9131 days ago (February 21, 1987) I met the woman that would become my wife. It was not love at first sight. In fact, she was way more interested in one of my frat brothers that evening that she was me. Lucky for her, my good looks and charm won out in the end 
The true version of our beginning. I got really lucky that night, even if I did go home alone 
Could such a go-it-alone ideology ever be truly progressive—by which I mean, does homeschooling serve the interests not just of those who are doing it, but of society as a whole?
via Homeschooling and unschooling among liberals and progressives. – Slate Magazine.
WTF? In what universe are engaged, educated, independent kids not good for society as a whole? Even if the public schools were a bastion of love and peace with no hint of violence and high test scores all around; having every kid come out of the same mold is not good for society. Diversity is good. You don’t get diversity from warehousing kids in a room with their same-age peers all day, every day, for 12 years.
Also, I don’t know one single progressive homeschooler that is going-it-alone. Very few homeschoolers are loners. Like I’ve been saying for years, the interesting thing about homeschooling is that it is nothing like school, and we are rarely at home.
The author misses another key point too. Well actually, she misses pretty much everything about homeschooling, Homeschooled kids have time to be engaged in their communities. If you are in school 7 hours a day, then doing band / football practice, then doing 3 hours of homework, you have no time for anything except self-interest. HSers, who frequently are putting in a couple of hours a day tops, have all kinds of time to devote to the sort of socially progressive causes that would impress Dana Goldstein.
Really, this is the quality of journalism I expect when reading about homeschooling. But usually, it’s coming from HSLDA.
The technology gremlins are running amok in my house over the last week. My wife’s desktop has some sort of file system error that causes it to take about 15 minutes to boot. Once up, it seems to function normally, although it will lock up if left unattended for a few hours. Not sure what to do as I don’t know if I have a hard drive or software issue there. It’s an older system so I’m leaning towards just replacing the hard drive and reinstalling Ubuntu.
On my desktop, a failed upgrade to XFCE 4.8 left me without a functional 4.6 or 4.8, and all sorts of dependency problems when trying to reinstall 4.6. I reverted to Gnome for now, until I decide what to do. I may just upgrade to 11.10 for now, then move to the new LTS once 12.04 has been out for a month or two,
My NAS appliance failed. Everything was backed up to S3, so no data will be lost. I’m awaiting the arrival of an eBay sourced USB drive enclosure to see if the drive is still usable.
Last night my Sansa Clip locked up. It took me about an hour to finally get it to a point where I could plug it in and reflash the OS. Then I had to spend 30 minutes reloading music and podcasts back onto it.
Whatever I did to annoy the technology gremlins, I’m apologize. Now please leave my stuff alone.
After numerous attempts to validate my sense of humor in the Free-Lance Star cartoon caption contest, I have finally made the Final 4. Please click through and vote for the one starting with, “Finally, somebody who understands…”
http://blogs.fredericksburg.com/toontalk/2012/02/08/caption-contest-156-finalists/
If you don’t think mine is the funniest, vote for it anyway Voting ends at noon on Friday 2/10.
Thank you for your support.
2/14 update: I won!
The latest Hardcore History podcast elegantly covers about 500 years of history in four years; from the Fall of Rome in the 476 CE through the general Christianization of the Germanic tribes shortly before the Crusades. Coincidently, my son and I spent about 4 hours in the car driving back and forth to Richmond this weekend. Stuff I learned…
Historians don’t actually use the term Dark Ages anymore. While it’s true that it took Europe about 1000 years to get back to the general level of technological advancement of the Roman empire, the Chinese and the Southern American cultures were advancing just fine during this time.
I had never heard of the Battle of Tours prior to today. Some believe that battle is what halted the spread of Islam into the West. Others believe it was a skirmish with a raiding party and of no real importance.
I’ve often wondered how the religion of a pacifist like Jesus Christ ended up being used to justify so much war. It may have all started with the Christian conquest of the Germanic tribes. Christianity changed from a pacifist movement to a religion where killing was kind of ok if it was in defense of a divinely appointed king. Once that was accepted, it wasn’t a huge leap to the Crusades, where killing the right people actually took previous sin off your permanent record.
Apparently people are still arguing about whether Charlemagne was French or German.
My son is scary. At least a dozen times during the podcast, as Carlin was leading into the next subject, Breck knew in advance what was coming. His AP History test scores should be fabulous
I had some time to kill in Richmond today, so I took a walk with my camera down Monument Avenue in Richmond VA. Monument Ave is generally considered one of the best streets in any city, due primarily to the 6 large monuments to Southern heroes that dominate the street scape. I’ve driven through the area several times. This was the first time I ever parked the car and walked the entire area, which is about 1.5 miles from the Jeb Stuart monument to the Arthur Ashe monument.
First of all, Monument Ave may be technically cobblestone, but it is not the quaint narrow cobblestone street that you are probably envisioning. The cobblestone surface is very smooth, the road is 2 lanes each way, with a 30 mph speed limit that is ignored. Most cars are doing about 40 through there. The locals use the wide grassy median as a park, hanging out and picnicking. On previous drives through, I always thought the stately houses were really pretty. And they are nice, but when you are walking you can see that many of them are really apartments, and judging by the number of craft beer bottles I saw littering porches, populated by a party happy crowd. That probably also accounts for the number of young female joggers that were out today. It’s definitely not a bad choice of neighborhood if you are a young single guy in Richmond! Quite a few of the houses needed some basic maintenance too; and generally, it’s not quite as uppity a neighborhood as the Richmond tourist sites lead you to believe. It’s nice, but not as extravagant as I was expecting.
If you are wondering how an Arthur Ashe monument ended up on a street with monuments to 5 Confederate war heroes, you aren’t alone. I think it’s one of those things still likely to start an argument in many places in Richmond. IMHO, the Ashe monument is out of place and probably should have been placed somewhere better than the northern edge of the Monument Drive park.
More pictures.
Fredericksburg Christian Lower (Elementary) caters in fast food every single day.
Monday – Pizza of undetermined origin.
Tues – KFC
Wed – Subway
Thur – Salsarita’s
Fri – Dairy Queen
Really? This is what they are teaching kids about healthy eating? This is a $7000 a year private school, you’d think they could do better than pump the kids full of fat and sodium every day at lunch. Are the parents there really ok with this?
Oh, and if your parents forget to add money to your lunch account?
Lower School students who do not have a lunch or a balance in their account, will be given a package of crackers and water and we will send you a note advising you of that action.
Obviously, no kid going to this school is depending on the school lunch as his only decent meal of the day, However, the prison like crackers and water bit is a little over the top. More sodium too! I’d think for $7000 a year the school could toss a hungry kid an apple.
Is this as ridiculous as it looks to me?
I just watched two hours of the most brilliant film making ever put to “film.” Star Wars uncut takes home made fan recreations of Star Wars from 405 film makers (I counted in the credits) to produce a scene by scene recreation of Star Wars. It goes from fairly serious attempts to recreate the movie to kids doing the scenes in the backyard to Lego stop motion to my personal favorite, beer bottles decorated to kind of sort of maybe resemble the Star Wars characters. I can’t recommend this enough. If you have a Kindle or Xbox Live, pop some corn, grab a brew, and sit back for two hours of pure entertainment.
This is a great blog post from Laura Grace Weldon (author of Free Range Learning) about her efforts to get the school system to work with her son, whose learning style was more than one standard deviation from the mean. The school, of course, just wanted to label the kid as ADD and drug him. After failing to get anywhere with the schools, she pulled him out to homeschool. The kid that couldn’t learn is currently a full scholarship grad student at MIT.
I think my kids would have done fine in school. They probably would have been like me, disinterested yet accomplished students going through the motions and maintaining a B average. But I wonder if either would have turned out to be the uniquely cool young adults they are (or are becoming) today. The school might have beat the uniqueness out of them, one worksheet at a time. And I don’t know if either would have developed the deep passions for their particular interests that they did while homeschooling. They might not have had the time.
It makes me wonder how many thousands (millions?) of talented, uniquely focused kids we miss out on developing each year because they are trapped in a school system that simply does not work for them. How many bored business majors at State U this semester would have been passionate “something elses” if they had been given the opportunities my kids had to develop those passions as kids?
Oscar Wilde’s only published novel was a bit of scandal when it came out over 100 years ago. I’m not sure my pedestrian command of the English language is really sufficient to review such a richly written book. An unexplained event sets young, dashingly handsome Dorian Gray up in a situation where a painting of him absorbs all the sins of his life. The painting ages as Dorian looks 20 forever, and the stain of Dorian’s immoral and decadent lifestyle stain the painting and stays clear of Dorian’s conscience.
Or does it?
The book is extravagantly written, and at times veered off into deeply detailed descriptions of events that don’t really advance the plot. There isn’t a likable character in the book, in fact, the two stars of the book are miserable human beings. The descriptions and setting in Victorian England are wonderful, and Wilde was clearly playing the book for satire in many places.
In the end though, the book is somewhat disturbing morality tale that borders on horror at times. It’s one of the classics, and I can’t believe I made to 2012 without reading it. I’m glad I finally got to it.
This is not a cookbook. It’s the print companion to the first 5 seasons of Good Eats. It does include recipes from each episode, which makes it handy for looking up that thing he did with shrimp in season 3. It’s much quicker than trying to navigate the Food Network website. It’s also includes lots of cool behind the scenes info about the episodes, shooting locations, etc.
And of course, it’s filled with science!
Since the 1980s, the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location. Education has been seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers, but as an instrument to even out social inequality.
via What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success – Anu Partanen – National – The Atlantic.
Contrast that with the US, where student performance and overall school excellence is highly correlated with the income of the families whose children attend that school. If you want to get ahead in American the best thing to do is to be born into a white, upper-middle class family. Homeschoolers are obviously not exempt, as being upper-middle class certainly makes homeschooling easier.
The high achieving kids are not the issue. Even with bad schools, those kids will be ok. Even the worst schools in America produce plenty of kids that go onto college and productive lives after school.
In 2005 I was interviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle. I was asked: “If there are 50 beers on tap, what do you order?” I answered, “Something out of a bottle.
Only January 2 and I’ve finished my first book of the year. I did cheat and start this in 2011 though! The author Charles Bamforth is a long time employee / executive at Bass and currently a Professor of Brewing at UC-Davis, in a position endowed by whatever we are calling Anheuser-Bush these days.
I wanted to love this book, but I just couldn’t. First of all, almost half the book is endnotes, which is a very odd was to organize a book. Some of the endnotes are technical details related to a point he was making, and thus are placed appropriately. Other endnotes are almost entire chapters, and should have been incorporated into the text of the book. I’m not sure what his editor was thinking.
Charlie has spent his career in the big brewer side of the beer world, and thus his view of beer is colored appropriately. He adamantly defends macro-lagers on several occasions in the book. I’ll grant the technical achievement in making Budweiser taste the same across the world. It is true that even a minor mistake is magnified and more noticeable in such a thin and flavorless beer. Personally, I think wasting such technical brewing ability on soulless beer is a crime.
However, his explanation of what happened to the British pub culture and brewing industry was fascinating, and I’m much smarter for having read his book; as I knew nothing of Thatcher’s changes to the beer industry in the 80s. Beer enthusiasts on the right-wing side of the US political spectrum may very well have to take her off the pedestal when they understand what she did to beer culture in the UK.
He also takes on MADD and other neo-prohibitionist organizations in the US. This a subject I can agree 100% with him on.
And finally, the quote I started this review with. It sounds heretical on the surface, but he has good reason for it. But you’ll have to read the book to find out why
If you are a beer nerd and can get the book cheap, I’d recommend reading it. I got is as free Kindle download. If I had paid $5 for the book, I wouldn’t feel cheated. I think I would be disappointed if I had paid much more than that though.
Are you familiar with the Kindle Daily Review? It’s a feature of the Kindle that takes your highlighted passages from books that you have read on the Kindle and presents those highlighted passages back to you flashcard style on the Kindle website. I’m finding it a great way to not forgot the key points in books that I felt were important enough to mark in the first place. One of the (many) downsides of getting older is that I don’t have the “read it and never forget it memory” that I had 30 years ago. You can enable it from your Kindle account on the website, then anything you highlight is automatically synced to the web. The Review feature only works for books that you have marked as read, and you can also pull in the popular highlights from other Kindle users too. You can make your notes public, or keep them private. It’s up to you.
If you have a Kindle you should check it out. I’m finding it to be one of the real killer features of the Kindle, and I’m trying to build a habit of quickly reviewing my highlights from one book each day.
So this is how a blog dies; not with thunderous applause, but with a whimper. (Apologies to Natalie Portman…)
This is a graph of O’DonnellWeb traffic, going back to 2005 when I first started using Google Analytics.. The high water mark was March 2006 – with almost 10,000 visitors. It’s been 10-15% of that throughout 2011. I suspect most personal blogs would show something similar. On one hand, it’s kind of depressing. On the other hand, if you had told me in 1995 when I started this that almost 1000 people would ever check in monthly, I’d have danced a jig.
I was averaging 1200 or so a month through May, when it nosedived to about 800 a month. Wasn’t that when Google made the big changes to the algorithm? Interestingly though, incoming search was still my #1 source of traffic, just edging out Facebook referrals.
