Back in December I subscribed to the They Might Be Giants video podcast for kids, but I didn’t keep up with it. Yesterday I decided to take a look, and had a laugh at some of the great songs and videos. This was my favorite:

So, this Friday’s meme from Heart of the Matter is to comment on this quote from William Butler Yeats: “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”

It sounds nice, which is what you’d expect from a poet, but that’s about the only good thing I’m going to say about it.

Education is certainly not dropping a bunch of knowledge into an empty receptacle, but, if the fire is supposed to be about creating a passionate interest in something, or everything, that’s not education either.

The fire, if we must keep up with the analogy, is already there. I’ve never met a kid who wasn’t curious about practically everything. I’ve never met a kid who didn’t ask ‘why?’

Your average kid has enough to “fire” to consume a parent’s sanity and then some.

So then what? What is an educator supposed to do with the fire?

At first, I suppose, give it new places to go. The fire has lots of interesting places to stretch within what any child knows from his environment, but the stuff outside that sphere contains fuel for a lifetime. A child isn’t going to immediately know that he’s interested in Egyptology, or botany, or architecture. You need to drop a bit of something into the pail before he realizes that’s even a place for his fire to go, so to speak.

So, there is a bit of pail-filling going on. A bit of flame fanning too. But it can’t end there.

You can’t spend the rest of your life helping your child find more fuel. You’ve got to teach him how to find his own too, and explore each path as far as he wants or needs.

And that too requires some pail-filling. Things like learning to read, how to research, and memorizing math facts and formulas are work, and they aren’t always fun to do. They’re not always what the flame wants to do. But without knowing those things, the child’s fire is severely restricted.

And finally, to finish off with this crazy flame idea, an education needs to teach him to focus the main power of his fire on the things he’s most interested in, to eventually use it as a tool (like a flamethrower or torch) to achieve certain ends.

A very interesting meme from Joyful Chaos by way of Trail Mix.

From What Privileges Do You Have?, based on an exercise about class and privilege developed by Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, Stacy Ploskonka at Illinois State University. If you participate in this blog game, they ask that you PLEASE acknowledge their copyright.

Bold the true statements.

1. Father went to college

2. Father finished college

3. Mother went to college

4. Mother finished college

(The education of both my parents was cut short due to the German occupation of Holland in WWII. It may be that under different circumstances one or both would have gone on to college. Many of my mother’s younger siblings were well educated, some becoming renowned in their fields.)

5. Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor.

6. Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers.

7. Had more than 50 books in your childhood home.

8. Had more than 500 books in your childhood home.

9. Were read children’s books by a parent

10. Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18
(Organ lessons. I still look back on those lessons with dislike. )

11. Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18

12. The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively

13. Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18
(Since this was a result of succumbing to the credit card tables at University registration, I’m not sure it counts. The card had my name on it, but so did the bills.)

14. Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs

15. Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs

16. Went to a private high school
This was a big expense for my parents, but they sent me because the high school in my area was bad, bad, bad.)

17. Went to summer camp

18. Had a private tutor before you turned 18

19. Family vacations involved staying at hotels

20. Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18

21. Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them

22. There was original art in your house when you were a child

23. You and your family lived in a single-family house

24. Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home

25. You had your own room as a child

26. You had a phone in your room before you turned 18
(Does it still count if I paid for it myself?)

27. Participated in a SAT/ACT prep course

28. Had your own TV in your room in high school
(I got a black and white TV from my brother when I was sick for nearly an entire year when I was about 8. It wasn’t a great set, but it was very welcome to alleviate the boredom.)

29. Owned a mutual fund or IRA in high school or college

30. Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16

31. Went on a cruise with your family

32. Went on more than one cruise with your family

33. Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up

34. You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family

This Friday’s Heart of the Matter meme is homeschooling tips and tricks.

Reading through some of the tips from other bloggers, I begin to realize how different we all are. I am definitely not the person to come to for scheduling and curriculum tips. We can’t even wake up at approximately the same time each day, much less start ’school’ at the crack of dawn. Reading some other homeschooler’s tips and their schedules from last week’s meme makes me feel like a slacker.

Anyway, here’s my tip: Desecrate an atlas

Buying an atlas to rip out all the pages has been one of my more inspired ideas. We bought a discounted (but still accurate) atlas and an oversized three ring scrapbooking binder. Each atlas page got ripped out (neatly) and put in a plastic sheet that was then placed in the binder. Every time we read a book, we find the atlas page where the story takes place, mark it, and add a page about the book, including  the place and historical period, into our customized atlas.

If a book goes into a lot of detail in one particular city, we print off a Google Map with the general area included, mark off as many landmarks as we can, and put it in our book in the most appropriate place.

We first tried this on a wall map, but found that places like England got lots of marks and became too squished. The ever-expanding atlas is much more functional, even though we can’t hang it on the wall.

It seems there’s a new online magazine for homeschoolers, “Heart of the Matter“, and they’re running a meme asking home schoolers to share a day in the life of their families.

I’m only homeschooling one five year old right now, and because he’s only five we take a pretty relaxed view of what goes on in a day. No day is typical for us, but this is what today was like….

Morning:

Woke up late after staying up a little too late last night. Had breakfast, made a HUGE pot of coffee, and started David on his Mathematical Reasoning book, while his dad and I got ready for a conference call. David worked while we explained to a client why we didn’t spend our Christmas holiday working on their stuff. The call lasted about an hour and a half, after which I checked on David’s progress and saw he’d finished a quarter of the book and covered sections on bar graphs, venn diagrams, and probability along with oodles of review pages.

Feeling guilty for leaving him to work on math for so long by himself, I teach him how to make paper chain people. He tries a few, and once he gets a chain he thinks he likes, he starts turning all the people in the chain into his favorite superheroes. So far he’s got Batman, Robin, and … Santa Claus. Ok, maybe not all superheroes.

Lunch time!

I go downstairs to make lunch. David follows me down and plays with his Crazy Fort in the living room while I cook up some food. I try to do dishes afterward to find out there’s no hot water. Sending Dad down to check it didn’t increase the water temperature at all, so I boiled water for the dishes while he called the repair man and argued that we really need hot water before next week.

After lunch, David practiced his piano. His last lesson was before Christmas so he’s been practicing the same songs for a long time. I think we’re both getting a little tired of them, though they’re sounding really good at this point.

I’ve still got piles of work to do, so David sits down and reads a few of the books we borrowed from the library. He reads out loud, and as long as I can follow with half an ear, I can help him with words he is having problems with from the context.

When he’s tired of reading, he goes back to his paper chain people and makes Superman before I pull him away to go to his piano lesson.

Evening

The piano lesson goes splendidly, and he’s got six new songs to practice for next week. At least the songs are getting a little more interesting now that he’s playing with both hands.

After his lesson, I start making supper while he sorts the recycling into the blue boxes. When he’s done with the blue boxes, he plays his RushHour game for a half an hour while I cook. After supper I take out the garbage and blue boxes and boil more water for dishes.

Once clean-up is done, we head back up to my office where he works on some more chain people while I work and we both listen to Alice in Wonderland. We’re listening to the version from kiddierecords.com this week. Last week we listened to a podcast version from Curiosoft. They are very, very different to listen to. Perhaps we’ll grab a third version from Audible next week.

Since the repair man isn’t coming to fix the hot water heater till tomorrow afternoon, there’s no bathtime tonight, so after brushing his teeth, David writes a line in his daily journal, gets is jammies on, and climbs in bed where I read him a few chapters from his latest book.

It’s another late bedtime, thereby dispelling any hopes I might have had of getting an early start tomorrow.

An interesting video clip from the Cato Institute. Neal McCluskey explains why the very institution that is supposed to unify causes so many arguments.

To illustrate, he quotes Lexington MA Superintendent of Schools Paul Ash as saying, “We couldn’t run a public school system if every parent who feels some topic is objectionable to them for moral or religious reasons decides their child should be removed.”

“In other words”, McCluskey says, “you can’t run a single system of education that upholds the rights and values of all those who pay for it.”

The video is about 12 minutes long, but a worthwhile listen:

I spent the first few days of this year working on a list of learning objectives for 2008. Nothing too regimented, since we’re still sort of un-schooling in our own semi-organized way, but it’s nice to have an idea of the types of things we should be bringing in to focus as life happens.

So, I got out the quarter million homeschooling books I picked up over the years, and went through them to see if I could find more ideas and concepts that might fit in our year. And I realized I have way too many of these books and it’s actually making things harder instead of easier.

So to winnow out some that don’t work for me, and to make some room in my bookcases, I thought I might eBay some books. But then I found BookMooch, and thought that might be more fun. I must have some good books, because people are mooching them almost as soon as I list them, though I’ve only found a few books that I really want available.

I’ll be adding more homeschool resource books, and preschool workbooks we never got around to using, in the next few days (I don’t want to add them too fast, since I could bankrupt myself with shipping!), so if you’re looking for some freebies, sign up for Bookmooch, set your settings to ship internationally or at least to ‘ask first’ (if you’re in the US) and add me as a friend.

It would be really great to see lots more homeschoolers using Bookmooch to get rid of previous year’s curriculum and resources, and pick up next year’s at the same time.