The Carnival of Homeschooling is up - The Austen edition

Carol is hosting this week's Carnival of Homeschooling at HomeschoolCPA

She starts with:

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I’m a huge fan of Jane Austen, one of the finest authors ever. Like many girls of her age, Jane was homeschooled learning reading, writing, music, dancing and foreign language from her home in the Stevenson Rectory in Hampshire, England in the early 1800s.
One of my favorite Jane Austen quotes reminds me of many homeschool mothers:
“Your mother must have been a slave to your education”-Lady Catherine de Berg, Pride and Prejudice
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Go check out the other fun Jane Austen quotes in this week's carnival.


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Technorati tags: homeschooling, homeschool, home school, home education, parenting, children, education, Carnival of Homeschooling

Test results

Most years I do standardized testing as a way to spot check myself. It gives me something tangible as proof that my children are on track. [I admit that there is some debate on the validity and usefulness of this kind of testing, but I do so love those little graphs and percentiles.]

Since at the end of the year, I always wish we had done more, testing relieves my anxiety. I feel especially guilty about my youngest daughter. I did a lot more one on one with the older girls, as well as more fun projects and recreational classes.

I also used to spend more time preparing for the test. This year I just handed them the test booklet and said do your best.

The test results came in the mail yesterday. I was happy to see that all the kids did well. Spelling is the only area that needs improvement.

As for my youngest daughter, she outscored her sisters yet again in every subject. She even scored above average in spelling, which makes her a superstar in this family.

I can see why unschooling attracts such a following.


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Technorati tags: homeschooling, homeschool, home school, home education, parenting, children, education, government schools, children, public school, public education

Pretty funny

My mother sent me a link to this:



Several of her Indian friends say there is some truth to this. (Watch it to the end.)


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Technorati tags: parenting, children, education

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

Carol will be hosting the next carnival at HomeschoolCPA.

She has announced her theme: All Things Austen: A Tribute to Jane Austen.

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.




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Technorati tags: homeschooling, homeschool, home school, home education, parenting, children, education, Carnival of Homeschooling

The Carnival of Homeschooling is up - The Beach Reading edition

Janice is hosting this week's Carnival of Homeschooling at Taking Time For Things That Matter.

I like her theme - The Beach Reading edition!

She starts with:

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I’m delighted to host the June 22, 2010 edition of Carnival of Homeschooling! It may be summer, but homeschoolers never stop thinking and learning. To celebrate the season, let’s imagine that we’re at a lovely beach with waves breaking, a gentle breeze blowing, and palm trees rustling. Now…. relax and read while your dear children build sand castles!
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Enjoy.




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Technorati tags: homeschooling, homeschool, home school, home education, parenting, children, education, Carnival of Homeschooling

Short review of "The Law"

My second daughter created a reading program for this summer. She is going to read a biography each week. Additionally she asked me for suggestions on informative and educational books to read. The first book I suggested was The Law by Frederic Bastiat.

Here is her review:

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Last week, I read a book called The Law by Frederic Bastiat.

It was about government. One of my favorite points argued was that liberty is a God given right, not a government given one.

Another main part was about Socialism and why we really don’t want that type of government. I would highly recommend this book to anyone learning about politics.

Maybe if more people read books like this, our government wouldn’t be in the sorry state it is in.
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She just finished Animal Farm yesterday and plans to write her review tomorrow. Next on her list is Parkinson's Law.

It is going to be a good summer.


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Technorati tags: Frederic Bastiat, The Law

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

Act now!

You have just eight hours to get in your entry for this week's Carnival of Homeschooling.

Janice will be hosting the carnival at Janice Campbell - Taking Time For Things That Matter.

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.




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Technorati tags: homeschooling, homeschool, home school, home education, parenting, children, education, Carnival of Homeschooling

Good advice on making marriage last

A couple years after we had been married Janine and I had another fight. I remember thinking that I had married the wrong woman, but that since we had a child, I had to stick it out.

Luckily we both matured and I now know that I am very blessed to have married the right woman.

Good marriages don't just happen. Marriage takes effort. It takes work.

Ann Voskamp shares 5 Secrets to Make a Marriage Last. She has some great ideas on what to do to improve a marriage. I think everyone can learn something from her post.


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Technorati tags: marriage

Math - optional or necessary?

A little over three years ago Janine and I were talking with a couple. It turned out the wife was an elementary school teacher. I asked which grade she taught. She said something about teaching the lower grades because fifth grade math was too hard.

Janine has a friend who is a kindergarten teacher. During a conversation it came up that she liked kindergarten, because the second grade math was too hard for her.

Even now, years later, I still find both of these events mind boggling. I can understand struggling with calculus or even some aspects of algebra. I don't understand how two digit multiplication could be a problem.


My oldest daughter doesn't like math. She has to work hard to master the concepts. She's asked a few times this year about why she has to study algebra. Some of my main reasons are:

1) Helps to develop logic skills
2) Helps provide a better prepective of the world, a deeper understanding
3) Helps to develop discipline

Not everyone needs to master calculus. But I think everyone should be able to do at least handle addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and some simple algebra.


Issues with teachers not being able to handle basic math may have some root causes in teacher schools. A recent article reports that U.S. Teachers Not Well Prepared to Teach Mathematics:

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In a seminal study of international teacher preparation released today, researchers found a striking parallel between future U.S. teachers’ knowledge of mathematics content and the performance of the students they teach.
Led by education and mathematics experts at Michigan State University (MSU), the Teacher Education Study in Mathematics (TEDS-M) is an international examination of how math teachers at both elementary and middle school levels are trained.
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The article continues later with:

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The study reveals that middle school mathematics teacher preparation is not up to the task. U.S. future teachers find themselves straddling the divide between the successful and the unsuccessful, leaving the U.S. with a national choice of which way to go.
The findings of TEDS-M additionally revealed that the preparation of elementary teachers to teach mathematics was comparatively somewhat better as the U.S. found itself in the middle of the international distribution, along with other countries such as the Russian Federation, Germany and Norway, but behind Switzerland, Taiwan and Singapore.
“Our future teachers are getting weak training mathematically and are not prepared to teach the demanding curriculum needed for U.S. students to compete internationally,” said William Schmidt, Ph.D., MSU Distinguished Professor of Education and Statistics, who directed the Study.
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It is no wonder that many students are graduating from public high schools without the basic skills needed to survive in our high tech world. Too many teachers can't teach them.

(Hat tip: Homeschool Math Blog)


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Technorati tags: children, education, government schools, children, public school, public education

Do you have something to say about research on homeschooling?

Milton Gaither blogs about Homeschooling Research. He is taking a break and has extended an invitation to others to contribute to his blog:

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A reader suggested that while I’m taking this year off there may be some of you out there who would be willing to do a review of a piece of homeschooling research you come across. If so, I’ll be happy to post it here for everyone to read. You can email me any reviews you may want to do at mgaither@messiah.edu. Thanks Rina for the suggestion!
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Technorati tags: homeschooling, homeschool, home school, home education, parenting, children, education

An interesting map of the world

This map shows the world with the size of the countries proportional to the number of people.

Interesting.


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Technorati tags: world, map, population

A reason to get an education

It appears John Wayne said this in "The Sands of Iwo Jima"

Life is tough, but it's tougher if you're stupid.

(Hat tip: PalmTree Pundit)

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Funny, I just realized I posted this quote back in February of 2006, along with some thoughts.


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Technorati tags: education

See images as the color-blind see

Vischeck is a cool web site. You select the type of color blindness you want to experience. Then you upload an image, and Vischeck shows you how a color-blind person would see the same image.


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Technorati tags: color, blind

Great video on motivation

My mother sent me a link to this great video of Dan Pink on Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us:



This is worth watching with your children.


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Technorati tags: Daniel Pink, motivation

Fun thought

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

A Golden Odie:

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


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Technorati tags: ignorance, happiness, Dan Galvin

Statistics on the traffice for the Carnival of Homeschooling Images

Just over two years ago our readers selected three images to represent the Carnival of Homeschooling. I set things up so people who wanted to help support the carnival could copy some HTML code to their blog or web site. The image would appear, along with a link back to the carnival.

I loaded the images up on PhotoBucket back then and didn't think too much more about it.

Today I went to PhotoBucket and happened to check the statistics.




The small image right now averages about 1000 downloads a day.




The medium image is a touch under 400 downloads a day.




And the large image is in the 900 downloads a day range.

I'm not sure why, but downloads were about 30% higher back in the December to February time frame.


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Technorati tags: homeschooling, homeschool, home school, home education, parenting, children, education, Carnival of Homeschooling

Pretty cool - see where people are moving from and to

Forbes has a cool web site showing Where Americans Are Moving. They have an interactive map. You click on a county and then Forbes displays both from which counties people moved from, and which counties people are moving to.

Here's their explanation:

"More than 10 million Americans moved from one county to another during 2008. The map below visualizes those moves. Click on any county to see comings and goings: black lines indicate net inward movement, red lines net outward movement."

Go check it out!

(Hat tip: Hacker News)


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Technorati tags: population, movement

The Carnival of Homeschooling is up

Mary Nix is hosting this week's Carnival of Homeschooling at The Informed Parent.




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Technorati tags: homeschooling, homeschool, home school, home education, parenting, children, education, Carnival of Homeschooling

Advertisers can target just you!

This is fascinates me. Gabrielf Weinbergon creates A FB ad targeted at one person (my wife).

I wonder if people will start proposing via a targeted Facebook ad, or if parents will ask their children to do chores?

(Hat tip: Hacker News)


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Technorati tags: Facebook, ads

One of my favorite quotes

"You say the little efforts that I make will do no good; that they never will prevail to tip the hovering scale where justice hangs in the balance. I don't think I ever thought they would. But I am prejudiced beyond debate in favor of my right to choose which side shall feel the stubborn ounces of my weight."
- Bonaro Overstreet


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Technorati tags: justice

Even more reasons to homeschool, from the archives

Long ago, before Janine and I started blogging, I used to browse around the internet looking for reasons to homeschool. Earlier this year I've been working through some old email and came across some of the links I had saved, so I started posting some of the reasons to homeschool. (Posts 1, 2, 3, 4)

Here are yet more from 2004:

Reason to homeschool: Because Homeschooling is Freedom.

Reason to homeschool: Because You can homeschool for Liberty.

Reason to homeschool: Because Children are a gift and responsibility from God.

Reason to homeschool: Because Teachers Unions really just care about the money.

Reason to homeschool: Because Many public schools are encouraging children to experiement sexually.

Reason to homeschool: Because Public school teachers send their children to private schools.


And if that is not enough, check out Ann Zeise's wonderful web site: A to Z Home's Cool. She has reasons for Mom, reasons for Dad, a few other reasons, and then her personal explanation of why Homeschooling is Best.


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Technorati tags: homeschooling, homeschool, home school, home education, parenting, children, education

Are you dangerous?

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

You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.
-Charles A. Beard


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Technorati tags: politics, Dan Galvin

Another reason to eat right - to fight cancer

From a TED talk: "William Li presents a new way to think about cancer treatment: angiogenesis, targeting the blood vessels that feed a tumor. The crucial first (and best) step: Eating cancer-fighting foods that beat cancer at its own game."



At exactly minute 13 there is a list of food that help fight cancer. The foods are mostly fruits and vegetables. My mother will be excited to know that Licorice seems to help!


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Technorati tags: health, food, cancer

I think this is a cool idea

One of the bottlenecks with computers today is pulling data off a hard drive, or writing data onto the hard drive. At the core of your hard drives is a spinning platter. Because the computer has to wait for the platter to spin around to the right place, and for the head to get to the correct grove, the computer has to wait a long time to get or store data on a hard drive.

In the future it appears hard drives will be replaced with Solid State Drives, or SSD. These are basically a collection of memory chips which retain the information after the power goes off. Currently they cost much more per Gig than hard drives, but the price per Gig is falling faster for SSD than hard drives, so the industry expect a big switch in a couple years. When this happens the performance increase of our computers will be huge. Boot up times may be in microseconds, instead of tens of seconds.

Seagate may bring some of the benefits of SSDs sooner that most of us expected. Seagate Demos First Hybrid Hard Drive explains:

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On Monday, Seagate released details of a new hybrid Flash memory-hard disk drive, which is intended to significantly boost performance of notebook computers.
The drives combine a traditional 250, 350 or 500 GB spinning platter drive (HDD) with 4 GB of single-level cell Flash memory, which is intended to be more reliable than cheaper varieties of flash memory. (Seagate says it has tested its SLC flash to levels reached after 5 years of use and found no degradation of performance or data loss.)
The result is a combined drive that approaches the performance of solid state drives, but at a fraction of the price. According to Seagate's own tests, the Momentus XT is 80% faster than a traditional notebook hard drive, and 20% faster than an ultra high-performance 10,000 RPM HDD.
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It is just such an amazing world.


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Technorati tags: computers, storage

I would love to know where the rest of the money goes

Bob Samuels has an interesting article called The Solution They Won't Try. His main point is that public universities can pick up a lot of extra money by accepting more students. The point I found most fascinating was in these two paragraphs:

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To calculate how much public research universities spend on educating each undergraduate student, we can look at national statistics regarding faculty salaries and how much it costs a university to staff undergraduate courses. According to a recent study by the American Federation of Teachers, "Reversing Course," the average salary cost per class for a tenured professor at a public research university is $20,000 (4 classes at $80,000), and it costs $9,000 for a full-time non-tenure-track teacher and $4,500 for a part-time instructor to teach the same course. Using these averages, we can determine the annual instructional cost for each student by considering the number of classes each student takes in a year and how much each individual course costs. Since we know that only a third of undergraduate courses are now taught by professors, and the other courses are taught by non-tenured faculty, we can calculate the per student cost, but we first have to determine the average class size to do this calculation, and this is the analysis that I believe no one has ever done.
Looking at transcripts from several public research universities, I have determined that the average annual course load for a student is six large classes (averaging 200 students) and two small courses (averaging 20 students). Next, by using the national faculty average salary per class, and determining who actually teaches the courses (1/3 professors, 1/3 full-time non-tenure-track faculty, and 1/3 part-time faculty), we find that the total average annual instructional cost per student is $1,456 (each large class costs $56 per student and each small class costs $560). In other words, public universities charge on average $7,000 per student and they get another $8,000 per student from the state, but in reality, it only cost about a tenth of this amount to teach each student.
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For me the key point is public universities have to pay out about $1,456 a year to teacher's salaries for each student, but the universities collect about $15,000 each year.

Where does the rest of the money go? I'm sure there are some reasonable administration costs. I know it costs some money to maintain the buildings and the grounds. But that shouldn't account for more than a couple thousand dollars a year per student.

Where does the remaining $10,000 a year per student go? Has anyone seen a good pie chart on the break down for where the money goes?

Keep in mind that this is happening while the cost of a college education is climbing three times faster than inflation.

(Hat tip: Instapundit)


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Technorati tags: children, education, government schools, children, public school, public education