HS Comments on the Fly

Okay, maybe it is not obscure to you, but I cannot remember ever reading it.

John Holt was interviewed by Mother Earth News way back in the first half of 1980, I presume, since the article was published in the June/July 1980 issue of the magazine.

Here are a few tidbits to whet your appetite:
(”PLOWBOY” is the interviewer for Mother Earth News.)

Formal education usually squelches the love of learning.

HOLT: Let me just say that most of what I know I didn’t learn in school, or in what people call “learning situations”. I don’t owe anything to formal education for my love of language, reading, and music. I had those interests before I went to school, I lost a lot of them in such institutions, and I’ve managed to get them back since.

PLOWBOY: Wait a minute! You lost your love for learning while you were attending school?

HOLT: That’s right. Take reading, for instance. I taught myself to read when I was four or five years old . . . even though hardly anybody read aloud to me. I just looked at all the signs on the streets of Manhattan’s East Side, where we were living . . . until, one day, I noticed a store that always had shirts in its windows and realized that the letters over that shop must have spelled “laundry”!

That was the first word I taught myself to recognize. I don’t remember what the second word was, but I do recall that I liked to read, so I read lots of books that were too hard for me . . . which is the only way anybody ever gets to be a good reader. I even finished all of The Three Musketeers and other classic books of Alexandre Dumas–long, long books–in a single summer when I was about ten.

PLOWBOY: You must have been a good classroom student.

HOLT: Well, I knew how to “play the game”, so I never had any difficulty with school. But I got bored with it as I got older, and –by the time I reached high school–I wouldn’t read a book unless it had been assigned. I didn’t start reading for my own pleasure again until eight or nine years after I got out of the Navy.

Adults don’t trust youngsters.

HOLT: I’m afraid that plain truth is that most Americans don’t really like children . . . even their own! Adults don’t trust youngsters, and school is an institutionalized expression of that fact. To put it another way, one of the foundation stones on which schools rest is a great big rock that says children are mostly no damn good.

PLOWBOY: Do you really believe that most adults–even parents–actually do not like children?

HOLT: I know that’s true . . . I’ve spent a lot of time observing how society treats children.

What should homeschooling be like?

PLOWBOY: Can you expand on your concept of what home schooling should be?

HOLT: I think that learning is not the result of teaching, but of the curiosity and activity of the learner. A teacher’s intervention in this process should be mostly to provide the learner with access to the various kinds of places, people, experiences, tools, and books that will correspond with that student’s interest . . . answer questions when they’re asked . . . and demonstrate physical skills.

I also feel that learning is not an activity that’s separate from the rest of life. People learn best when they’re involved with doing real and valuable work, which requires skill and judgment.

These concepts are my basic philosophy of learning–and are mirrored in my magazine, Growing Without Schooling–but I’m in favor of having people teach their chidlren at home and don’t insist that they have my reasons for doing it or even follow my methods. As a result, the readers of Growing Without Schooling, or GWS, include a variety of people . . . ranging from leftist counterculturists to right-wing fundamentalists.

Teaching is not a mystery.

PLOWBOY: But aren’t a lot of parents nervous about trying to educate their youngsters themselves? I can imagine someone thinking, “I don’t know how to teach!”

HOLT: I run across that fear all the time, and in people with Ph.D.’s just as often as in Joe Blow from Kokomo. I tell such folks that teaching is not a mystery . . . anybody who knows something can help anybody else who wants to learn it. In fact, what passes for official “teacher training” often makes people much less effective educators than they would have been if they hadn’t had it.

If everybody starts homeschooling …

HOLT: Home schooling is not a threat that’s going to overturn the whole school system. Most people are never going to try it . . . they don’t like their children enought to want them around all of the time!

Of course, there’s a whole lot more where this came from! And there’s a completely different article at NaturalChild.com.

Many moons ago, my then soon-to-be husband told me that our children would be homeschooled. I silently disagreed because I thought, “How could I do the job of a teacher who is trained for the job? How could I presume to do her job?” I figured that I had plenty of time to get things sorted out and get those future kids in school.

Funny thing is … I’m the one who got sorted out. One day I was reading Mothering and came across an article about homeschooling titled “Homegrown and Homeschooled.” Here’s the part that convinced me that homeschooling was probably something that would be good for us.

According to Bronfenbrenner and others, children in the first 10 to 12 years of life are better taught at home; they are also far better socialized at home…. Positive sociability is characterized by altruistic and principled attitudes and is firmly linked with the family. It is demonstrated in both the quantity and quality of self-confidence, self-respect, and self-worth deriving from the values and experiences provided by the family at least until the child can reason consistently. In other words, children who work, eat, play, rest, and interact each day with parents more than with peers sense that they are part of the family corporation–that they are needed, wanted, and depended upon. Such children are more often thinkers rather than mere repeaters of other children’s thoughts. [Because they are] independent and self-directed in their acquisition of values and skills, they largely avoid peer dependency.

I didn’t save this article and was surprised to find it online. It starts on Page 1.

	last night’s full moon

Tonight Mars is the brightest it will be for the next nine years. Of course, it looks like a star instead of a planet. You should be able to see it in the twilight just before the sky goes totally black. It was the only star out there last night when I saw it up next to the moon in the eastern sky.

It will be up there again tonight, and it should be easy to find if you take the family out just after sunset with a mug of hot cider. But go out before it gets too dark and all the other stars come out. Planets reflecting the recently set sun are visible before stars start to shine. Being out there early will raise your chances of locating Mars easily.

Two articles that will help you locate Mars:

Full Cold Moon Nears Mars (last night)
Earth Between Mars and Sun (tonight)

Other Mars news: “Because of current uncertainties about the asteroid’s exact orbit, there is a 1-in-75 chance of [Asteroid] 2007 WD5 impacting Mars.”

To follow up on my post from 13 DEC 07, the Clark brothers won on Friday night on The Next Great American Band, which is produced by the American Idol folks.

Truth be told, they’re adults now, but they were homeschooled as children.

Who would revive society if everything collapsed? Homeschoolers….

Yeah, probably not.

But if you enjoy fantasies, you’ll want to read about how the Homers got it right.

The Lucas family is slated to appear on Extreme Home Makeover sometime in February or March. They are a military family, with the father deployed in Iraq with the Virginia National Guard. They brought him home for the event.

An interesting tidbit is that the local homeschooling co-op nominated the family for the show.

Read more.

J.K. Rowling, a Time magazine runner-up for Person of the Year 2007, reveals that wizards are usually homeschooled before entering Hogwarts.

6. Where do wizard children go to school before Hogwarts?
Most are homeschooled, because they aren’t really able to control their powers so it would be too dangerous to let them out and about.

So, does she think that all homeschoolers keep their children from being “out and about” or only those who are teaching wizard children? Wouldn’t you think that the parents would figure out a way to get their little wizard children out and about rather than keeping them at home all the time? Isn’t it only muggles who keep their charges under the stairs the way Harry Potter was?

Of course, it doesn’t really matter what she thinks in the grand scheme of things. It’s patently obvious that homeschoolers — wizards or not — are “out and about” at various times throughout the week. And homeschooling is a lot less confining than a boarding school.

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!

I have never heard of this show — not surprising with all these new shows on the tube because of the writers’ strike. It is called The Next Great American Band and is on Friday nights on Fox.

One group still in the contest is The Clark Brothers who were homeschooled.

The Clark brothers are no strangers to … recording….

Ashley, 27, said he played fiddle and guitar with [Carrie] Underwood’s band for two years. Austin, 24, played Dobro in bands with both Underwood and SHeDaisy, while Adam, 29, has played mandolin and guitar with SHeDaisy.

Their father Freddy Clark, 64, who plays 20 instruments, said he started teaching all 11 of his children to play instruments when each of them turned 5 years old…. All were home schooled….

Anyway, according to an online article out of Florida, you can vote for this band or one of the other three competing bands just like on American Idol. The winner gets a recording contract.

In case you’re interested, I’ll provide a link to the family web site even though it seems a little anemic.

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.

Wow, I never thought they would let a Sophomore win it.

History first: Heisman Trophy is awarded yearly to the most outstanding college football player. Here are the names of some of the former greats who have won the Heisman: Roger Staubauch, O.J. Simpson, Marcus Allen, Doug Flutie, Vinny Testaverde, Herschel Walker.

Winning the Heisman is a big deal in football circles.

Tim Tebow, who I mentioned way back when, was homeschooled, spent summers doing missionary work, and played football for the local highschool team.

From NY Times article:

With his right hand in a cast, Tebow, 20, accepted the 25-pound bronze trophy and gave an emotional acceptance speech in which he thanked everyone from his strength and conditioning coach to his offensive linemen to Jesus. His nervousness was apparent when three times he repeated, “I love being a Gator, and I love Gator Nation.”

If Tebow had been an upperclassman, the victory might have been a landslide. But his status as a sophomore had many of the traditionalists among the voters wondering if the award should take into account a more complete college career.

From Fox News article:

First off, he was home-schooled. On the stigma that goes along with that, Tebow jokes, “I’ve heard it all. Home schoolers aren’t supposed to be athletic. It’s like, ‘Go win a spelling bee or something.’”

Tebow also happens to be the kind of guy you wouldn’t lose sleep over your daughter dating. He’s humble and respectful, and strong in the classroom. He didn’t spend the night before the Heisman ceremony in Manhattan nightclubs and seedy bars until 3 a.m. He went on a double-decker bus tour around New York instead.

He has a good head on his shoulders and possesses an even greater heart. While most know him as the super-human one-man wrecking crew terrorizing SEC defensive lines each weekend, there are thousands of men, women and children in the Philippines that know him as a familiar face and a friend.

Tebow’s spent the majority of his summers in the Philippines — living with his parents and assisting with his father’s ministry — the Bob Tebow Evangelistic Association (www.btea.org). Where most other nationally recognized high school athletes spent their teenage summers at camps sponsored by shoe companies and enjoying nights out with the prom queen (and more than likely, her friend, too), Tebow — or “Timmy” as his mother Pam still calls him — was in the Philippines each year for two months tending to the underserved.

On top of the ministry work, Tebow’s also a regular visitor to the BTEA orphanage located in Mindanao in the Philippines that is home to 49 orphans and 13 staff members. He holds these experiences as close to his heart as the ones on the gridiron.

Articles:

• Tim Tebow’s page at Gatorzone
• article about Tebow and Heisman at Gatorzone
• Tebow Makes Heisman History
• Homeschooler Snaps Up Heisman Nomination (by ex-homeschool-blogger Isabel Lyman)
• ESPN article with video
• mentions his homeschooling (old article)
• photo of the whole family

Tim traveled to New York City to hear the announcement that he’d won the Heisman. Here’s a quote from the most amusing article:

In Gainesville, they like to say “Superman Wears Tim Tebow Pajamas.” Now he’s come to Metropolis and taken Superman’s trophy, too.

Timothy Richard Tebow may not be the Man of Steel, but he will forever be the first sophomore in history to bring home the Man in Bronze.

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.

We just found out that feng-shui was one of the major causes of the Boxer Rebellion. Maybe you knew that, but I didn’t.

So, we’re watching Charleton Heston and Ava Gardner in 55 Days at Peking and getting a little bored. You can’t turn off the distracting Chinese subtitles either. It’s filmed in Spain, near Madrid, and not in China. So, it’s a little bit of a strange movie. It’s 2 hours and 40 minutes long, so we may watch the rest tonight. Maybe not.

You remember the Boxer Rebellion, right? Around 1900, some Chinese people (Boxers) decided that the foreigners needed to get out of China. So the Boxers got violent toward the foreigners. The Boxers lost. That’s about it. The truly inquisitive may do further studies if they need their memory jogged to a greater degree. I suppose one of the main results was the eventual downfall of the Qing dynasty, which led to a new government.

So, during the movie, my husband decides to check out the Boxer Rebellion on Wikipedia — mostly to figure out the relationship between the Empress Dowager and the Boxers — and then he read this quote to us from the Boxer Rebellion entry:

[The Boxers] attacked foreigners, who were building railroads and violating Feng shui….