Thursday, October 31, 2013

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: Under the Golden Apple tree.

This will be the 410th 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.

Carnival of Homeschooling

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

Carnival of Homeschooling

Wednesday, October 30, 2013

This week's Carnival of Homeschooling is up - the Learning Inspiration Edition

Amanda is hosting this week's Carnival of Homeschooling at The Faithful Homeschool.

She starts the carnival with:

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Homeschool Carnivals are a great opportunity to see what others are doing to train up and teach their children at home. This week's submissions were quite the bundle of inspiration and ideas... 
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Enjoy.


Carnival of Homeschooling

Monday, October 28, 2013

The Next Generation of Homeschoolers

The last fifteen plus years of studying education and public schools has only re-enforced my opinion that there is little hope for public schools. There are so many problems that I can only see the Gordian Knot of government schools getting bigger.

Homeschooling gives me a ray of hope for our country. I believe homeschoolers will have an impact far greater than their numbers would indicate, because knowledge is power.  And since in general children who are homeschooled have a better education, I think they will greatly influence society.

Ronald Reagan said that “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” I am afraid that like freedom, homeschooling must be passed on to the next generation. In general it seems that most children who are homeschooled view it positively and plan to homeschool their children. (My three daughters, ages 19, 17 and 13, have all indicated they plan to homeschool their children. My son, age 7, hasn’t talked too much about even having children, let along if he will homeschool them.  :-)  )

Even though most homeschooled children seem to like homeschooling I am wondering how do we increase the likelihood that our children will want to homeschool. Here are some ideas I’ve come up with:

Make it a positive experience – if our children enjoy the experience then they will want the same for their children. Homeschooling can be such a blast, from hanging out with siblings for hours, to doing vacations in off season, to being able to learn exciting and cool things when you want to learn them and at your own pace.

Explain the benefit – It is important to articulate why you decided to homeschool and enumerate various benefits that come from homeschooling. I know our reasons have increased and changed over the years. One of our first was we wanted our children to retain their love for learning. Over the years we found dozens more.  Once our children see the benefits then they will be more likely to pass on the experience.

Paint an honest picture – Children are pretty sharp. If we whitewash homeschooling and make public schools out to be the bogyman at some point our chidlren may toss out everything we said about homeschooling. By allowing children to see the few (very few) benefits of government schools and the few (very few) warts of homeschooling they won’t be easily swept up if someone points out a flaw in their education world view.

If you have any other suggestions on how to help our children homeschool the next generation, please add a comment.

Friday, October 25, 2013

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: The Faithful Homeschool.

This will be the 409th 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.

Carnival of Homeschooling

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

Carnival of Homeschooling

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

This week's Carnival of Homeschooling is up - Reaping What You Sow

This week's Carnival of Homeschooling is up at The HSBA Post.

The carnival starts with:

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Welcome to The Homeschool Post’s edition of the Carnival of Homeschooling: Reaping What You Sow.

It is October! Time for harvesting the fields before winter sets.

As homeschoolers, our ‘harvest’ has yet to come. Our children are still growing and learning. We still have storms that threaten to do damage to our hard labors. We wanted to take this month to offer encouragement to our readers. The time you spend sowing now, will bring in a great harvest.

Train up a child in the way he should go,
And when he is old he will not depart from it. Proverbs 22:6
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Enjoy!

Carnival of Homeschooling

Monday, October 21, 2013

Another reason to homeschool - It is easier to see the doctor

One of the reasons we started this blog was to capture reasons for homeschooling. (Next week will be our eight year anniversary.  Wow!) We have posted dozens and dozens of reasons to homeschool. Many of these reasons fall into main categories of: better education, better family life and better social development.

Today a new reason occurred to me: It is easier to go see the doctor.

Our son came into our life almost six years ago. He was placed with us as a foster child of 14-months-old. For the first several months he was always just a week or two away from going home. But things didn’t work out with his biological parents and three years ago we adopted him.

Our son is thin and we’ve worried about his weight. He still hasn’t crossed the forty pound line. I took him in this morning for a check-up. A nurse weighed him and measured his height. The doctor checked him out and said he was doing fine. He probably will be thin and short as an adult. (Which may be a problem with the career choice of the week of being a football player.) But he is healthy!

It occurred to me that it was so much easier for us to take him to the doctors than if he had been in school. The doctor is more available in the morning so it was easier to schedule. And we didn’t have to fill out a bunch of extra forms for the school or get their permission.

Just another benefit to homeschooling!

Friday, October 18, 2013

My son thinks we should do something like this as a family

But my wife and daughters don't want me to sing. 

Pretty fun - Sacla' Stage Shopera in London Foodhall:



Hat tip: my mother

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: The HSBA Post.

This will be the 408th 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. 

Carnival of Homeschooling

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

Carnival of Homeschooling

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

This week's Carnival of Homeschooling is up - Fall is in the Air!

Jamie is hosting this week's Carnival of Homeschooling at momSCHOOL.

She starts the carnival with:

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As I’m sitting down to put together this October 15th Edition of the Carnival of Homeschooling, I glance out my window and see the beginning signs of fall. The leaves on the trees around my home are turning those beautiful well-known shades of red,orange, purple, and even yellow. Though Spring is my very favorite time of year, fall is equally amazing. The beautiful colors, scents of baked goodies, apple picking, pumpkin carving, and the oh-so-fun hayrides. Each is guilty of making incredible memories that last for a life time. So, as this beautiful season commences, I’d love to encourage each of you to be grateful. Grateful for the opportunity to experience the richness of another fall, and the blessings of freedom to homeschool. So, without further ado… let’s get to the goodies…
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Enjoy!

Carnival of Homeschooling

Friday, October 11, 2013

Life Humor 2.6

From the Henry Cate Life Humor collection:
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From the Sacramento Daily Union of Nov 17, 1860.

News What is News

We find the following announcement in a St Louis paper: A party of gentlemen in Sacramento, California, have been for some time secretly experimenting in diamond making.  The last mail informs us that the whole affair blew up, nearly killing J W Underwood, one of the enthusiasts.

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From the Sacramento Daily Union Dec 30, 1860

The French Railway companies have made a new regulation, whereby every passenger is weighed and charged accordingly.

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From the Nevada Morning Transcript of January 30, 1861

A New Way of Taking Pills

A physician one night in Wisconsin being disturbed by a burglar, and having no ball or shot for his pistol, noiselessly loaded the weapon with small, hard pills, and gave the intruder a "prescription" which he thinks will go far towards curing the rascal of a very bad ailment.

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By Daniel Mintz
San Jose News, 8/22/83, Business Section

**All of these were collected by a businessman named John Ehrman, a "computer professional" (whatever that is).  Each one was actually said or written ingenuously.   My favorites are marked by **

COINING SOME PHRASES

"She had a missed conception." **

"To be a leader, you have to develop a \spear de corps/."

WHEN TALKING BEARS VEGETABLES

"I can't hear what you're saying because of the noise of the celery I'm chewing in my ears."

"All food must be removed from this refrigerator on Friday for cleaning."

UTTERLY AMAZING

"That needs some thinking about; let me go away and regurgitate for a couple of hours." **

"Things are so bad right now that even positions with people in them are vacant." **

Thursday, October 10, 2013

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: momSCHOOL.

This will be the 407th 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.

Carnival of Homeschooling

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

Carnival of Homeschooling

Some of our best posts from June 2008

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 June 2008:

I shared some thoughts on What happened to the rugged individualist?

I explain why we shouldn't focus on Improving public schools by changing the school size.

We can be too over protective in keeping our children from risk.

Wednesday, October 09, 2013

Life Humor 2.5


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A book review:
Title: David Frost's Book of the World's Worst Decisions
Author: Frost, David & Michael Deakin
Publisher: Crown Publishers, Inc.
Date: 1983

David Frost is a well-known TV personality. Michael Deakin is programming director for a television station founded by Frost in England. This book is a collection of truly bad decisions from the fields of politics, sports, business, science, show business, and everyday life.

Sam Phillips owned a small recording company in Memphis. In 1955 he sold to RCA Records, for the sum of $35,000, the exclusive contract he had with a young man named Elvis Presley, thereby forfeiting royalties on more than a billion records.

In 1977 a South African hang-gliding instructor spotted an interesting sight and made an obscene gesture at a woman who was sunbathing on a rooftop below his flight path. The woman's husband appeared with a submachine gun and blasted the birdman out of the sky.

In 1880 a house master at Harrow wrote of one of his pupils, "He is forgetful, careless, unpunctual, irregular in every way.... If he is unable to conquer this slovenliness he will never make a success of public school." The boy in question was Winston Churchill.

In 1886 prospector Sors Hariezon decided to sell his South African gold claim for $20. Over the next 90 years, mines sunk on or near his claim produced over a million kilograms of gold a year, 70% of the gold supply of the Western world.

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From the San Jose Mercury News, Monday afternoon 1 July 1985:

Cats scratched from Boston jury

You've heard of a kangaroo court. Now from the Massachusetts Office of the Jury Commissioner comes the feline jury.

David Christian's pets, Cat Mousam and Leo A. Longfellow, took on new identities in the Boston Election Department. The department, which compiles the census, had fabricated entire identities for Mousam and her "stepbrother" cat, Longfellow, whose name was also listed on Christian's door.

Mousam, said to be born in 1956, and Longfellow, born in 1953, were both listed as nurses.

Registrar of Voters Charles Scordino said the department uses meter maids, crossing guards, and off-duty police officers to take the census, and said if voters aren't home, their names are often taken off doors and mailboxes.

"Evidently, someone made a mistake somewhere," said Scordino.

Christian, the cats' owner, figures the jury list was made up after city census takers took the cats' names off his front door.

"It's not going to reflect on the Elections Commission over there. It's going to reflect on us. We're going to look stupid summoning a cat," said Francine Thomas, secretary to the State Jury Commissioner.

Cat Mousam was in fact ordered to report for jury duty Aug. 7. But she has since been taken off the jury list.

"It's funny, they didn't disqualify her because she was a cat," said Christian, 40, a psychiatric social worker. "They disqualified her because she can't speak English."

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Survey of proof techniques

I recently came across a survey of proof techniques that I remembered reading a few years back. Many of you have probably already seen it but I thought that it might be a helpful guide for anyone whose educational background has been so lacking as to have missed it. The survey was written by Dana Angluin. His professional association was not given. Luckily, the survey is short enough to present here:

Proof by intimidation:
'Trivial.'

Proof by omission:
'The reader may easily supply the details.'
'The other 253 cases are analogous....'

Proof by eminent authority:
'I saw Karp in the elevator and he said it was probably NP-complete.'

Proof by reference to inaccessible literature:
The author cites a simple corollary of a theorem to be found in a privately circulated memoir of the Slovenian Philological Society, 1883.

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This week's Carnival of Homeschooling is up - The Home Education edition

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

The Headmistress starts the carnival with:

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There were not very many submissions this week, so I took the liberty of adding some links to homeschool related blogposts on various topics.=) Hope you find something of use to you here:
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For the last year or so the Carnival of Homeschooling has been averaging around ten to fifteen submissions for each carnival.  The Headmistress went out and gathered up several dozen submissions.  This may be the biggest carnival we've had in over a year.

Enjoy.

Carnival of Homeschooling

Tuesday, October 08, 2013

Should Christians send their children to government schools?

In Should Christian Parents Send their Children to Public Schools? Paula Bolyard reviews some of the points Dr. Albert Mohler makes about Christian parents and children.

Near the end of the post in this paragraph:

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For many families, public school may be the only option. For others, it may mean difficult choices and sacrifices — including foregoing a second income. The stakes are very high. Consider the effects of thirty or more hours a week in a government school where you have no control over what your children are taught — where your local teachers have little or no control over the content of their lessons. Where the federal bureaucrats — many of whom have antipathy toward your Christian values — dictate what your children learn, all day long. How much time are you willing to invest in debriefing your children? Are young children equipped to discern truth from error, day after day over a period of many years? How will you convince them that you are the authority on any given subject — that what you’re teaching them is right — and not their teachers? Is it fair to put a young child in the position of choosing between what their teacher is telling them and what their parents and Sunday school teachers say?
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Government schools are not supportive of parents' beliefs.  Parents have less and less influence on what their children are taught in public schools.

If you believe God is going to hold you accountable for the spiritual development of your children, then you may have little choice but to pull your children.

Hat tip: Instapundit

Good input for when deciding on a major

There are several factors people should take into account when selecting a major.  Their own personal interests are important.  Their talents and skills are worth considering.  But it is also good to know how much various careers pay. 

The Most (And Least) Lucrative College Majors, In 1 Graph has a nice graphic on which degrees can the best and worst potentials.

For more details check out a 182 page report by Georgetown University.

Hat tip: One of my brothers.

Cool - an Online Code Editor

A friend recently shared with me this cool web site collabedit.  It allows several people to look at the same code at the same time.  If you have children who are learning to program, this can be a good way for them to work with others on tough problems.

John Stossel on Escaping Government Schools

I enjoyed John Stossel's recent column - Escaping 'Government' Schools

He starts the column with:

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People say public schools are "one of the best parts of America". I believed that. Then I started reporting on them.

Now I know that public school -- government school is a better name -- is one of the worst parts of America. It's a stultified government monopoly. It never improves.

Most services improve. They get faster, better, cheaper. But not government monopolies. Government schools are rigid, boring, expensive and more segregated than private schools.
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John Stossel even mentions homeschooling.

It is a good column.

Another great reason for homeschooling - to give your children time to play

Peter Gray makes a great point in The play deficit

He starts with:

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When I was a child in the 1950s, my friends and I had two educations. We had school (which was not the big deal it is today), and we also had what I call a hunter-gather education. We played in mixed-age neighbourhood groups almost every day after school, often until dark. We played all weekend and all summer long. We had time to explore in all sorts of ways, and also time to become bored and figure out how to overcome boredom, time to get into trouble and find our way out of it, time to daydream, time to immerse ourselves in hobbies, and time to read comics and whatever else we wanted to read rather than the books assigned to us. What I learnt in my hunter-gatherer education has been far more valuable to my adult life than what I learnt in school, and I think others in my age group would say the same if they took time to think about it.

For more than 50 years now, we in the United States have been gradually reducing children’s opportunities to play, and the same is true in many other countries. In his book Children at Play: An American History (2007), Howard Chudacoff refers to the first half of the 20th century as the ‘golden age’ of children’s free play. By about 1900, the need for child labour had declined, so children had a good deal of free time. But then, beginning around 1960 or a little before, adults began chipping away at that freedom by increasing the time that children had to spend at schoolwork and, even more significantly, by reducing children’s freedom to play on their own, even when they were out of school and not doing homework. Adult-directed sports for children began to replace ‘pickup’ games; adult-directed classes out of school began to replace hobbies; and parents’ fears led them, ever more, to forbid children from going out to play with other kids, away from home, unsupervised. There are lots of reasons for these changes but the effect, over the decades, has been a continuous and ultimately dramatic decline in children’s opportunities to play and explore in their own chosen ways.

Over the same decades that children’s play has been declining, childhood mental disorders have been increasing. It’s not just that we’re seeing disorders that we overlooked before. Clinical questionnaires aimed at assessing anxiety and depression, for example, have been given in unchanged form to normative groups of schoolchildren in the US ever since the 1950s. Analyses of the results reveal a continuous, essentially linear, increase in anxiety and depression in young people over the decades, such that the rates of what today would be diagnosed as generalised anxiety disorder and major depression are five to eight times what they were in the 1950s. Over the same period, the suicide rate for young people aged 15 to 24 has more than doubled, and that for children under age 15 has quadrupled.
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I am so glad we can homeschool.

Some of our best posts from May 2008

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 May 2008:

One of the wonderful things about homeschooling is we can teach our children the difference between needs and wants.

I provided a three month update on Powerful Learning Trick - the continuing saga.

And I posted The Carnival of Space - the anniversary edition.

Monday, October 07, 2013

Is this thought about children?

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

Patience is bitter but its fruit is sweet.
                                     -Anon

Life Humor 2.4

From the Henry Cate Life Humor collection:

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Heard on the radio - "Quintuplets were born today to ---------.  All will be named Thursday."

Is that to be Thursday 1, Thursday, 2, etc.?

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When people think of Jersey City, they remember the good old days and people such as Barney Doyle, who was named superintendent of weights and measures as political payoff by the ruling Democratic machine.

"Superintendent, how many ounces in a pound?" yelled one reporter after Barney's swearing-in ceremony.

"Give me a break, fellows." he replied. "I just got the job."

[Forbes, December 31, 1984]

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As reported by the May 28th issue of Aviation Week and Space Technology:

Ma Bell Rescue

It took a while to surface, but it appears that a long-distance credit card may have saved a U.S. Army unit from heavy casualties during the Grenada military rescue/invasion. Major General David Nichols, (Air Force) said the Army unit was in a house surrounded by Cuban forces. One soldier found a telephone and, using his credit card, called Ft. Bragg, N.C., telling Army officers there of the perilous situation. The officers in turn called the Air Force, which sent in gunships to scatter the Cubans and relieve the unit.

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The reasons that each of these countries has had to renege on its financial commitments were all somewhat different:

Argentina: because of a war

Poland: because of its vast misguided over investment in heavy
industry


Honduras: because the coffee price went sour

Zaire because nobody in the government there has a clue as to how to run a country.

  Paul Erdman's Money Book

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Taken from the Rochester paper:

ROCKFORD,  ILL.  --When  temperatures  plunged to minus  26,  the Rockford  Register asked its readers to finish the  sentence,  "It  was so cold that----". Here are some of the responses:

O    Our snowman begged us not to leave him out another night.
O    Even the world leaders couldn't get into a heated argument
O    When I went out, my shadow froze to the sidewalk
O    I saw a fish jump in the river and the splash froze
O    My false teeth chattered-- and they weren't even in my mouth
O    When the police saw a robbery suspect they said 'freeze'-- and he did
O    The snow is turning blue

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Date: Thursday, 21 March 1985  19:44-EST

From: Joe Pistritto 

To:   Soft-Eng at MIT-MC Re: Disastrous bugs

 Well, there was this cement factory that a company [who shall remain nameless], I used to work for built an 8080 based distributed control system for (at the time this was state-of-the-art in process control).

 The plant crushed boulders into sand before mixing with other things to make cement.  The conveyors to the rock crusher (and the crusher itself) were controlled by the 8080s.  A batch of defective MOSTEK ram chips used in the processor had a habit of dropping bits (no parity or ECC), causing at one point the 2nd of a series of 3 conveyors to switch off.  This caused a large pile of boulders (about 6-8 feet in diameter) to pile up on top of the conveyor (about 80 feet up), eventually falling off and crushing several cars on the parking lot, and damaging a building.  We noticed the problem when we couldn't explain the dull thuds we were hearing in the control room and looked out the window...

 You had to be there...

                              -JCP-

PS: I became a convert to error correcting memories (which were quite expensive at the time, this was 1975), immediately.

PPS: Everyone I know in industrial process control has a dozen of these type stories (all true) to tell.  Its just amazing what happens when you let computers control BIG things.

Looking for thoughts and insights on the Carnival of Homeschooling

Almost eight years ago my wife and I started up the Carnival of Homeschooling. I think it has been a net positive benefit for the homeschooling community.

At first many of the carnivals had 25 to 50 entries. We even had a few that broke 65 entries, in a single carnival! It was a bit crazy to try to handle all the submissions. For the first four to five years this level of activity held pretty strong. But recently the submission rate has dropped off. This year the average number of entries per carnival has been more in the 10 to 15 range.

I have talked with some organizers of other blog carnivals and they have experienced similar trends.

I don’t want anyone to worry, for now I plan to keep the carnival going. While the traffic has died down I think it is still a positive influence for homeschooling.

I do have a few questions:

Are you finding the carnival entertaining, educational or useful?

Do you have any suggestions on how to generate more interest in the Carnival of Homeschooling?

Thanks.

The 2013 Homeschool Blog Awards are opening for nominations

The 2013 Homeschool Blog Awards is now open for nominations.

The Carnival of Homeschooling archive has been updated

Normally each week after the latest Carnival of Homeschooling is posted I'll update the archive.

This summer has been hectic and I let this go. 

Finally this weekend I updated it.

Hyperinflation explained in a couple dozen ways

My brother collected a couple dozen different ways Hyperinflation can be explained.

Hilter takes on high stakes standardized testing in New York

There are dozens and dozens of videos of Hilter reacting to one issue or other.  Here Hitler responds to High Stakes Standardized Testing in New York....the DOWNFALL !  He is frustrated that parents are questioning Common Cause! 



I especially liked his last couple sentences.

Cool map - Shows

I enjoyed the map at The map that shows where America came from: Fascinating illustration shows the ancestry of EVERY county in the US.

Hat tip: Instapundit

Dan Mitchell asks "Are Government Schools a Form of Child Abuse?"

Dan Mitchell's post Are Government Schools a Form of Child Abuse? makes some good points.

He lists over a dozen incidents where government officials take action against children for pretty stupid reasons.

Hat tip: Instapundit

Thursday, October 03, 2013

This week's Homeschool Showcase is up

This week's Homeschool Showcase is up at The Holistic Homeschooler.

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: The Common Room.

I am pretty sure this will be the 406th 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.

Carnival of Homeschooling

Wednesday, October 02, 2013

This week's Carnival of Homeschooling is up

Karen is hosting this week's Carnival of Homeschooling at Homeschool Atheist Momma Blog.

She starts the carnival with:

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Welcome to this 405th edition of the Carnival of Homeschooling! I haven't read the Carnival from the beginning; I started reading round about the 350th one. LOL It's my time! It's your time too. This is the time that I am focused on homeschooling my kids and on reading as much as I can about providing the best experience that I can for them. It's my time!
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Carnival of Homeschooling