question now has an 89% chance of receiving a passing score.

Federal tests do not show the same kind of dramatic increase in passing rates that the New York state tests have in recent years. In fact, math scores have been stagnant on the 8th grade NAEP exams since 2003 and 4th graders have only made minimal progress. SAT math scores in the state have actually dropped by 18 points since 2005.

The jump in scores on state tests helped 97% of schools in New York City earn ratings of "A" or "B" on their state Dept. of Ed. report cards. Does anybody seriously believe that 97% of NYC schools actually are doing a good job at educating their students? Nearly 40% of all students in the city do not complete high school, including 49% of African-Americans and 52% of Latinos. Nearly 3/4 of those who do manage to graduate and enroll in college require remediation in at least one subject.

Families deserve to know the truth about how their students are faring. It is unethical to lower the bar and then trumpet the "progress" that has been made :-(

Where's the Personal Responsibility in the Health Reform Discussion?

2009-09-12T10:39:00.000-07:00

If every American made 4 simple lifestyle changes, 78% of the $2.1 trillion spent on healthcare last year would be unnecessary. These lifestyle changes would eliminate 91% of diabetes cases, 81% of heart attacks, 50% of strokes, and 36% of cancers. Not having to pay to treat preventable disease would leave plenty of money to subsidize coverage for low- to moderate-income folks.

These lifestyle changes are not difficult to understand or even to do for somebody who's sufficiently motivated. They are:

don't use tobacco
eat a healthy diet rich in produce, whole grains, and lean proteins
exercise 30 minutes per day
maintain a healthy weight

Sounds obvious, but fewer than 1 in 10 individuals actually manage to do all four. And that is one of the main reasons why my family had to pay $1500 for one month's worth of COBRA coverage.

Yes, genetics do play a role in body weight. We should focus more on eating healthy and exercising than the number on the scale. But while genetics might make someone 25-30 lbs. overweight, they're not going to make someone morbidly obese. That's the result of poor lifestyle choices. Genes haven't changed in the past two decades, but the percentage of the population who are morbidly obese has increased dramatically. And the rest of us are paying up the wazoo to subsidize the diseases caused by poor lifestyle choices :-(

How the Home Educator Recognizes it's Time to Move on to the Next Subject

2009-09-04T12:57:00.000-07:00

The task in her grammar workbook was to write creative sentences imitating the structure of sentences from literature. The last one in the section was to imitate the following model:

"It appeared in the dusk as a crouched and shadowy animal, silent, gloomy, capable." - from "An Underground Episode" by Edmund Ware.

After being reprimanded several times for not focusing on her grammar lesson, Miss Scarlet finally dictated the following:

"The mother wrote in the morning like a terrifying and furious monster, mean, horrible, and abusive."

Somebody better call CPS to report the horrible abuse of teaching grammar...

Baby #19 on the Way for the Duggars

2009-09-01T12:18:00.000-07:00

Their 18th is only 8 months old, but Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar have announced that she is 12 weeks along with baby #19. Wow!

My youngest, Princess P., is the same age and I can't even begin to think about having another one so soon. I'm still adjusting to the 3 I've got now! DH does talk about wanting a fourth but I'm taking things one baby at a time. With Miss Scarlet and Rusty, I didn't start feeling like I was up to the challenge of having an additional child until about their second birthday.

Of course, had God seen fit to bless us with a new pregnancy sooner than that, we would've found a way to make things work. I do strongly believe that babies should be seen as blessings rather than burdens. But I just can't begin to imagine how Michelle Duggar and other moms who have very large & closely spaced families manage it.

"Ethical Diversity" or Moral Relativism?

2009-09-01T00:45:00.000-07:00

I have set up a notification at my local library such that I receive an email whenever they acquire a book on the subject of homeschooling. One recent acquisition was Write These Laws on Your Children: Inside the World of Conservative Christian Homeschooling by Robert Kunzman of Indiana University. I was curious to read it even though I am more moderate in my political beliefs that the profiled families and of course am a Catholic rather than an Evangelical Protestant.

Kunzman is very concerned in the book with whether homeschooled kids get to encounter what he calls "ethical diversity". It's not enough in his view to merely expose kids to differing beliefs; he wants parents to:

"present conflicting perspectives- that they themselves reject -in the strongest possible light, to allow their children the opportunity to genuinely consider them as potentially reasonable alternatives."

He criticizes homeschoolers who

"emphasize why [they] believe those alternate worldviews are wrong".

Rather, home educators ought to

"provide the best case for [other worldviews], showing that they have points worth considering, even though at the end of the day you feel they're incomplete or even wrong?"

First of all, I don't believe for one second that government-run schools in this country present Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular in the strongest possible light or provide the best case for it. Just look at the treatment of the Church in the typical world history course. So it's hypocritical to criticize homeschoolers for not presenting alternative worldviews in a positive enough manner.

But leaving aside the bias in government-run schools for the moment, I take issue with Kunzman's basic premise. There's a difference between recognizing that we live in a pluralistic society where people are free to believe what they choose, and saying that all those beliefs are equally valid & should be presented as such. I reject moral relativism and I am going to teach my kids through the prism of our family's Catholic faith. I don't consider other worldviews to be "potentially reasonable alternatives" with "points worth considering" as if I'm merely choosing between different flavors of ice cream. This is eternal salvation that's on the line.

Do I fully support others' freedom to hold a different worldview? Absolutely. God gave each of us free will, and we have the liberty to choose our own paths. Christ warned us that the way is narrow and that only a few would find it. We should therefore not be surprised that there are so many competing worldviews. The Founding Fathers in their wisdom granted us Americans the legal protection to follow whatever religion we choose for ourselves. Respect for pluralism, however, does not mean that I don't consider other worldviews to be, quite simply, wrong.

I'm not going to be all wishy-washy and pretend that there is no objective right or wrong, just whatever's right for each of us individually. In Kunzman's chapter on the Protestant "Generation Joshua" youth civics program, he makes it clear that he disapproves of such an "adversarial", "narrow", and "dogmatic" view and he prefers one filled with "moral shades of gray", where "reasonable disagreement might exist on important issues." Christ, however, framed things in black-or-white terms: "He who is not with me is against me" (Matthew 12:30). That's the lens through which I'm going to teach my children.

Kunzman's book was published by Beacon Press, which apparently is the publishing arm of the liberal Unitarian Universalist Church. I'm not sure if Kunzman is Unitarian himself [Updated: he appears to be a member of the UU Church of Bloomington] but certainly he shares their enthusiasm for "ethical diversity" and dislike of moral absolutes. It may strike him as "adversarial" for me to teach my worldview as right and all other worldviews as wrong. But Jesus came into this world in order to be the adversary of sin. My responsibility as a parent is to do the best I can to raise my children to be Christ's disciples. As St. Paul wrote to the Galatians, "Am I now trying to win the approval of men, or of God? Or am I trying to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ."

More Proof that Homeschoolers Are Weird

2009-08-27T14:09:00.000-07:00

The task in her grammar workbook (Story Grammar for Elementary School by Don & Jenny Kilgallon) was to write a sentence of her own imitating the structure of the following model:

"Little Man, a very small six year old and a most finicky dresser, brushed his hair." - Mildred D. Taylor from Song of the Trees

My not-quite-seven year old offered the following:

"Cerberus, a three-headed dog and a most terrifying monster, guarded the entrance to the Underworld."

I'm pretty sure that the typical student at a government-run school would not have come up with that particular sentence just out of the blue. So yeah, homeschooled kids can be pretty weird at times.

But weird in a good way :-)

My Take: Home-school Parents Deserve Freedom from Unwarranted Government Intrusion

2009-08-26T21:17:00.000-07:00

Can you imagine the public outcry and indignation if an elected official called for mandatory home visits and regularly scheduled conferences with a social worker for all children of say, never-married mothers? After all, the politician could point to a handful of highly publicized tragedies and claim that justifies the gross intrusion of privacy for millions of families. Are our politicians afraid of the baby mama lobby?

If women insist on raising children outside of wedlock, they should be proud to show everyone how good a job they are doing, right? If they can’t, or won’t, perhaps their children really need to be rescued, and the mom sent to jail for neglect and/or abuse- shouldn't they?

Do you think any respectable newspaper would publish an op-ed piece calling for the implementation of the above policy?

Why, then, is it okay for school board member Peggy Boyce of Saugatuck, MI to call for government intrusion into families' lives for no other reason than their decision to homeschool their children?

If we would (rightly) be outraged by a politician considering all unwed moms to be guilty of child abuse and/or neglect until proven innocent, why aren't we outraged when it happens to homeschoolers?

By all means, child welfare authorities ought to investigate cases of suspected child abuse and neglect. But there needs to be some legitimate grounds for suspicion, not just the simple act of homeschooling. One cannot just go about calling for the government to invade the privacy of millions of American homes and to subject millions of U.S. children to interrogations by social workers without one heckuva good reason.

And the fact that Ms. Boyce in her not unbiased opinion considers homeschooling to be a "farce" simply isn't good enough.

Considering a Road Trip to Sacramento...

2009-08-24T16:04:00.000-07:00

I've never been the kind of girl to attend a protest march or political rally. Just not my kind of thing, KWIM? Yes, I have strong opinions but to take time out of my busy life to go stand around with a bunch of other folks shouting slogans and waving signs? No, thanks.

When I first heard about the "tea party" movement last spring, I'll have to admit I rolled my eyes a bit. Was I mad about the Feds using tax dollars to bail out corporate losers in the financial services and automotive industries? Absolutely. But while I sympathized with the anger behind the tea parties, I didn't think much of the idea of protesting.

At this point, however, I'm so fed up with the whole Obamacare thing. I'm sick of being accused of racism and/or classism and/or being un-Christian and/or a Nazi and/or wanting people to die in the streets for simply having well-founded concerns about the quality of government-run healthcare. It's like the proponents are unable to make a legitimate case for their plan so they're resorting to ad hominem attacks on opponents. And conservatives are the ones being accused of wanting to stifle legitimate debate on the issue? Give me a break!

So I'm now seriously considering heading up to Sacramento on Friday for the national kickoff of the Tea Party Express bus tour. Not because I watch Fox News (we don't have cable or satellite). Not because I listen to talk radio (can't stand it). I'm not even a Republican (proud "decline to state" registeree).

But because I don't want my kids paying exorbitant taxes for mediocre government-run healthcare. It's time to stop being part of the "silent majority" against Obamacare and start speaking out publicly.

No Wonder I Was So Cranky Yesterday...

2009-08-22T10:43:00.000-07:00

I was coming down with mastitis :-(

I'd been feeling a bit dizzy and weak yesterday afternoon before I went to the park, but had thought it was because I had had a light lunch. So I ate a piece of fruit to get my blood sugar up and didn't think too much of it. But by the evening, I had a low grade fever and two hard red spots on my breast. I drank a whole bunch of water and went to bed early but I'm still feeling lousy this morning. So now I'm off to the urgent care center for some antibiotics before it gets any worse.

With my oldest, I got a really bad case of mastitis and wound up in the ER with a 104 degree temp, ugh!

Dear Overprivileged, Ubertrendily Dressed Park Moms...

2009-08-21T16:48:00.001-07:00

I should not have butt into your blathering on and on about how people should boycott Whole Foods because its CEO does not support government-run healthcare.

I should have kept my temper in check and not let you know just how bad government healthcare REALLY is.

It really isn't any of my business how clueless you, like virtually all civilians, are about the massive shortcomings of military healthcare.

I should not have told you about the long wait times, how the patient has NO choice about whom to see, how much of a nightmare getting a referral to a specialist is, how routine procedures like a second trimester ultrasound are simply not done, how providers switch prescriptions to cheaper but less effective medications, and how poor the overall quality of care provided is.

I should not have pointed out that Canadians who can afford to travel to the U.S. for treatment often pay out of pocket to do so rather than waiting in the ridiculously long government lines.

I should have kept my mouth shut about that British woman who was forced to give birth ON THE SIDEWALK because some bureaucrat refused to send an ambulance for her when she went into labor early (HT: "Fausta's Blog").

I should have just sat there listening to you in your designer clothes with your overpriced Bugaboo strollers blather on cluelessly ad nauseum about the evil Whole Foods executive who wants to deny Americans health insurance.

That would've been the polite thing to do.

But I just couldn't keep silent any longer...

New Study: Homeschoolers Average in the 86th Percentile on Standardized Tests

2009-08-10T21:40:00.000-07:00

Interesting results out from the followup to the 1998 Rudner study on the standardized test scores of homeschooled students. Homeschoolers scored nearly 40 percentage points above their government-run school counterparts on the Reading subtest and 34 percentage points above on the math subtest. Results did not vary signficantly by gender, family income, amount of money spent on homeschooling curricula, whether the parent held a state teacher's credential, or the level of government regulation required by the particular state. The education level of the parents did affect the results; however even when neither parent had a college degree the kids still scored in the 83rd percentile, well above the comparable results for government-run school kids.

Our family did not participate in this particular study as we've not yet had my oldest take a standardized test (she's only 6).

Vacation, All I Ever Wanted...

2009-07-21T08:20:00.000-07:00

I'm off this afternoon to visit my folks back East. DH couldn't come because he just started his new job a month ago. My mother-in-law is gracious enough to fly back with me in August and then stay for a few days to visit. But on the way out it'll be just me and the three kids on the plane, yikes! Thank goodness it's a non-stop flight.

An Inflection Point for Homeschooling?

2009-07-19T11:10:00.000-07:00

I had an interesting conversation yesterday with a fellow guest at a BBQ celebrating the engagement of one of DH's grad school buddies. This gentleman had a PhD. in Education from Stanford and is a past recipient of the prestigious Soros fellowship. He was on sabbatical from his job as an ed school professor to write a book about the persecution of his grandfather by Josef Stalin.

Anyways, the conversation turned to the subject of homeschooling and to my surprise, he was extremely in favor of the practice. He went on and on about the benefits of home education and the evils of compulsory schooling. Turns out he's a big fan of John Taylor Gatto. I had to leave partway through the conversation to deal with some issue with the kids but it made a big impression on my DH. My DH has heard most of the arguments before from me; however, I suspect it was more persuasive coming from someone with a doctorate and professorship in the field of education.

This conversation made me wonder if our society is at an "inflection point" in the acceptance of homeschooling. When somebody who is a professor of education starts approvingly quoting Gatto's work, that's a sign that home education has turned from being a fringe movement to a serious part of the discussion among the eduwonks.

Stop, it's Grammar Time!

2009-07-14T17:12:00.000-07:00

To be frank, I've always felt that grammar instruction was akin to flossing one's teeth- something that it very important but not enjoyable.

I am grateful that back when I was going through, my school did still explicitly teach grammar. My youngest brother came of age during the "whole language" fad and did not receive much in the way of grammar instruction. I got a first-hand look at how his writing suffered when he asked me for feedback on his college honors thesis. While one would expect a certain number of errors in a draft, I was taken aback by how virtually every sentence needed one or more mistakes corrected, meanings clarified, and/or awkward phrasing revised. And this was a bright kid who'd received decent grades in honors English classes and a respectable score on the verbal portion of the SAT.

While I recognize the importance of teaching grammar, I've found the traditional method to be, well, rather tedious. I can absolutely understand why the "whole language" approach seemed so appealing on the surface. WL did throw the baby out with the bathwater, but critics of traditional grammar are correct when they call it boring.

Two years ago in her kindergarten year, Miss Scarlet did a highly compacted version of the 1st & 2nd grade book of Jessie Wise's First Language Lessons for the Well-Trained Mind. She did not need as much repetition as FLL built into the lessons plus many of the topics we skipped entirely as she had learned them years earlier (days of the week, months of the year, etc). So we got through the whole book in 7 months.

I had heard raves about the old Catholic version of Voyages in English so I made the mistake of ordering the 3rd grade book sight unseen. When it arrived, I found it was too repetitive of the content in FLL for Miss Scarlet. I had originally planned on exchanging it for the 5th grade VIE book but I ended up deciding to keep it in case I wanted to use it with one or more of my other kids.

After shelving VIE, we planned on enrolling her in the Stanford EPGY Language Arts & Writing course, which has a grammar component. Unfortunately, we were unable to do so because of the crisis in the financial services industry and the near-collapse of my DH's then-employer. Needless to say, we could not afford pricey online classes with all the uncertainty surrounding his employment situation.

While I was debating what to use instead of EPGY, I had Miss Scarlet do copywork and narration exercises using Susan Wise Bauer's Writing With Ease program. She also finished up some of the various workbooks I'd used as supplements to FLL such as Language of God for Little Folks Level A from Catholic Heritage Curricula, No Boring Practice, Please! Sentence Structure from Scholastic, and Reading-Thinking Skills 4 for Young Catholics from Seton.

I looked at a number of different grammar programs- the 4th grade book of First Language Lessons, Primary Language Lessons, English for the Thoughtful Child, Queen Homeschool Language Lessons, Simply Grammar, Michael Clay Thompson's Grammar Island, etc. -but while these all seemed like solid options, they did not jump out at me as being what I really wanted.

Then last week, while reading the "Kitchen Table Math" blog, I came across a recommendation for a grammar series by Don Killgallon. I really liked the concept behind the books, which is teaching grammar by having students write sentences imitating ones from literary classics. For a review with a more detailed explanation of this, click here. This approach reminded me a bit of the description I'd read of the ancient Greek progymnasmata exercises. I'd considered using the Classical Writing Aesop book but that one had seemed like it would require too much in the way of writing for my DD's motor skills (always a concern when using an above-grade level program). The elementary level Killgallon book looked like there was much less printing and more underlining, matching, circling the correct answer, and so on. It was relatively inexpensive, so I decided to give it a try.

I have received the copy of Story Grammar I ordered and I'm really excited about it. My goal in teaching grammar is not for my kids to score well on standardized tests but rather to help them become good writers. I have high hopes that the Killgallon book will assist me in progressing towards that goal.

Wise Words from a Serendipitous Book Find

2009-07-11T17:15:00.000-07:00

One of the things I love about my library's on-line book catalog is how it allows me to discover interesting books that I might otherwise never know about. While looking up the record for The New Global Student by Maya Frost (an excellent title that I plan to blog about soon), I saw that it was tagged with the subject "experiential learning". As I'm a big fan of that practice, I decided to see what other books in the catalog were similarly tagged.

That's how I discovered Peripheral Visions: Learning Along the Way by Mary Catherine Bateson. I didn't realize it when I requested the book, but Dr. Bateson is the daughter of famed anthropologist Margaret Mead. I've only read the first two chapters of Dr. Bateson's book, but it's been excellent so far as she is quite a gifted storyteller (guess the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree).

I was particularly struck by the following passage:

"The quality of improvisation characterizes more and more lives today, lived in uncertainty, full of the inklings of alternatives. In a rapidly changing and interdependent world, single models are less likely to be viable and plans more likely to go awry....Adaptation comes out of encounters with novelty that may seem chaotic....The improvisatory artist cannot be sure whether a given improvisation will stand as a work of art or be rejected as an aberration....

This same ambiguity sets new tasks for parents and teachers. Instead of passing on hallowed certainties and maintaining the status quo, they must make childhood an open-ended introduction to a process of continual change in which self-observation can become the best of teachers. If we knew the future of a particular child, we might be able to prepare that child with all the necessary skills and attitudes, and we might say at a given moment that the preparation is completed and it is time for real life to commence. That situation, however, is long gone, if indeed it ever existed. Rarely is it possible to study all the instructions to a game before beginning to play, or to memorize the manual before turning on the computer. The excitement of improvisation lies not only in the risk involved but in the new ideas, as heady as the adrenaline of performance, that seem to come from nowhere. When the necessary tasks of learning cannot be completed in the portion of the life cycle set aside for them, they have to join life's other tasks and be done concurrently. We can carry on the process of learning in everything we do, like a mother balancing her child on one hip as she goes about her work with the other hand or uses it to open the doors of the unknown. Living and learning, we become ambidextrous."

A big goal of my homeschooling is to incorporate it into our family's life as Dr. Bateson talks about in the above passage. I discussed a bit about how I do that in this post.

I also agree with Dr. Bateson about the importance of flexibility and creative thinking. As Daniel Pink points out in his superb book A Whole New Mind:Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age, my kids are going to need so-called "right brained" skills in order to compete in this globalized economy. They may work in jobs that don't even exist today- certainly I know folks who work in jobs that did not exist when I was a child. Change is something they're going to need to know how to deal with- if they cannot figure out a way to adapt to changing circumstances, they're going to get left behind.

C'mon Google, Fix the Blogger "Scheduled Posts" Function Already!

2009-07-08T15:39:00.001-07:00

They've known about the issue for weeks, and a fix was promised by yesterday. I've got a couple of posts in limbo land and it's too big a pain to rewrite them into new posts.

Homeschooling for My Mr. Mechanical

2009-07-08T06:25:00.000-07:00

Do you ever get visions where you can vividly imagine just what your child will be like several years in the future?

I can just see my Rusty as a skinny red-headed 'tween going nuts building stuff here:

and here.

Not to mention First Lego League, Destination Imagination, The Tech Museum Challenge, and the Odyssey of the Mind.

If the curators were to permit it, I have this feeling that he'd be absolutely over the moon to help restore the historic military equipment at the Military Vehicle Technology Foundation.

He is only 3 1/2 so it'll be a while before he's old enough to do any of this. But I just know that he's the type of kid who'd enjoy tinkering with whatever machines he could get his hands upon.

Amen to That, Sister!

2009-07-07T18:33:00.000-07:00

I've been skimming through the 14 pages of comments to the "Scaling Back Career for Baby" post on Lisa Belkin's "Motherlode" blog at the New York Times website. Most of them have fallen into the predictable two camps of pro- and anti-SAHM. Yawn.

But then on comment #255, I came across this gem from a commenter named "Gail":

"The true crisis in this country is the waste of intellectual capital due to the difficulty women have in re-entering the work force after raising children. Our investment in the next generations growth and development is to be applauded, but once that job is done, the women and men who stepped off the career ladder should be able to again contribute. The U.S. is missing out on the productivity of (mostly) women, many with advanced degrees and high skills, due to the difficulty of reentry."

This is so true! There are so many moms (and some dads too) who have so much to offer a potential employer but get looked down upon because of their decision to sequence their career in order to raise a family. It's very discouraging that this is still the case three decades after feminism was supposed to free women to make their own individual life decisions.

There's a fabulous article over at the "Your On Ramp" website called "5 Reasons Why Moms Returning to the Workforce Make the Best Employees". Too bad the author is preaching to the choir because it's a message that hiring managers need to hear!

Planning for the Upcoming School Year

2009-07-07T08:42:00.000-07:00

We homeschool year-round so the division between one school year and the next is an arbitrary one. I usually pick the Monday after return from our annual trek back East to visit relatives.

As Rusty will be turning 4, I've decided it's time to start some gentle preschool work with him. I'm not planning to do kindergarten until 2011 because his birthday is November and I think he could probably benefit from the "redshirting". Also that way both kids would be on the same part of the cycle for history & science.

With Rusty, I've decided to try the first activity book of the Core Knowledge preschool sequence. I feel that given his speech & language delay it would probably be a good idea to follow a formal preschool curriculum even though I did not use one with Miss Scarlet. As his speech therapist puts it, some kids just need explicit instruction for stuff that most kids pick up on their own. I liked the look of the CK preschool book and the price was certainly reasonable. Miss Scarlet decided to play teacher when the book arrived and did a few of the activities with Rusty. Some were too easy for him but others were on the challenging side. So overall, I think it's the right level.

Miss Scarlet will be "officially" in second grade but she's all over the map in terms of what she's doing. It's tricky trying to figure out what will be challenging but not too frustrating.

For religion, she's going to be finishing up the 2nd grade Faith and Life book (we had to shelve it around Christmastime in order to ensure we completed the parish CCD book We Believe by Sadlier prior to her 1st Communion). Once we're done with that, we'll continue on with the 3rd grade F&L volume.

For math, we're currently in the middle of the Level C book in Right Start. I'm trying to decide whether to continue on in that program when we finish or switch to Singapore. I really liked Level B of RS but am less happy with C. I had her take the Singapore placement tests to see where she would be in that program. She got everything right on the 1B test except for the two subtraction word problems. She could solve subtraction equations but got stumped by the word problem aspect. Right Start is a bit weak on word problems so even if I don't switch programs entirely I'm going to have her work through the Singapore Challenging Word Problems books. On the Singapore 2A test, she had trouble with the word problems again and also the multiplication & division equations. So my other math goal for the year is to have her memorize the multiplication table.

For science, we're going to be studying chemistry, and I think we're going to try The Elements by Ellen McHenry. I did not use a formal curriculum with science in the past but I'm less confident about my ability to properly teach chemistry. I did take chemistry in both high school and college; however, I don't feel like it's a subject that lends itself as easily to "winging it" with library resources as biology, geology, and astronomy did.

In history, we're going to be continuing doing unit studies in a roughly chronological order. We're finishing up our study of ancient India right now. Future units include ancient Greece, ancient Rome, Islam, the Vikings, Mesoamerican civilizations, medieval times, feudal Japan, and so on.

For English, I'm going to continue working through the Writing With Ease workbook for copywork, dictation, and narration exercises. I'm also going to try Story Grammar for Elementary School by Don & Jenny Killgallon. Thanks to Catherine Johnson at the "Kitchen Table Math" blog for the recommendation! Finally, I'm going to have Miss Scarlet do the Seton Reading-Thinking Skills 5 for Young Catholics workbook. It's great for vocabulary building and she really seemed to enjoy the grade 4 book when we did that one.

For spelling, I'm going to continue using the lists from the Words Their Way book. I discovered this one at my local library and really like how the lists are organized. The lists aren't groups of random words to be memorized but rather grouped by some feature. For example, the most recent list Miss Scarlet did had words with an unaccented final syllable ending in -r (e.g. motor, farmer, similar and so on).

For music appreciation, we're going to be using How to Introduce Your Child to Classical Music in Fifty-Two Easy Lessons from Emmanuel Books. I already had most of the pieces either in my CD collection or on my "I should really get a copy of this" list (and here's my excuse to get off my duff and acquire them!) The rest I should hopefully be able to borrow from my library.

For art, I'm leaning towards enrolling her in the local parks & recreation drawing class. Plus we'll continue to take field trips to local art museums.

For home economics, we're going to finish up Level 1 of Pearables Home Economics for Homeschoolers and then start on the Future Christian Homemakers Handbook. I'm not wildly thrilled with the tone in both books that the traditional homemaker role is the only proper one to which Christian girls ought to aspire. Yes, it's a very valuable one- in most cases the ideal one when a woman's children are young. But I certainly consider it a season in my life. I was employed full-time in the past and plan to resume my career at least on a part-time basis when my children are older and more independent. I want my girls to know there's nothing wrong with wanting both a career and a family, it'll probably just take some sequencing of the former in order to give the latter its proper priority. Okay, I'll get down off my soapbox now :-p

Anyways, I do like the actual lessons contained in the home ec titles mentioned so we're using them. Miss Scarlet will also continue participating in 4-H. She wants to do the baking project again and also the sewing project. That one will take special permission since she'll be younger than 8. If I can get her skilled enough on the sewing machine by the fall I think they may let her.

I think I've covered everything I'm planning to do in our homeschool next year.

Proof It Really Is a Buyer's Market

2009-06-29T10:48:00.000-07:00

We went to a party a couple weeks ago at the home of one of DH's grad school classmates, who lives in one of the towns where we're househunting. DH's friend bought the house one year ago this month. So when a listing came into my email for a home in the same neighborhood, I decided to check public records on the friend's home. I knew prices had come down quite a bit from last year, but it's really something to see it.

DH's friend paid $881.5k for a 3 BR/2.5 BA 1608 sq ft home with a pool, or roughly $550/sq ft.

This current listing is for $725k for a 4 BR/2 BA 2012 sq ft home with a pool, or roughly $360/sq ft. Now I've not actually seen the inside of this house in person, but the photos look similar to the one owned by DH's friend.

Unfortunately, we've had to postpone our purchase due to difficulty finding attractive financing. Although we've got excellent credit and a good, stable income, all the lenders we've talked to won't touch us because we have <20% to put down. A couple of the lenders we talked to want 30% and one even said 35%. So we're staying in our current rental townhouse as cramped as it is and trying to save up a larger downpayment.

An Experience is Worth 1,000 Textbook Pages

2009-06-17T11:40:00.000-07:00

Remember how I had mentioned about a month ago that I had never been to the Northwest? Well, I can now say that I've been to Oregon, Washington state, and British Columbia. DH had 3 weeks in between when he left his old position and when he begins his new one. So we decided to road trip up to Vancouver. Along the way, we saw Redwoods Natl. Park in Northern CA, Crater Lake in OR, Seattle, and Mt. Rainier Natl. Park.

Miss Scarlet checking out animal tracks on the banks of the Rogue River in OR.

Crater Lake, OR
The Science Fiction Museum in Seattle, WA designed by Frank Gehry.

Mt. Rainier Natl. Park in WA

On Overrated Rich Schools

2009-06-06T21:50:00.000-07:00

Via the "Kitchen Table Math" blog, I came across an interesting debate about "nominally high performing" schools. That is, schools located in affluent neighborhoods that score reasonably well on standardized tests because of their demographics but in reality are actually mediocre. Like the one my own children are zoned to attend, which is ranked in the top 10% statewide but the bottom 20% when compared to other schools with similar demographic profiles. I was especially struck by the following:

"Parents and school boards in affluent communities may not want to hear that the teaching in their schools is mediocre. The accountability system does not call attention to the problems of instructional quality in these schools, nor does it reinforce efforts to solve them....Unlike low-performing schools, which may be galvanized by external pressure to improve, so-called high-performing schools must often swim against a tide of complacency to generate support for change."

I get so frustrated at the perception gap in my town. "We're a California Distinguished School!" the school boasts. "We moved here because of the good schools!" beams an acquaintance. I just smile politely but inside I want to scream, "wake up and smell the coffee, people! Things aren't as hunky-dory as you all seem to believe they are!"

Laura McKenna over at the "11D" blog takes a more blase view of the problem of underperforming affluent schools:

"First of all, you should not rely on your schools to educate your kids. I spend a lot of time with my kids teaching them random things. If Jonah's doing his homework, I will be there in the room using the homework as a jumping board for my own lesson. If he does sloppy work, I make him redo it. I reteach the math lessons. We'll go up to the computer to look up a country in Africa. No school does this."

If a parent has to "afterschool" in order to make up for the academic deficiencies of the school, then what's the point of enrolling the child in the first place? Why not just homeschool and free up the child's afternoons for enrichment activities and unstructured play?

Laura follows up with a post detailing a number of the things she dislikes about her kids' school:

"Jonah's teachers have been terrible about math. They don't do enough repetition of math facts, and they just explain things really badly.
They don't do handwriting anymore, because the teachers tell me that all work will happen on laptops in the future.
Their time in specials (art, library, computers, health) is a complete waste of time.
They don't do enough writing.
They are not preparing the kids for good colleges. In fact, the head administrators seem to think that college consists of kids working in groups on laptop computers. They aren't preparing the kids for big lecture halls and blue books.
They assign book reports that consist largely of art projects that the parents complete.
They assign stupid homework like word searches and crossword puzzles."

So again my question is- if the academics are so lacking, why bother sending her kids there in the first place?

Is it "socialization"? I discussed that issue a couple weeks ago. Also, just today I was reading the newsletter from my town mothers' club when I came across a humor piece in written by a woman whose oldest child is a kindergartner. Here is an excerpt from it:

"They say a parent's influence only makes a difference for about the first seven years of a child's life. Well, make that five years. As soon as they enter the stream of public education and co-mingle with the throngs, they soak up everything like a sponge: the latest YouTube videos, the trendiest fashion fads, the most in-vogue vernacular. Soon you'll find yourself made obsolete as the go-to source of all things hip and happenin' and you feel as redundant as yesterday's newspaper (wait, make that newspapers, period)."

Yeah, I think I'll take a pass on this kind of "socialization" of my kids.

Now, quite possibly Laura is employed outside the home and is looking to her kids' school to provide childcare while she is at her job. I don't know her situation so I'm not going to make a judgment about that one way or the other. But for me personally, I'm a full-time homemaker and (God willing) plan to stay that way for a while. So that's not a reason for me to put my kids in a subpar school. I'm only going to enroll them in a school that would do a better job educating them than I can do myself. And that's definitely not my local government-run school...

Are Homeschoolers Motivated by Racism? Pt, II

2009-06-03T06:23:00.000-07:00

The demographics of homeschooling families has come under quite a bit of scrutiny recently, particularly the findings that an increasing percentage of them are white, college-educated, and have incomes >$50,000 than in 1998 (though it is unclear whether that particular number has been adjusted for inflation). These findings play into the belief among certain critics of homeschooling that racism/ethnophobia is a major factor driving families to choose homeschool.

I discussed this topic back last December. You can read the full post here, but the key part is this:

"Is there any evidence that homeschoolers are disproportionately likely to reject integrated schools? I'm not aware of any research on the topic, but anecdotally it doesn't hold true for the homeschoolers I know personally....The school my children are zoned to attend is only 2.8% Hispanic and a mere 1.8% black. Low-income students of any race/ethnicity make up only 3.2% of the school's enrollment. So obviously my decision to homeschool is not due to a 'fear of mixing with the opposite race or class' because there are hardly any black, Hispanic, or poor kids at our neighborhood school. In fact, I'm pretty sure the percentage of black and Hispanic kids in our homeschool support group actually exceeds the percentage at the school (it's certainly not less)."

The fact that homeschoolers are disproportionately white, college-educated, and higher income means absolutely nothing if the schools they are rejecting are filled with students of the same demographic. If critics want to make an argument that homeschoolers are motivated by racism, they need to provide some data to show homeschooling rates are higher for families zoned to attend a diverse school than for those zoned for a non-diverse school.

Jesse Scaccia of the "Teacher Revised" blog asks in his post "The Case Against Homeschooling":

"How can a young person learn to appreciate other cultures if he or she doesn’t live among them?"

That is a fair question, but his proposed solution of enrolling in the government-run schools is no guarantee that a child will encounter a diverse set of classmates. The above quote from my previous post shows how faulty that assumption can be. And the school my kids are zoned to attend is hardly alone in its lack of diversity. Consider the demographics of the following government-run schools from across the country.

Located in Massachusetts, where the statewide numbers are 8% African-American, 13% Latino, and 29% low-income.

My alma mater: 2% African-American, 1% Latino. Less than 1% are low-income.
My dad's alma mater: 4% African-American (many of these are bused in from Boston through the METCO program rather than town residents), and 3% Latino (again many of these are METCO participants). 2% of the students are low-income (again most are METCO kids).

Located in Ohio, where the statewide numbers are 15% African-American, 3% Latino, and 36% low-income.

My mom's alma mater: Less than 1% African-American, 1% Latino. Less than 1% are low-income.

Located in California, where the statewide numbers are 7% African-American, 49% Latino, and 51% low-income.

The high school in one of the towns where we're considering buying a home: 1% African-American, 4% Latino. Less than 1% are low-income.
The high school in the second town where we're considering buying a home: Less than 1% African-American, 3% Latino. Less than 1% are low-income.
High school #1 in the third town where we're considering buying a home: 7% Latino, 4% African-American. 3% of the students are low-income.
High School #2 is: 8% Latino, 1% African-American. 3% are low-income.

Homeschooled children therefore are far from alone in having there be "probably only one race/background in the room" as Mr. Scaccia puts it. De facto segregation is still a real problem in the U.S. four decades after civil rights legislation put an end to de jure segregation. But regardless of how important a challenge it is for our society to overcome, it is not a homeschooling issue. So don't try to make it into one.

Bureaucrats vs. Bible Study in San Diego

2009-05-28T17:57:00.000-07:00

My mom and her church small group ministry should be glad they don't live in San Diego. Holding regular meetings in someone's home to discuss Scripture and other religious topics without paying thousands of dollars to obtain a "religious assembly" permit apparently violates county regulations there. Rev. David Jones' weekly Bible study typically attracts about 15 people, less than many ladies' bunco or guys' poker nights. But after a fender bender between vehicles belonging to one of the members of the Bible study group and a visitor to a neighbor of Jones, some busybody called county officials to complain. A code enforcement officer was sent to grill Rev. Jones about the gatherings, after which the county issued a formal citation.

Doesn't San Diego county have more important things to worry about- say the $244 million shortfall in the county budget? Or are the two things related? Christians seem to make easy shakedown targets for Californian bureaucrats these days. The city of San Francisco is trying to levy a $15 million tax on the city's Catholic archdiocese on properties transferred from one administrative arm of the archdiocese to another.

The First Amendment should protect religious groups in these types of cases, but unfortunately activist judges have been chipping away at that protection for decades. And with the election of Barack Obama, I don't foresee the situation improving in that regard any time soon in the Federal judicial system.

Let's pray that the San Diego bureaucrats stop persecuting Rev. Jones and his Bible study group!

Hats off to Those Who Made the Ultimate Sacrifice for Freedom

2009-05-25T11:28:00.000-07:00

Last year on Memorial Day I was in the midst of first trimester morning (noon, and night) sickness so I neglected to post a thank you on this blog to all those brave men and women who gave their lives so the rest of us could be free. My apologies for not feeling up to giving a more public display of gratitude!

This year, I've decided to share the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson's Concord Hymn as my Memorial Day post. Emerson was writing about the battle of Concord in the Revolutionary War but his beautiful poem is a fitting tribute to all those brave Americans who paid the ultimate price for our freedom.

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled;
Here once the embattled farmers stood;
And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps,
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream that seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We place with joy a votive stone,
That memory may their deeds redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

O Thou who made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free, --
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raised to them and Thee.

6 Going on 16: Yet Another Reason to Homeschool

2009-05-21T15:27:00.000-07:00

The other day I was walking through the park on our way home from the library with the kids when we passed two little girls who appeared to be practicing a cheerleading routine. They had bunches of flowers in their hands that they were waving around like pom-poms and they were doing high kicks, dance moves, and other cheerleader-type stuff. The two girls looked a bit younger than Miss Scarlet, who's 6 1/2. I would guess that they were 5ish. No parent/guardian was in the immediate vicinity.

What really bothered me about these two little girls was their provocative clothes and dance routine. I'm not a huge fan of midriff-baring spaghetti strap tanks and miniskirts even on teens but these were prepubescent children! And the sexualized routine just struck me as icky. Just because the Laker Girls dance like that does not mean kindergarten-age cheerleaders should, KWIM?

Miss Scarlet was fascinated, however. It struck me that if she were enrolled in a traditional school, this is what she might be learning at recess from her classmates.

I was reminded of this incident when I read a depressing article in the Rethinking Schools journal entitled "Six, Going on Sixteen". It was written by a veteran elementary schoolteacher who currently teaches a combined K/1 class. Here is what she describes happening in her classroom:

"I had 5-year-old girls vying for the attention of the 'coolest' 1st-grade boy. They would push to be near him at the sand table, and groan audibly if I didn't place them in his book group. Students in the class thought of each other as 'boyfriend' and 'girlfriend.' Freeze dance and soul train, which are usually a big hit and lots of fun, had a new dimension as students danced out the social scenarios they had seen in music videos. Performer Chris Brown was the ultimate favorite, though 50 Cent and others were also on the scene. My 5-, 6-, and 7-year-olds played out and talked about 'being in the club' and 'drinking Heineken.' They wrote about the music world in their journals and turned the block area into a radio station. Sometimes they used the hollow blocks to build a stage to perform on. Small cylindrical blocks were their microphones. This type of play was OK with me, except who was 'in' and who was 'out' was a constant social battle.
There was another aspect of this that negatively impacted our classroom community, and that was the idea of certain kids wearing the 'right' sneakers. This was among a group of boys, but the rest of the class was affected. It was something we had class meetings about, and tried to minimize the negative effects of, but it was a continuous struggle. One morning, as they walked up the stairs to our second-floor classroom, a kindergarten boy and a 1st-grade boy got in a pushing and hitting fight because the younger boy said he was wearing 'Carmelo Anthonys' and the older boy said, 'No, those are Jordans.' Another boy, whose mom refused to buy expensive sneakers, had repeated meltdowns (crying, throwing things, yelling) when other boys arrived at school with new sneakers, stylish shirts or outfits, or big plastic gold rings."

These types of narratives just reinforce our decision to homeschool. The homeschooled kids of my acquaintance don't exhibit this type of pseudosophistication. The little girls dress their age rather than looking like mini-streetwalkers. If there's dancing, it's typically something like the Hokey Pokey or ballet.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

2009-05-16T08:50:00.000-07:00

Things have been kind of crazy around here in the past couple of weeks. After a 7 month job search, DH was finally able to land a great new position. He loved his old one but his employer had gone through 7 rounds of layoffs with more rumored to be on the way. Not to mention that since the company had accepted TARP funds, they Are now bound by the Congressional rules limiting the size of his year-end bonus.

I understand anger over the AIG situation but what the average American doesn't understand is that in the financial industry, a bonus isn't really a "bonus" (i.e.. a one-time reward for unusually good performance that only a handful of folks at the company receive). It's actually more like a sales commission- an expected bit of deferred compensation to make up for the relatively low base salary. You hit or exceed your target numbers, you get your bonus. To put it into perspective, the base salary at DH's new job is more than twice what his current base is., though the total estimated comp is only somewhat more than his 2007 total comp. The only reason that Wall St. firms can get away with paying their employees a relatively low base salary is because of the bonuses. When Congress arbitrarily restricts bonuses to 1/3 of the base, anyone who can find another position is almost certainly going to leave. Those are typically the best performers, like my DH. He made his employer a ton of money last year and the first part of this one even with the bear market. He had absolutely *NOTHING* to do with the mortgage mess- why punish him for mistakes other people made?

Getting off my soapbox and back to my main point. Now that DH has accepted this new position, we've decided to take the plunge and buy our first home. It's kind of sad that it's taken us until the age of 33 (for DH) and 32 (for me) and over a decade of marriage to get to this point. My parents were only 27 and 23 & newlyweds when they bought their first place. Granted that was a teeny 2BR ~1000 sq ft starter home and we're looking at 4 to 5 BR homes that tend to be in the ~1800-2400 sq ft range. And the towns we're considering are nicer than Campbell, the suburb of San Jose where my parents first lived. But we're probably going to be spending triple or even quadruple the inflation-adjusted cost of my parents' first house. That's even with the recent declines in the housing market.

I'm finding the househunting process exciting but a bit overwhelming. Fortunately it's not the frenzy of a couple years ago. More properties seem to be coming on MLS than are going off and there are a LOT of reductions in the listing price.

Proof That I've Been on WAY Too Many Road Trips...

2009-05-13T18:13:00.000-07:00

The next time I drive cross-country, I've got half a mind to take I-90/I-94 and hit the northwest & northern Great Plains states. I've done the I-80 and the I-70/I-15 routes in the past. DH did the I-40 route once but Miss Scarlet was a baby at the time so we decided it would be best for me & her to fly rather than go in the U-Haul.

I have visited 36 states (72%)
Create your own visited map of The United States

Ban on Communion Wine: Prudent or Paranoid?

2009-05-03T22:04:00.000-07:00

Today was a big day for our family as it was Miss Scarlet's First Communion and Princess P.'s baptism. We did both on the same day since most of our family does not live in the area. My parents, both of my brothers, DH's parents, and his sister came. The only one who was not able to make it was DH's brother, who is finishing up his last semester at college and scrambling to try to find a post-graduation job (it's a tough, tough market out there for this year's seniors!)

Anyways, at the First Communion Mass the priest read a letter from Archbishop Niederauer stating that because of the outbreak of the H1N1 swine flu in the archdiocese the parish was not to offer the Eucharist under the species of the Blood. Miss Scarlet was happy to hear that, as she'd tried the unconsecrated wine at the rehearsal & hadn't liked it. But it just struck me as a bit overly cautious given that the total number of probable cases our county has reported so far is two.

Our parish could've just given the kids receiving their First Communion the Blood and not the rest of those attending the Mass. The schools in our town are all open, and that IMHO is a more likely method of transmission than the Communion cup.

Cool Site to Check "Walkability" of Addresses

2009-05-02T00:58:00.000-07:00

Now that we've had a 3rd child, the townhouse we're currently renting is getting a bit cramped. Also, the dip in home prices is making buying our own place a more attainable goal than it was a few years ago. So I was checking out the real estate section on SFGate.com to see what they had listed. I noticed the listings included a "walkability" score. Our current home is rated "somewhat walkable" with a score of 58 out of 100.

I love the concept, though I would quibble over the details of the algorithm. The biggest flaw IMHO is that it's missing one of the most important places to which I would ideally like to walk: church. When DH was in grad school and we lived in student housing we used to walk to church every Sunday. Unfortunately, our current parish is 2.6 mi away from our home, which is farther than I care to walk with the kids on a regular basis. I couldn't care less whether there's a bar within walking distance (one of the categories that *IS* listed) but it would be very nice not to have to drive to Mass every week.

File This Under "D" for "Duh"

2009-04-28T11:25:00.000-07:00

Last month, the elite media heavily publicized the finding by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life that 10% of Americans have left the Catholic Church after having been raised Catholic. Those ex-Catholics are fairly evenly split between those who are now Protestant and those who are now unaffiliated with any faith (only a small percentage have converted to non-Christian faiths). An article in today's Christian Science Monitor goes into detail about why survey participants reported leaving Catholicism:

"When asked to explain in their own words the main reason for leaving the Catholic Church, about half cite a disagreement with the church's religious or moral beliefs. For those now unaffiliated, about half were unhappy about birth control, 56 percent about teachings on abortion and homosexuality, and 40 percent about the treatment of women."

Yep, those are the 3 issues where Catholic doctrine most prominently differs from the "anything goes" mentality pushed by secular modern culture. While a number of the mainline Protestant denominations have chosen to abandon the traditional Biblical teachings on these issues in the name of "modernization", the Vatican has thus far resisted the pressure to do so.

As St. Paul preached to the Galatians almost 2,000 years ago:

"For do I now persuade men, or God? or do I seek to please men? for if I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ. But I certify you, brethren, that the gospel which was preached of me is not after man. For I neither received it of man, neither was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ." (Galatians 1:10-12)

The CSM article mentions in passing the fact that most people who switch affiliation do so prior to the age of 24, but the Pew Forum website goes into more detail. Nearly half (48%) leave Catholicism prior to the age of 18. An additional 30% leave between 18 and 23.

To me, this statistic shows the failure of families, parish CCD programs, and Catholic schools to properly catechize Catholic youth as to the reasoning behind Catholic doctrine. I've discussed this issue at length here and here. If we want young Catholics to "follow the narrow way" and resist the siren song of moral relativism, we need to do more than simply tell them the rules. Catholics of whatever age are far more likely to obey if they understand *WHY* the Church teaches X, Y, or Z. It's far easier to dismiss simple appeals to clerical authority than it is to dismiss a reasoned argument in support of Church doctrine.

One More Reason to Feel Old

2009-04-25T08:16:00.000-07:00

Rusty's speech therapist has given me a packet of various oral motor and vocabulary exercises for daily practice at home. One page in particular he's been having all kinds of difficulty with. It's a part/whole analogies exercise, which is not the easiest concept for a 3 year old to grasp to begin with. However, he does okay on a different analogies exercise in the packet that has clothing and body parts on it (e.g. "toes are part of ____" matched to a picture of a foot).

On the page Rusty has been struggling with there are pictures of 5 items: a cathode ray television set with rabbit ears, a car, a pocket watch, a film camera, and a typewriter. Here are the questions:

"A ribbon is on a _____"
"A windshield is on a ____"
"Film is in a _____"
"Minutes are on a ____"
"A screen is on a _____"

The only one Rusty can answer is #2. He's familiar with watches and television sets, but the ones in our home don't look much like the pictures on the page. And I don't think he has any conception whatsoever of film cameras and typewriters, LOL! I suspect for him they'll be like an 8 track tape player and a telegraph machine would be for folks my age- something we've heard about but never actually used.

HALO Breast Cancer Pap Test Featured on Rachael Ray TV-Show

2009-04-24T14:48:00.001-07:00

New Non-Invasive Breast Cancer Screening Test

2009-04-24T14:32:00.000-07:00

As I am in my 30’s, I am at getting to the stage in my life where female acquaintances my age are starting to be diagnosed with breast cancer. In fact, two of them sadly recently lost their battles with the disease). But I am still too young to undergo routine mammograms. I know that earlier detection of breast cancer leads to a better long-term prognosis, and that is important not just for myself but for my family. I have 3 young children who depend on me and God willing, I want to be there for them.

A friend of mine recently sent me a link for a new non-invasive breast cancer screening test. It's called the HALO Pap Test for the Breast. It takes about 5 minutes and costs about $100 (not yet covered by most insurers). Unfortunately, there are not yet any doctors in my area who offer the test, but I wrote a letter to my OB-GYN practice requesting that they offer it to patients like me who want it.

Please be aware that I have no affiliation with the manufacturer or any other sort of financial interest in the product- I just wanted to get the word out to other women who might be interested.

Catholics Called to Take Action on Climate Change

2009-04-23T14:19:00.000-07:00

Via the link the commenter on my post the other day left promoting the "Meatless Mondays" campaign, I eventually wound up discovering a website for a group called the Catholic Coalition on Climate Change. It was launched yesterday to call Catholics to "make a serious commitment" to all of the following:

"PRAY and reflect on the duty to care for God's creation and for the poor and vulnerable;

LEARN about and educate others on the moral dimensions of climate change;

ASSESS our participation-as individuals and organizations-in contributing to climate change (i.e. consumption and conservation);

ACT to change our choices and behaviors contributing to climate change and;

ADVOCATE Catholic principles and priorities in climate change discussions and decisions, especially as they impact the poor and vulnerable."

As a Catholic, I do feel a moral obligation to try my best to be a good steward of God's creation. If we wait to take action until the debate over global warming has been settled it may very well be too late.

I also believe it's important for the Church to make its voice heard on this issue to make sure that any proposed government action does not conflict with Catholic doctrine. There are many environmental activists who would like to see family size limited in the name of "saving the planet". Catholics need to ensure that the focus is on reducing consumption through simpler and more sustainable living rather than fewer births.

Let's lead by example that families do not have to be small to be "green"!

How Green is Your Diet?

2009-04-20T11:03:00.000-07:00

I'm currently reading an excellent new book entitled Go Green, Get Lean: Trim Your Waistline with the Ultimate Low-Carbon Diet by Kate Geagan, RD. I had known that a "flexitarian" diet has a much lower impact on the Earth than the typical American way of eating (of course, a vegetarian one is even more eco-friendly but I'm not ready to give up animal proteins entirely just yet). As a Christian, I feel a responsibility to try to be a good steward of God's creation. I also want to take good care of the gift of the body He gave me and make the most of the financial resources He has been generous enough to put at our family's disposal. There are so many families in our area who are hurting in this recession and demand for our local food pantry is up 50% from last year :-( If reducing our meat consumption frees up money in our budget to help feed the hungry, that's a sacrifice I believe Jesus would have us make.

Anyways, while I had a general sense that eating a plant-based diet with meat "as a condiment" was the way to go, reading Go Green, Get Lean has been a real eye-opener. I had no idea that the average American diet creates more per-person CO2 emissions than the typical amount Americans drive. Or that the food system consumes nearly 20% of all petroleum burned annually in the U.S. Red meat alone accounts for 30% of all greenhouse gas emissions from food in the average American household. Every 1 kilogram of beef consumed (~8 quarter-pound servings) has the same CO2 emissions as driving the typical European car for 155 miles. If Americans were to substitute 1 lb. of bread per month for 1 lb. of beef each year, that would save energy equivalent to 120 million barrels of oil!

Eating a "flexitarian" diet rather than a meat-heavy one also makes it easier to maintain a healthy weight. 1 lb. of porterhouse steak contains 388 calories vs. a mere 94 for 1 lb. of tofu. Not only does obesity raise the risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, and other health problems but it's also bad for the environment. A study done by researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine reported on CNN today found that the increase in obesity in the U.K. from the 1970 to today accounts for 270 million metric tons annually of additional greenhouse gas emissions. Yikes!

Regardless of one's views on the "hot button" issue of climate change, I believe we should be erring on the side of caution. I hate to sound like an alarmist, but if we wait to take action until the debate over global warming is resolved it very well might be too late. Reducing our meat consumption, especially red meat, is an easy and inexpensive way to lower our carbon footprint.

Our next car (at least we hope!)

2009-04-19T18:37:00.000-07:00

I'm not much of a car aficionado, but I am officially in love with the Tesla Model S electric sedan prototype. One of DH's friends from grad school works for Tesla and invited us to come down to their showroom in Menlo Park to check it out last weekend.

The car is super stylish and HUGE! Tesla claims it seats 7; I'm not sure about that but it would easily seat 6. It's supposed to go 300 miles on one charge and re-charge in 45 minutes.

Depending on what happens with DH's job situation, we're seriously considering buying one when it comes on the market in 2011. It'd cost almost triple what we paid for our current car, but we've shared a single economy car for the entire 10 years we've been married. And it's not like we're buying a BMW or Lexus- the premium is for the green technology. We don't wear designer clothes or fancy jewelery, go on exotic vacations, own pricey electronics, etc. I think one splurge on a car that will also help the environment is justifiable at this point, assuming we can spare the cash.

Right now because of the turmoil in DH's industry, we've built our emergency fund up to a higher-than-normal level. We want to make sure that we'd be okay if he were to be laid off and had to endure a lengthy job search. But if the outlook starts looking more rosy, then we could put a portion of that cash towards the purchase of a second car.

DH's friend has promised to arrange a test drive for us soon and possibly even a tour of their manufacturing plant.

Smiling on the Outside and Screaming on the Inside

2009-04-02T13:42:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned yesterday, I had a meeting this morning with the school district's special education program regarding services for our DS, "Rusty". What an incredibly frustrating experience it was!

I knew going in that the district is financially strapped and was not going to want to pay for services if they could at all avoid it. The hospital speech therapist he's been seeing had warned me that he might not qualify at this point. So I was not surprised to hear that he did not meet the criteria for speech and language impairment as set forth in the CA Ed Code. It's a stringent standard- the child has to score below the 7th percentile for his/her chronological age on two or more standardized tests of speech & language development. While I believe that this is overly strict, nothing would be gained by arguing the point with the district special ed personnel. Their job is to follow state law, not to write it.

What frustrated me was not that the district determined that Rusty did not meet their eligibility criteria for special education, but that the evaluation revealed a significant discrepancy between where he is in terms of his language capabilities and where he really ought to be.

On the non-verbal portions of the IQ test, he scored well above average- and this was very likely an underestimate because he got bored partway through the block design subtest and decided in typical 3 year old fashion that he'd much rather stack the blocks than copy the design that the evaluator had made. At home, I've seen him copy complex tangram patterns that are designed for kids several years older than him.

On the verbal portions of the IQ test, however, he scored about 3/4 of a standard deviation below the mean. This is considered within the normal range, but to me it raised a big red flag. Typically, verbal IQ and non-verbal IQ differ by less than 2/3 of a standard deviation, and for Rusty's scores the difference was nearly two standard deviations (or more if he indeed underperformed on the block design subtest). DH, Miss Scarlet, and I all tested within the gifted range and normally there's a high correlation between parental/child IQ scores and also between siblings' IQ scores.

On the speech and language assessment, there were also wide discrepancies between the various subtests. Rusty scored above average for a subtest that was primarily a memory exercise (repeating complex sentences spoken by the evaluator). On most of the others, he was somewhat below average. And on a few, he was quite a bit below average.

It is so clear to me that Rusty does, in fact, have some sort of speech and language impairment. If he had low scores across the board and came from a family who also tended to score low, then there would not be much cause for concern. But he's got certain scores that are well above average and he comes from a very high-scoring family. I'm positive his high baseline is masking the disability, because it causes him to score within the normal range even with the impairment.

Fortunately, we do have insurance that provides coverage for speech therapy so we can continue getting Rusty the help he needs. But what if we didn't? Our therapist charges a whopping $1400/month for one session per week. There's no way we could afford that kind of expense if we were responsible for the full cost.

All We Care About is Talking, Talking Only Me & You

2009-04-01T15:19:00.000-07:00

I haven't talked all that much about our DS, whom I call "Rusty" for the purposes of this blog. We suspect he's what's known as "twice exceptional"- both intellectually gifted and disabled. In Rusty's case, he has speech and language delay. Although I've got serious reservations about getting involved with the government-run schools, tomorrow we've got a meeting with the district special education program to discuss an Individual Education Plan.

Our oldest, Miss Scarlet, has always been very advanced verbally. At 14 months, she answered my parents' first names when asked the question "who is that?" At 16 months, she knew color names including secondary ones (in fact, her first color word was "purple"). At 18 months, she knew all the letters and their sounds and was speaking in phrases of 3-5 words or longer. By 2 1/2, she was speaking more or less fluently, albeit with certain immature pronunciations (e.g. "f" instead of "th"). Now at age 6, she has a more sophisticated vocabulary than a sizable percentage of adults.

When Rusty had slower language development than his big sister I was not initially all that concerned. He was more advanced in certain other areas than Miss Scarlet had been at the same age. When he was 12 months, he could build a stack 6 blocks high. He excelled at puzzles, and at 2 1/2 figured out how to play a DVD without help (a two-step process). As he clearly was bright, I just figured we had the stereotypical mechanically inclined boy and verbal girl.

As he got older, however, I began to worry about his speech, particularly his articulation. Even though I spent all day with him, I had difficulty understanding much of what he was saying. He would say a whole long phrase and I might be able to figure out a single word. People who saw him less frequently like DH and other relatives basically found his speech unintelligible. I hoped he might just need some more time to develop, but eventually my mom goaded me into having a formal evaluation by a speech therapist. He was diagnosed as having articulation disorder with receptive and expressive language delay.

Between June of last year when Rusty had the evaluation and when he got off the waiting list for therapy at the end of September, his speech did improve quite a bit. But he still was behind what was typical for his age. He saw the therapist twice per week until our baby was born in January, and has been going once per week since we resumed therapy in February. Our health insurance covers 30 sessions per year plus another 30 with authorization, but we're still responsible for a $30/session co-pay. Fortunately, my parents have been generous enough to reimburse us for the co-pays thus far. But now that he's 3 and old enough to be covered under special education, we'd like to try to get the district to provide speech therapy.

I'm hoping that he'll continue the progress he's been making in therapy and outgrow the need for it before he reaches kindergarten age. If not, the district does supposedly offer an independent study program, which might be a possibility if there aren't too many strings attached (yeah, right).

This afternoon, I came across an intriguing book entitled The Einstein Syndrome: Bright Children Who Talk Late by Thomas Sowell, an economist at Stanford's Hoover Institution and the parent of a late-talking child. As I was reading the reviews, I recognized my child in what they were describing:

analytical
musical
strong-willed and stubborn
slow to toilet train
loves puzzles, blocks, and Legos
loving and affectionate but sometimes aloof
concentrates on some tasks & ignores requests/directives to perform other tasks
can work almost every tool and gadget in the house
relatives who are tech geeks and/or musicians

I've requested the book from the inter-library loan program. I'm curious to see what Dr. Sowell has to say in it. From the reviews, it appears that he takes a skeptical view of speech therapy. We've found that to be helpful with Rusty, and I'm not going to discontinue it based on the opinions of a single author. But I'm hopeful that the Einstein Syndrome book will help me better understand my little Mr. Mechanical.

College Admissions by Lottery of Qualified Applicants? Part II

2009-03-31T14:18:00.000-07:00

Today is the last day of March, which means it's time for the annual ritual of high school seniors learning which colleges they've been accepted to and for my jaw to drop at how insanely competitive the process has become. There's good news and bad news for this year's applicants to selective colleges.

First, the good news: applications to certain of the liberal arts colleges were down, allowing a larger percentage to win acceptance. More fat envelopes are going out this year from the following: Amherst, Williams, Middlebury, Pomona, and Grinnell.

Unfortunately, many more of the top schools are reporting record low admissions rates:

Harvard 7% vs. 8% last year
Stanford 7.5% vs. 9.5%
Yale 7.5% vs. 8.3%
Columbia 9.8% vs. 10%
MIT 10.2% vs. 11.6%
Brown 11% vs. 13.4%
Dartmouth 12% vs. 13%
Duke 17% vs. 20%
Penn 17% (same as last year)
Cornell 19% vs. 20.4%
Wesleyan (CT) 22% vs. 27%

Chad Aldeman had an iteresting blog post a couple weeks ago over at "The Quick and the Ed" calling for selective colleges to hold lotteries of all applicants who meet the school's minimum academic qualifications:

"What this becomes, more or less, is a lottery. And if it's a lottery, and everyone treats it that way except the students who invest their time, money, and emotions, maybe we should just start treating it that way. No more pretending it's about student activities, their essay, recommendations, or their devotion to the school. We've all heard about the perfect 4.0 student with excellent extracurriculars who gets rejected from their dream school. Instead, let's just institute a lottery. Schools set their baseline, kids submit their numbers, and then we run a giant lottery for the spots. Poof, like magic. Such a system operates in other fields that we're perfectly comfortable with--medical residency programs or coveted charter schools, for example--so maybe it's time to give it a shot for college applicants."

As I blogged almost two years ago, holding lotteries would go a long way in reducing the pressure cooker atmosphere at many of today's high schools.

There's a girl in our 4H club who is the valedictorian of her class at one of the local government-run schools. She was telling me at one of the recent project meetings about her crazy workload. She's currently taking FIVE (!) Advanced Placement courses. I took one AP course my senior year and thought that by itself was a lot of work. I can't imagine multiplying the demands of that by five!

If students knew that they did not need to try to impress an admissions officer, maybe they could stop obsessing over external markers of achievement like grades and standardized test scores- and start focusing on learning for its own sake. The current system encourages kids to "play the game" of school and often penalizes those who stretch themselves intellectually by enrolling in courses where they won't receive a high grade. Shouldn't we be discouraging students from settling for the "easy A" and rewarding those who challenge themselves?

Please Pray for our Neighbor

2009-03-30T11:35:00.000-07:00

The elderly gentleman who lives across the street from us was just taken away in an ambulance. I'm not totally sure what happened, but when the paramedics arrived at his house they brought in one of those defibrillator machines. So I'm guessing that he may have had a heart attack. He was conscious when the ambulance left, which hopefully means that he'll be okay. Please keep him in your prayers for a speedy and complete recovery.

What's Up With the Adoption of "Fuzzy Math" in Silicon Valley?

2009-03-28T14:31:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I ~~ranted~~ blogged about how my local district voted to adopt the notorious "Every Day Mathematics" program. As it turns out, my district is not the only one in the area making the switch. The "Kitchen Table Math" blog has an excellent series of posts on the battle over the adoption of EM in Palo Alto.

I just don't understand why the districts are pushing to switch their math programs now. Doesn't it cost a lot of money to buy new materials and train teachers to use them? Aren't the schools facing huge cuts to their budgets because of the state's economic crisis? Not that I think that they should ever adopt a "fuzzy math" program like EM or TERC Investigations. But it strikes me as a spectacularly bad waste of scarce resources at the present time.

3 Kids is a "Large Family"?

2009-03-26T07:50:00.000-07:00

Opening up my email this morning, I saw an invitation to join a website called "Large Families Today". This struck me as just a bit odd since I only have 3 kids. Maybe because I'm Catholic and also have a number of Mormon friends, but I don't consider myself as having a "large" family just yet. It's only since the birth of our 3rd in January that I've even started to think of myself as having a medium-sized family. To me, a "large family" has 5 or more kids.

We may get there some day- I'm only 32 and taking it one baby at a time. DH has already started in about wanting baby #4 but I told him to check back with me in a year or two. Right now I'm still adjusting to having a 3rd! For me, being "open to life" does not equal "have as many babies as physically possible". It means seeing children as gifts from God and not setting an arbitrary limit on family size. It means keeping an open dialogue with God and DH about whether to try to conceive, try to avoid pregnancy, or something in between.

Large families are wonderful and I personally believe our society would be better off if there were more of them. It makes me sad when I hear others give materialistic reasons as justification for having only 1 or 2 kids. Wouldn't it be nice if children were again seen as blessings rather than burdens?

Would You Give Contraceptives to Your 14 Year Old Daughter?

2009-03-23T15:28:00.000-07:00

Remember all that controversy a few years back over the New York Times article "Truly, Madly, Guiltily" by novelist Ayelet Waldman? In it, Ms. Waldman admitted that she'd rather all 4 of her kids die than her husband:

"What if, God forbid, someone were to snatch one of my children? God forbid. I imagine what it would feel like to lose one or even all of them. I imagine myself consumed, destroyed by the pain. And yet, in these imaginings, there is always a future beyond the child's death. Because if I were to lose one of my children, God forbid, even if I lost all my children, God forbid, I would still have him, my husband. But my imagination simply fails me when I try to picture a future beyond my husband's death."

The whole piece came off as rather creepy to me. I love my DH but I'm not obsessed with him the way Ms. Waldman seems to be with hers. My whole identity is not so wrapped up in our marriage that I would not be able to function should God forbid it end. Would I be devastated? Absolutely. Can I "imagine no joy without [him]" as Ms. Waldman puts it? The truth is that I believe I would be able to work through my grief in time; while I would certainly miss him, I'd still be able to find joy in other parts of my life. God has given me many blessings. The loss of one, even of a major one like my marriage, would not end my ability to appreciate the remaining ones. In fact, I would likely come to treasure them even more.

Anyways, Ms. Waldman has a new provocative piece on NPR.org and linked to by Lisa Belkin's New York Times "Motherlode" blog. In the piece, she relates how she decided to place a stash of prophylactics she'd received as a freebie in her kids' bathroom (her oldest is a 14 year old girl):

"I was about to throw them away, but after an internal debate that seemed at once to encompass every attitude, preconception, goal and belief I have about parenting, I took the bag and put it on the very top shelf of the cupboard in the kids' bathroom."

I had friends growing up whose parents put them on the Pill at 16 and allowed them to stay out all night with their boyfriends. They were clearly given the impression that teen sex was okay; not surprisingly they lost their virginity on the early side and had a high number of partners as teens. They are now in their early 30's and still single.

Compare their outcome with those of my friends whose parents held more conservative beliefs about teen sexuality. They were virgins at high school graduation and while most of them did not wait all the way until marriage, they tended to have few or even only a single partner. The majority of them are now married or engaged.

These are anecdotes, but research findings back up the notion that a lower number of premarital sex partners leads to better marital outcomes. People who marry their first sexual partners are less likely to cheat than those who have multiple partners before marriage. Also, according to a study by the Centers for Disease Control, women having no non-marital sexual partners had an 81% chance at a stable marriage. By contrast, when a woman had just one non-marital sexual partner that chance dropped to 54%. If a woman had five sexual partners outside of marriage she has only 30% chance of a stable marriage.

Which would you want for your daughter(s)- promiscuity as a teen or a better chance at a happy marriage when she's an adult?

Is the New "Tween Dora" a Sell-Out?

2009-03-19T15:55:00.000-07:00

Like many moms, I was a bit concerned when I read a few weeks ago that Mattel was going to be introducing a middle school aged version of Dora the Explorer. My 6 year old, Miss Scarlet, is a big Dora fan (though since we do not have cable/satellite her exposure is limited to books and the occasional DVD). As far as kids' entertainment goes, Dora is one of the better options in my book. She's kind, resourceful, brave, encourages kids to explore nature, and even teaches a few words of Spanish.

When I first heard of the "Tween Dora", I was afraid that she might resemble those awful Bratz dolls with too much makeup and too little clothing. A sexually provocative Dora would be about as welcome at our house as the infestation of 50,000 Africanized honeybees we heard about on NPR last week.

Today, I received an email from the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood asking me to sign a petition to Mattel against "Tween Dora". This petition reads in part:

"We know that if the original Dora grew up, she wouldn't be a fashion icon or a shopaholic. She'd develop her map reading skills and imagine the places she could go. She'd capitalize on those problem solving skills to design new ways to bring fresh water to communities in need around the world. Maybe she'd become a world class runner or follow her love of animals and become a wildlife preservationist or biologist. We'll never know because the only way a girl can grow up in tween town, is to narrow that symphony of choices to one note. It's such a sell out of Dora, of all girls. "

I agree that the original Dora would grow up to be clever, imaginative, and want to use her talents to solve problems and give back to the community. But why does that mean she can't also enjoy fun girlie-girl stuff like fashion? Why does she need to be androgynous to be smart and successful in a career? Why can't "Tween Dora" like exploring AND shopping? Why, four decades after feminism was supposed to free women from gender-based stereotypes to make their own decisions are we still perpetuating the false dichotomy between brains & beauty?

Now that the look of "Tween Dora" has been revealed, I'm relieved to see that it's fairly innocuous. I'm not thrilled about the pierced ears and makeup, but they're on the subtle side. Her figure is slender, but not anorexic-looking nor Barbie's extreme hourglass. Her outfit is age-appropriate and I personally think it's cute.
I don't see this new "Tween Dora" as necessarily being a sell-out of everything that the original Dora stood for. She does have a more overtly feminine appearance than her preschool counterpart, but so what?

I had a pixie cut & tomboyish clothes as a preschooler and then wore my hair long and cute feminine-looking outfits when I got older and more into fashion. But I still was into science and speaking my mind and wanting to make this world a better place. The outside might look a bit different, but inside I was still the same person. I liked going to the mall to pick out a new lip gloss one day and playing hockey with my brothers the next.

Why can't "Tween Dora" be similarly multifaceted?

The Case Against Breastfeeding or For Selfishness?

2009-03-16T11:02:00.000-07:00

There are some fantastic comments over at Lisa Belkin's New York Times "Motherlode" blog about Hanna Rosin's anti-breastfeeding rant in the current issue of The Atlantic.

While I agree with Ms. Rosin that the scientific case for breastfeeding isn’t remotely as strong as “lactivists” would have us believe, I was extremely turned off by the selfish attitude so pervasive throughout her article. What her entire argument boiled down to is that moms should not feed their children the way God (or Nature if one prefers) intends because nursing requires the mom put her child’s needs ahead of her own desires. Hello, that’s called parenting! All the reasons Ms. Rosin gives for not breastfeeding are selfish ones- mom’s career, mom’s desire not to be “tied down”, mom’s discomfort with nursing in public (just wear a nursing top & coverup/blanket if modesty is a concern), mom’s desire to alternate night feedings with dad so she can sleep better, whine, whine, whine. It’s all about what SHE wants and not what’s best for the baby.

The most outrageous part of the article to me is that Ms. Rosin spins her anti-breastfeeding position as the "feminist" one. What ever happened to trusting womens' bodies to nourish their babies being the feminist position?

Here's an excellent comment on the NYT blog signed "MJ":

"Like many women my age, I blame the previous generation’s feminist movement’s focus on having everything for men and women be exactly the same. News flash–men and women are NOT biologically the same! We carry the babies, we nurse the babies, we are the mommies. My husband and I have what I call a more enlightened equal marriage. Instead of trying to divide every task exactly down the middle, like the author’s Canadian friend seemed to be doing, we realize that we have different abilities/strengths and divide the housework and childcare duties according to those. Yes, I feed the baby during the night, but that’s because I have the boobs! It’s ludicrous to think that men and women are exactly the same. We need society to realize this, and provide the kind of support for families that women are crying out for–laws mandating that employers provide maternity leave and the support new moms need when they return to the workplace. When you feed your baby formula solely because it is more convenient, you are giving up the fight for the rest of us. We need to stick together and demand that society supports us in our choice to breastfeed!"

Poster "Amanda" added:

"It’s articles like these that make me wonder whether or not I want to be affiliated with the feminist movement. I am empowered by the ability to create, grow, and feed another human being– not brought down by it as Rosin suggests. As others have said, I cannot understand why people are so hell bent on men and women being the same. We are different and I wish the feminist movement would focus more on those differences. Why should I be eager to make myself more like a man? Shouldn’t we celebrate the things that make us WOMEN?

For those who think that breastfeeding causes an imbalance in your marriage– you probably have problems that go far beyond breastfeeding. If your husband can’t pick up the slack in other places, then that’s something formula feeding cannot solve."

Here's another good comment signed"Soon to be Mother Mary":

"Rosin’s article is an example of the growing backlash against women who choose a more traditional approach to motherhood. Her response, 'We are in a time of incredibly intensive parenting,' 'Why now, when women have less time and more opportunity than ever before? You would think some other form of parenting would be thriving now.' is indicative of the disconnect between the two groups. As a woman who has taken up the banner of pregnancy and motherhood rights, I’ve discovered that more traditional feminists view me and my compatriots as confused at best and turncoats at worst. They don’t understand why, when we could be out there making money, we quit our jobs, clip coupons, and raise our children. Because of this, we have a situation where traditional feminist organizations like NOW will only lend token support to the issues of pregnancy rights.

The problem I had with Rosin’s article was that she attempts to do exactly what she accuses the lactivists of doing. Where they have tried to guilt her into breastfeeding, she tries to make them out to be air-head fad followers."

And here's a man who gets it, "Josh Hill":

"The notion that breast feeding is some kind of sexist plot to manipulate women into changing diapers is beyond ridiculous, almost a satire of 60’s era radical feminist chic. Men don’t breast feed because they don’t make milk. Evolution has equipped the sexes to have specialized roles in the raising of offspring. Her acquaintance should be glad she doesn’t have to sit on eggs.
I’m glad to express my support to those women who make the sacrifices necessary to breast feed. And at the same time, I unequivocally condemn those who make life hard for them, and those who, lacking a sound medical or economic reason, are too narcissistic to do the best thing for their children. The state of our knowledge may one day change, but as far as we can tell from the current evidence, they might as well drink or smoke during pregnancy."

Amen to that!

If Shakespeare Used Facebook

2009-03-12T11:47:00.000-07:00

Via the Core Knowledge blog, I discovered a hilarious spoof of Shakespeare's Hamlet written as if it were a Facebook news feed. Enjoy! (Note: I've slightly edited it to clean up the language)

Hamlet (Facebook News Feed Edition)
by Sarah Schmelling

Horatio thinks he saw a ghost.

Hamlet thinks it's annoying when your uncle marries your mother right after your dad dies.

The king thinks Hamlet's annoying.

Laertes thinks Ophelia can do better.

Hamlet's father is now a zombie.

- - - -

The king poked the queen.

The queen poked the king back.

Hamlet and the queen are no longer friends.

Marcellus is pretty sure something's rotten around here.

Hamlet became a fan of daggers.

- - - -

Polonius says Hamlet's crazy ... crazy in love!

Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Hamlet are now friends.

Hamlet wonders if he should continue to exist. Or not.

Hamlet thinks Ophelia might be happier in a convent.

Ophelia removed "moody princes" from her interests.

Hamlet posted an event: A Play That's Totally Fictional and In No Way About My Family

The king commented on Hamlet's play: "What is wrong with you?"

Polonius thinks this curtain looks like a good thing to hide behind.

Polonius is no longer online.

- - - -

Hamlet added England to the Places I've Been application.

The queen is worried about Ophelia.

Ophelia loves flowers. Flowers flowers flowers flowers flowers. Oh, look, a river.

Ophelia joined the group Maidens Who Don't Float.

Laertes wonders what the h*** happened while he was gone.

- - - -

The king sent Hamlet a goblet of wine.

The queen likes wine!

The king likes ... oh c***

The queen, the king, Laertes, and Hamlet are now zombies.

Horatio says well that was tragic.

Fortinbras, Prince of Norway, says yes, tragic. We'll take it from here.

Denmark is now Norwegian.

"Fuzzy" Math Coming to My Town, Ugh!

2009-03-09T22:51:00.000-07:00

To stay informed, I make it a habit to read the summary published in the local paper of the school district board meeting. I may not enroll my own kids in the government-run schools, but I am very concerned about education especially in light of California's current budget crisis.

So last week I was checking out the summary from the recent board meeting when, buried among the numerous other items, I come across the following:

"Approved the Elementary Math Committee's recommendation of Everyday Math for the [district] math program."

The notorious Everyday Math? The one that eschews teaching kids traditional algorithms in favor of calculator use? The one that has students answering inane questions such as "If math were a color, it would be [blank], because [blank]", "If it were a food, it would be [blank], because [blank]", "If it were weather, it would be [blank], because [blank]". That Everyday Math? Seriously?

I went to the district website to see if I could find out any additional information on the school board's decision. Nada. Zip. Zilch. I could not find any information on the members of this math committee, nor whether there was any sort of parental/community input.

I smell something rotten in the state of Denmark. Why all this secrecy around the adoption of Everyday Math?

The next town over uses EM. Over the weekend, I bought some Girl Scout cookies there. The 2nd grader I bought them from struggled to figure out the correct change from a $20 bill for a $16 purchase. I don't think that 20 -16 = 4 should be all that difficult for a student seven months into 2nd grade, know what I mean? The Right Start Mathematics Level C that I'm using with Miss Scarlet (designed for 2nd graders) has students mentally subtracting a 2 digit number from a 3 digit number with regrouping (e.g. 103 - 58) in lesson 86. The table of contents for Saxon Math Grade 2 lists subtracting 2 digit numbers in lesson 109. Singapore Primary Math 2A also lists subtracting two and three digit numbers with regrouping. So 3 of the math programs popular with homeschoolers all expect 2nd grade students to solve even harder subtraction problems.

EDITED: I found a scope & sequence for Everyday Math Grade 2, and their goal is for students to do 2 digit subtraction "using manipulatives, number grids, tally marks, and calculators." It isn't until 4th grade (!) that students are expected to do subtraction with "automaticity".

I find it a bit ironic that just about the same time my local school board voted to adopt EM, a study for the U.S. Department of Education found that the traditional Saxon led to significantly higher student math achievement than the similarly "fuzzy" Investigations.

I predict there will be a surge in enrollment at the local Kumon tutoring center...

Introducing Miss Scarlet, Rusty, and Princess Persimmon

2009-02-25T15:55:00.000-08:00

Ever since I found out last summer we were expecting another girl, I've been thinking that I really need to come up with some blog nicknames for my kids.

My nom de plume was chosen back several years ago when I joined the Babycenter.com website. I'd originally wanted "Cardinal Girl" after my college's mascot, but it was already taken so I settled on "Crimson Girl" in honor of the university where my DH was doing his graduate work at the time. I later changed it to "Crimson Wife" after I got accused of falsely pretending to be an alumna of that school during a BBS thread that got rather heated. I wasn't but decided to change my username just to clarify things.

When I started this blog, I decided to keep it anonymous to protect my family's privacy. Since I'd been using the CW username on Babycenter for so long, I thought it made sense to blog under the same one.

For my kids' noms de blog I've decided to stick with the shades of red theme. Perhaps a bit on the cutesy side but I really couldn't come up with anything I liked better.

My oldest is going to be Miss Scarlet. She shares a number of personality traits with Scarlett O'Hara- vivaciousness, stubbornness, spunkiness -so it seemed appropriate.

My DS is going to be Rusty. His hair is rust-colored plus he's really into mechanical stuff.

My new baby girl is going to be Princess Persimmon or Princess P for short. DH's nickname for her IRL is Princess Poop-n-stuff. But persimmon is so much nicer, don't you agree? The ancient Greeks considered it the "fruit of the gods".

Carnival of Homeschoolin #165 is Up!

2009-02-24T12:28:00.000-08:00

Judy Aron over at "The Consent of the Governed" is hosting this week's 165th Carnival of Homeschooling: Stimulus Edition. Happy reading!

Re-visiting My Educational Philosophy

2009-02-19T04:45:00.000-08:00

I'm approaching my 2 year blogiversary, and a recent post by an Australian homeschooling blogger linking to my very first post (thanks for the link love and all the kind words!) got me thinking.

My inaugural post was entitled "Our Educational Philosophy". It was written seven months into our trial year homeschooling our oldest for pre-k and a few months after we made the decision not to enroll her in a traditional school for kindergarten. This first year was spent mostly on figuring out if homeschooling was right for our family and once we decided it was, figuring out how we were going to do it. It was heavy on the planning, and relatively light on the actual teaching part.

Fortunately, 4 year olds don't need that much in the way of formal academic instruction in general, and mine already knew most of the traditional pre-k stuff like the alphabet, counting, shapes, colors, etc. I did do formal phonics with her based on Romalda Spalding's The Writing Road to Reading (adapted to be less reliant on fine motor skills) but the other subjects were done informally.

My point in relating all this is that when I wrote up my educational philosophy, it was based primarily on my ideas about education rather than actual experience. Not that it was done lightly- I had read extensively on the subject and carefully considered a wide variety of viewpoints before trying to formulate my own philosophy. But the $64,000 question is how do I feel about it now that we're halfway through our second year of formal homeschooling?

Back then, I wrote:

"Our primary goal in homeschooling is to teach our children to love God and to serve Him in everything they do. We teach science as the study of His creation; mathematics as His order for the universe; literature, art, and music as the fruits of His inspiration; history as His plan for humanity; health and physical education as taking care of His precious gift of our bodies; and religion as His instructions for how we should live our lives here on Earth. We strive to provide our children with the tools (spiritual, academic, and practical) that they will need in their future vocations."

I still agree with everything here. However, I have been more successful in integrating our faith with certain subjects than with others. History and math in particular I need to do a better job expressing how they are part of God's design.

"We seek to foster in our children a true love of learning so that they will continually seek out new challenges and avenues for growth. We wish to encourage creativity, thinking 'outside the box', and approaching problem-solving in innovative ways. We believe this is best accomplished through integration across subjects; hands-on experiences; exposure to great literature, art, and music; discussing topics in-depth; applying what has been learned to novel situations; lots of variety and freedom to explore; and a balance of teacher-guided and child-directed activities."

Again, I still agree with all this. I've found the integration across subjects to be more difficult than I'd imagined. I got all these promising-looking materials to teach the history of math, science, art, music, etc. but my DD has not really been all that interested. Ditto for trying to do arts & crafts projects related to what we're studying. This is where the "encouraging creativity and thinking outside the box" has come back to bite me in the rear because she wants to do it her way (cue Frank Sinatra) rather than following the directions.

"We believe in tailoring the curriculum to the student's individual abilities, interests, and learning styles while still providing rigorous academic instruction. Our goals include the ability to read, write, and speak fluently and persuasively in English using proper grammar and spelling; strong quantitative skills and the ability to analyze data; familiarity with science, world and U.S. history, geography, and civics to be an informed citizen; computer literacy; and a thorough understanding of Scripture and Church doctrine in order to lead a moral life."

I definitely still agree with this. However, I realize now that I neglected to include some important goals. A big one is a thorough knowledge of economics and personal finance. Our country is in turmoil right now because too few of its citizens have a strong understanding of those key topics. Another important area is home economics and other practical skills. I'm not necessarily buying into the whole "training our daughters to be keepers of the home" thing (though certainly I'm not knocking women who've embraced the traditional female role and would have no problem if my girls decide to spend some time as homemakers when they grow up). I'd just like all my kids (including my son) to be able to cook, do basic sewing, and other household tasks.

"We draw upon the wisdom of many educators including pioneers like Charlotte Mason, Dorothy Sayers, and Maria Montessori as well as contemporary ones like Raymond Moore, Susan Wise Bauer, and Laura Berquist."

I am definitely still an eclectic homeschooler, with strong Classical and Charlotte Mason leanings. In addition to the above names, I've also found helpful information from Catherine Levison, Harvey & Laurie Bluedorn, and even some books geared at "unschoolers" by Mary Griffith and Mary Hood (these are full of ideas for experiential learning).

Overall, I think my original educational philosophy has held up relatively well. We've definitely made progress towards our goals. We could be doing better in some areas such as ensuring our family's faith is integrated across the whole curriculum rather than just certain subjects. It's been a learning process for me as well as my kids, and I'm sure that it will continue to be so in the future.

You Don't Have to be a Rocket Scientist to Homeschool (Really!)

2009-02-18T16:27:00.000-08:00

Don't y'all just love it when someone who has no clue about what homeschooling is really like tries to convince an individual considering it that he/she absolutely, positively, should never in a million years do it?

Yeah, me too! (insert eye-rolling smiley here)

This particular ignorant comment comes courtesy of the reader feedback to an article in yesterday's Atlanta Journal-Constitution entitled "Is Home School a Good Option for Middle School?" The author is unhappy with the lack of academic challenge for his oldest daughter and his family's budget precludes private school tuition. He is also attracted to the flexibility and individualization homeschooling offers. All of these are good reasons to homeschool, and there are many more additional ones.

Commenter "motherjanegoose" then spouts forth her ignorant tirade against homeschooling (her words are in italic, with my responses in bold):

"I am thoroughly opposed to home schooling with the exception of a few circumstances.
WHY? One reason is because of the enormity of the task and the fact that I have met several folks who have tried it and then decided it was way too hard.

I know several people who dropped out of college because it was too hard for them, but I did not let that deter me from enrolling. And guess what? I ended up graduating with a very respectable GPA.

Is this why we require formal education to teach?

No, that has to do with the political influence teachers' unions have had. Private schools typically don't require teaching credentials, and their students on average outperform those in government-run schools.

DUH…I train teachers all over the country.

You know that old cliche about those who teach the teachers...

I am considered an expert in early literacy. I do not know enough about science, math, social studies and foreign languages to begin.

Any subject a home educator feels unable to competently teach can be easily outsourced. There are co-ops, tutors, online classes, community college classes, museum workshops, and so much more out there these days.

This is kind of like: I can cook…I should open a restaurant. I will order a kit to show me how and then VOILA I am on my way.

Bad analogy. Teaching in a homeschool is more like being a personal chef than running a restaurant.

COULD it happen…YES but the chances are slim. I love to work with wood, I will build my own house…get me the kit and I am on my way!

Ever hear of Habitat for Humanity? Those houses are mostly built by amateurs. Also, there are log cabin kits one can purchase.

You are practicing on your child

It's called "parenting". Even those who have worked as childcare professionals find it's completely different raising one's own children.

who needs social skills and to understand how to mesh into a routine that perhaps is not his/her favorite ( at school and with teachers who may not be on his/her top ten list) BUT THAT IS LIFE.

Homeschoolers are not hermits. They learn socialization through their interactions with others, out in the real world (unlike the highly artificial world of the classroom).

I have heard ( from teachers) that the transition back to the classroom is hard....

Did it ever occur to her that unsuccessful homeschoolers are overrepresented in the population of those returning to a traditional school? Those for whom homeschooling is working well are significantly less likely to make the switch,

Next, she discusses the two "acceptable" situations to homeschool. #1 is if the family can afford to jet all around the world. #2 is if a boy is going to have a homosexual male teacher (I'm not making this up!)

If you live in any metro area, me thinks that you could find a suitable school for your child.

Really? I spent quite a bit of time looking for one for my oldest when she was going to be entering kindergarten and could not find a single one that met our needs. The one we liked best costs a whopping $24k per child per year, way out of our budget.

By the time you spend 40 hours per week preparing and teaching, anyone could work a job and pay the tuition of most schools."

And just how much would I need to earn to have $72k left per year after factoring in taxes and the costs associated with me going back to work (second car, professional wardrobe, etc.)? More than I'm likely to get in this economy, that's for sure!

Not to mention that homeschooling is so much more time efficient that I don't spend anywhere near 40 hours per week on it.

I hope the author of the AJC article doesn't get scared off by ignorant nay-sayers like "motherjanegoose" and actually gets to know some real homeschooling families. Homeschooling may well be the perfect solution to his dilemma over his daughter's education :-)

Heart-Warming Link

2009-01-23T15:57:00.000-08:00

Earlier this afternoon, the baby was asleep in my arms and I was sipping tea and flipping through this week's edition of the Archdiocese newspaper. I came across the following column by Ginny Kubitz Moyer (who blogs over at "Mary & Me"). Maybe it's just the wacky post-partum hormones, but it brought me to tears.

"it's not really the clothes I want to keep forever. It's this age, the beautiful baby months when Luke smiles his gummy smile, learns to hold his rattle, and laughs with the glee of the very new.

I love it, this sweet time when he fits perfectly against my shoulder, when his little body smells of warmth and sleep and babyhood.

No, I can't make the earth, or time, stand still.

But, like all moms, I'd give anything to try."

Beautiful!

We're Home!

2009-01-16T04:09:00.000-08:00

Our new baby girl was born at 1:03 P.M. on Tuesday the 13th after a little less than 4 hours of labor. She weighed 6 lbs. 4 oz. and was 19" long.

The Light at the End of the Tunnel

2009-01-12T19:36:00.001-08:00

Assuming that I don't go into labor on my own tonight and that L&D does not get swamped tomorrow morning, my OB has scheduled me for an induction. Please keep me and my baby in your prayers for a quick and uneventful delivery!

Still Twiddling my Thumbs

2009-01-11T19:26:00.000-08:00

I spent several hours at L&D yesterday before they decided to release me because I was not yet in active labor. That's what I had told my OB when I had called but she had still wanted me to be checked out. Turns out that the fluid I felt trickling was just my mucous plug and not amniotic fluid and the irregular contractions that were 5-7 minutes apart never got any stronger or more regular.

I've got an OB appt tomorrow, and if the baby has not yet arrived, I'm going to ask about scheduling an induction.

Keeping My Fingers Crossed...

2009-01-09T12:14:00.000-08:00

...that all these irregular contractions I've been having this morning actually turn out to be something significant. I've so ready to get this show on the road!

To Quote Tom Petty...

2009-01-08T16:13:00.000-08:00

"The wai-ai-ting is the hardest part..."

Don't get me wrong- labor is far from a walk in the park but at least for me it goes fairly quickly (3 hours with my 1st, 6 hours with my 2nd).

But this sitting around having reached my due date just twiddling my thumbs with no discernible end in sight is absolutely killing me!

Gadget Lust

2009-01-07T12:27:00.000-08:00

I'm generally a fairly frugal and pragmatic individual, but there's something about the very end of pregnancy that makes me start pining after stuff I don't really need and don't really have the disposable cash in my budget to purchase.

Fortunately, the first thing is something that I probably couldn't find anyways: a Wii Fit system.
Now, DH has had a PlayStation 2 system for a number of years that I have never used. Video games are simply not something I find interesting. I'd much rather spend my free time reading or cooking or surfing the 'Net or whatever. But the Wii Fit looks really cool!

Intellectually, I know that I already own plenty of stuff to get a great home workout- a closet full of fitness gear and several shelves' worth of exercise DVD's. But part of me is like a spoiled child whining for the latest "hot" toy: "I don't wanna play with those things- I want THAT one!" Real mature, huh?

The second thing that I've been lusting after is another fitness gadget: the Nike + iPod system. I've already got a decent pair of running shoes, mp3 player, and heart rate monitor that until recently I've been perfectly happy with. They just aren't all synced together in a high tech way. Again, intellectually I know it's not worth spending ~$150 on an iPod Nano, ~$90-120+ for a pair of Nike+ shoes, and ~$29 for the kit to make them work together. BUT that doesn't stop the spoiled brat part of me from wanting it...

Still Waiting...

2009-01-05T05:15:00.000-08:00

Boy, the last bit of pregnancy does seem to really drag on! My due date is Thursday, but my oldest was a week late (my 2nd was a scheduled induction). I tried all the old wives' remedies for jumpstarting labor with my first and nothing worked- the doctor ended up having to break my water. So I think I'll just skip all the heartburn-causing spicy food and whatnot this time around...

Welcome 2009

2009-01-01T10:49:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year, everyone! Let's hope that 2009 sees a turnaround in the economy and soon :-)

I've Been Married a Decade Today...

2008-12-28T17:58:00.000-08:00

DH and I are celebrating our 10th wedding anniversary today. Boy, does that make me feel OLD!

I know that rationally I shouldn't feel that way because we were practically babies by today's standards when we took the plunge (I was a month shy of my 22nd birthday and DH had just turned 23). But 10 years still seems like a fairly long time to be married!

Merry Christmas!

2008-12-25T00:23:00.000-08:00

: In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that the whole world should be enrolled.; This was the first enrollment, when Quirinius was governor of Syria.; So all went to be enrolled, each to his own town.; And Joseph too went up from Galilee from the town of Nazareth to Judea, to the city of David that is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and family of David,; to be enrolled with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child.


: While they were there, the time came for her to have her child,; and she gave birth to her firstborn son. She wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.; Now there were shepherds in that region living in the fields and keeping the night watch over their flock.; The angel of the Lord appeared to them and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were struck with great fear.

: The angel said to them, "Do not be afraid; for behold, I proclaim to you good news of great joy that will be for all the people.; For today in the city of David a savior has been born for you who is Messiah and Lord.; And this will be a sign for you: you will find an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger."
: And suddenly there was a multitude of the heavenly host with the angel, praising God and saying:; Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.
: When the angels went away from them to heaven, the shepherds said to one another, "Let us go, then, to Bethlehem to see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us."; So they went in haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the infant lying in the manger. When they saw this, they made known the message that had been told them about this child.; All who heard it were amazed by what had been told them by the shepherds.; And Mary kept all these things, reflecting on them in her heart.; Then the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, just as it had been told to them.

From the humblest of births, the world was saved. Alleluia! Gloria in excelsis Deo!

Memo to Facebook: Moms Nursing Their Babies are Not "Obscene"

2008-12-20T14:41:00.000-08:00

I'm a fairly modest person and when I'm nursing a baby, I personally prefer to look for a place where I can have some privacy if we're away from home. But I strongly support the right of other moms to nurse in public if they so desire. God designed a woman's body to feed her child, and it's not at all obscene for her to do so. Just because I personally feel more comfortable with a higher degree of privacy when I'm nursing does not mean that other women should be required to do the same.

I was therefore appalled to discover via Lisa Belkin's "Motherlode" blog on the New York Times that Facebook considers pictures of moms nursing their babies to be "obscene". Several moms have apparently had the site censor photos of them nursing.

A spokesman for Facebook told Ms. Belkin:

"[Nursing] is a natural and beautiful act and we’re very glad to know that it is so important to some mothers to share this experience with others on Facebook. We take no action on the vast majority of [nursing] photos because they follow the site’s Terms of Use. Photos containing a fully exposed [bosom] do violate those Terms and may be removed. These policies are designed to ensure Facebook remains a safe, secure and trusted environment for all users, including the many children (over the age of 13) who use the site. The photos we act upon are almost exclusively brought to our attention by other users who complain."

Facebook allows all kinds of highly provocative photos that I find distasteful and not particularly appropriate for minors. But a mother feeding her child? That's not obscenity, people!

On December 27th, there's going to be a virtual "nurse-in" on Facebook to protest the policy. Anyone can participate, whether they're a nursing mom or not. All supporters have to do is to change their profile photo to a picture of a nursing mom and to and to change their status to the sentence, “Hey Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene!”

I don't have any photos of me nursing, and wouldn't really feel comfortable posting them to Facebook if I did, so I'm thinking of using Our Lady of La Leche. And nobody could reasonably complain that that is "obscene"...

Does the "80% Commandment" Hold True in a Homeschool Setting?

2008-12-05T04:17:00.000-08:00

Insomnia again, sigh. The silver lining is that I've got the chance to catch up on interesting posts from around the blogosphere.

One of these was on the "Kitchen Table Math" blog entitled "The 80% Commandment". It discusses a quote from a 1999 book by Elaine McEwan-Adkins and Mary Damer called Managing Unmanageable Students: Practical Solutions for Administrators. The quote is this:

"The relationship between students’ accuracy with schoolwork and their subsequent behavior is described by the 80% Commandment: 'Thou shall not expect a student to do a learning task when he or she does not have the skills to complete the task with 80% success. Otherwise, that student will either act out or tune out.' Today’s frustrated students who lack basic skills most often respond by acting out."

The author of the KTM post, Catherine Johnson, agrees wholeheartedly with McEwan-Adkins & Damer about the 80% Commandment and believes it's the reason why her students are struggling.

I tend to agree with this statement as it applies to a traditional classroom setting with 20-30+ students. But I wonder how applicable it is in a homeschool, where the child spends much of his/her time working one-on-one with the teacher.

I have definitely noticed that my DD will become frustrated if the task she's being asked to do is way over her head. At the same time, however, I want her to be challenged by her schoolwork and to stretch herself beyond her comfort level. That's the only way she'll grow in what she's capable of doing.

I'm not convinced that 80% is the optimal challenge level in a homeschool setting. If she's getting 4 out of 5 of them right all on her own, that seems to me like the task is too easy. I'd say that the challenge level I'm aiming for is more in the 1/2 to 2/3 range. Hard but not so difficult that she just gives up in frustration. Then I provide the "scaffolding" (to use the term associated with Vygotsky's work) that enables her to get to the point where she can complete the task herself with 80-90% accuracy. Once she can do that, I increase the challenge level again and the process repeats itself.

Because I'm only working with a single student, I'm able to do a lot more in the way of scaffolding than a traditional classroom teacher could. I can also devote as much time to a particular topic as she needs before we move on.

Last year we spent almost an entire month on one math topic that the curriculum we use is designed to cover in a few days (telling time to the nearest 5 minutes). She was having difficulty with the concept that each of the twelve numbers on the clock represents a different number (i.e. 5 representing 25 past the hour). That requires some pretty advanced thinking for a then-5 year old. But I kept working on it with her, and eventually the light bulb went on in her head.

I guess it's not so much the general principle of the 80% Commandment that I question, just the specific challenge level that was chosen. I'm curious to hear what other homeschoolers think- what do you consider as the optimal challenge level for your student? For those of you are homeschooling multiple children, do you find it varies from child to child?

Parenting a Girl Isn't All Sugar & Spice

2008-12-04T17:05:00.000-08:00

There's an interesting guest post on the New York Times' "Motherlode" blog today from a mom of 3 sons mourning the loss of what she imagines parenting a daughter to be like:

"My future daughter had a lot of Anne of Green Gables and Ramona Quimby to look forward to, as well as French braids and tutus and Mary Janes and apron dresses. She was going to watch 'Felicity' marathons with me and ogle the new J. Crew catalog and have annual viewings of 'It’s a Wonderful Life' with me under a blanket with hot chocolate and lots of whipped cream....

My worst nightmare, back then, was that I would end up being a Mom of Boys, one of those women with a 'practical' haircut and flat shoes who spent her afternoons at the baseball field and washed a lot of sweaty athletic clothes. A Mom of Boys bought a lot of boring clothes for her children — polo shirts and khaki shorts and Nike trainers. She was looked on with pity by the Moms of Girls, who color-coordinated with their daughters and took them on trips to the American Girl store and 'The Nutcracker' and who had princess birthdays and tea parties with their mommy friends."

I just had to laugh at this. Parenting my little girl isn't 100% pink ribbons and taffeta. She's just as likely to be in jeans and sneakers kicking around a soccer ball as she is to be in a tutu twirling around to Tchaikovsky. Last weekend she had a blast playing engineer with her little brother and a virtually all-boy crowd at the Nevada State Railroad Museum. Her tea set gets more use digging in the dirt in the backyard than it does with her dolls.

I'm not sure if a ponytail or a French Twist counts as a "practical" hairstyle, but that's how I wear my hair much of the time. I did use to color-coordinate my outfits with DD but that went out as soon as I had a 2nd kid (now I just settle for everybody wearing clean clothes, LOL!)

From what I remember of Ramona Quimby, she wasn't exactly a girlie-girl either :-)

And Always it Comes Back to the "S" Word...

2008-12-03T16:16:00.000-08:00

There's an interesting post on BlogHer today from a mom who's considering homeschooling her DD next year for kindergarten and then enrolling her in a traditional school the following year for first grade. Overall, it's a fairly positive post and she makes a lot of good arguments for HS. However, I'm concerned about one particular statement she made (emphasis mine):

"I researched and I found myself becoming more and more interested in homeschooling, thinking it might actually be a great thing for us. That was until I ended up on National Home Education Network's site, reading their list of 55 Reasons to Homeschool . While I understood why majority of the list would appeal to many, I felt that they were indicative of taking away valuable life experience for children that would help mold them into well rounded people."

Oh, brother. Why do we always keep having to refute the mistaken belief that traditional schooling is necessary for proper socialization?

I suggested that the author read Rachel Gathercole's excellent book The Well-Adjusted Child: The Social Benefits of Homeschooling.

Some other excellent blog posts on the topic include:
The "S" Word from Heather over at "My Supernatural World"
Homeschoolers Miss Out from Tammy over at "Just Enough and Nothing More"
So, How Do I Plan to Socialize My Children? from Dana over at "Principled Discovery"
"What About Socialization?" from Jen at "Bourgeois Baby"
The Socialization Question from Jena over at "Yarns of the Heart"
Monday's Musings: Socialization from Prairie Chick over at "Prairie Prologue"

I'm sure that there are tons more wonderfully written posts out there from my fellow homeschoolers so please don't be offended if I did not include yours in the above list. I just need to wrap this up so that we can go to our town's Christmas tree lighting :-)

Does Curvy = Traditional When it Comes to Women?

2008-12-03T12:20:00.000-08:00

When I'm not pregnant, I've got very much of an hourglass figure. My weight has fluctuated somewhat as an adult, but I seem to gain & lose pretty evenly all over. I might be a 38D-25-38 size 8 or a 34C-22-34 size 4 or something in between but my waist-hip ratio (WHR) stays fairly constant (in the 0.64-0.66 range). If a pair of pants or a skirt fits me in the hips, it almost certainly is going to need to be taken in at the waist.

So I found it very interesting to read about a new study in the December issue of the journal Current Anthropology done by Dr. Elizabeth Cashdan of the University of Utah. Previous work has established that a WHR of 0.7 or lower in women is associated with higher fertility and lower rates of chronic disease. Studies have also shown that men prefer a WHR of 0.7 or lower when looking for a mate, which makes sense from an evolutionary psychology standpoint. Dr. Cashdan noted, however, that the average WHR for women in 37 societies around the world she examined was >0.8.

"If 0.7 is the magic number both in terms of health and male mate choice, why are most women significantly higher? That's where the hormones come in.

Androgens, a class of hormones that includes testosterone, increase waist-to-hip ratios in women by increasing visceral fat, which is carried around the waist. But on the upside, increased androgen levels are also associated with increased strength, stamina, and competitiveness. Cortisol, a hormone that helps the body deal with stressful situations, also increases fat carried around the waist.

'The hormonal profile associated with high WHR (waist-to-hip ratio) … may favor success in resource competition, particularly under stressful circumstances,' writes Cashdan. 'The androgenic effects - stamina, initiative, risk-proneness, assertiveness, dominance - should be particularly useful where a woman must depend on her own resources to support herself and her family.'"

In societies where women tend to be less economically independent, the typical female WHR is lower than in societies where women bear more responsibility for providing for themselves and their families.

The question Dr. Cashman's research raises in my own mind is this: given that I'm both curvy and prefer a more traditional gender role, which is the direction of the causality? Am I curvy because I'm more traditional or am I more traditional because I'm curvy?

153rd Carnival of Homeschooling is Up!

2008-12-02T13:20:00.000-08:00

Silvia over at "Po Moyemu-In My Opinion" is hosting this week's 153rd edition of the Carnival of Homeschooling. Happy reading!

Are Homeschoolers Motivated by Racism/Ethnophobia?

2008-12-01T03:44:00.000-08:00

According to Dr. Gene V. Glass of Arizona State University, homeschoolers:

"appear to be motivated by a fear of mixing with the opposite class or race."

Pretty strong statement, no? One that a reasonable individual would want to see backed up with some compelling evidence when put forth in a scholarly work such as Dr. Glass' recent book Fertilizers, Pills, and Magnetic Strips: The Fate of Public Education in America, wouldn't you agree?

The only thing Dr. Glass uses to support his claim is the 1998 study of homeschooling done by Dr. Lawrence Rudner. There are several problems with using Dr. Rudner's study. The first is that it was done a full decade before the publication of Fertilizers, Pills, and Magnetic Strips. The second was that it was a self-selected sample of fewer than 12,000 families recruited from among the membership of the Home School Legal Defense Association. Dr. Glass may not be familiar with HSLDA, but those of us within the homeschooling community know that the membership of that organization is not particularly representative of all homeschoolers. It'd be akin to polling the membership of some suburban PTA and using that to generalize about all government-run school families.

In 2003, the National Center for Educational Statistics did a survey of homeschoolers that came up with a quite different demographic makeup than the earlier Rudner study. The percentage of non-Hispanic whites in the NCES study was 77% vs. 94% in the Rudner study. The percentage of blacks was 9% vs. only 1%, and the percentage of Hispanics was 5% vs. <1%. The makeup of the overall school-age population in 2003 was 61% non-Hispanic white, 14% black, and 17% Hispanic. Blacks and Hispanics are therefore somewhat underrepresented among homeschoolers, but it's not nearly by as much as Dr. Glass would have his readers believe.

Furthermore, I'm not convinced that the fact that non-Hispanic whites are somewhat overrepresented among homeschoolers is proof by itself of racism/ethnophobia. Is there any evidence that homeschoolers are disproportionately likely to reject integrated schools? I'm not aware of any research on the topic, but anecdotally it doesn't hold true for the homeschoolers I know personally.

For example, the school my children are zoned to attend is only 2.8% Hispanic and a mere 1.8% black. Low-income students of any race/ethnicity make up only 3.2% of the school's enrollment. So obviously my decision to homeschool is not due to a "fear of mixing with the opposite race or class" because there are hardly any black, Hispanic, or poor kids at our neighborhood school. In fact, I'm pretty sure the percentage of black and Hispanic kids in our homeschool support group actually exceeds the percentage at the school (it's certainly not less).

Out of all the homeschooling families I know personally, only one lives in a neighborhood where their kids would be zoned to attend a school with a significant Hispanic population. And they are strongly Fundamentalist Protestant and therefore wouldn't send their kids to the "Godless" government-run schools in any case. All the rest live in neighborhoods similar to mine.

Dr. Glass has a highly annoying tendency throughout Fertilizers, Pills, and Magnetic Strips to claim racism/ethnophobia as a motivation without providing much in the way of objective evidence to support his assertion. He even admits as much in the appendix, noting that his personal preference is:

"for psychoanalysis to explain many of the most important aspects of human behavior...I do see something akin to the 'defense mechanism' at work in intellectualizing of motives of both experts and ordinary people around questions of racial and ethnic segregation in public education. No one likes to be accused of being prejudiced, but most of us are."

Such conjectures have no place in a scholarly work. Stick to the facts, please! If I want psychobabble, I'll turn on Dr. Phil.

One More Reason to Homeschool: You Can Recreate the 1st Thanksgiving in Peace

2008-11-26T23:11:00.000-08:00

File this one under the category of "don't these people have anything more important to do?"

Police in Claremont, CA (an upscale suburb of L.A.) were called to Eleanor Daly Condit Elementary School after rival protesters clashed in front of the school. The dispute stemmed from the decision by the school board to cancel the construction paper costume portion of the four decades-old tradition of having the kindergarten students recreate the First Thanksgiving.

Apparently, one Condit parent, Dr. Michelle Raheja, who teaches Native American Literature at UC-Riverside, complained that the costumes were "racist". She compared the recreation to:

"asking children to dress up like slaves (and kind slave masters), or Jews (and friendly Nazis)"

Testifying in front of the school board in support of Dr. Raheja's position were Dr. Jennifer Tilton, professor of Race & Ethnic Studies at the University of Redlands, and instructors from Pitzer College and Riverside Community College.

Parent Constance Garabedian accused Dr. Raheja of:

"using those children as a political platform for herself and her ideas. I'm not a professor and I'm not a historian, but I can put the dots together."

The school board took the political correct position and ordered the students to forgo the costumes "in order to be sensitive to the Native American culture."

I'm of Irish heritage. My ancestors had to deal with oppression by foreign conquerors and when they fled to the U.S., they faced discrimination. But that was a long time before I was born. I wouldn't get my knickers in a knot if some kindergarten kids wanted to celebrate St. Patrick's Day by making leprechaun costumes out of construction paper. True, it may be a bit cartoonish, but certainly not racist.

They don't call it "La-la Land" for nothing!

Average American Fails Civic Literacy Quiz

2008-11-20T09:55:00.001-08:00

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute has released the results of its 3rd annual Civic Literacy quiz, and they're pretty dismal. 71% of respondents failed the quiz; the average score was only 49% correct. A mere 0.8% of those surveyed received an "A", yikes! Those in my age group (25-34) got only 46% correct. College graduates only did slightly better than average, with a still mediocre 57%.

I'm pleased that I only missed one question, for a score of 96.97 % :-) And it was an economics-related question, which is a subject I have never formally studied. I had narrowed down the choices to 2 possibilities and simply guessed wrong.

You can take the quiz here.

As If I Don't Have Enough Stuff To Do...

2008-11-10T16:55:00.000-08:00

I just got a jury summons to appear 8 days before my due date. So now I've got to get a note from my OB to verify that I would be medically unable to serve at that time. What a complete pain in the you-know-where...

Anybody Use a Cloth Diapering Service?

2008-11-04T10:25:00.000-08:00

I've always been tempted to cloth diaper but frankly have never wanted to deal with the hassle of so much additional laundry. With my previous 2 babies, there's never been a diaper service available where I was living. This time around, I've found a service called Tiny Tots that's based out of Campbell and delivers to my area.

Their monthly price isn't really a huge premium over what I'd be paying for disposables so I'm seriously considering giving it a try.

Has anybody out there used a cloth diapering service? If so, were you satisfied with the quality of the diapers and the customer service?