HS Comments on the Fly

So, it is two days after the Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday.

It is the perfect time to ask* your students to tell you what they know about Martin Luther.

Some students will rattle off, “Assassinated in 1968, Montgomery Bus Boycott, I Have a Dream, etc.”

And then you can say, “Hmmm. And I always thought Martin Luther was from Germany.” Or “Oh, and what did he nail to the door in Wittenberg?” Or “I’m asking about Martin Luther.”

Yes, I did this with my students … back when my kids occasionally fell for it. It helped my students to pay better attention and subsequently avoid the confusion with the two names that quite a few people encounter. It’s an easy mistake to make if you’re not paying attention.

* Of course, you can only do this if you’ve already studied Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation as well as Martin Luther King, Jr., and the U.S. Civil Rights Movement.

Here is the homeschooling portion of a nebulous article about Google:

Bisciglia’s mother, Brenda, says her son seemed marked for an unusual path from the start. He didn’t speak until age 2, and then started with sentences. One of his first came as they were driving near their home in Gig Harbor, Wash. A bug flew in the open window, and a voice came from the car seat in back: “Mommy, there’s something artificial in my mouth.”

At school, the boy’s endless questions and frenetic learning pace exasperated teachers. His parents, seeing him sad and frustrated, pulled him out and home-schooled him for three years. Bisciglia says he missed the company of kids during that time but developed as an entrepreneur. He had a passion for Icelandic horses and as an adolescent went into business raising them. Once, says his father, Jim, they drove far north into Manitoba and bought horses, without much idea about how to transport the animals back home. “The whole trip was like a scene from one of Chevy Chase’s movies,” he says. Christophe learned about computers developing Web pages for his horse sales and his father’s luxury-cruise business. And after concluding that computers promised a brighter future than animal husbandry, he went off to U-Dub [as in UW aka University of Washington State] and signed up for as many math, physics, and computer courses as he could.

I think there’s value in reading the article because of the info on Google’s cloud computing. The homeschooling portion, though, does show that homeschooling can open up avenues of ideas for young people, freeing them up to explore their options — with learning as an often effortless by-product.

The Road From Home is a fairly well-known homeschooling book. It’s recommended by a few curriculum publishers and is a Newbery Honor Book (1980). It’s about Veron, a young girl who is Armenian, and her family’s trek across Turkey into Syria, I believe, back in 1915. We read it aloud quite a while back, and I don’t remember all the details perfectly.

But my point is that if you read The Road From Home to your students, you might want to tie it in to current events going on between the US House Committee and Foreign Affairs and Turkey. What Veron and her family lived and died through has shown up in today’s current events … nearly a century later.

I’m happy to say that reading the book gave us a bit of a framework to help us understand today’s issues. Funny how that works.

Here are a few articles if you haven’t already heard the about the issue:

• Turkey Condemns U.S. House Vote on Armenian Killings
• Armenia Hails Controversial U.S. Vote Recognizing Genocide
• Turkey Calls Home Its U.S. Ambassador Over Armenian Resolution
• Traumatic Issues Trouble Turkey’s Sense of Its Identity

Not all women look as good as Faith Hill. Not even Faith Hill.

Redbook magazine put Faith Hill on the cover, but totally gave her a Photoshop makeover, which she didn’t need, by the way. Jezebel.com put the original photo and the retouched photo on their web site. Faith got her back fat, back hump, hips, wrinkles, nose, arm, neck, hair, eyes, freckles, earlobes, chin, and maybe more all fixed with a little magic wand. Be warned that the language could be offensive to some, but then all you’re needing to do is look at the two pics, right?

With all of our homeschooling focus on academics — Latin and algebra and phonics and penmanship — let’s not forget to teach our children about the lies that are perpetrated in the greedy pursuit of “sales.”

Our boys need to know that girls and women are pretty without being retouched and that what a person is on the inside is also part of what makes a person attractive.

Our girls need to know that models on the covers of magazines have been digitally enhanced. Our girls need to know that they are pretty just as they are, that they don’t need to live up to some impossible lie perpetrated by the media.

I think we should define pretty for ourselves and teach that definition to our children.

… Support Us In This Boycott Of Germany By Vowing Not To By [sic] Goods, Travel To, Or Support Any Commerce With Germany. (source)

I suppose you’re already involved in this boycott — after all, you are a homeschooler. But I just heard about it.

This boycott is supposed to influence Germany into returning German teen Melissa Busekros to her German family. The web site provides links to Melissa’s story and also the German companies that are to be boycotted. Some big names include Bayer, DHL, Merck, Volkswagen, BMW, Siemens, T-Mobile, and Random House.

I won’t be involved in it, though, because I love my Miele upright vacuum and will continue to buy vacuum cleaner bags. I’ve had a Miele or Miele-designed vacuum cleaner since around ‘92 and have no intention of switching. This the one I own right now; I have the maroon one. It’s a dream come true. I can’t imagine going out and buying a new non-German vacuum to use until Melissa Busekros is returned to her family, which is when I would be allowed to buy more vacuum cleaner bags.

I can easily comply with the German travel part of the boycott. Traveling to Germany has never been high on my priority list. So, I guess I’ve been boycotting travel to Germany all my life.

Curious, I gave our home and garage a cursory glance, looking for German items. We use German technical pens and pencils, binoculars, power tools, a metronome, and a few other items, but not many. Interestingly enough, some of these items were assembled in other countries. My Miele vacuum was made in Spain. One of the power tools was made in Taiwan. How does that affect things? It seems like there will be collateral damage. Is that the right term?

I’m sure you’ve already heard the big news.

Yes, Senegalese chimps are sharpening sticks with their teeth and then hunting bush babies and eating them.

I think this is the funniest article about it. Best sentence:

I saw “Planet of the Apes” and know where this is going.

Another, more serious article tells us that human beings and chimpanzees share 98% of their DNA. Most baffling sentence:

Chimps are known to use tools to crack open nuts and fish for termites.

Sure, I know that most people wouldn’t find it befuddling, but I did the first time I read it. After reading it, I thought, “But there aren’t any termites in fish.”

I would have understood it more easily if it read:

Chimps are known to use tools to crack open nuts and to fish for termites.

Or maybe I just needed labels over the nouns and verbs in the sentence like all good grammar textbooks provide.

Don’t miss the article from the Scotsman which tells us that the female chimp’s name was Tumbo. Snidest comment after the article:

So what were saying here is females can be cold blooded killers when they want to be……….what a Revelation

Ha.

The National Geographic article has links to video footage showing the hunting chimp. This article probably gives the most details. You know, stuff like:

The tools, on average, are about 24 inches (60 centimeters) long and 0.4 inch (11 millimeters) around.

The researchers refer to the tools as spears. Pruetz said they differ from throwing spears, in the sense that they are jabbed into tree trunks and branches, not tossed.

As for animals using tools, let’s not forget the shrikes! They are like the noisiest birds — at least the ones around here are. They have a good use for barbed wire.

[Shrikes] feed mostly on larger insects, like grasshoppers, but also small vertebrates such as mice and lizards. Some species impale their prey on thorns or barbed wire for later retrieval. Their rapaciousness is legendary.

And cows! Even cows use tools to groom themselves.

He found they spend about 3% of their day grooming and preening themselves….

They mainly use their tongues and hind hooves to groom the rear end of their bodies, Kilgour says.

But they also use inanimate objects like trees, branches, fence posts and stumps to get at areas they can’t reach, he says.

“They’ll walk up to fallen tree limbs which have protruding branches and groom around their eyes,” he says.

So, there ya’ go.

The UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre in Florence ranked the U.S. 20th out of 21 economically advanced nations on child well being. The UK was 21st.

I first saw the story on the BBC television news this morning. So, I went looking for the BBC online article and found the list of the 19 nations that scored higher than the UK and U.S.

You can read the whole 52-page report online. What I found a little strange was that I didn’t see which children were interviewed for this report. I know my children weren’t, but I didn’t read the whole thing, just bits and snippets.

The report isn’t without merit, though, and I can use a reminder on some of those topics now and then. For instance, fruit every day is a good idea. If we don’t have fresh fruit, I rarely go grab fruit out of the freezer or canned fruit out of the cupboard. It just doesn’t occur to me. Fruit is a snack and not part of the meal, and I’m no longer in charge of snacks now that the kids are so old.

Anyway, the report is being met with mixed reviews.

“I think when you try to compare nations in a report like this, you tend to ignore so many other factors specific to those nations that the comparison becomes somewhat meaningless,” Horn [of DHHS] said.

[U.S.] State Department spokesman Paul Denig was also critical of the report and said his department first learned of the study through the media and was not asked to provide input.

Britain said the report did not take account of recent improvements to education, health and general living standards in the country. (source)

Others aren’t necessarily surprised by the findings and used the report to criticize others:

“After ten years of [Tony Blair’s] welfare and education policies, our children today have the lowest well-being in the developed world,” [UK Treasury spokesman George Osborne] said. [Blair’s likely successor] Brown had “failed this generation of children and will fail the next if he’s given a chance,” Osborne said. (source)

Anyway, I’d think most parents would find it interesting to compare their family with national averages, etc. I did.

Oh, here was an interesting indicator of depravation: Number of books in the home! 12.2 percent of U.S. children reported less than 10 books in the home. The U.S. was third from the bottom of the list on that indicator. The Czech Republic came in first with only 1.9 percent of homes reporting less than 10 books in the home.

Scientists from Oxford University, the Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany, and University College London are working on reading people’s intentions, and their results are 70% accurate.

A team of world-leading neuroscientists has developed a powerful technique that allows them to look deep inside a person’s brain and read their intentions before they act.

The research breaks controversial new ground in scientists’ ability to probe people’s minds and eavesdrop on their thoughts, and raises serious ethical issues over how brain-reading technology may be used in the future. Source

It’s eerily similar to Minority Report. I mean, they’ve already got one of those Perceptive-Pixel-type touch screens that they showed in Minority Report and now they’ve almost got pre-cogs in the form of brain scan software.

If brain-reading can be refined, it could quickly be adopted to assist interrogations of criminals and terrorists, and even usher in a “Minority Report” era … where judgments are handed down before the law is broken on the strength of an incriminating brain scan.

It’s an interesting article and mentions other quite helpful uses for this new technology.

Of course, Minority Report isn’t the only example of science fiction becoming science fact. This article discussing robots’ rights shows how I, Robot could soon become a part of our real world.

“If we make conscious robots they would want to have rights and they probably should,” said Henrik Christensen, director of the Centre of Robotics and Intelligent Machines at the Georgia Institute of Technology….

Robots and machines are now classed as inanimate objects without rights or duties but if artificial intelligence becomes ubiquitous, the report argues, there may be calls for humans’ rights to be extended to them.

It is also logical that such rights are meted out with citizens’ duties, including voting, paying tax and compulsory military service.

Mr Christensen said: “Would it be acceptable to kick a robotic dog even though we shouldn’t kick a normal one? There will be people who can’t distinguish that so we need to have ethical rules to make sure we as humans interact with robots in an ethical manner so we do not move our boundaries of what is acceptable.”

The Horizon Scan report argues … “If granted full rights, states will be obligated to provide full social benefits to them including income support, housing and possibly robo-healthcare to fix the machines over time,” it says.

I think we’re going to be hearing “Orwellian” and “Brave New World” with increasing frequency as time goes on. However, it doesn’t look like my remaining student is all too interested in reading either book. I wonder if there’s some other good sci-fi that I could scare up to tempt her. I’m open to suggestions.

I’m glad we homeschool so that we could properly commemorate Groundhog Day.

I wanted to skip it this year, but my daughter chirped, “But it’s tradition.”

And she is right. We watch it every year. Even though today I would have rather just stuck with the schedule, which makes me feel like we’re on the right track.

So we watched Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell in the eternal classic Groundhog Day. We got it out of the way early.

This, of course, leads us right into our “Quote for Homeschooling Use.” You see, any time anyone says, “I’ll finish it (algebra, writing, science) tomorrow,” any family member can reply,

Well, what if there is no tomorrow? There wasn’t one today.

~ Phil in Groundhog Day

It’s not quite a movie for the very young — too many suicide attempts which would likely be confusing, plus there’s other objectional stuff. But for those of us who can stomach some of the bad, like when Phil just hauls off and punches Ned, Ned Ryerson, it ends up being a touching story.

UPDATE for NOVEMBER 2007: See EarthSky for directions to view current Comet Holmes.

Just an update to the other day’s comments about the comet …

We saw McNaught! It was so much better than Hale-Bopp, which we remember as a cotton-ball-type mass in the sky. McNaught had a really long tail, surprisingly, and it was rather vertical-looking. The comet and its tail were visible by the naked eye. It looked just like a comet should. Perfect.

I am so jealous of the Southern Hemisphere getting to see it for a few weeks.

Didn’t any other homeschoolers see it? I don’t see much talk about it among homeschoolers online.

UPDATE: No longer visible up north. See Wikipedia article.