I’m not going to pretend to know both sides of the story here, but here’s the way the article outlines it…

1) Kids are/feel harassed at school
2) Mom complains to school but gets nowhere
3) Harassment escalates to the point where mom feels children are physically threatened
4) Mom pulls kids from school to homeschool
5) School says mom can’t adequately teach and files a complaint of educational neglect.

Now, maybe there’s something else happening here, but I have a hard time seeing this as anything close to educational neglect. Wasn’t she neglecting her children more when she kept them in school despite frequent bullying?

Technorati Tags: bullying, bullies, homeschool public_school

“Have you blogged about the puppet box yet, mom?”

Oops. Things got busy and I forgot to post a picture of the puppet box my son painted this weekend.

He’s got about 20 puppets now, 8 people puppets and a dozen or more animals of the domestic, zoo, and farm varieties. Up till now they’ve been living in a cardboard box in his bedroom.

So when I saw large canvas bins on sale at Zellers (that’s like a Canadian version of Target, for my American readers), I picked one up in hopes all the puppets would fit.

I ALWAYS have a good supply of paints on hand, fabric paint, acrylic paint and tempura paint all live in my house in abundance, so I dragged out some primary colors of fabric paint and set David working on personalizing his puppet box.

He did a fantastic job, if I do say so myself.

And he’s happy he gets to have another personalized item in his room for his toys. He’s shown it to every visitor we’ve had since it’s been done, and he’s been after me to show it on my blog too.

See, kiddo!? I’ve done it. I’ve blogged about your puppet box.

Technorati Tags: puppets, puppet theater, painting, fabric paints, art, crafts, homeschooling

David was very excited today to learn that paleontologists have discovered a nearly complete fossil of a hitherto unknown species of dinosaur in Patagonia.

The herbivorous Futalognkosaurus dukei measured an estimated 105 feet to 112 feet from head to tail and was as high as a four-storey building. It is one of the three biggest dinosaurs yet found in the world.

And here’s proof that with enough money you can have anything named after you…

Futalognkosaurus dukei’s name is derived from the indigenous Mapuche language meaning “giant chief of the lizards”, and the name of U.S. power company Duke Energy Corp, which financed a large part of the excavation in Argentina.

The New York Times had an interesting article this weekend about the problems associated with governments using lotteries to fund public schools.

Now, on the one hand, I’m all for using lottery cash for public schools because that’s one form of taxation I don’t have to be subject to. Yay!

But having the government encouraging people to gamble for any reason is a little weird. And what happens when the state isn’t raking in enough lotto money to pursue whatever they want to do? Well, if not enough people are buying tickets, pull in more customers by increasing payouts.

But that cuts into revenues too.

What you REALLY need to do is increase your “core” lotto buyer base. You know the folks. They’re the ones that blow hundreds or thousands of dollars a week on the lotto. And how do you get more people crazy enough to do that? Make the games more addictive, of course. Games with instant winnings, video lottery terminals, and keno all encourage marginal gamblers to stretch their boundaries, thereby bringing in more cash for education.

And since few public schools teach their pupils about sound fiscal management, or even informal logic, future citizens will be more than willing to throw their paychecks away for the hope of unearned riches and, of course, public education.

What a utopian dream. We can have the perfect public education system if only we can create more gambling addicts.

David loves math, but often doing worksheet after worksheet to reinforce mathematical learning is too dull for either of us to pursue. So, when I bought MindWare’s Addition Adventures, I thought it might be a nice change.

What I didn’t expect was how much fun he would find it.

On top of each page of the book there’s a treasure map of sorts, with a star indicating the starting point. Your child answers about 20 mathematical questions, and the answers to each of those questions (plus the N-E-S-W direction beside the equation) indicates how many squares and in what direction you should move away from the last point, till you reach your final destination.

The pages start off at a grade 1 level, with addition problems that only go up to ten, and don’t advance too quickly. By the end of the book the numbers go up to 20, but slowly enough that it seems like a natural and easy progression.

We always start out by guessing where the path will lead us, and if one of us guessed right, that person ‘wins’, which turns the page into a treasure map AND a game.

Highly recommended. And I’ve already ordered Subtraction Secrets in the same series so that we can keep going once we’re finished the addition book.

I’m surprised that David hasn’t gotten sick of me buying toys that remind me of my childhood, but so far he’s remained very interested in what I was like as a child, and what I liked to do.

So he was game when we unwrapped this morning’s delivery of mosiac peg boards and colored pegs. I found them at The Oriental Trading Company for a great price. The standard set (which includes six boards and 2000 pegs) is $19.95, but if you get the “Inspirational” set, which includes Christian themed patterns on cardstock instead of generic, you can get the same boards and pegs for less than $10.

I’d recommend the cheaper version, since most of the fun of playing with these pegs and boards is making your own designs. If you want more pattern ideas, coloring books for very young kids often have great simple pictures of objects and animals that are easily adapted. You can either ‘wing it’ or color the picture, then put it under the peg board as a guide.

Since the boards are 8.5X11″, a standard coloring book page will fit right underneath it.

If you decide to make the same purchase and find some other neat stuff at The Oriental Trading Co, you can get free shipping on orders over $60 by using coupon code RLS100 at the checkout.

A a report on home schooling released today by The Fraser Institute should make you more confident in your ability to educate your children, even if you don’t have a university degree.

Home Schooling: From the Extreme to the Mainstream (2nd edition) by Patrick Basham, John Merrifield, and Claudia R. Hepburn is a current survey of many peer-reviewed homeschooling studies that have been published recently. While true statistics are impossible to come by, a survey of all the existing data can be helpful to come to some general conclusions about the value and efficacy of home schooling.

The report covers the history and regulation of homeschooling, the growth of the movement, the socio-economic characteristics of homeschooling, academic successes, and socialization concerns related to homeschooling.

Some interesting stats in the report:

• Home schooling parents have above-average levels of education. 75% of homeschooling parents have studied beyond high school vs 56% nationwide
• 81% of homeschoolers are two-parent households vs 66% of American families with children
• Having at least one parent who is a certified teacher appears to have no significant effect on the achievement levels of home schooled students.
• Homeschooled children of university graduates perform significantly better than do children whose parents do not have a degree, BUT the educational achievement of the homeschooling parent has LESS impact than the educational achievement of the parents of public schooled kids.
  “…regardless of whether their mothers held a degree or did not complete high school, the [home schooled] children’s scores stayed between the 80th and 90th percentile. By contrast, in 8th grade math, public school students whose parents are college graduates score at the 63rd percentile, whereas students whose parents have less than a high school diploma score at the 28th percentile. Students taught at home by mothers who never finished high school scored a full 55 percentile points higher than public school students from families with comparable education levels.”
  
• Home schooled kids watch less television than their public school peers
• Home schooled students enjoy a life satisfaction score considerably above the score of their public school peers

Overall, nothing but good news. Home schoolers already know they’re making the right decision, but it doesn’t hurt to have a little encouragement from researchers now and then.

Watching the hockey game tonight, instead of the regular hollering and yelling at the Leafs to get in front of the net, and SHOOT for goodness sake!, this is what you would have heard in our living room…

“How many points do the Leafs have, David?”

“How many points does Ottawa have?”

“How many points have been scored altogether?”

“How many goals does Ottawa have to score to win the game?”

Not to mention the discussion of thirds when discussing periods, and the various reasons there might be intermissions between periods… like giving the players a chance to go to the bathroom… and the need for the television network to show advertising to show the game on TV.

What are we becoming, turning Canada’s sacred national sport into a learning experience, rather than the bloodthirsty team rivalry it ought to be?

Ann and Bob Smith are a devoutly religious couple who choose to homeschool their seven-year-old twins Susan and Sam. In accordance with their religious beliefs, they teach their children only religious doctrine, refusing to provide their children with a basic education in reading, writing and arithmetic.

Thus begins a lengthy article authored by Kimberly A. Yuracko from Northwestern University School of Law (available in PDF form here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1016778)

Of course, Ann and Bob Smith are simply a figment of Yuracko’s imagination. While some of the Christian homeschoolers I’ve become aware of are teaching some dubious stuff and calling it science, they are (at least from my experience) far more likely to follow a strict and challenging boxed curriculum than secular home schoolers.

Yuracko’s article is based on a few different premises I completely disagree with:
1) that parental control over children’s basic education flows from the state (rather than vice versa).
2) that a good education necessarily includes indoctrination in such liberal values as sex equality, gender role fluidity, multiculturalism, etc.
3) That the state’s obligation to ensure children receive the abstract values mentioned above in their educational regimen overrides the parent’s rights to transmit their own family/cultural values to their children.

Yuracko begins by asserting that homeschooling puts children in danger of not receiving a minimum education.

“Much has been written in the popular press about the superior academic achievement of homeschooled children. However, the widely-touted studies showing that homeschooled children outperform their public school peers deserve skepticism. They generally suffer from selection biases among homeschoolers and do not control for the family characteristics of the homeschooling and non-homeschooling families being compared. With only half of all states requiring standardized testing or evaluation of homeschooled students, and with poor enforcement of such requirements where they do exist, there is simply no good data on what and how much homeschooled students are learning.”

In a scientific journal the writer would be expected to establish, from the numbers that do exist, upper and lower boundaries in order to better estimate the true achievement of home schoolers in general. But this is a law article. We can just ignore the numbers, however inaccurate, that have been collected and proceed to anecdotal evidence.

“Anecdotal evidence suggests that at least some homeschooled children, by design or accident, may not be receiving even a basic minimum education. The fact that one cannot know for sure how rare such occurrences are is itself a problem. I contend in this Part that, as a matter of federal and state constitutional law, states may not permit such deprivation.”

Anecdotal evidence also suggests that at least some public schooled children, by design or accident, may not be receiving even a basic minimum education, but that’s another matter.

Lets look at the anecdotal evidence she cites in her footnotes. The first two anecdotes are quotes from unschooled teens that indicate that they spend most of their time doing things they like — dance and snowboarding, in these instances. This alone does not in any way indicate that those teens were unable to do other, more ‘educationally acceptable’ things.

My son, for instance, has spent most of his time in the last month building and enacting elaborate medieval battles with plastic knights and cardboard castles. While it doesn’t sound like he’s being thoroughly educated, he also happens to read at a third grade level and is starting second grade math, which is a tad better than his public-schooled age peers who have just begun senior kindergarten.

The other anecdotal evidences in her footnotes could more easily be described (and prosecuted) as child abuse. And as sad as it is that these things happen in ‘home schooling’ families, they no more indict home schooling than anecdotal evidence of molesting teachers and bullying peers indict public schools. And there is no need for further legislation to protect these children when the existing legislation, if applied and enforced, is fully adequate.

Let me just make this little analogy to illustrate why Yuracko’s argument doesn’t fly with me:

I don’t think I need to say more on this point.

Yuracko’s second issue with home schoolers is that homeschooling parents with peculiar beliefs may provide their sons with far better and more sophisticated educations than their daughters.

I have never heard of this particular problem occurring with home schoolers, and, perhaps aside from some self-enclosed religious circles, I don’t think it’s a common occurrence. Even among religious groups that set themselves apart– like FLDS, Amish or Old Order Mennonites– you’d be less likely to find undereducated HOMESCHOOLED girls than undereducated girls in a separate, group-run school system. The primary reason being that if the tradition of homeschooling is to be continued, the girls need an education sufficient to educate the next generation of patriarchs, lest illiterate girls produce illiterate sons and the whole sub-culture goes up in a social darwinian flame after a few generations.

And, to be honest, I don’t think I can see the benefit of the state forcing an Amish school to teach sexual equality. It would hardly prepare those children for the life they are most likely to live.

But this leads, I guess, to the next objection … that home schooled children might not be taught “liberal values” — or worse — that they be taught values considered anathema by the bulk of liberal society.

And as much as it might get me in trouble with my fellow secular home schoolers, I don’t think it’s wrong that fringe groups, or any group, educate their children with values outside the norm. After all, the values of any society are fluid and constantly changing. If certain groups wish to try to influence the direction of that evolution, I believe they should be free to do so, as long as the values they are promoting do not promote physical, actual harm to other people or property.

So, from my libertarian viewpoint, if they want to teach their own children that all non-Christians, gays, and left-handed people are going to hell, that’s fine with me. If they want to teach their kids that the earth is flat, that Jesus had a pet dinosaur, or that the earth was created two weeks ago, that’s fine with me too. While I believe all those things to be false, in most professions one’s belief in the shape of the earth or the origin of the universe are pretty irrelevant. I don’t care if my dentist believes in intelligent design. I don’t care if my accountant is a member of the flat earth society. I only care that they can do the jobs I need them to do.

But perhaps my belief that religious home schoolers should be given all the freedom they want to instill their particular Christian values to their children comes partly from the fact that as a Libertarian, my own values and political views are as anathema to the political mainstream as the values and views of Christianity.

Might sound like strange bedfellows, but I’d rather hang with a freedom loving Christian than an authoritarian ‘freethinker’ any day.