HS Comments on the Fly

Hey, have you looked around over at the Homeschool Video Blog web site? I hadn’t until I found a YouTube version. I don’t like having to download and save the whole video file to my own computer (which is required at the HVBP site), but with YouTube, I don’t have to. So I watched a few episodes.

The project is a good idea! Hearing from real and experienced homeschoolers should put new homeschoolers at ease and give them confidence. I’m sure the sound quality will get a little better. I had to turn up the volume pretty high; maybe it’s a YouTube issue. I wonder if the Homeschool Video Blog Project will include all types of homeschoolers or if they will limit their project to certain sub-groups of homeschoolers. I guess that will depend on Matt and Laura and their personal ideas of homeschooling.

Here’s a link to Laura describing the purpose of the HVBP (Homeschool Video Blog Project).

And here’s a link to a great video explanation of lapbooks at YouTube.com.

More lapbook links since the video isn’t exhaustive in its explanation: Buy lapbooking stuff, Buy lapbooking stuff, Buy lapbooking stuff, Examples, How-To links

Watch over the next few days for a handy link in the sidebar.

My daughter is really rocking my boat.

She is calling me on the phone from her bedroom (approx. 30 steps away) to ask questions about math and to do corrections - yes, I’m one of those homeschoolers who won’t give their children the answer keys, at least not for algebra. Call me what you will.

But don’t call me on the phone. It’s unsettling. It’s too new. I guess I’ll get used to it. It’s what I get for switching cell phone companies so that we can get a better signal. With our old cell phone company, we usually couldn’t reach each other on the phone when standing 4 feet from each other.

Anyway, I guess it’s just part of homeschooling in the technological age. It’s handy, I guess. It means she doesn’t have to budge off her bedroom couch to come ask me a question. Well, I guess I’ll resort to a quote from that fabled philosopher, Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it.”

I think other quotes of his get used more often around here, though. “Where’s your brain?” “Never had one lesson.” Those are popular remarks and even keep with the whole homeschooling flavor of things.

Oh, you’ve got to be kidding! I just found Wikiquote. Oh, I’m going to have to bookmark this. I think they’ve quotes from all the movies. Oops, I think my shallow side is showing.

I suppose other homeschoolers use cell phones throughout the day in their homeschools, but I’ve not heard of it. Maybe it doesn’t bother anyone else. But it really rattles me to be minding my own business and then have to do corrections and teaching over the phone. Seems a bit ridiculous, but it works just fine.  And keeps the student happy.

I don’t have many memories of President Ford.

I don’t think it’s good that one of my strongest memories of Pres. Ford is actually Chevy Chase playing President Ford and making him look clumsy and bumbling. jt.org states: “The running gag in which President Ford encounters one malady after another stems from a June 1st, 1975 incident in Salzburg, Austria, when he slipped on a wet ramp while exiting Air Force One.” I know that’s not terribly useful info, but I’ve always wondered why a fellow who had played football so well was depicted as someone without any coordination on Saturday Night Live.

I guess I can be forgiven for having few memories of President Ford because I was fairly young at the time and hated watching Walter Cronkite each evening at dinnertime. I remember him running for President against Jimmy Carter. But I think that’s only because a classroom teacher made us come up with campaign slogans for the candidates. One girl used, “Ford will keep things above board.” Hear the rhyme? Well, I had no idea what “above board” meant at the time. I also had to write a short bio of him in school, and that’s where I learned he was a football star in college in Michigan.

Well, we’ll have the news on today for a few hours and hopefully my daughter will learn a little bit of history (me, too). My son will be working - and he’s finished with school, anyway. I think about all I ever taught them about Ford was that he was the fellow who stepped in when Nixon stepped down and that Ford pardoned Nixon, which was controversial.

Good sites:

Ford Biography

Ford’s Recent Activities

President Gerald Ford Memorial

We gave up on Mila 18. I don’t get it. Twenty years ago I liked it and have fond memories of reading it. But blech. My daughter and I are both just not feeling it.

So we switched to Tales of the Alhambra by Washington Irving, who named the New York Knicks, btw. (proof, more proof, absolute proof)

Anyway, we’re still in the introduction, regrettably. Let’s hope we move past it soon as I’m getting a bit bogged down and so is the other reader. We’ve gone on to look up Irving in a few American literature textbooks that I store downstairs. They’ve given us a bit of background and told us that he was the first “American author.”

So far, Washington Irving, who actually did visit Andalusia, is traveling from Seville to Granada with a few fellows. He’s meeting people along the way and using a few Spanish words here and there that we’re trying to learn. He also uses a few English words that we’re not familiar with — some we look up if we’ve remembered to fetch a dictionary off a shelf before we get cozy in our respective cozy spots. We drink coffee-laced cocoa and snuggle under blankets, with the fire crackling in the background. We try to stump each other with questions from the text as we read along - it makes us pay attention and is fun for us (and is a sneaky form of review that I started many years ago). We also look up towns along the way in our respective atlases — many of them haven’t changed since … uh-oh … I think it was written in the early 1800s. I’ll check. The introduction states, “In the spring of 1829….”

We’re reading it because we’re supposed to be traveling to see the Alhambra in the next few years, once we’ve saved up something like 500,000 pennies. But that’s not exactly the point. Tales of the Alhambra is reputed to be “literature,” yet I can’t find any online study guide for the book. The Cliffs Notes web site doesn’t have it listed at all. I guess it’s not one of the popular literature books these days — not controversial or popular enough maybe.

I did find it on one homeschooling book list: PNEU. I’m not sure if it’s in The Well-Trained Mind. I just checked; it’s not — only Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle. It’s not on the Sonlight list. It could be on other homeschooling lists, but I can’t keep up with all of them.

Here’s one excellent excerpt:

Such were our minor preparations for the journey, but above all we laid in an ample stock of good-humour, and a genuine disposition to be pleased; determining to travel in true contrabandista style; taking things as we found them, rough or smooth, and mingling with all classes and conditions in a kind of vagabond companionship. It is the true way to travel in Spain. With such disposition and determination, what a country is it for a traveller, where the most miserable inn is as full of adventure as an enchanted castle, and every meal is in itself an achievement! Let others repine at the lack of turnpike roads and sumptuous hotels, and all the elaborate comforts of a country cultivated and civilised into tameness and commonplace; but give me the rude mountain scramble; the roving, hap-hazard, wayfaring; the half wild, yet frank and hospitable manners, which impart such a true game-flavour to dear old romantic Spain!

Not just in traveling, but in everyday life, having a genuine disposition to be pleased, is the way to go. The whole excerpt is a great motto to travel (or live) by.

The Chicago Sun-Times printed an article about unschooling.

Neil Steinberg at the Chicago Sun-Times gave his seemingly unresearched opinion about unschooling.

Kimzyn at Relaxed Homeskool interviewed herself for the original article.

So, when you say, “Everyone should eat their cake,” is there always someone nearby correcting you?

Well, no more!

I was cleaning out some papers, amazingly, and found an old comment about they being used in the singular by Shakespeare. So, I searched the web for more info and found this at crossmyt.com:

So it seems that it was only in the late 18th century or early 19th century, when prescriptive grammarians started attacking singular “their” because this didn’t seem to them to accord with the “logic” of the Latin language, that it began to be more or less widely taught that the construction was bad grammar. The prohibition against singular “their” then joined the other arbitrary prescriptions created from naïve analogies between English and Latin — such as the prohibition against ending a sentence with a preposition.

One person put it this way:

Latinizing grammarians and other small-minded pedants claim that no self-respecting lover of the English language can use “their” as a singular pronoun — as in: “Anyone who loves English will watch their grammar.” Well, this page shows that “singular their” has a long history of use as fine English since the 1300s….

This discussion paper seems to cover it all, though I didn’t take the time to read it. I’ve printed it out to go over with my student later.

I added a form over on the bottom left column.  It’s the form I’ve been using for years for read-aloud books.  I finally updated it with the shading.  Turning it into a .pdf was easy, so I decided to put it online.  I know it won’t fit most folks’ needs.  It seems like forms are so personal that every homeschooling family needs to make their own.

Oh, the “lb” means “left-bound.”  That form is adjusted to the right just a tad.

I just found another case of trouble at the Barnes & Noble checkout counter. You know, where Barnes & Noble makes it difficult for homeschoolers to get the 20% discount that they originally wanted to give us.

This homeschooler provides the book list showing what they bought for their homeschool. You must page down a little because their page formatting is a bit askew.

Reference: my previous post

Justin Armstrong, now 24, has built himself a sea-going cutter. The article provides a number of photos of the little beauty named Penny Rover. She’s 30′ - that’s not really that small. Most cutters have just one mast and a long bowsprit (a piece of wood sticking way off the front to attach a sail to). It can be sailed by one person. I wish we could see the interior and maybe a floor plan.

Justin was homeschooled. He started building boats when he was 12 and was working as a shipwright(!) at age 16. This is what Justin’s father said about him:

His father describes Justin as a quiet young fellow who would spend hours working on projects as a boy.

“When he was 6 years old, he’d work on a project for 10 hours a day. Those practical projects were a vehicle for his learning,” Bob Armstrong said. “(He and his older brother Jeremy) had a can-do attitude. When I saw where they wanted to go, I tried to give them the tools and opportunities.”

By 9, Justin was helping with wiring the family garage. Two years later, he was operating a saw mill, his father said. After reading Arthur Ransome’s “We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea,” Justin and Jeremy grew interested in boats, so Bob bought them an old sailboat to restore from a garage sale.

From what I can tell, it sounds like Justin learned in a relaxed way, possibly being unschooled. The article mentions:

… His less-structured schedule as a young man allowed him the freedom to pursue his passion for building.

Do go read the article; it’s inspiring and exciting. He even poured his own keel! That’s cool. I bet he can’t wait to get her in the water!

I read Lucy’s comments this morning and followed a link which eventually landed me at an article that is partially about bias against homeschoolers, specifically Christopher Paolini.
And, for now, on the verge of 2007, it’s socially acceptable to mock or denigrate homeschooling and homeschoolers.

I know we think so in our family. We often mock homeschooling, but it’s more of a mocking of those who mock homeschoolers. When one of us makes an error of some sort, we say with a sneer, “I bet you were homeschooled.” “What are ya’? A stoopid homeskooler or sumthin’?” I guess we’re a bit humor impaired.

But now, thanks to Dinitia Smith’s comment, we’ve got another little quip to add to our repertoire:   “… despite your lack of formal schooling….” I think we can get a lot of mileage out of that one.  You know, with stuff like this:  “Hey, you managed to dress yourself - despite your lack of formal schooling.”

Alice Bachini-Smith wrote an article about the real reasons to homeschool over at Edspresso yesterday. It seems like it’s written to those whose children currently attend classroom schools. As a homeschooler reading it, it sort of makes me think that I might as well put my kids into the classroom. What I get out of the article is that it doesn’t matter which way you go - homeschool or classroom school - since “… you and the school have the same goals.”
Let’s see if I can find a another quote from Alice’s article to whet your appetite:

I could give you a thousand more examples of things homeschooling can do that schools find much more difficult - but the thing is, schools can and do achieve the same sort of things eventually as well.

So are you dying to read it now? If so, here’s the link.

And since we’re on the topic of Alice … okay, we’re not really on that topic, but I liked this bit over at her tea-tray page:

Just because homeschooling routinely does better in studies doesn’t mean every child must be homeschooled. Some genuinely prefer school, and happy children pretty much always learn better and more. (emphasis mine)

I just stumbled onto a section of the BBC site where youngsters can post their own stories.

Here’s three stories from some home learners in the UK:

Sarah

Cienwen

Felicity (includes a video)

It’s a bit of a slow homeschooling news day, so I had to slog through a good portion of a long article for this little tidbit.

Mary Eberstadt, in her article describing scapegoating by those who are in denial, tells us that Randall Balmar in his book Thy Kingdom Come: An Evangelical’s Lament says that homeschooling “‘… represents a betrayal of an essential component of American culture.’”
Eberstadt’s article seems to say that the U.S. is in denial and a sympton of denial is scapegoating. I could be misunderstanding it; so do go read it for yourself. It can be found here also.

So, Balmar, an author I’ve never heard of, btw, thinks that homeschooling is a betrayal of American culture? Yeah, that’s lucid. C’mon we have a TV or four, an XBOX, a few iPods, a bunch of DVD movies, and on and on; believe me, we’re not betraying American culture by homeschooling.

It appears the Jared Allen, Defensive End for the Kansas City Chiefs, may have been homeschooled. Either that or he was trying to get a laugh.

This is what was said during Sunday Night Football (SNF) according to SportsFeatures.com:

In the SNF player introductions … where the starters introduce themselves with name and school attended, Jared Allen (DE Kansas City) said, “Homeschooled, thanks mom.” Al Michaels points out that Allen went to Idaho St. but adds, “that’s the first time we’ve had one of those.”

Al Michaels was likely one of the announcers that evening.

I tried to verify elsewhere that Jared Allen was homeschooled. I searched around on the internet and found a site that indicated that he wasn’t homeschooled during his high school years, but nothing was mentioned about K-8.

I also found this comment on the CSTV site:

In high school, [Jared Allen] and his buddies bought an old Dodge just to wreck, a little home-schooled demolition derby.

But that’s the only mention, and I don’t really think it’s about actual homeschooling.

So, I’m going to guess that he was just goofing around during introductions on Sunday and was not homeschooled. If you know anything different, please leave a comment.

Frankie over at Kitchen Table Learners has posted an address so that we can help out the homeschooling family whose home burned last week. I posted a link to the story last week.

And here’s an updated article with a photo or two. The Red Cross had paid for them to stay in a hotel until Monday. The article states:

“I just cannot even wrap my mind around this,” said [Ruby] Williams, 32, who escaped from the fire with her husband, Ricco Brown, six children, an aunt and a cousin. “I just don’t know where to start. Monday’s going to be rough, because we’ll officially be homeless. I really didn’t want to be starting over again at this point in my life.”  (emphasis mine)

I just had a crazy thing happen just now. I opened up one of my bookmark folders full of tabs that I skim now and then in a free minute. I thought I was reading my own words because the event being narrated was so … déjà vu.

Here’s what I wrote back on May 1, 2006 on another page.

Review of Barnes and Noble’s Educator’s Discount
Do you know what I just realized?

I just realized the Barnes and Noble’s Teacher Discount has ultimately made me not shop there anymore. Or at least not too often.

Years ago, a friend and I went and spent the evening there paging through homeschooling books and curricula, chatting and having fun in the comfy chairs. An employee walked up and offered us Educator Discount Cards. We didn’t need to prove that we were homeschoolers; Barnes & Noble just gave us the cards no questions asked.

The no-questions-asked policy continued for a few years … I suppose because I just turned in the card and got another each fall.

However, the past few years they’ve gotten all … “Prove you’re a homeschooler.” “Show us the ‘Homeschooling Association’ card.”

Well, some years I join the local homeschooling group and some years I don’t. If I don’t have the card, that doesn’t mean that I’m not a homeschooler. We aren’t required to join the association by the state.

So Barnes & Noble told me to bring in my approval form from the school district. However, the school district doesn’t send anything out to homeschoolers issuing approval. We don’t need their approval to homeschool in this state. We send in notification, but we don’t receive anything in return.

So proving to Barnes & Noble that we homeschool just to get the 20% discount card has become difficult.

And for me, it’s embarrassing. I tell them that I’m a homeschooler and that we plan to use these books in our homeschooling efforts. They look at me and say [basically] “We don’t believe you. Prove it. We here at Barnes & Noble don’t trust you to be telling us the truth.” Okay, sure, I know people lie. I know that so many people lie that B&N needs proof that customers homeschool or everyone would come in and claim the 20% discount.

However, it’s embarrassing to me to basically have to beg for that 20% discount that they initially offered to me years ago without any proof.

Last year they gave me a big ol’ run around. I had to speak with the manager, who knows me by looking at me, btw. Yet, I still had to describe the class that the book was going to be used for before they would give me the discount. Frankly, as inarticulate as I am, describing an English literature course to a bookstore manager is more work than I want to do for a 60 cent discount. I get so tongue tied that I come off as a total incompetent.

The year before they told me that I’d have to bring in all my home education books to show that I homeschooled. So I hauled them to the store … three boxes of them … until I realized that three boxes of books doesn’t prove I’m a homeschooler. I didn’t take the books in. It would be embarrassing; who wants to be a part of a public spectacle? Besides, anyone can have three boxes of teacher’s editions and curriculum books. That doesn’t prove they’re homeschoolers. I ended up talking to the manager that year also (because the cashier can’t make decisions about replacing old Educator Discount cards).

So when I went last week to buy some Shakespeare books, having them in hand and thinking, “I have to go up there and duke it out with them for the Educator’s Discount” … well, I just turned around and put those books back on the shelves and left. It’s so much easier to just buy them from Amazon where I usually get a pretty hefty discount anyway. And with Amazon’s free shipping on orders over $25, well … why not shop at Amazon instead of my local B&N?

I’d love to buy locally and support my local Barnes & Noble (the local economy), but it’s not worth the embarrassment and trouble and stress. And it’s extremely embarrassing to me, especially with all the other customers looking on.

You might wonder why I don’t just buy the books at Barnes & Noble and just not take the 20% discount. Well, it’s sort of a matter of principle. If they don’t want to give me the benefit of the doubt when I take up Folger’s Shakespeare books, then why do I really want to give them my business? I don’t really.

I probably should have gone over to Border’s. They gave me a 20% Educator’s Discount with little trouble a few years back. However, they don’t have the comfy chairs that I love, so I rarely shop there.

Anyway, I just realized that I don’t shop at Barnes & Noble so much anymore. I used to buy all sorts of homeschooling books there, but slowly, over the years, they’ve chased me away with their policy. So, I’m a little surprised, a little sad.

So when I read Anna’s comments over at Open Path Learners, I was amazed at the similarities. It was like an instant replay. Anna, however, is willing to overlook B&N’s system.

It was Sense and Sensibility that I and my daughter were trying to buy when they wanted me to describe the whole English Lit course and describe how we would use the book “in the classroom.” Usually someone buying a Jane Austen novel is doing it for some type of “school.” You and I know Jane Austen lit is fun and entertaining (at times), but B&N workers know that customers buying a Jane Austen book are likely doing so for a school project of some sort–especially if the homeschoolers are there in the middle of the day. Give me a break!

UPDATE: Another B&N experience.

Sonya Sorich boogies down memory lane with this comment:

That’s how I met Mike, a member of my church congregation who was home-schooled and in need of a night out on the town.

But when we hit the dance floor, he proceeded to immediately bust out a pre-choreographed swing routine. Apparently they teach that in homeschool.

Oh, yes, apparently.  And apparently, our homeschool missed that memo.

The big question:  Where is swinging Mike now?

A homeschooling family in Knoxville, Pennsylvania, lost their home on Thursday (14-DEC-06). It seems that the fire was caused by an electrical malfunction on the second floor. The whole family, including six homeschooled children, managed to get out safely even though it happened around 3 a.m.

[Ricco Brown is] especially concerned … because his wife home-schooled the children, and all of their books and a computer were lost in the fire.

‘They didn’t just lose their home, [sic] they lost their school….’

Because she quit.

And because I think too many homeschoolers are voting for her just because she’s a homeschooler. Am I the only one thinking about lemmings?

Here’s the link in case you have no idea what I’m talking about.