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.

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.

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.

Sure living books are great for grade school, but should a homeschooler still be using real books (aka living books) at the high school level?

I really don’t see why not. That’s how I, as an adult, learn. Think about it. All adults who are done with their classroom education use real books to learn. Oh, sure, you might use a tutorial to learn PostgreSQL, but a tutorial isn’t a textbook. While some college classes require a textbook, many also require that real books be read or consulted. If I want to know how to garden, I don’t grab the first botany textbook that I can find; I buy a gardening book. Take a look at your local bookstore. Is it full of textbooks? No. That’s because learning is best done through the use of real books.

So why can’t high schoolers learn by using real books, too? Why should high school science education be different? I guess it probably shouldn’t.

However, how can someone like me make sure that my students are properly prepared for college-level science if they’ve not covered what’s in the high school science texts? Well, a high-school-science-teacher homeschooling parent can figure that out. But I can’t. It’s easier and faster to just do what’s in the science text than it is to re-invent the wheel. No pun intended.

So we only do one year of “real book” science in high school. We title the class “Science Survey.” I have no idea if that’s the best title for the class, but it’s good enough for us. If you know of a better name, let me know.

For that class, the student chooses from biographies of scientists or any non-fiction science book that we can find in the library. It has to contain a lot of science; it can’t be a story about the childhood years of Enrico Fermi. My daughter’s already chosen and read a few books. She read that one about Archimedes, I think it was. She read another about a teenage chemist who became a perfumer. She’s read a few others, but I can’t remember the titles. She’s got them written down in her school records, but that’s at her desk a ways away.

Right now we’re reading Galileo’s Daughter by Dava Sobel together as a read aloud. I’m enjoying how Sobel shows Galileo’s excitement about finding four “Jovian planets” and how that when he took a trip from Florence to Rome, he set up his telescope every night along the way. She also tells that when Galileo found two of Saturn’s moons that he sent an encoded note to Johannes Kepler in Prague. Kepler could not read the code, as intended by Galileo. But the code proved to the world that Galileo was the first person to find two moons of Saturn — or it proved it when Galileo released the meaning of the code. He was a little hesitant because he wanted to make sure of a few more things before he told the world, but yet he still wanted to get the credit for the discovery.

So far, it’s a good book and we’re enjoying ourselves reading it. It gives us an example of a real scientist at work and how he recorded his findings and why. Reading books like this makes science seem real to the regular person rather than something only done in labs by people with goggles on. I truly think I’m learning more by reading some of these books with my students than I did taking that required science class at the university. Science doesn’t have to be boring. There are all sorts of science topics out there to choose from when picking real books.

Anyway, if you want to see a list of the books my son read for his class, I’ve posted them over at Homeschool RAQ.

I just re-evaluated the *Visitors Favorites* section at my Latin and Greek roots site and my favorite is not on the list!

The top 5 Latin and Greek roots resources are pictured at the bottom. These are based on visitor sales since the beginning of July of this year.

The surprise new addition to the list is Vocabulary from Classical Roots. I’m not overly fond of it since it didn’t seem to help out my student at all. It seemed to not include enough work with each of the roots — or at least not enough for the roots to successfully lodge in the gray matter permanently. And no, I don’t think it was the student’s fault.

I am thinking of decreasing my breaths per minute. That will lessen my carbon footprint, right? Anything to be green.

I am rather miffed that we did not get to finish The Lost Painting today. I want to finish it myself, but it’s a read aloud that my daughter and I are reading together. It takes real character to not go and finish that book on my own, I will have you know. But then, that would rob me of the pleasure that comes from reading it together. Okay, it would rob her of it, too, but it’s all about me right now.

I have been weeding out my links on the left. You know, removing links to unproductive blogs. If they haven’t posted since May, then there’s no need to keep them on the list. While doing that, I got distracted a bit — particularly by Mariposa, Wind Dancer, and Lifetime Learning.

I was also distracted by Crystal who wrote:

Basically, our society thinks it’s REALLY COOL to treat kids like crap ~ oh, and husbands too!

Crystal can be found over at Daikini Crossroads, and she had a link to this song on YouTube. It made me shudder and feel like I was about 8 again. Hopefully, all moms don’t all sound like that all the time. I have tried not to, but a few things have to be said and taught, imo. Or maybe it’s just quicker to tell a child something than it is for them to figure it out on their own or hear it on the playground. Like … raw veggies are usually better for you than cooked. But with kids, sometimes you’re wrong either way you slice it because I know there are things I wish I’d been instructed on before I left home — like that using a fork upside down with your left hand is okay. Someone dropped the ball on that one. I just hope that most folks think that there’s more to motherhood than that song indicates. What will digital archeologists 200 years from now think of motherhood in the early 2000s when they view it? Yes, I know there are no digital archaelogists … yet.

Okay, what else to blather about?

Oh, I know. This is a good one. I’m finally getting around to selling my oldest’s homeschooling books — now that I know which ones we won’t be needing for my daughter. I thought for sure I could get about $200 on eBay for all the books, but all I found is one set of books which will net me around $45 if I’m lucky after eBay and Paypal fees. So, yeah. A minor disappointment. Not a big deal, but still a deal.

I ordered The Man Who Made Time Travel last night. And then as I was brushing my teeth in preparation for slumbering, I remembered that I could have Mooched it, or at least tried to Mooch it because I’m not sure that BookMooch.com has any copies available. What was I thinking? How could I forget about BookMooch? Quick change of topic, sort of: Doesn’t it seem like BookMooch is just more like StandInLineWaitingForABookYouCan’tWantAllThatMuchOrYou’dJustPayForIt?

To avoid any chance at misunderstandings, I am now removing the world sleep from my vocabulary because the second listed meaning for the verb sleep at m-w.com is to engage in s*-x-ual i-n-t-e-r-*-ourse. (must foil the search engines) Why can’t we just freeze our language and never let it change? kwim? I know! Oh, I bet it’s because it’s a tool. We are not the servant of our language. You know, just like curriculum is a tool and we don’t let the curriculum dictate how we teach our children.

See how I brought that right back around to homeschooling?

Oh, but I forgot to say something about The Man Who Made Time Travel. That’s John Harrison. The smartest and most resourceful and determined man in history. Did you see that movie Longitude? Of course, you did. Everyone has. It’s so good. Inspiring. Michael Gambon’s (you know, Dumbledore) acting is superb. He is the perfect Harrison. But he was also good in Wives and Daughters — shockingly so. It brought tears to my eyes. But back to the book — The Man Who Made Time Travel is supposed to be for little kids, but I’ve never seen it. I finally just gave in and ordered it. (I’ve been trying to see a copy before buying — one of my cardinal homeschooling rules — for way too long.)

John Harrison was the fellow who made a clock that could travel by sea. That’s important because people used to get lost at sea and then starve to death or die of scurvy, which, of course, led to ghost ships. Queen Anne of England offered a huge reward to anyone who could figure out a way of figuring longitude at sea because she was tired of losing her expensive ships and quite possibly tired of losing her subjects, too. Many tried to figure longitude by figuring out the movements of the stars and moon. Harrison did it with a clock by using springs and layering metals (see H1, see H4). I think they need a statue of him at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. Seriously. I’m surprised there isn’t one. Wait. He was a commoner, wasn’t he?

Hey, you know that homeschooling mom, Amy, who makes soap in the middle of the night with a goofy hat on and has four boys in Florida? I love her Pearberry Soap! You need some. It smells great! You remember the description of Pearberry on her site? It’s the soap that her neighbor spends hours whiffing. Now I understand. I’m not a big fan of the Lilac. But the Pearberry and Rosemary Mint are both brilliant.

The good news? The Office is on tonight. Let’s hope it’s got more funny parts than *shudder* parts.

So, anyway, I guess I’ve got plenty to do around here. Like correct yesterday’s algebra work. And, yes, I do wield a claymore-sized red pen. It’s math. And it’s high school.

100 Books Your Child Should Hear Before Starting School

I found this list by clicking through from Painted Rainbows and Chamomile Tea.

I think it’s just stoopid to put “should” in the title of the list. Possibly “might” would be a better word.

OR … wait for it … maybe the could produce a flyer that helps parents and children choose books all by themselves instead to fostering dependence.
Maybe the flyer could state:

• See the shelves (or bins) in the E section? Look through them and pick out some books that look interesting. (After all, why couldn’t any one of those books be a good book?)
• Parents should pick out some books that appeal to them personally because the parent may get to read it a few times if the child enjoys the book a lot.
• Buy books for your child and give the child unlimited access even if it’s a really nice book. If the book gets rough around the edges or falls apart, buy another.
• Not all children like to hear the same story over and over again.
• If the child is not enjoying the book, find another.
• Look for books that evoke happiness, peace, and wonder, ones with lovely illustrations and engaging characters. Reading should be enjoyable.
• The goal is to raise a person who, as an adult, enjoys reading — novels, newspapers, travelogues, how-to books, reports, history books. So try to make all reading experiences with your child enjoyable. Give them happy memories of trips to the library or bookstore with their parents. Give them warm memories of you, the parent, reading books aloud to them on the couch, in bed right before lights out, or out on a summer day in the shady hammock. If they are happy while reading, it will be a feeling that they will want to duplicate as the years go by which will result in a person who ends up loving to read.

One thing that really bugs me about the book list is that some of these books will be enjoyed more (or again) after a child is school age. Just because a book is listed on List A to be read during grade 1 doesn’t mean a 3rd grader may not enjoy the book also. Putting limits on when a person should read a book is foolish.

I know that we didn’t do the Macaulay books (City, Castle, Pyramid, Mosque) when the homeschooling catalogs said we should at around 9 years old. My oldest read City around age 14. We had already studied Rome a few times by then and so the info in City was easily assimilated and had a deeper meaning. If he’d read that book at age 9, he’d never pick it up again later, which is sad since it’s a great book on city planning — great light reading for a high schooler who may be considering engineering. Timing. It’s really important, but getting it right is a matter of serendipity, really. The only reason that City didn’t get read earlier is because I didn’t see it at the library and couldn’t afford it in addition to all the other books we truly needed. I finally found it at a library sale. You see, it wasn’t about sticking to a reading list; it was just how things turned out.

Ack. I just realized that I’ve already written an entry like this. Create Your Own Classics aka Skip Twist. Repeating oneself, a sure sign of getting old. I should be doing crossword puzzles to stave off Alzheimer’s, but crossword puzzles just make me cross.

Anyway, my point, lest I get lost in old-age-induced digressions, is: We can’t let self-proclaimed experts tell us what books need to be read when as if we are too stupid to figure that out for ourselves. A list may be a good starting point, but it shouldn’t be allowed to dictate our reading choices. If we do give it that type of power over us, we are limiting ourselves and our children — and sometimes just wasting our time on drivel-filled books.

But, back to that list for just a second. I do not understand why some books are on that list. I never read my kids Where the Wild Things Are. Teachers and librarians read that book to me incessantly when I was very young. I hated that story. It was creepy and gave me nightmares and made me afraid to go to bed at night.

Here’s how Amazon.com describes the book comments in [] are mine:

Where the Wild Things Are is one of those truly rare books that can be enjoyed equally by a child and a grown-up. If you disagree, then it’s been too long since you’ve attended a wild rumpus. [That’s me! Wild rumpus free for years and proud of it.] Max dons his wolf suit in pursuit of some mischief and gets sent to bed without supper. [Hey, that would be awful. Why scare kids with denial of food?] Fortuitously [Oh, yeah, lucky me], a forest grows in his room, [um … scary] allowing his wild rampage to continue unimpaired. Sendak’s color illustrations (perhaps his finest) are beautiful, and each turn of the page brings the discovery of a new wonder.

The wild things — with their mismatched parts and giant eyes [teeth, claws, fangs] — manage somehow to be scary-looking without ever really being scary; [Um … they are too scary!] at times they’re downright hilarious. [No, they’re not hilarious; they’re creepy.] Sendak’s defiantly run-on sentences [Oh, yeah, let’s teach the children well by using bad grammar defiantly] — one of his trademarks — lend the perfect touch of stream of consciousness to the tale, which floats between the land of dreams [I’ll make my own dreams, please.] and a child’s imagination.

This Sendak [non] classic is more fun than you’ve ever had in a wolf suit [Only wolves and werewolves have fun in wolf suits.], and it manages to reaffirm the notion that there’s no place like home. [There’s no place like home? That’s what Dorothy said after her scary time with the flying monkeys and witch. At least she got to make her own dream.]

Don’t you just want to buy a copy of your own?

I believe that the best* way to learn geography is the way we did it over the years. (Don’t I sound all braggy?)

We read books aloud in the afternoon for usually 1-2 hours, and we used our laser pointer to point out locations on the wall map.

So here’s how it worked: I’d read a book … let’s say He Went With Vasco Da Gama. It was a long time ago, so I’m going by memory here which is extremely faulty these days … okay? So, the expedition started out on the Tagus River. That is in Portugal, right? For some reason, though, I’m thinking the Tagus is in Spain, but I’m almost positive that Tagus was the river at the beginning of the Da Gama book. So, we point out Portugal on the wall map with the laser pointer. We just lay or lie there — whichever is the more proper (lie, probably, but I teach the kids that lying is wrong so laying could actually be more proper, especially for chickens) — and one of the kids will point to Portugal while I say something seemingly inane like, “It’s west of Spain and just north of the Rock of Gibraltar, you know, there by the Pillars of Hercules.” Inane, yes, but also instructive in a sneaky, possibly obnoxious sort of way that some kids don’t notice as being obnoxious.

On other days, I would say other trivial things like “Cape of Good Hope, Verde means green, residents of Sao Tome and Principe still speak Portuguese, Angolans might also, the Pope gave the eastern side of the Line of Demarcation to Portugal.” You get my drift.

Then, because our wall map doesn’t show the Tagus River or which cities prevaricate … I mean lie … on its shores, I pull out Goode’s World Atlas, which is not overly unwieldy, and pass it around. Sometimes, when reading a book with a bit of history in it, we have to resort to a historical atlas because the names and borders of the countries have changed. When we were reading about Cyrus the Great, we initially couldn’t figure out which was the Hycanian Sea.

So, back to Da Gama. We’d read He Went With Vasco Da Gama, and each day we’d get further along on the journey in the book. I seem to remember it ending in Goa, a city/province in India. And each day we would collaborate to retrace the trip that Vasco Da Gama and his men took, trying to remember his stops. I’d read (sometimes the kids read aloud) and we’d enjoy the story and keep track of where the characters were by means of the map and the laser pointer. By the end of the book, we had a pretty good idea of a number of places on the coast of Africa.

Oh, sure, I know that not all of the geographical information sticks, but a lot does stay with you. You’d be surprised. And if all that was gleaned from the exercise was just knowing the locations of Atlantic Ocean, Indian Ocean, Portugal, South Africa, and India, it still puts one a bit ahead of things and starts a framework for future geographical learning.

We also sometimes used a globe on a stand that I found at a thrift shop one day for a measly few bucks. It weighs about a pound and is still surviving. It has been awarded a prominent position in our living room behind a chair. It wasn’t too outdated when we got it. It has Zimbabwe and East Germany on it; the geographically average will be able to surmise the decade the globe was manufactured from that info. Because it’s on a stand, it’s pretty easy for us layabouts to pass around.

We also have two different inflatable globes that we tossed around to mix things up, you know, sedentary variety. After some years, my life partner made a map framed — one side was the US and the other was the world. It actually resides in a type of rack on the wall in the office, and it gets brought out to the living room to be set against the tv armoire during most school days. These maps were the most up to date that we could find even though the globes weren’t. That way we did have a definitive place to look for geographical truth. Of course, now Google Earth takes care of that.

Drats! I just tried to “save and continue editing” and it didn’t save and I lost some content. Drats. I can’t remember what I wrote.

Okay, so, let’s see … after a while I started bringing out my change jar. I’d read aloud and ask questions as I went. I’d ask questions, some geographical and some not, and the first to answer would have a random coin tossed to them. Sometimes I’d ask a specific question of each student and other times I’d give a bonus if the students could stump the teacher with one of their own questions. I’m not sure that it’s really a good idea to drag out the money, not just because I about went broke playing that game, but because I tend to believe that learning itself should be its own reward, Alfie Kohn, and all that. And once you start the whole money thing, it’s difficult to go back to the way things were. It does add a spark to the reading period if you can get the right balance. Grapes could also be the reward if you want to do the reward thing. Marbles. Legos. M&Ms ::Shrug::

I think I got off of the topic of geography. Um. The best* way to learn geography, right? So did it work? Yes, fairly well. I don’t believe that my students need to know the location of every country and its capital. However, something close to that would be ideal. I believe they should know where about 98% of the countries are. (You know, Upper Volta is in Africa, near the Sahara, and Malaysia is a bunch of islands basically northwest of Australia. Mumbai used to be Bombay and Myanmar used to be Burma and the capital of Australia is not Sydney.)

MAIN POINT: I think that geography is something more easily retained when learned in context. When it’s married to a story, it tends to stick around longer. When it’s part of a shared story between family members, then we can together refer back to that information for years thus supplying us with a painless method of review. Oh, I know, this method takes years to implement, but we started early … like from Day One. I think I started it initially because I spent day in and day out with these children and when I discussed country X, I wanted them to know where I was talking about — we needed a common ground, so to speak, when having discussions. A basic geographical knowledge is something that most people should bring to the table; I think most people agree, probably.

In the end, we can use World Discovery Deluxe (discontinued) and Geosense.net or some similar software program to learn the capitals and countries that were missed somewhere along the line. We have a GeoSafari Laptop, too, which provided some enjoyment over the years and can help fill the inevitable, but mostly inconsequential, gaps. And we are currently enjoying Geosense.net quite a bit. You log in (only a user name and password) and play online with others. My daughter and I can even sometimes manage to play each other. It’s not an easy game; it’s actually challenging because time is also a factor. It’s fun to see how close you can get to the proper city. I am awful at all those countries that used to be part of the USSR.

*Of course, I don’t believe that our way is best. I’m poking a bit of fun at “the experts” who have a penchant for telling us what is “best.”

I remember while growing up thinking after a certain age that it just wasn’t cool to color anymore. But that was in the olden days. Now we’ve got these coloring books that claim to be “… suitable for both the college and health professional students….”

I’m talking about the The Anatomy Coloring Book and The Physiology Coloring Book. There are other topics covered by these coloring books. I’ll see if I can find some others.

Yeah, I found these:

• Gross Anatomy
• Gray’s Anatomy (see inside the book)
• Botany (see inside the book)
• Zoology (see inside the book)
• Biology
• Microbiology

I’m not sure if I agree with the pedagogy supporting this form of learning. That much coloring would fry my brain. I don’t think I’d suddenly understand the function of the rods and cones in the eye by coloring a picture of all of them.

However! That’s just me. My daughter can’t believe she’s getting credit for coloring and seems to enjoy it. Plus she’s able to give me a reasonably well formed explanation of what she has colored when she’s done. So … Re Sult!

For the curious, she will not be coloring either of the books in their entirety. That would be overkill. She’ll color until interest lags or she’s not able to pass my tough, but not obvious, evaluation procedure.

And on a lighter note … did you see where The Foil Hat Chick called the Bluedorns “kind of insane” yesterday? I am amused.

My husband pointed me to this blog entry over at Healthbolt about cognitive bias and how it affects our decision-making abilities. I guess a lot of the time we’re just deluding ourselves, which is probably not really surprising if I really think about it.

I thought I had a lot of decision-making stuff taken care of with Logic and critical thinking curricula. I was wrong. I should have covered this with my son. I can still cover it with my daughter, but I’ve never heard of most of this stuff so teaching it won’t really be all that easy. Drats.

Here’s an excerpt to pique (not peak) your interest:

A cognitive bias is something that our minds commonly do to distort our own view of reality. Here are the 26 most studied and widely accepted cognitive biases.

1. Bandwagon effect - the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink, herd behaviour, and manias. Carl Jung pioneered the idea of the collective unconscious which is considered by Jungian psychologists to be responsible for this cognitive bias.
2. Confirmation bias - the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions.
3. Disconfirmation bias - the tendency for people to extend critical scrutiny to information which contradicts their prior beliefs and uncritically accept information that is congruent with their prior beliefs.
4. Endowment effect - the tendency for people to value something more as soon as they own it.

See? They’re rather in depth — or at least unfamiliar to me for the most part.

You know, we only did the first semester of Memoria Press’s Logic and maybe that’s why we missed some of this stuff. But my son quickly perused the Book 2, thinking it would look like Book 1, and promptly rejected it, I believe, because it had a bit of a different look to the content. That’s fine with me … you can lead a horse to water, etc. Book 1 was quite good; in fact, it was what I’d been looking for for a number a years. Book 2’s likely good also, but I no longer have it to comment upon. Easy come, easy go.

Anyway, I digress as usual. The list of 26 cognitive biases is well worth covering in this homeschool since how we make decisions in life is so important.

Oh, yeah, and my son did use the instructional DVDs for Logic 1 a little. I think it depends on the student if they can stand the repetitive nature of reading the lesson and then listening to it all over again on the DVDs. A younger student would probably want the instructional DVDs.