Spreading the Problem with the Cure

Henry Cate at Why Homeschool has a long excerpt from a John Taylor Gatto book, Intellectual Espionage. It examines the declining literacy rates measured by Army intake exams from the 1940s through the 1970s. At the end of the post, Henry says, "I don't understand why the 'professional' educators are willing to put up with 27% illiteracy rates. Why don't they wake up and say 'Whoa, we need to go back to phonetics!'"


In my more cynical times, I would say that the education professionals* look at increasing numbers of students identified with learning problems as a sign that they are finding students who previously would have been allowed to just pass on through. The rising numbers call for a pat on the back for the professionals' improving insight and demonstrate how education ought not be left to amateurs. But there is very little suggestion that the failing students were caused by the education practices of the last few decades. If large numbers of students are failing, the conclusion is always that there is something to be corrected within the student, not within the instruction.

If this were happening on a medical level, we might be excited at first that we could identify those who were not healthy. But as sickness spread wider and wider and previously healthy populations started to show the same symptoms, we should ask different questions. We should also beware of the possibility that it is some factor of the treatment itself that is spreading the sickness.

*FWIW, I got my masters in education through a program for non-traditional students, ie older adults making a change in career. Most of my instructors were classroom teachers or administrators rather than professors from the school of education. Several of them took pains to describe themselves as teachers, not educators. I remember one saying that an educator was someone who hadn't been in a classroom for a decade.

A Souvenir I Don't Need

Seen in a Kyoto gift shop: a set of bamboo ear scrappers decorated with the seven lucky gods. Evidently these ear picks are known as mimikaki and are very popular.

Um, I'll pass.

Carnival of Homeschooling

Last week's Carnival of Homeschooling was hosted by Homeschool CPA. We were on vacation to Kyoto, so I missed mentioning when it went up.

Do go over and see what the offerings this week are.

Tokyo Train Finder

Here is a helpful Kanto Plain and Tokyo Train Finder. You put in the start and stop train stations with the date and time and it will give you options for the best train route.

As my friend pointed out, the hardest part is figuring out how to spell the station names.

Hat tip: Jamie at Inkspots 101

Cell Phones and Driving

When I went through indoc class here in Yokosuka, the kids came with me. They mostly sat and read, but they did enjoy several parts of the presentations. I was especially glad that they were in the driving class with me, because they are just at the age where turning 16 and driving sounds really cool but not at all a dangerous endevour.

It is so easy to forget about the dangers presented by driving. That mistakes with a car can result in thousands of dollars of damage, or even cost lives. And once a driver has mastered the mechanics of driving, it seems like there is no real issue with doing all sorts of other things while driving. Eating, leaning over to the passenger floorboard to get drinks out of a cooler, looking for a new tape or cd, turning to break up a fight in the back seat, or using a cell phone. These are all things that I've done, even when I was sometimes thinking that I shouldn't be.

Having pretty much changed the culture that thought that drinking and driving was acceptable, we now have the rise of the cell phone menace. Cell phones are being used by more and more drivers, especially young drivers (who both have less driving experience and use their phones more often) and are being increasingly cited as contributing to accidents.

Check out this New York Times article on how cell phones distract drivers and how state legislatures are loath to do anything about it (which must make it one of the last behaviors that they are unwilling to regulate). Then have your kids read the article.

When we lived in Germany, it was totally illegal to use a cell phone while driving. When we did long road trips to go shopping, the front passenger was always in charge of the driver's cell phone. I remember often pulling over to the side of the road to take a call. I even trained my oldest kids how to check the phone and answer it. Funny, I don't recall that time in my life as somehow blighted because I wasn't able to chat and drive at the same time.

Obama is No Uncle Tom

Obama is No Uncle Tom by Elizabeth Lev. This is an excellent article on the current administrations stance that abortion is no big thing. The author also comments both on the power of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and the way that Uncle Tom's image has been warped into something quite the opposite of how he behaves in the book. Those of you who glean your familiarity with the classics from tv, book summaries and editorial cartoon references should watch out. Maybe you're not being told the whole truth.

Hat Tip: Palm Tree Pundit

Home Schooling VS Home Cooking

Beverly Hernandez at homeschooling.about.com has fielded a variety of queries from parents looking to sign up their children for a homeschool and wondering which homeschool to send them to. It is sort of funny, but then many of us remember wondering where we might get text books for our homeschool or how we would know what to teach and how. And many commercial and public school offerings have sprung up over the years to provide this guidance (at varying costs in cash or independence). So then Beverly asks if alternate methods should be considered homeschooling. I can't wait to see what some of the other answers are in a week or so.

For me, food analogies seem to work best as a parallel for homeschooling. If I cook a meal, selecting the menu, choosing ingredients and using my own kitchen, everyone would agree that this is home cooking. And if the family sits down at a table in a restaurant to eat a meal prepared by the paid staff of the restaurant, everyone would agree that this is not home cooking.

But what about a family eating a meal planned by the mom but cooked by a housekeeper or cook? Or a takeout meal served at home on one's own dishes? Or a frozen lasagna baked in your own oven with bakery bread and your own salad? Or a make ahead meal prepped in a commercial dinners-to-go kitchen by the mom from their menu card and then cooked up weeks later at home? Which of these is home cooking and which isn't? Is there a difference between home cooking and eating at home (and does the difference matter)?

The failing of this comparison is that most families would still hold up the ideal of a lovingly home cooked meal as at least the equal if not the better of most restaurant meals. Visions of holiday meals involve generations cooking family favorites, not making reservations. And when we go to a restaurant, we still get to pick the one that suits our tastes and pocketbooks. We don't just go to one of the three closest restaurants and hope that we like what is set before us by a panel of government trained and approved chefs.

Nor is my cooking endangered by my neighbors' choices. I've yet to hear someone tell me that my cooking steak at home was reducing the ability of the local steakhouse to provide quality steak and potatoes meals to those who didn't have the skills or time to cook at home. Nor do I have to fear that my neighbors bringing home Chinese takeout and calling it eating at home is going to result in legislation that requires all home meals to be prepped in a professional kitchen.

Prvacy Problem on Blogger

I blog using a pseudonym. For many, many years I used the name Sebastian with all my friends. I still occasionally get a Christmas card addressed this way or have to remind someone of what my "real" name is. For a variety of reasons, I went back to Sebastian as my nom de cyber.

This morning, I realized that my full name was showing up on the Followers listings of blogs that I follow publicly. I'd just recently changed a couple from anonymous to public, because I wanted to give those blogs some recognition of having them in my profile. I think that they are great blogs. But the Blogger dashboard controls made it seem that my Blogger profile, Sebastian, would be what was shown, not my mild mannered alter ego.

I wanted to mention this because some friends may see their follower count drop. And because it does run a bit counter to the info posted in the Blogger help section that describes following. So be careful out there.

Update: I think I have this figured out. When I signed up to follow other blogs, it was using the profile from by gmail account. I was able to change my Google profile. This also changed my profile in gmail to Sebastian, so then I had to also go into gmail and change the setting for how my outgoing mail reads.

Carnival of Homeschooling

The latest Carnival of Homeschooling is posted, this week hosted by the Carnival originator, Why Homeschool. As always, this is a nifty source of interesting ideas and inspiration.

Giant Asian Wasp

Math was interupted by the appearance of a giant wasp outside our balcony. This is an image of it, hanging out on the neighbor's screen door, about twenty feet away. It is holding some sort of another large insect, possibly a cockroach, which it proceeded to consume.

Here is another image that gives a bit better view.

It seems that this is an Asian giant hornet, or Vespa Mandarinia. You won't find this in the US, but evidently it loves the mountainous regions of Japan. It seems that they are insectevores, that are especially a danger to honey bees. A few hornets can wipe out a honey bee hive of thousands, especially European honey bees, which have no defense. Japanese honey bees have a defense of swarming and overheating the hornets.

Oddly enough, it seems that the hornets make a paste of the insects they catch, which they feed to their larvae. Then the adults consume a secretion of the larvae. I guess technically, this makes the larvae insectovores and the adults something else.

After this beauty made its appearance, Cauliflower had to move his math work so that his back wasn't to the balcony door. Can't say that I really blame him.

Would You Rent a Homeschool Book

There are times when I justify buying a curriculum with the idea that over time (and over three kids) I will get my money's worth. Non-consumable works like Spelling Power or Institute for Excellence in Writing or Latin dvds seem more affordable when I compare them to the cost of workbooks for three kids for several years. Unfortunately, this complicated bistro math falls apart if I end up not using the books as long as I predicted. If our interests change or if one child's learning style is different or just if something comes out that I like better.

But what if I could rent homeschool books?

A company called Chegg has been renting textbooks to college students for the past couple of years. They are a bit of a cross between Netflix and the campus standby of having bookstores buy up books at the end of the semester and sell them as less expensive used copies the following semester.

So would this work for homeschoolers? Our books don't run to the incredibly high prices of many college texts, where it's not uncommon to have to pay a couple hundred dollars per course for books. And there is the issue that many homeschoolers prefer living books to text books. But what if you could get Latin texts and dvds through a rental system? Or high school science textbooks? Or the next math curriculum? I can certainly see an application in the high school years, when more textbooks are used. But what about middle school or even elementary? Would you rent the teacher's manuals of your curriculum if you could?

Would the cost reduction be worth not keeping the book and not recouping part of the original cost by reselling it? Or do you look at each years curriculum purchases as a time to build the family library?

Audiobook Giveaway

Recorded Books has another audiobook giveaway for July. This month they are profiling My Sister's Keeper, a story about conflict between the family of a sick girl and the sister conceived as a source of healthy cells to donate as a cure. Sounds interesting and it is the basis of the movie My Sister's Keeper coming out in a few weeks.

The movie looks good if heartbreaking and I'm looking forward to reading the book.

Hiccup Cure - Coin Method

I learned this cure for hiccups from my junior high algebra teacher. I have used it over and over with great success.

Hold a coin in your hand where the hiccuping person can see it. Ask them to hiccup for you. If they do, then tell them to look at the coin and if they can hiccup one more time, then the money is theirs.

I have no idea why this works. It just does. When I have hiccups and dh does this to me, I can feel the hiccups lift as soon as he whips out the coin and smiles. It's really weird.

It has occasionally failed to work on my kids, but not more than once or twice. And the person has to be old enough to understand that the coin is something that he wants to get. But otherwise the denomination doesn't seem to matter.

Audiobooks for School

Last year I bought each of my kids an iPod shuffle. We were facing several long plane flights and I wanted some alternatives to in flight movies that weren't always family friendly. Plus we were spending up to six hours a week in our tae kwon do center because the kids were in different classes and I was looking for a way to redeem the time to get a better educational punch.

I gathered up all the audio books that I had laying around the house and uploaded them to our iTunes library. Then I sorted them into folders and made sure that the chapters were all in the right order. I can easily fit an entire book onto one of the shuffles, with room to spare for a bit of music.

Many of our audio book selections were just fun classic children's literature, like Winnie-the-Pooh and Little Bear. I also found some Henry and Mudge, older science fiction like Heinlein and Asimov, Star Wars Radio Dramas (which are such a favorite of my kids' that we'd worn out a couple sets of the cassette tapes) and Classical Kids musical stories. I even had several volumes of Story of the World on CD, which was too big to fit onto the Shuffles. So I split it up into slightly smaller sections and assigned my older kids specific chapters during each tae kwon do day. This was tied to what we were studying and was directly tied to schoolwork (although the kids like the audio versions so much that they were prone to putting them on during breakfast, just for fun).

More recently, I've found free audio book versions of older literature, like Heidi or Swiss Family Robinson or Around the World in 80 Days. Sometimes these have been books assigned in our school days, but they're just as likely to be a fun diversion. Librivox is one of my favorite sources for free audiobook recordings. Librivox is an effort to record a wide swath of out of copyright literature (similar to the Gutenberg Project or the Baldwin Project for written work). The recordings are done by volunteers, so the quality isn't always the same that you might get from a professional recording. But most of them have been at least as good as my readings are. And as a bonus, you can even find some readings done in other languages.

My most recent discovery is Lit2Go, which has free audio versions of poems and stories neatly divided up by grade level. The offerings range from kindergarten favorites to Shakespeare and standard high school required reading. There are even some recordings here in Spanish. If you search Lit2Go on iTunes, you will find these are easy to download for iPods. Another cool feature of Lit2Go is that you can view the text online, so readers can read along with the audio. There are even support materials for some texts, like vocabulary quizes.

Have fun with free audio books this summer, whether you enjoy them poolside, on road trips or as part of your summer school activities.

Book Reviews

I'm doing some book research for our next swath of school. I'm thinking of using Tapestry of Grace. But we already have shelves and shelves of books on the ancients, so I am having to put a bit more work into the project in order to decide which books I already have, which I need and which I have a sutible substitute for.

I have to say that the Amazon reviews for some of these books are less than helpful. First you have the reviews that gush about how wonderful or groan about how horrible the book is, without any details or substantiating remarks. Then there are the reviews, clearly written by the young readers of the books, that still don't give any detail for why said readers found them helpful or boring.

Then there are the reviews that object to the very subject matter of the book, without regard to the content, writing or illustrations of the book in question. So any book on Noah's Ark gets low marks because they disagree with the Biblical account. Or a book of Greek mythology is slammed for failing to portray a Christian vision.

Is it really too much to ask for a review of the book in question? With comments on text readability, content, quality of illustrations. I don't mind a discussion about the historical veracity of a book. But I am going to assume that someone looking up The Revenge of Ishtar or The True Story of Noah's Ark is already aware of the world view or theology represented in these works.

Audio Poems and Stories

I was bumbling around iTunes and found an incredible cache of poems and stories read aloud. These are from Lit2Go, which is an effort of the University of Southern Florida. On the website you can search by theme or by author. On iTunes you can download an entire grade's worth of readings at once by picking a grade and then clicking on Get Tracks.

These range from nursery rhymes and stories to Alice in Wonderland and Beatrix Potter to fairy tales to readings on logic and mathematics to Great Expectations to Frankenstein to Mark Twain to Beowulf to . . . well you get the idea. This is quite a storehouse of readings. I think it would be a great resource to homeschoolers, classroom teachers and parents looking for good stuff to load up for summer listening.

Ideal Days

Summer doldrums have been dragging us down. I find that we're not getting much done, despite the fact that we still have lots of school to get through in order to redeme the time lost in moving last fall.
We were all out of bed today and had school going by 0805. I pretty much stayed off of the computer. Cauliflower was done by 1500 and even Rutabaga was done by 1600. There is a bunch of Lego building going on now. Cauliflower is programming a Lego Mindstorms creation and listening to European football songs. He was very inspired by the elaborate designs that the kids at Heart of Harmony have been using for their own inspiration. (They are creations of a talented Greek lego builder).

This is what homeschool's supposed to look like when I picture ideal days in my head. Now to repeat it tomorrow.