Life Humor 1.R

From the Henry Cate Life Humor collection:

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There was a flood in this town and they had to evacuate the city.  A man is standing in water up to his knees and a rowboat comes along  and the people say "Can we give you a helping hand?"  The man in the water says "No thank you, I have faith in the Lord, He'll save me."

A little later on when the water is up to the man's waist, a motor boat comes along and the people say "Can we give you a helping hand?"  The man in the water says "No thank you, I have faith in the Lord, He'll save me."

A little later on when the water is up to his neck, a helicopter comes by and the people say "Can we give you a helping hand?"  The man in the water says "No thank you, I have faith in the Lord, He'll save me."

Well, finally the water goes over the man's head and he drowns.  He goes to heaven and sees God and he says to God "Lord, I had faith in you and I  drowned anyway.  What happened?"

And God said: "I sent you two boats and a helicopter!"

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A mother mouse was taking her large brood for a stroll across the kitchen floor one day when the local cat, by a feat of stealth unusual even for its species, managed to trap them in a corner.  The children cowered, terrified by this fearsome beast, plaintively crying, "Help, Mother!  Save us!  Save us! We're scared, Mother!"

Mother Mouse, with the hopeless valor of a parent protecting its children, turned with her teeth bared to the cat towering huge above them and suddenly began to bark in a fashion that would have done any Doberman proud.  The startled cat fled in fear for its life.  As her grateful offspring flocked around her shouting "Oh, Mother, you saved us!" and "Yay!  You scared the cat away!" she turned to them purposefully and declared: "You see how useful it is to know a second language?"

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A circus foreman was making the rounds inspecting the big top when a scrawny little man entered the tent and walked up to him.  "Are you the foreman around here?" he asked timidly.  "I'd like to join your circus; I have what I think is a pretty good act."  The foreman nodded assent, whereupon the little man hurried over to the main pole and rapidly climbed up to the very tip-top of the big top.  Drawing a deep breath, he hurled himself off into the air and began flapping his arms furiously. Amazingly, rather than plummeting to his death the little man began to fly all around the poles, lines, trapezes and other obstacles, performing astounding feats of aerobatics which ended in a long power dive from the top of the tent, pulling up into a gentle feet-first landing beside the foreman, who had been nonchalantly watching the whole time.
"Well," puffed the little man.  "What do you think?"
"That's all you do?" answered the foreman scornfully.  "Bird imitations?"

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What's the difference between a Ukrainian fairy tale and a Soviet fairy tale?
A Ukrainian fairy tale begins, "a long time ago, beyond the forests over the mountains..."
A Soviet fairy tale begins, "Tass news agency reports...."

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 These are both old favorites of mine, and I hope they've not been submitted to this net too recently.
Woman walks into the divorce lawyer's office, and he begins to ask her some questions....

 "Ma'am, what are your grounds?"

 "Oh, 'bout an acre an' a half..."

 "No, I mean do you have a grudge?"

 "No, but we've got a carport..."

 "Lady, just tell me: why do you want a divorce?"

 "Why, total lack of communication, of course!"

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Our family strongly believes this

My family is very slow to blindly trust authority:

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.
-Galileo Galilei, physicist and astronomer (1564-1642)

A TED talk by a 13-year-old Homeschooler

Hackschooling Makes Me Happy: Logan LaPlante is a fun talk:

Amy Welborn on why homeschooling continues to grow

Amy Welborn has a good column on who homeschooling continues to grow - An intuition and an encounter.

Hat tip: Instapundit

Reminder: Please 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 next Carnival of Homeschooling will be held at: Golden Grasses.

I am pretty sure this will be the 402nd edition of the Carnival of Homeschooling.

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.

I have a reminder mailing list. If you would like email reminders, please tell me.

Another good explanation about protecting yourself when talking with the police or FBI

I like this video - Protect Yourself from FBI Manipulation:



Remember, when talking with the police or FBI you always want a lawyer.

True education

Are your children getting a true education?

"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know.  It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't."
  - Anatole France (1844 - 1924)

Some of our best posts from December 2007

Janine and I have been blogging about homeschooling for almost eight years. If you missed some of our early posts, you have missed some of our best thoughts. Here are some highlights from December 2007:

We shared Another reason to do foster care.

I wrote about some of the problems with Politics and public schools.

I shared one of my favorite poems The Ambulance in the Valley.


December 2007 was the first time I saw Tim hawkins' - A Homeschool Family:

This week's Carnival of Homeschooling is up

This week's Carnival of Homeschooling is up at The Informed Parent.

The carnival starts with:

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I apologize for keeping you all waiting for this 401st Carnival! Life throws some curves at times and this week a loved one fell and broke a hip and needed surgery on the days I would have been mindful enough to do this.

Thanks to the Cates for their ongoing faithfulness and again thank you for patiently waiting!

Instead of being clever, or finding awesome photos, I’d like to just get everyone’s submissions posted. Please feel free to tweet, stream or share these submissions so others can read them as well!
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Interesting point about school choice - It is really about How to learn

J.D. Tuccille makes and interesting point in his article School Choice Isn't About Fighting for Resources, It's About Choosing How To Learn.

He starts with:

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On a family vacation a few weeks ago, my older nephew's unhappiness with school was a major topic of conversation. His fifth grade teacher, it turns out, required all of the kids in class to read assigned books at the same rate—sprinting ahead was strictly forbidden. For a kid who just tested at the reading level of a high school senior, this was a pointlessly morale-killing rule that contributed to a very smart boy's growing discontent with school. Sixth grade is now underway, and so are parental negotiations for a more flexible approach toward education, or else a healthier venue, including home. It's with this experience in mind that I read research psychologist Peter Gray's all too accurate piece in Salon comparing modern schools to prisons—horrible, curiosity-crushing institutions that teach all the wrong lessons. His points are excellent in themselves, and provide a major insight into why the school choice debate is often so off-base.
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Hat tip: Instapundit

Progress with our public schools

When stated like this it is kind of scary:

"In one century, we went from teaching Latin and Greek in high school  to offering remedial English in college."
  - U.S. columnist Joseph Sobran

Life Humor 1.Q

From the Henry Cate Life Humor collection:

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What do you get when you drop a piano down a mine shaft"
 A-flat miner.

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Where does the Lone Ranger take his garbage?
 To the dump, to the dump, to the dump dump dump.

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What's a wok?
 Something you thwow at a wabbit!

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  Old man LaFontaine was duck hunting with his new bird dog down in the Bayous of Louisiana. He was fortunate and brought down a large goose which landed in the middle of a small lake.

LaFontaine told the dog to go fetch and amazingly enough the dog ran pitty-pat, pitty-pat, pitty-pat on TOP of the water and brought back the game.

The man was just amazed and thought he was coming down with swamp fever or something equally bad until the dog did this wonderful feat several more times.

LaFontaine could not resist the chance to gloat over this marvelous dog and brought his friend Couvillion hunting with him the following weekend. Couvillion drilled a Mallard and sure enough, the dog went pity-pat, pitty-pat, pitty-pat across the water to fetch the game. Couvillion acted as though nothing odd had happened.

LaFontaine said "Didn't you notice anything the least bit strange about the way my dog fetched your game?"

"Yep!" answered Couvillion. "The dumb dog can't swim!"

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Looking for a cool one after a long, dusty ride, the drifter strode into a saloon.  He sidled up to the bar, ordered shot and a beer, and settled back to enjoy his refreshment.  Suddenly, a man galloped into the bar, shouting, "Run for your lives!  Big Mike's comin'!

The drifter watched as most of the locals bolted for the door.  Suddenly, the bar doors burst open.  An enormous man, standing eight feet tall and weighing at least 400 pounds, rode in on a bull.  Grabbing the drifter by the ankle, he tossed him over the bar and thundered, "Gimme a drink!"

The terrified fellow handed over a bottle of whiskey, which the man guzzled in a single gulp and then shattered on the bar.  The drifter stood aghast as the man stuffed the broken bottle in his mouth, munched the broken glass and smacked his lips with relish.

"Can I, ah, get you another, sir?" the drifter stammered.

"Naw, I gotta git," the man grunted.  "Big Mike's comin'."

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A husband and wife had a human cannonball act in the circus.  One day the wife ran off with the lion tamer.  The husband was extremely dejected.  The strong man asked him what he was going to do.  The husband answered, "This is a disaster.  I don't know where I'm going to find another woman of her caliber."

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An engineer wakes up in the middle of the night and smells smoke, goes to the bathroom, fills the garbage pail with water, douses the fire, and goes back to sleep.

A physicist wakes up in the middle of the night and smells smoke, grabs paper and pencil, does a page of calculations, goes to the bathroom, fills a glass with water, tosses it with great precision, douses the fire, and goes back to sleep.

A mathematician wakes up in the middle of the night and smells smoke, grabs paper and pencil, does four pages of calculations, exclaims "A solution exists!" and goes back to sleep.

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The house is empty except for the family dog.  The telephone rings.  The dog walks over to the phone, pushes the receiver off the hook with his paw, and says,  "WOOF!"

No response.  The dog waits a moment, and once again says,  "WOOF!"

Still no response.  The dog moves closer to the phone and says, "William.  Oscar.  Oscar.  Frederick."

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 A man walks into a bar with a dog.  He orders a drink and tells the bartender: "This here dog can TALK". The bartender says "Gad, I'm sick of you guys ... Get out!"

The man says: "Wait, wait ... Give me a chance, I'll prove it."
The bartender agrees to this, and the following exchange takes place:

Man (to dog):  "What does Sandpaper feel like?"
Dog:  "Ruff!"
Man (to bartender): "See? What did I tell ya!"
Bartender: "Get out."

Man: "Wait, give me another chance...."
Man (to dog): "What is on top of a house?"
Dog: "Ruff!"
Man: "See? He said a roof is on top of a house!"
Bartender: "Get out."

Man: "Wait, one more chance........"
Man (to dog): "Who was the greatest baseball player of all time?"
Dog: "Ruff!"
Man: "See? He said Babe Ruth!!! I told you!!"

     With this, the bartender throws both the man and he dog out of the bar. As they are laying in the gutter outside, the dog looks at the man and says: "Do you think I should have said Joe Dimaggio?"

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Why is common sense missing from our public schools

Are zero-tolerance policies at school targeting harmless kids? has a summary of a number of incidents where public schools make federal cases out of children doing harmless things. 

I believe many of us have heard about the Maryland 7-year-old who got suspended for eating a pop-tart into the shape of a gun.  I hadn't heard of the 5-year-old who was suspended for talking about shooting a Hello Kitty bubble gun that blows soap bubbles. 

What are these people thinking?  A little child TALKED about a bubble gun.  What is wrong with these people?

It is a sign of our times that so many parents just meekly accept this as OK.

This is just another reason to homeschool - so your children can talk about guns without being thrown in jail.

Advertising in the internet age

This is cute:



My mom had sent me the embedded URL and I missed the first few seconds so I didn't know what they were advertising until the end.

In just four months they have 60,000,000 hits.  Just amazing.

How many of you will watch it twice?

Modern parenting may be a big step backwards

After becoming foster parents Janine and I have learned so much about the importance of helping brain development in children.

Modern parenting may hinder brain development, research shows is a good post about how recent practices of child raising are hurting children.

Hat tip: Instapundit

A problem with reading

I am so glad our children love to read. 

Someone once suggested that school is trying to inoculate our children against "Reading for Pleasure", since that has been known to stimulate thinking *gasp*!

Some of our best posts from November 2007

Janine and I have been blogging about homeschooling for almost eight years. If you missed some of our early posts, you have missed some of our best thoughts. Here are some highlights from November 2007:

In Public schools - a Gordian Knot or a Sisyphean activity? I argue that public schools have crossed a point and they are no longer fixable.

I was surprised to learn that Having more than three children helps men live longer.

We live in an amazing time.  We are so greatly blessed.  I write about The servants at our house.

The cost of higher education has exploded over the last several decades.  I shared some ideas about The coming revolution in higher education.


We first came across this Homeschool Girl -- Sims video:




And I think November 2007 was also the first time I across Like_youknow.  I still enjoy watching it after having seen it dozens of times:

Regulations have consequences - we are much poorer

The whole point of the Broken Window Fallacy is it is easy to forget about what is unseen.

Federal Regulations Have Made You 75 Percent Poorer makes this point.  The article starts with:

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The growth of federal regulations over the past six decades has cut U.S. economic growth by an average of 2 percentage points per year, according to a new study in the Journal of Economic Growth. As a result, the average American household receives about $277,000 less annually than it would have gotten in the absence of six decades of accumulated regulations—a median household income of $330,000 instead of the $53,000 we get now.

The researchers, economists John Dawson of Appalachian State University and John Seater of North Carolina State, constructed an index of federal regulations by tracking the growth in the number of pages in the Code of Federal Regulations since 1949. The number of pages, they note, has increased six-fold from 19,335 in 1949 to 134,261 in 2005. (As of 2011, the number of pages had risen to 169,301.) They devise a pretty standard endogenous growth theory model and then insert their regulatory burden index to calculate how federal regulations have affected economic growth. (Sometimes deregulation extends rather than shortens the number of pages in the register; they adjust their figures to take this into account.)

Annual output in 2005, they conclude, "is 28 percent of what it would have been had regulation remained at its 1949 level."
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Just think of it, without all this burdensome regulation your salary could be six times great.

I'll acknowledge that there is some room for laws.  I like having some driving laws.  But that doesn't mean ever regulation is a good thing.

What is the best kind of government

I really like this thought:

What government is the best? That which teaches us to govern ourselves. -Goethe (1749-1832)

Would you or your children like to control a satellite?

NanoSatisfi is selling access to their nanostats.  For $250 you can use their instruments for a week. 

Peter Platzer gives the elevator pitch and answers some questions here:



Here's an article with a little more information. 

Maybe after soccer season I might be tempted.  Its only $250!

No, really, that is what homeschooling looks like

As you may have guessed, we love to talk bout homeschooling.  Today, while at a community pancake breakfast, someone asked me what homeschooling was like.  My soon to be 17 year old daughter was sitting across the table from me.

I turned from my friend who asked the question and looked at my daughter.  I said to my daughter, "Did you do your homework?  Did you write it down?"

(Side note:  We keep a learning journal.  I tell me kids that school work doesn't count unless they write down what assignments or activities they do.)

I turned back to my friend and said, "That is what homeschooling looks like."

My friend thought I was kidding.  "No, really, this is what homeschooling looks like, at least at this stage."

My daughter then described her schedule of two college classes at the community college, two online high school classes from a private school, math with a tutor, music lessons, and choir and band rehearsals.

I this point I popped in with, "Basically, all I do is drive her around."  I then corrected myself, "Well, now that she has her drivers license, I don't even drive her around anymore.  She does that herself."

I further explained how homeschooling is more like being a principal than a teacher.  I arrange the instructions, but I don't do very much hands on.  Most of my time is spent on scheduling and driving kids to the things I have scheduled.  In our area, there is an abundance of enrichment classes which are affordable and we utilize these resources.

The exception to this pattern is my soon to be 7 year old who gets one-on-one instruction from me, though I spend an awful lot of time driving him around too.  I find that in general, I do a lot of "hands on" instruction until my children learn to read and write.  At that point, I slide into my "principal's chair."  Though, I do still put on my "teacher hat" once in a while to teach a class at our homeschool co-op.

There are many, many styles of homeschooling.  So, don't let my style of homeschooling scare you away from homeschooling if this is not right for you. 

We do need to be humble

At times we need to take a deep breath and really think about what is true and no just our position:

Everyone wishes to have truth on his side, but not everyone wishes to be on the side of truth.
-Richard Whately, philosopher, reformer, theologian, economist (1787-1863)

Life Humor 1.P

From the Henry Cate Life Humor collection:

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Avid comic book reader asked his friend:  "Why doesn't life come with subtitles?"

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"Maturity is knowing when and where to be immature."

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"...the two most common things in the Universe
   are hydrogen and stupidity."  --Harlan Ellison

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One day an old Jewish pole, living in Warsaw, has his last light bulb burn out.  To get a new one he'll have to stand in line for two hours at the store (and they'll probably be out by the time he gets there), so he goes up to his attic and starts rummaging around for an old oil lamp he vaguely remembers seeing.

He finds the old brass lamp in the bottom of a trunk that has seen better days.  He starts to polish it and (poof!) a genie appears in cloud of smoke.

"Ho ho, Mortal!" says the genie, stretching and yawning, "For releasing me I will grant you three wishes."

The old man thinks for a moment, and says, "I want Genghis Khan resurrected.  I want him to re-unite his Mongol hordes, march to the Polish border, and then decide he doesn't want the place and march back home."

"No sooner said than done!" thunders the genie.  "Your second wish?"

"Ok.  I want Genghis Khan resurrected.  I want him to re-unite his Mongol hordes, march to the Polish border, and then decide he doesn't want the place and march back home."

"Hmmm.  Well, all right.  Your third wish?"

"I want Genghis Khan resurrected.  I want him to re-unite his ---"

"Ok. ok. ok.  Right.  What's this business about Genghis Khan marching to Poland and turning around again?"

The old man smiles.  "He has to pass through Russia six times."

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When teachers teach the Constitution they get fired

Joanne Jacobs has a post about a mind boggling response from a school board - Teaching the 5th draws suspension.  Her posts starts with:

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When Batavia High School students were asked to reveal their drug and alcohol abuse on surveys marked with their names, social studies teacher John Dryden told them they didn’t have to answer. It’s in the 5th Amendment.

The 20-year veteran was reprimanded and suspended without pay for a day for what the school board called ”inappropriate and unprofessional” conduct. In a letter, he was ordered to refrain from using “flippant” or sarcastic remarks, providing “legal advice,” and discrediting any district initiative, reports the Chicago Tribune.  "Other requirements in the letter include that when Dryden is given a directive in a meeting, he must now repeat the directive back at the end of the meeting and agree to comply."
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Just another reason to homeschool - You can teach the Constitution to your children.

Trouble with sleeping in

I like Baby Blues.  It is a fun comic. 

Yesterday's comic had a funny thought on the trouble with parents sleeping in.