What a darned good question.

The answer is, of course, nothing.

A high school graduate is not really trained for anything. Not by their traditional education, anyway.

If they’re lucky enough to have a gift for computer programming or art, they can certainly adapt those skills into a business or career, but by and large, the education you receive at school doesn’t even get you so far as to be perfectly competent as a retail clerk. If it did, I wouldn’t have gotten the confused and panicked look I got today when I dug up 31 cents after a cashier had run in $20 payment for a $10.31 bill.

And so, it’s not surprising to see that, according to an associated press poll,  Americans think that schools are not properly preparing kids for life.

Half of Americans say U.S. schools are doing only a fair to poor job preparing kids for college and the work force. Even more feel that way about the skills kids need to survive as adults, an Associated Press poll released Friday finds.

Given that in the not so distant future, we’re going to need to expand the workforce to include those high school graduates in order to pay for the benefits promised to retiring boomers, perhaps this is something that needs to be addressed sooner rather than later. Or, do we just need to accept that the new ‘high school diploma’ … the new benchmark for entry level jobs … is going to be a college/university degree?

And to those of you who are homeschooling, what do you want to say your children will be educated to do when they’re done high school?

No, it’s not the name of a new reality TV show, though the early auditions would be fun to watch if it were.

The Canadian Space Agency began its latest recruitment campaign in May and over 5000 candidates had registered for two positions when the deadline closed last week. The list will narrowed down to a 120 who will undergo physicals in September. Of those, about 15 candidates will be left next April.

The Canadian Press reports that this is just the third time since the creation of the Canadian Astronaut Corps in 1983, that Canada has added new space explorers to an exclusive group of astronauts.

The winning candidates get a starting salary of  $83,3000.

I love weekends. Every weekday I get to spend the day at home, but I have to work. I have to answer the phone, and work in front of the computer, and I feel guilty if I spend a few extra hours playing a game or going to the park on a Monday afternoon.

But weekends are all about NOT working. It’s not like we do millions of things. It’s just that there’s no guilt, or opportunity cost, associated with doing them, so it feels all that more free.

It wasn’t always that way.

When we started the business, we didn’t distinguish between one day and another. The only difference on weekends was that that phone rang less. We still sat and worked as much as we could.

Now, as I approach 40, I just can’t keep up that pace, and with a 5 year-old son to enjoy, I don’t want to.

So, yesterday we went to the barn and helped with the haying. We groomed and grazed a horse, and ran around the fields like madmen. We went to a movie (Kung Fu Panda) and ate pie.  Today we played in the garden, made messes in the mud, and spent hours playing Treasure Quest, a game I picked up  from a clearance bin at Toys’R'Us.

Now, I’m having a coffee, while David plays in the mud puddles. When he comes in we’ll have bathtime then a story.

No regrets. No worries.

I love weekends.

When I was in school, I generally tended to fall in the upper end of the ‘Average Students’. As such, I never received much attention from teachers. I wasn’t a brilliant genius who could make a teacher or a school look good at an academic meet, and I didn’t need any remedial help with my schoolwork. I just showed up. And from my end, that’s about all I bothered to do too. I never had much enthusiasm for school, I skipped when I could, but I at least did the minimum amount of work required to hand in each assignment.

The only year that actually changed for me was in Grade 9. I didn’t get any academic attention that year, but I did find out my teacher enjoyed the same types of fiction as I did. For the entire year, we swapped books and suggested authors to each other. And that was all the attention I needed. Just that little bit of connection between me and one teacher, and my entire attitude toward school changed. I worked harder, cared more, and bumped myself to the top of the class.

The next year, that connection absent, I reverted to the old habits once again.

All this is prelude to my comments on a report released by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute called “High-Achieving Students in the Era of NCLB”

The report claims that:

Congress was quite clear about NCLB’s objectives. Right on its cover, it’s termed “An Act to close the achievement gap.” Congress followed through with accountability mechanisms that have one clear and explicit purpose: drive up the achievement of low-performing pupils. As for students on either end of the spectrum, indeed all youngsters who could already be termed proficient,  NCLB’s core provisions treat them with benign neglect. Let them fend for themselves. Let someone else worry about them. Let them eat - well, whatever is left over at the bakery when the bread runs out.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that one of the results of the NCLB is that gifted students are gaining little ground. That’s simply a necessary part of the design of the act. After all, the achievement gap can’t close if all groups improve their performace at an equal pace — that’s simply moving the gap up the scale a little, not reducing it.

And while I agree that it’s a travesty to ignore the gifts and talents of advanced students, the statistics seem to show that advanced students have college educated, strongly participatory parents who can lobby for them, or get them outside tutoring if they wish.

I wonder if the greater tragedy is that, now more than ever, those average students with the potential for greatness are being ignored. The average students, by far the largest portion of a class, are the least likely to get any one on one attention from a teacher. After all, they’re doing fine.

Likewise, of the home educators I know, quite a number are homeschooling kids who are either gifted or special needs.  Would those parents have considered homeschooling if their kids were in the ‘average’ range? Would they pull them out of government schools where  “they’re doing just fine?”

Is “just fine” as good as it gets for someone labelled Average?

Maybe they’re the most chronically ‘left behind’ group of all.

This year, our summer project is container gardening. Last year, our gardening attempts failed miserably with snails, slugs, squirrels and chipmunks eating nearly everything we planted before it even ripened.

This year, we’re working on solutions… copper for the slugs and snails, bloodmeal for the rodents. So far, it’s working pretty well. The tomato plants look healthy, and already have a dozen small tomatoes growing, with many more flowers indicating a bumper crop. The green peppers and celery seem to be thriving too.

We’ve been getting a TON of rain lately, which seems to be bothering the carrots, parsnips and onions. Perhaps they weren’t quite big enough to survive the deluge. We’ll cross our fingers and see.

So far the only casualty of the garden pests has been our lettuce, but I’m going to try plant some new in pots and place them higher up in a windowsill instead of near the ground, in hopes that it’ll be more difficult for the rodents to reach.

David’s flowers are doing amazingly well. He’s got poppies, violets and marigolds planted from seeds earlier in the year all over the flower beds. They look amazing.

Last year we learned that he’s got quite a green thumb when the marigolds and delphinium he planted and tended bloomed and thrived when the rest of the garden crashed. This year he’s got a bunch of vegetables too… maybe he’ll be feeding our family with his harvest before long.

Is the Internet making us stupid?

NPR has an interview with Nicholas Carr, who has recently written an article for The Atlantic Monthly called, “”Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Carr says that even though the Internet allows us access to a vast amount of information very quickly, it imposes on us a new way of thinking. Rather than reading deeply, or contemplating any single subject, we tend to jump around. As a result, our attention spans are shortening, and our ability to read longer articles and books might even be in jeopardy.

Just as the arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press helped to make reading universal, in the process ushering in enormous social revolutions, Carr says the Internet is producing a revolution of its own that is once again changing how we structure everything. While much of the revolution is positive, Carr says, he thinks that we should be aware that there might be some casualties, including prolonged reading and time for contemplation.

Listen to it here.

Image via WikipediaI haven’t posted much recently, mostly because we haven’t done a whole lot of homeschooling lately. Mostly just home-playing, which is educational, but playing with Lego for days on end does not a quality blog post make.

But, as many of David’s lessons and group activities close up for the summer, we’ve got a few plans to use the summer learning time.

David’s just finishing up the last 50 pages or so of Mathematical Reasoning Level B, and once that’s done, we’re going to go through the much slimmer Times Tables book from Hodder Home Learning over the summer.

We’re also going to go through Apples, Bubbles and Crystals: Your Science ABCs (published by the American Chemical Society), which has a good mix of outdoor and rainy-day type activities. This spiral bound book combines reading and rhyming with simple science activities that begin with a list of everyday household materials and come with colorfully illustrated step-by-step instructions. Also provided are explanations of the science principles behind the fun. The 26 activities cover everything from making rainbows, rockets, music, fingerprints, and glue while exploring density, thermodynamics, wave transmission, mechanics, shadows and other topics.

We’ll keep reading… Right now David’s only interested in reading books about Batman on his own. Luckily, Scholastic has a fairly good set of Batman readers available, so he should have reading material for most of the summer. We’ve got two more books in the Dragon Detective Agency series to read as read-alouds, and once those are done, I’ll see if he’s ready for Encyclopedia Brown.

A few weeks of day camp, a few fishing trips, camping trips and park time, and lots and lots of Lego ought to fill out our summer nicely.

Paint often wrinkles—but sometimes it cracks. This seems odd, he points out, because in wrinkling, things are pushed together, whereas cracks form when things are pulled apart. What accounts for these antithetical behaviors?

Read about the science of drying paint, elephant wrinkles, fluttering flags and more in this article from Harvard Magazine.

I was surfing before bedtime and saw this. I’d really love to try this, but I’m not sure I would if Scotchguard contains perfluororoctanoic acid. I’ll have to see if there’s an ingredient list on the can.

Yesterday I was surfing the web for Wordpress plug-ins when I stumbled upon PopShops. Its a Web 2.0 way to add a quick affiliate shop to your site in no time flat.

First, sign up with a few big affiliate companies like LinkShare and Commission Junction, then make a free account with PopShops. A free account will let you build ten shops, which seems like enough to start with. You enter your affiliate ID information with each of the affiliate companies you’re a member of when you sign up. You’ll have to join merchant programs separately, though.

The PopShops builder lets you search for any keyword, like Valentine’s Day, and it will produce a list of products that match. Simply click to add the ones you want to your shop, and fiddle with the style, and you’ve a store. They’ve got a widget for Blogger and TypePad, a WordPress plug-in, or you can just plop in the little blob of javascript to put the shop on your site.

I typed “Magic Tree House” and selected Audible as the merchant, then told David to put the audiobooks in order. Once he was done, I created a new page, added a bit of text, and used the plug-in to add the shop. And viola! Here’s his Magic Tree House Audio page.

The store building was so easy, David only needed help when he misplaced one of the books and wanted to remove it. Once I showed him the remove button, he was able to finish the shop on his own.

Seriously easy, and I think it looks pretty neat!