HS Comments on the Fly

I am surprised that anyone would give anything that Robin Sampson (aka Robin Scarlata) has done a negative review. And yet, remarkably, it has happened.

The following quotes come from Eclectic Homeschool Online, and they are about Robin’s book, The Heart of Wisdom Teaching Approach.

Mrs. Sampson presents the Hebraic educational model in a well-researched and thorough manner. Her treatment of the Greek/Classical educational model stands in stark contrast as biased, superficial scholarship. I wouldn’t accept the imbalance in resources from either of my high school age students, and I certainly expected better from Mrs. Sampson. A great deal of these chapters amount to a thinly veiled attack on what the author perceives as the evil of classical education. Her campaign runs into problems with the details.

Her repeated use of poor logic antagonizes the very people (classical homeschoolers) she’s trying to convince. Her classical education bashing rests on the unstable foundation of a number of logical fallacies.

… she assumes that other homeschool parents can’t recognize the propaganda in these chapters. Perhaps this is because she doesn’t recognize that it IS propaganda.

Ouch! I think that’s gonna leave a mark.

But that’s not all! Eclectic Homeschool Online points us to John Mark Reynolds at Scriptorum Daily who gives The Heart of Wisdom Teaching Approach a thorough tongue lashing.

These groups attack a straw man by arguing against “Greek education” and advocating “Hebrew education.”

… [I]t is easy to demonstrate … that good intentions on sites like “Heart of Wisdom” combined with bad information are not going to help the Christian home school movement.

It is an abuse of history to argue that the varied educational methods that produced thousands of years of Church leaders are simply “pagan.”

The problem with the “Heart of Wisdom” argument is not the intentions, but the reasoning.

Which Greeks? The atheists? The ones who welcomed Paul at Mars Hill (Acts 17), because he had the answer to their philosophical questions that had prepared the way for their reception of the gospel? The Platonists? the neo-Platonists? The Cynics? The Stoics? The Epicureans? They agreed on so little that making a chart of their beliefs as a unified whole is absurd.

One would be hard pressed to find a single doctrine on this chart that would command a majority of Greek philosophical support. It should disturb home school folks tempted to believe these folks that [Robin’s] chart is just wrong . . . not wrong from a worldly point of view, but wrong factually.

The fact that this chart can rapidly be shown false not just in some small details … but in almost every point should cause the home school mom to lose faith in it.

The Heart of Wisdom folk risk reading books to educate their children in a way that guarantees that their children could not write the books they are reading.

There’s a lot more that is said at Scriptorum Daily. Robin Sampson and the homeschooling parents who use the Heart of Wisdom program are really taken to task.

Not to change the subject very much … here’s a recent interesting and instructive post on Robin’s blog for you: Should Homeschoolers Teach Logic? (This might be a better link.) Yeah, we did and will, but who knows if they should. Does it really matter all that much? I should get started on it with my daughter; the end of the school year is looming. We used Traditional Logic with my son and my daughter will go through it also. We only use Book 1 because … um … maybe it’s because I kind of listen to my kids and let them decide on a great many things pertaining to their education once they are upper teens. My son took one look at the second book of Traditional Logic and said that it went into it further than he was interested in going into it. I think that part of it was the format changed a fair bit and the lessons seemed to be less practical than the first book. But that was a few years back, and my memory is fuzzy.

If you want to buy it:

Traditional Logic, Book 1, Student (35% off special, limited time only)
Traditional Logic, Book 1, Key
Traditional Logic, DVDs (24% off special, limited time only)

Traditional Logic is easy to use, simply set up, takes about a semester. I just threw it in with the English class. It’s decent training for the mind. If your student wants to learn logic, and many do, then it’s probably the best product on the market for homeschoolers. For those homeschooling for reasons other than religious, the religious flavor of the program is probably skippable in the first book of the series but not the second.

Okay, this is old news, but it is new to me.

The Magna Carta went up for auction at the end of last year (2007). No, it was not on eBay.

It was auctioned off by the famous Sotheby’s.

Magna Carta, a declaration of human rights that would set some of the guiding principles for democracy as it is known today.

The U.S. Constitution includes ideas and phrases taken almost directly from the charter, which rebellious barons forced their oppressive King John to sign in 1215.

It sold for $21.3 million. Wow!

You remember the Magna Carta, don’t you? Bad King John of Robin Hood fame. Runnymede. 1215. The barons. No one is above the law. Good stuff. You may find this over-done Wikipedia article helpful if you find your memory has dimmed. The following articles, though, were pretty good and not nearly as verbose.

Article A: Magna Carta Copy to Fetch Fortune at Auction
Follow-up Article: Magna Carta Copy Sells for $21.3 Million at Auction

When working on our U.S. Government class in high school, we read most of the Landmark Magna Charta. It’s pretty good.

T. R. Fehrenbach wrote a short commentary on the education of journalists, but I think it can apply to people in general who are serious about education … you know, like homeschoolers.

A degree in journalism can help you get a job and teach you some skills but the best journalists, I think, have degrees in history, economics, philosophy, English, or science.

Education has little to do with making a living; a great deal to do with understanding the species and the cosmos. We tend to mistake trade-school training (law, medicine, journalism) for education. Nor is education information that can be Googled….

You’ve heard that one before, right? You know, it’s similar to that old saying that goes something like, “Education is not about learning how to make a living, but about learning how to live.”

A good editor should never be unread in Shakespeare, the Iliad or the Bible.

I’d add in mythology, too. I’m sure there are more topics to add in, but our society seems to be riddled with mythological references. I think you could just buy a copy of The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy to cover the topic of mythological references for a teen. If the goal is to get the main mythological references, I think it might be overkill to have them read Hamilton’s Mythology, though one of my students did and I was required to in high school.

The journalist unschooled in science [who writes about] science or the reporter on politics who has never read Machiavelli are often the blind misleading the blind.

Ha. Good use of misleading, huh?

And that last quote, my friends, is why I don’t write about politics — I’ve never read Machiavelli. Nor do I intend to. But these two books do look good: What Would Machiavelli Do: The Ends Justify the Meanness and Ross King’s biography of Machiavelli. There are so many books I want to read. I wish authors would just take a break so that I could catch up.

T. R. Fehrenbach’s complete commentary can be read online.

I wish I had known about this book sooner; we did not run across it until my oldest was in high school. It is Next Time Questions by Paul Hewitt. It is one of the supplementary and optional books to be used with Conceptual Physics.

Next Time Questions are little daily doses of physics principles presented specially for the uninitiated. Hewitt has illustrated each brain teaser engagingly and humorously. These simple Next Time Questions are supposed to be used by the high school or college instructor to introduce the next day’s physics topic, so they are not as technical as the actual lesson. So most of them are just right for any beginning physics student.

Example:

Who knew that candle burning was dependent on the effect of gravity and convection? Well, physicists, of course, but if kids learn that and the other physics principles early, then it’s like second nature to them when they’re older. Many of us don’t think scientifically, but little brain teasers like these will help students to understand simple natural phenomena while they’re younger providing a foundation to build on when they’re older.

Originally, when we were using these here at home, I was copying these pages (because the answer is on the back) and then taping the two sheets (question side and answer side) up on the tv screen each morning. Then when we were done discussing, I would just toss them. However, once I got through the first 20 or so that I copied, I didn’t make more copies and this little exercise fell by the wayside. A regret.

The way I would do it now, looking back, would be to tape one of those page protectors up to the fridge with Scotch tape. I’d just tape the back side of the pocket. Then I’d just use the page from the book (mine’s perforated) and place it in there. Once everyone had come up with an answer (many of the questions are multiple choice or yes/no), I’d just turn the page over in the page protector for the rest of the day.

I would keep the Next Time Questions book and a 3-ring binder (my book is 3-hole punched) right on top of the fridge or in a cupboard right next to it so that I could put the used lessons away immediately … even if it meant giving up a shelf. For me, unless the system is set up to be completed easily, I won’t be able to effortlessly stick with it. So I would have a system for this. This is the same system I used with the art photos, except the art photos I kept up longer so that the kids became familiar with them–you know, they looked at them every time they opened the fridge for a couple weeks.

But, yeah, I think that these physics principles are definitely worth this effort. If I had to do homeschooling all over again, I would hope that I would do this when the kids were in their elementary or middle school years. It’s no substitute for a science curriculum, but it is a quick thing to do and can be discussed over breakfast. And you get a lot of bang for your buck education-wise. The time investment:educational value ratio is high.

It really doesn’t matter which version of Next-Time Questions you get. Here are links to the less expensive ones at Amazon. You need to buy used because as far as I know, the publisher doesn’t sell new books to homeschoolers. They’re all less than 10 - 15 years old, and I doubt much physics stuff has changed in that amount of time.

Next-Time Questions 3rd Ed. or Next-Time Questions 9th Ed. (Don’t worry about editions. I’ve got the college and it’s easy enough to understand.)

I am stunned. It reads like a science fiction novel, but it is true. There is even photographic evidence.

… NASA’s telescopes show the supermassive black hole as it begins shooting jets of radiation into the heart of a distant galaxy.

With tens of millions of stars in the black hole’s path it is likely that many planets will have been caught up in the deadly blast.

No life on any planet could survive the attack, according to astronomers. (source)

This is difficult to fathom. Here’s another snippet that tells that new stars and new solar systems could be the result of such upheaval.

The offending galaxy probably began assaulting its companion about 1 million years ago, which is relatively recent on a cosmic time scale….

“We’ve seen jets do pretty weird things to their environments, but a head-on collision is really rare and generates a [large] amount of information about physics that we can understand and use,” Evans said. “For that galaxy to be looking right down … the barrel of the gun of that jet is incredibly rare, so this makes it a really exciting discovery.”

Turns out that the “death ray” may not be all bad news for the victimized galaxy, at least theoretically, as such a massive influx of energy and radiation could help form new stars and solar systems by compressing gases. (source)

The second article has more photos.

We’re reading Galileo’s Daughter, which so far is much more about Galileo and his discoveries and troubles than about his daughter, which I’m happy with if you care to know. But the title, so far, is a tad misleading but may not be so as we get farther into the book. So anyway, I can’t help wondering what Galileo might have thought of black hole that’s on the offensive and what he might have postulated and/or concluded.

You’ve heard of Tycho Brahe, right? He was the Danish astronomer that lost part of his nose in a duel or something. Okay, then, here’s a funny bit from Galileo’s Daughter about Brahe’s beliefs:

According to the Tychonic order, the five planets orbited the Sun, while the Sun — surrounded by Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn — circled the stationary Earth.

Can you imagine? I can’t. Galileo dismissed this view of reality, btw. Seriously, I don’t know why Galileo’s Daughter isn’t on homeschooling reading lists. It has been a great read aloud for us so far and would be fine for about 6th grade and up.

BBC1 has developed a mini-series called Cranford. It is based on Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell which I was reading earlier this year. It got so depressing … what with a lot a dying and lost love … that I couldn’t bear it and put the book down and have not picked it back up.

I would like to say that the mini-series is more upbeat, but it really isn’t. It doesn’t go into the detail the book does, so I’m not left weeping. However, I’m still seeing lots of death and sadness. The good news is, though, that Imelda Staunton as Miss Pole has me laughing so hard that I’m spewing hot chocolate. It’s actually best that I don’t eat while I watch it. I do wonder, though, if she actually intended to say “renumeration” instead of “remuneration.” Or maybe I just heard it wrong.

I watched it Saturday night on YouTube.com in 10-minute increments. It’s a bit trying to watch it in such short bits, but I otherwise wouldn’t be able to see it for a few years, I imagine. It’s just now showing on British TV and isn’t on DVD yet. It’s not on BBC America yet either. But it’s worth buying, so we’ll probably buy it when it comes out.

I’m dying to see episode 5. I hope someone uploads it to YouTube in the next couple of days. The rest of the family watched it Sunday evening, and I rewatched bits of it. It’s very well done. It’s about a very small town basically run by older women, some of whom believe that men in a home just get in the way. Men come and go, but the leading ladies in the town aren’t married. The town has various trouble and events — things like a garden party, railroad issues, new doctor, amputation, young love, old-and-wrinkled love, the croup, gypsies, problems with the help, a sickly sister, proposals, visitors, the cat that ate the lace made by nuns, hair dying with indigo, etc., etc., etc. Victoria is the Queen, and it’s set in the early 1840s up near Manchester, England.

My only student has now picked up the book and is reading it. And, of course, this is homeschool related. It’s a mini-series based on classic literature and has inspired my student to read the literature. So. There ya’ go. Of course, she’s already completed all of her literature credits and should be focusing on science, but I’ll turn a blind eye. It’s not like the US didn’t win the space race, right? Sputnik causes no fear these days.

In an effort of full disclosure, here’s what I wrote back on 01-DEC-06:

I’m reading Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell. I spent some quality time with it while waiting for Costco to balance and rotate my tires. I sat in the food court. I felt a little self-conscious while laughing at the funny bits though. I’m surprised that it’s as amusing as it is. I mean how can two townspeople fighting over the literary talents of Samuel Johnson and Mr. Boz be amusing? I don’t know, but it is.

It’s a story about life in a fictional small town in England in the mid-1800s. It’s slow; it’s not like The DaVinci Code. It’s simple and yet complex. You have to pay attention, though, sort of like watching Michael Kitchen’s face as Foyle, or you’ll miss the humor. Maybe I should spell it humour since it is British humor.

Gaskell also wrote North and South and Wives and Daughters. I’ve not read those; I’ve only watched the DVDs. I’m reading Cranford because I picked up a lovely little vintage copy at a booksale, and I grabbed it off the shelf on the way out of the house knowing I’d be stuck waiting on my tires.

Oh, wanna hear what’s on the back cover of our newer softcover version?

Elizabeth Gaskell’s comic portrait of early Victorian life in a country town describes with poignant wit the uneventful lives of its lady-like inhabitants, offering and ironic commentary on the separate spheres and diverse experiences of men and women. As the external world necessarily impinges even on Cranford, the unlikely juxtapositions of old and new brought about by the pace of change are also explored: the effect of Victorian commerce and imperial expansion co-exist with the survival of customs and habits of thought from much earlier times.

Yeah. So there.

Go get some hot chocolate and a cozy blanket and start watching it on YouTube now. It will give you a little peaceful diversion after a long day of homeschooling and momming. My advice: Do not delay. Things have a way of disappearing off of YouTube pretty quickly in some cases.

UPDATE: Episode 5 is now up!

Lynn over at Homeschool 2.0 has a Geography IQ is a whopping 125. The actual term is “Traveler IQ,” but this test/game has nothing to do with traveling. You don’t have to travel to play, so I’m calling it “Geography IQ.”

The game is online, free, colorful, and requires no login. It has a world map on the screen, and you have to click where you think the city is located. The closer you are, the better your score. The quicker you are, the better your score. It usually asks you to locate cities, but sometimes it’s a well known location — Old Faithful was one they gave me.

I choked at Level 11 in the “World” section. Total score 477,664. Go and beat my score! Lynn already did with her 125 IQ. Mine was 123. I made some whopper mistakes. Hint: Christmas Island, Australia, is over south of Indonesia. Who knew? I tried to place it a little south of the Great Barrier Reef. Big mistake.

Anyway, I’m happy Lynn shared this game. My daughter has a class titled World Geography this year, so we can add this to our geography arsenal. It’s a great program.

Still on the topic of geography, have you seen my little ClustrMap over on the right near the bottom? What is up with the fact that someone has been to this site from the Maldive Islands and yet no one — not one visitor — from France? Why would that be? I’ve had visitors from nearly every country in Europe except France (and Iceland and maybe Estonia and Slovenia). But France is a little more populated than those, I would imagine. (If you’re in a reader, you’ll have to click through and take a peek!)

Hey, is anyone else out there enjoying The Amazing Race (Sunday evenings on CBS)? I have no idea who I want to win. I have really liked TK and Rachel from the beginning, but the other teams seem worthy, too. There are five teams left. Three are teams that are romantic couples (one seems about to break up), one is a father/daughter team, and the other is a grandson/grandfather team.

What’s fun about The Amazing Race is that it’s like a travelogue show, but not boring and/or dopey because you’ve got something else going on — the racing activities. During the most recent show, they went to Croatia, and we got to see how pretty the coast was. Some people couldn’t figure out how to row their boat. Some fought the whole time and then couldn’t find a cab who would take them up the hill because they got wet while paddling. I guess that on the next show that they’re going to Italy.

Since I have been lacking inspiration lately, I went and dredged this entry up out of my old archives from 2003. I had recently read The Odyssey aloud to my students.

I re-found this really irreverent classics site while trying to find something else. Perfessr writes,

Homer is also the Emily Post of antiquity. The Odyssey is nothing if not a book about manners. In a world without law or government, the guest relationship is all-important. There were certain rules to be followed among the nobility, and the moral person was above all a good host. Martha Stewart has nothing over King Nestor, except possibly her strawberry tortes.

Many others have mentioned Greek hospitality (as described in Homer’s works) as being a theme of the poems. We have been noticing it, too, over and over again while reading The Odyssey.

At one point (can’t remember which book or even who), we were surprised that a stranger had to be fed and wined before the host could even ask him why he had decided to visit. Can you imagine? Also, it seems that you were supposed to send your guests off with gifts when they left — not a bad idea, but a little costly if you’re not careful.

In Book XV (Rieu trans.) Menelaus says to Telemachus, “I condemn any host who is either too kind or not kind enough. There should be moderation in all things, and it is equally offensive to speed a guest who would like to stay and to detain one who is anxious to leave. What I say is, treat a man well while he’s with you, but let him go when he wishes.” Okay. Fine. But what about those nasty freeloaders–the Suitors? Hmmm? Frankly, I think they abused the hospitality offered them. Why didn’t the laws of hospitality allow them to be booted on out of there?

And what about Hyperion? Why was it okay for him to withhold his sheep and cows from the weary travelers? But, you know, Polyphemus was the worst. He gobbled up his guests and washed them down with milk. Yeah, it doesn’t get much worse than that.

Oh, yeah, and we also read Perfessr’s column entitled, “Choose Your Truth” after we read Euthyphro and were shocked by how “the great Socrates” acted.

Question: If a homeschooling family is feeling a little under the weather on December 7, what should they do?

ANSWER: Dig out their copy of Pearl Harbor and watch it. I hear a lot of people didn’t like it (or maybe it was just the critics), but I thought it was pretty good as war movies go. And they get extra points for adding in the Doolittle Raid (covered in Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo in Landmark Books).

Tip for new homeschoolers: Under the Blood-Red Sun is a good boys book about Pearl Harbor. It would be a good read aloud, too.

When Amazing Grace showed up in the mailbox last week, I was disappointed. Markedly so.

As I am quite sure you are aware, we Netflix. Since I am a Michael Gambon* fan, Amazing Grace was in my queue. But I had intended on removing it from the list when I heard the movie was about the writing of the song Amazing Grace by a missionary. Wow, that sounds like a snore, doesn’t it? So, anyway, I forgot to remove it from my Netflix queue and that’s how I ended up with it in my mailbox. To be true, this is a sad tale of woe. Getting the wrong movie … it is just a tragedy.

But since Michael Gambon is in the movie and Romola Garai, too, I plopped in in the DVD player and we started watching. I was bracing myself for the worst. It starts out with William Wilberforce being sick (colitis) and going to Bath (England, of course) to drink the healing waters from the hot springs. He’s being set up by his friends for romance. Then he begins telling this woman he just met his past history — the history of his struggle to get Parliament to outlaw the slave trade on UK ships. Yeah, it’s about the slave trade, not the song Amazing Grace.

Sure, I guess that Wilberforce is a religious man; maybe he was a clergyman … I don’t remember if the movie said … but it’s not primarily a religious movie. It’s more about Wilberforce’s struggle to get his bill through Parliament, plus the bit of romance with this woman he met in Bath. The town, not the tub. Wilberforce’s persistence is epic, and his female friend’s support of him is critical to his eventual success in the face of defeat.

I suppose Wilberforce’s laudanum use would bother some, but he was in a lot of pain from his colitis and wasn’t sure what else to do. Laudanum was pretty standard back in the day. He did eventually kick the habit, and I believe he was off it entirely by the time his six children came along.

I would heartily recommend this movie as a history film. I really enjoyed it. Of course, I had extremely low expectations that colored my opinion. But the history is interesting. Here’s some of the stuff touched upon in case you might want to incorporate the movie into your homeschool studies.

• William Pitt the Younger, good friend of Wilberforce who was Prime Minister
• plenty of time shown in Parliament’s House of Commons where you can see how British government works, even with the yelling
• show importance of public speaking abilities
• quite a few political twists based on their system give the movie some energy
• shows Quakers briefly
• shows inside of slave ship
• discusses how slave trade worked
• shows why there was resistance to abolition in Britain
• the actual lines that Wilberforce used when speaking in the House of Commons were in the movie
• actual lines from a letter from Prime Minister Pitt to Wilberforce were in the movie
• Abolitionists in England
• short discussion of French Revolution

I would think that this movie is probably for students 12 and up. Setting: London. Time period: right around 1789.

*For the few who may not know, Michael Gambon plays Dumbledore in the later Harry Potter films — that’s where I think most people would know him from. I, however, enjoyed his performances in Longitude and Wives and Daughters. He was pretty good in Amazing Grace, too.

Hey, I just figured out that I can link to a preview. Scratch that. I can’t figure it out. Oh, well.

Here’s an excerpt from Carmon’s blog that caught my attention:

I am aghast at the idea of a home with fewer than 10 books, and marginally appalled that 100 books in a household would be considered a number great enough to make a significant difference in test results for the student who lives with those tomes. There are more books than that scattered around my room, begging for me to read them. I’m amused that the researchers found people with college degrees who had fewer than 10 books in their households. What are they teaching them in schools these days?

10 books? Only 10 books in the home? Are you kidding? And this isn’t a poverty issue (one caused by lack of money) because you can get really inexpensive books at library sales or thrift stores. This is a poverty of another kind. Why wouldn’t people want more than 10 books in their homes? Why is it that they don’t need more than 10 books in their homes?

However, when you think about it, you can get a ton of stuff online. Shakespeare, automotive repair, world atlas, home remedies, gardening, general household repairs — all that kind of thing can be found online now. In fact, I hardly ever use my cookbooks when I need an idea on what/how to cook anymore. I just use a search engine and type in — as I did yesterday — chicken pot pie recipe. Then I read about five different recipes and go make chicken pot pie. It’s much easier to do that than to dig out five different cookbooks and read the recipes in them. So, life is different with the internet — and I suppose with XBOX, DVD players, and IPods, which we also have.

But still … we have more than 10 books. I probably bought nearly that many just in the past month.

And I don’t think I even believe that the researchers found people with college degrees who had less than 10 books in their homes. That’s not possible. When I finished university, I had tons of books. I can’t imagine someone just dumping the books they’ve bought during the college years as soon as they’re done with college. It just doesn’t work like that.

Anyway, both of my homeschooled students seem to like books, and they buy their own these days. They each own over 100 and will take them with them when they move out. So, I don’t think either of them will purposely live in a home without 10 books in it. Mission accomplished.

Hint for newbie homeschoolers: Buy each child their own bookcase early on.