Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes of Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed if not annihilated; scotched, if not slain.

“Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he hold to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.” - (The Literal Meaning of Genesis)

For our science lessons, we’ve been learning about some of the physical processes involved when gasses and liquids are heated up (or cooled down).

We measured a balloon filled with air, then measured again when we heated it over the furnace vent for an hour or so, then put it in the fridge for an hour and measured it again tp learn that when air is heated it expands, and when it is cooled it contracts.

We also tried some experiments to demonstrate the movement of hot and cold air. The most fun was the Warm Air Whizzer (from The Best of WonderScience)

On a piece of cardstock, we traced around the lip of a coffee mug to get a perfect circle. Then we fold it in half three times to get folds that look roughly like the image below.

We measured and cut 2cm slits down each of the folds, and folded the left side of each “pie piece” down and the right side up. Then we poked a hole in the center, and hung it from a knotted piece of string.

Then all we had to do was find a heat source. Sadly, we have over-greened our home, and we couldn’t find a light bulb that generated enough heat to spin our whizzer. They did quite adequately illustrate that it was NOT light that spun the whizzer, however. In the end we used a candle to demonstrate the air movement, and it worked rather well.

We spent several hours experimenting with the whizzer… getting it to spin the other way, trying to get it to spin using cold air above it, and using magnifying glasses and mirrors to see if we could get it to spin using solar energy.

My little guy sometimes has a hard time understanding why he’s being homeschooled. He has a desire, like many little kids, to be like everyone else.

I explain the benefits, and he doesn’t exactly want to go to school, but he still doesn’t want to be different.

Tonight I found and ordered a book about homeschooling called “I am Learning All the Time.”  I haven’t seen it yet, and won’t for at least a month, but I’m hoping that it will at least give my son a sense that there are more than just him and his handful of homeschooled friends who are ‘different’.

If your young child is feeling the same way as mine, this might be a good pick for you too.

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.

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!

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.