Reminder - send in a post for the next Carnival of Homeschooling

Please remember to send in a post about homeschooling for the next Carnival of Homeschooling. The Carnival of Homeschooling will be held next week at The Faithful Homeschool.  She has announced a theme of Spring.

This will be the 327th edition.

Blog Carnvial seems to be repaired. It is now accepting submissions. But is is probably best to keep sending submissions directly via email.

Go here for the instructions on sending in a submission.

As always, entries to the Carnival of Homeschooling are due Monday evening at 6:00 PM Pacific Standard Time.

This week's Carnival of Homeschooling is up - The Texas Edition

This week's Carnival of Homeschooling is up at Sprittibee:

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Welcome to the Texas Edition of the Carnival of Homeschooling! If you are new to ‘blog carnivals’, please read the link at the bottom of this post to find out more. This post has many links that take you off-site to other homeschool blogs where you can read their ‘showcased’ article submission. If you would like to submit an article for a future carnival or host the carnival on your site, please see the bottom section to find out how. Each carnival writer has the option to put their compilation to a ‘theme’ if they so choose. So... being a Texas lover, I figured I would share some tidbits about the Lone Star State.
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I apologize for being so long with this notice.  I was recently promoted at work and I'm working about an extra 20 hours a week.  The extra hours will only be for another couple weeks.

Why would homeschoolers need tight regulations?

Many states loose on homeschooling regulations is an OK article about homeschooling.  It covers the basics of homeschooling.  It discusses the laws in Ohio where parents just have to notify that they will be homeschooling their children. 

But the article has implied call to "fix" homeschooling in Ohio.  I have a problem with the comparison of public schools to homeschools.  The article starts with:

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With ever-tougher academic standards coming from both state and federal legislatures, schools are under unprecedented, increasing pressure to perform well on a variety of measures, including mandatory testing and more rigorous teacher evaluations.
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The implied assumption through the article is that tougher regulations are somehow good.  That more and more laws have helped the government schools. 

But the opposite is true.  Over the last thirty years the quality of public education has declined.  Over the same time period there has been an explosion in regulations.  The government keeps demanding tougher standards; but more and more students are graduating illiterate.  While corelation does not imply causation, I think it is easy to see in this instance that instance that having law upon law with conflicting goals and more and more forms makes it hard for teachers to teach.  And I'll acknowledge that there are many other contributing factors.

But more laws, on either public schools or homeschoolers, does not mean education will improve.

Rather than worry about something which is not broken, homeschooling, I wish people would stay focused on a very real problem: broken government schools.  Every year tens of thousands of students in public schools simply drop out.  They stop showing up. 

Reminder - send in a post for the next Carnival of Homeschooling

Blog Carnvial seems to be completely broken. It has stopped accepting submissions. For now the only way to send in your post is directly via email. Go here for the instructions on sending in a submission.

The next Carnival of Homeschooling will be held at Sprittibee.

As always, entries to the Carnival of Homeschooling are due Monday evening at 6:00 PM Pacific Standard Time.

The Carnival of Homeschooling is up - The Creativity Edition

Misty is hosting this week's Carnival of Homeschooling at HomeschoolBytes.

She starts the carnival with:

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We’ve all chosen to homeschool for a variety of reasons and many of us have discovered that every child is a bundle of different needs, learning styles, and undiscovered talents. Nurturing the creativity of our children fills the journey with diverse and amazing discoveries.
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Another reason to homeschool - Because teachers don't like creative students

Creativity: Asset or Burden in the Classrom? reports:

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One of the most consistent findings in educational studies of creativity has been that teachers dislike personality traits associated with creativity. Research has indicated that teachers prefer traits that seem to run counter to creativity, such as conformity and unquestioning acceptance of authority (e.g., Bachtold, 1974; Cropley, 1992; Dettmer, 1981; Getzels & Jackson, 1962; Torrance, 1963). The reason for teachers’ preferences is quite clear creative people tend to have traits that some have referred to as obnoxious (Torrance, 1963). Torrance (1963) described creative people as not having the time to be courteous, as refusing to take no for an answer, and as being negativistic and critical of others. Other characteristics, although not deserving the label obnoxious, nonetheless may not be those most highly valued in the classroom.
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You might find the full report worth reading.

In many ways the conclusions are not surprising.  Most teachers see their classes as a job.  They are trying to make something of a difference with dozens of students in a fixed amount of time.  A child who questions authority or wants to understand a topic in greater detail is disrupting the flow.  The teacher doesn't have a lot of options.  They can make the class wait while they address the one student or they can move the class along to the next point to be taught leaving the creative student frustrated.  I'm sure that many students who are ignored and told to just conform will become more frustrated each time their unusual questions are ignored.

Homeschooling allows creative students to flower and grow.  They can chase their dreams and dive into problems they want to learn more about. 

I do want my children to be polite, but there are times when refusing to take no for an answer is the right response.
In comments on Marginal Revolution someone pointed out that this is exactly the message Sir Ken Robinson gave in his TED Talk "Do schools kill creativity?"



If you haven't seen the video before it is worth watching.

Science: Pupils get wider when someone is paying attention

I found The pupils are the windows to the mind fascinating:

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The pupil is best known for changing size in reaction to light. In a dark room, your pupils open wide to let in more light; as soon as you step outside into the sunlight, the pupils shrink to pinpricks. This keeps the retina at the back of the eye from being overwhelmed by bright light. Something similar happens in response to psychological stimuli, says Bruno Laeng of the University of Oslo, who cowrote the paper with Sylvain Sirois of Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières and Gustaf Gredebäck of Uppsala University in Sweden. When someone sees something they want to pay closer attention to, the pupil enlarges. It's not clear why this happens, Laeng says. "One idea is that, by essentially enlarging the field of the visual input, it's beneficial to visual exploration," he says.


However it works, psychological scientists can use the fact that people's pupils widen when they see something they're interested in.


Laeng has used pupil size to study people who had damage to the hippocampus, which usually causes very severe amnesia. Normally, if you show one of these patients a series of pictures, then take a short break, then show them another series of pictures, they don't know which ones they've seen before and which ones are new. But Laeng measured patients' pupils while they did this test and found that the patients did actually respond differently to the pictures they had seen before. "In a way, this is good news, because it shows that some of the brains of these patients, unknown to themselves, is actually capable of making the distinction," he says.
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Some progress towards greater choice in education

Superior Court Upholds Education Savings Accounts has good news:

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Education-reform advocates won a key victory today, with a judge upholding the constitutionality of Arizona’s first-in-the-nation education savings accounts.


The Maricopa County Superior Court rejected a legal challenge by the Arizona School Boards Association and the Arizona Education Association against the accounts, known formally as empowerment scholarship accounts (ESAs).


“Though this is only the opening round of a protracted legal battle, it is gratifying to start with a victory for the kids,” declared Clint Bolick, vice president for litigation at the Goldwater Institute, who argued on behalf of the Institute before Judge Maria Del Mar Verdin.


ESAs were proposed by the Goldwater Institute as a way to expand educational opportunities, and were adopted by a bipartisan majority of the Arizona Legislature for disabled schoolchildren in 2010. For eligible children who leave the public schools, the state provides 90 percent of their per-pupil funding in an account that can be used for a wide variety of educational purposes, including private school tuition, tutoring, distance learning, community college classes, and educational software.
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Learning lessons from life

From Dan Galvin's Thought For The Day mailing list:

We all learn by experience
but some of us have to go to summer school.

-Peter de Vries (1910-1993)
Writer

What is the goal? Well behaved children or competent adults?

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry has some good thoughts about what is important in raising children. His column The Truth About French Parenting (and I Would Know) starts with:

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As a French parent who speaks Americanese on the Twitters (you should follow me here by the way), I must have been asked countless times what I think about the latest parenting meme: the idea that French parenting is superior to American parenting.


The basic gist is that French parents know how to be more strict, kowtow less to their children, and as a result their children are better behaved.


Oh boy.


Depending on your perspective, I am either the worst or the best person to ask about this, because I view the first 20 years of my life as a constant fight against the education ideas that rule in France. Now that I have a child, my almost monomaniacal obsession is how to protect her from French parenting and French education, which is why we are considering Montessori schools and homeschooling/unschooling rather than put her in French schools. (Let me rephrase that: I am considering setting myself on fire rather than put her in French schools.)
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Janine and I would love perfectly behaved children, but our end goal is that our children grow up to be sane, healthy, wonderful adults.  (And provide us with dozens of delightful grandchildren.  :-)  )

It is easy to get distracted by the simple solution of forcing good behavior when children are young, but too often children who are forced to be good at five and ten have little desire as adults to follow the teachings of their parents.  It is much more effective to raise children who understand the value of good behavior and are self motivated to live a good life.

Hat tip: Instapundit

Some good Bollywood movies

I have several friends at work who are from India.  Partly as a way to connect with them and partly because of the claim that Islam fears Bollywood more than the United States I have been watching a few Bollywood movies over the last eight months.  Many of these movies are available streaming from Netflix.  The movies I've watched have been a lot of fun and I encourage you to check out the following:

Bend It Like Beckham may not be a true Bollywood movie.  It is short and there was no dancing.  The movie focuses on an Indian young woman living in England who wants to play soccer.  She and Keira Knightley both struggle with disapproving parents, but we have a great conclusion.  Janine and I saw it back in 2002 when it came out and recently watched it again with our children.  I give it four stars.

Taare Zameen Par is currently my favorite Bollywood movie.  Disney released this in the United States as Like Stars on Earth.  This is a powerful story about a young boy who suffers from undiagnosed dyslexia. His parents and teachers are highly critical and the boy is dying emotionally from the hostile environment.  As a parent the first hour is very rough to watch.  One of my daughters was crying at one point.  But things work out in the end as a teacher recognizes what is going on and is able to help the young boy.  I liked this movie so much that I requested the DVD for Christmas.  I give it five stars.

Bride & Prejudice is a fun version of Pride and Prejudice.  The producer is Gurinder Chadha who produced Bend It Like Beckham.  The "Bennet" sisters are Indian and Darcy is a rich American.  The plot is roughly the same, but with lots of dancing and singing.  Janine really enjoyed some of the dances.  We also bought this DVD.  I give it four stars.


Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi is a powerful story of Surinder Sahni, played by Shah Rukh Khan, one of Bollywood's mega stars. The movie starts with Surinder having an arranged married to a young woman who has lost all those she loves.  Surinder is kind of a nerd and doesn't know how to reach out to his wife.  Through a sequence of events he takes on a cool-hipster like persona and proceeds to enter a dance competition with his wife, but she doesn't recognize the new man in her life is her husband.  The movie ends with them dancing in the competition as she realizes that her dance partner is her husband.  I have watched the final dance scene a couple times.  This is a fun story.  I give it four stars.

Chak de India stars Shah Rukh Khan as a disgraced field hockey star who has a disastrous game.  He returns seven years later to coach the India women's field hockey team and take them to the World Cup.  One of the interesting themes to me from the story was just how fractured India is.  The coach struggles with the team players seeing themselves as state champions. They value their state first and then India.  The coach helps them to learn to work together.  I give it four stars.

Kismat Konnection is about a young Indian architect who is having bad luck.  He finds his good luck charm in a young woman, but they don't get along for the first three fourths of the movie. It is a pleasant story.  I give it three stars.

If you have never watched a Bollywood movie before I encourage you to check out some of the movies above.  I think you'll enjoy them.

Have you heard of Script Frenzy?

Last November four of my family started NaNoWriMo and one of us finished it. The goal is to write a novel in the month of November.

I've learned there is a similar program called Script Frenzy which encourages people to try and write a full 100 page script in the month of April.  If you have any budding screenwriters you might have them check out the program.

Another sign of our changing world

Encyclopaedia Britannica to end print editions starts with:

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CHICAGO — Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. said Tuesday that it will stop publishing print editions of its flagship encyclopedia for the first time since the sets were originally published more than 200 years ago.


The book-form of Encyclopaedia Britannica has been in print since it was first published in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1768. It will stop being available when the current stock runs out, the company said. The Chicago-based company will continue to offer digital versions of the encyclopedia.


Officials said the end of the printed, 32-volume set has been foreseen for some time.
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Reminder - send in a post for the next Carnival of Homeschooling

Blog Carnvial seems to be completely broken. It has stopped accepting submissions. For now the only way to send in your post is directly via email. Go here for the instructions on sending in a submission.

The next Carnival of Homeschooling will be held at HomeschoolBytes.

As always, entries to the Carnival of Homeschooling are due Monday evening at 6:00 PM Pacific Standard Time.

Humor: How do you use your iPad?

My mother forwarded the video below.  This is roughly the translation:

Daughter is visiting father and is helping in the kitchen.

She asks: “Tell me dad, how are you managing with the new I-Pad we gave you for your birthday?”



His response to her incredulous stare at the end of the video needs no translation, but he says, "Vas gibt's?" ("What's wrong? or What's going on?")

This week's Carnival of Space is up

The latest Carnival of Space is up at Linked Through Space, hosted from Finland!

I think this is the first time I've participated in a Carnival of Space in over a year.

Ask an intelligent question and get chased out of a public school

Reading Frederick Douglass in Rochester tell a sad story of a young black girl who questioned the value of public schools and was chased out of school.  Here is the start of the column:

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Here is a sincere question: Why have the good people of Rochester, N.Y., failed to tar and feather school superintendent Bolgen Vargas as a prelude to running him out of town on a rail?


Mr. Vargas is fortunate enough to have in his charge one Jada Williams, a 13-year-old eighth grader who voluntarily took on some difficult extra work: reading Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life and writing an essay on the subject. Frederick Douglass is dangerous reading, truly radical stuff. Miss Williams, like most of the students in her dysfunctional school, is black. Most of the people being paid to go through the motions of teaching them are white. Coming across the famous passage in which Douglass quotes the slavemaster Auld, Miss Williams was startled by the words: “If you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there will be no keeping him. It will forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master.” The situation seemed to her familiar, and her essay was a blistering indictment of the failures of the largely white faculty of her school: “When I find myself sitting in a crowded classroom where no real instruction is taking place I can say history does repeat itself.”
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Go read the rest of the coloum.

This week's Carnival of Homeschooling is up - to those who homeschool because of illness

This week's Carnival of Homeschooling is being hosted at Notes From A Homeschooled Mom.

The carnival starts with:

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Hi and Welcome to the Carnival of Homeschooling at Notes from a Homeschooled Mom. I am have homeschooled for nearly a decade now and am near the end of the journey with my children. You may have noticed I have recently changed my blog name. It was a simple change of one word: Homeschooling to Homeschooled. The reason for the change is that I now know that I wasn't just teaching my kids, they were teaching me all along. Homeschooling has made me braver, stronger, more opinionated, and less afraid of expressing those opinions. Homeschooling has also taught me to face life standing up and not to let it mow you down.
This is one of those weeks when I would have refused to get out of bed ten years ago. I have experienced a loss of a precious niece, and will be heading home tomorrow for a few days to be with family. But like I said, homeschooling has taught me to keep standing and keep going, and in that vein, I present this Carnival in the memory of my niece Candace Barnes who was forced to homeschool the last few years of her education because she was unable to go to school a great deal of the time. While I am sorry for her death, I am grateful for her life and the short lives of other family members who had been struck with the same affliction.
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We did it! This is our 5,000th post

According to Blogger this is our 5,000th post!

Nice review of "Stop Stealing Dreams" with a homeschooling mention

Penelope Trunk has a thoughtful review of Seth Godin's new book, Stop Stealing Dream.

Homeschooling is mentioned.

Another benefit of homeschooling - getting paid while you study

I just asked my second daughter what she likes about homeschooling.  She thought for a minute and then said she loves to be paid to babysit, while she studies.

My two older daughters have become very well known among our friends for being available for babysitting during the day.  They can babysit five to ten hours a week!  One week my second daughter babysat over twenty hours.

It helps that they have a regular gig each Monday morning.  A friend of ours swings by at 8:30 AM and drops off her younger child for the morning and goes off to preschool with her older child.  The baby is nine months old.  My three daughters will take twenty minute turns playing with the baby until she falls asleep.  They are making good money, while they are studying.

Homeschooling is hard to beat for the flexibility.

Reminder - send in a post for the next Carnival of Homeschooling

You have less than five hours to send in your submission for the next Carnival of Homeschooling.

Blog Carnvial seems to be completely broken. It has stopped accepting submissions. For now the only way to send in your post is directly via email. Go here for the instructions on sending in a submission.

The next Carnival will be held at Notes From A Homeschooled Mom.
As always, entries to the Carnival of Homeschooling are due Monday evening at 6:00 PM Pacific Standard Time.

This week's Carnival of Homeschooling is up - The Teacher Inservice edition

This week's Carnival of Homeschooling is up at The Common Room:

The Headmistress starts the carnival with:

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Welcome, welcome, welcome to this week's Carnival of Homeschooling! It's time for a teacher inservice day. Let the kids go out to play, fix yourself a cup of tea, and replenish your homeschool toolbox as you read through the collected experiences, wisdom, ideas, and more, all shared by your fellow homeschooling parents!
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Why aren't more people happy?

From Dan Galvin's Thought For The Day mailing list:

If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people?

The value of having a positive attitude

From Dan Galvin's Thought For The Day mailing list:

A positive attitude will not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
-Herm Albright

Reinventing the wheel

Next year will be our 14th year of homeschooling. By this time, I feel like I know what I'm doing. My oldest daughter will soon "graduate" and continue her studies at our local community college. Her sisters will in rapid succession follow.

Next year, I will be starting all over again with a kindergartener. Not only that, he's a boy. Most (if not all) my homeschool friends have daughters. If they do have boys, they are older.

Our son has some challenges that manifest is some very unusually ways. For example, we have to substantially limit screen time because it aggravates his tic. If he gets too much screen time his head will involuntarily jerk to one side.

In the past, we've used quite a lot of online resources as part of our homeschooling, like ALEKS and STARFALL.COM, not to mention PBS or NOVA. We also have used online classes. None of these things are going to work for him.

Honestly, I briefly considered sending him to the local parent participation school. However, I don't believe that he would do well in a school environment (no matter how good) because of the state emphasis on testing. He's on his own track and can't be pushed along to meet arbitrary benchmarks. I believe he will do well over time, but he's going to get there at his own pace.

So, I need to reinvent the wheel. In many ways, next year will be like homeschooling for the first time. I will need to make new friends (who have little boys), use new methods, and different materials.

Wish me luck.

Space Access 2012 will be held April 12 to 14

Our long time readers may remember I enjoy attending Space Access. 

I like my brother's explanation of Space Access as “There are lots of people thinking about getting into space. There are lots of people who talk about getting into space. Space Access is run by people who are doing the work.” It is attended by entrepreneurs and people looking for practical steps to moving into space.

It has the feel of Silicon Valley in the late 1970s.  Much of the big technology companies were scattered across the United States, and across the world.  Yet dozens of people like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were working in their garages to rapidly push technology into new areas like the personal computer.  They changed the world.

Space Access has the same types of people.  Many of they are also working out of their garages and are rapidly pushing technology. And I think they will also change the world.

If you enjoy learning about the latest breaking news on privates efforts to get into space look into attending Space Access this year.  It will take place next month, April 12-14, at the Grace Inn in Phoenix Arizona.

I'll be attending with my father, a brother and one of my daughters. 

Sending more students to college doesn't necessarily improve the economy

In response to President Obama's call to double the number of students going to college Peter Wood explains in Supersizing: Obama’s Higher Education Agenda why merely increasing the number of college graduates doesn't help the economy.  He starts with:

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The most conspicuous part of President Obama’s agenda for higher education is his plan for gigantic increases in enrollment. Obama announced this goal very early in his term. In February 2009, in a speech to a joint session of Congress he declared, “by 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.” Translated into actual enrollments, that would mean more than doubling the number of domestic students attending the nation’s colleges and universities.
Last week in Obama’s Higher-Education Agenda I said I would in a series of posts examine the eight majors components of that agenda, and then try to put them together as a whole. His dream of gargantuan expansion comes first both as first-announced and as the foundation for everything else.
The idea of gargantuan expansion did not pop out of the blue. Rather it popped out of the College Board in a report released just before Obama’s inauguration, and it also popped out of a two-page ad that appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe in December 2008. The College Board report, Coming to Our Senses: Education and the American Future, called for granting college degrees to at least 55 percent of “young Americans” by 2025. The “young Americans” qualifier is important. This was a summons not for more more adult and continuing post-secondary education, but for a radical increase in college education for those under age 35. And it wasn’t just a call for increased enrollments, but for actual graduates.
The proposal was—there is no finer word for it—nuts.
As I pointed out at the time, in Cold Brine and The Battle of Bunker Hill, if you sat down and did the calculations on the basis of census data and actual enrollments, to grant 55 percent of young Americans college degrees by 2025 would mean awarding 129 million college degrees between 2009 and 2025—57 million more than would have been awarded at 2008 rates. Even if you think that is a good idea, American colleges and universities had then and still do not have anything like the capacity to accomplish it. To get there, colleges would need to more than double their enrollments and sustain them at that higher level. How many colleges and universities could have done that starting in 2009?
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later in his column he writes:


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But does having the highest percent of college graduates among the nations have any particular connection to economic competitiveness? That’s really the question we need to answer. Clearly an advanced economy needs a critical mass of engineers, doctors, teachers, scientists, and experts in various fields that involve a high level of education. We even need a certain number of lawyers. But recognizing we need college graduates does not necessarily mean more is better; or that “most” is best.
To be the nation with “highest proportion of college graduates in the world” sounds grand, but is actually rather vague. What nation is now in that position? When President Obama said it in February 2009 the best available data from the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) said it was Russia, which as of 2003 claimed that 54 percent of its population aged 25-64 had college degrees, compared to the U.S. at 38 percent. The Russian Federation wasn’t then and isn’t now a towering economic power or a dynamo of intellectual and industrial creativity, but lots of its citizens have college degrees.
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 I am all for higher education, but Peter Woods is right merely sending more people to college is not a magic bullet for improving the economy.

Hat tip: Instapundit

Incredible India

Some of my friends at work are from India.  They recently shared with me this enticing video:



It would be fun to go visit India some day.

Reminder - send in a post for the next Carnival of Homeschooling

Please send in your submission for the next Carnival of Homeschooling.

Blog Carnvial is partially broken. It is accepting submissions, but not forwarding them. It would be easier if you just submitted your post directly via email. Go here for the instructions on sending in a submission.

The next Carnival will be held at The Common Room.

As always, entries to the Carnival of Homeschooling are due Monday evening at 6:00 PM Pacific Standard Time.

Newspapers are really suffering

Mark J. Perry has a fascinating chart showing the dramatic drop of newspaper revenue over the last five years.  From 1950 to 2000 revenue from advertising grew steadily from $20 billion to $60 billion.  This growth all evaporated in the last five years as revenue dropped back down to $20 billion. 

I can remember delivering the local paper in the 1970s.  Today's Sunday edition is often smaller than the dailys I used to drop at people's door steps.

Hat tip: Instapundit.

The Carnival of Homeschooling is up - If I had a million dollars

Jen is hosting this week's Carnival of Homeschooling at Forever, For Always, No Matter What. 

She starts the carnival with:

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I'm excited to be hosting the Carnival of Homeschooling this week. As always a great selection of homeschool encouragement, new ideas, and tips to make your days more productive and enjoyable.


There's nothing like a few days away from the normal hustle and bustle of family life to get some perspective. While we were away last week enjoying the sun and some quiet time by the pool, we had time for many good conversations. Normally when we are talking "career", we are talking about my husband's career, not my career of stay-at-home, homeschooling mom.


During one of our many conversations, I mentioned that a few friends had recently re-entered the work force after being home and caring for young children for several years. I made the comment that it just didn't seem appealing to me, going back to work, and that even if I didn't homeschool I wouldn't be putting together my resume any time soon. My husband responded that's because I was born to do exactly what I was doing, and that if I won a million dollars I wouldn't stop doing what we were doing. He is absolutely correct.


Certainly everyday is not perfect, we have our share of rotten days when nothing goes right, everyone is mis-behaving {even the teacher!}, but if I was suddenly gifted a great sum of money life really wouldn't be all that different. Oh, I would definitely hire a cleaning service and maybe a math tutor, and our field trips would most definitely become a bit more extravagant - shall we follow the route of Lewis and Clark for a few weeks? - but all in all we would keep on keeping on with this wonderful gift of home education.
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