July 31, 2001
Simplify your life!
Great article profiling a few people that have ditched their high pressure jobs for a much simplier way of life. Exactly what I'm hoping to do someday...
Permalink | Comments (0)July 30, 2001
Reply from American School Board Journal
ASBJ.org is going to print my letter to the editor, or at least excerpts. The excerpts part scares me. I've been staring at my letter (see below on 7/27) trying to figure out how they can hack it up to make me look really stupid. Maybe they'll print the whole thing - that should take care it just fine :)
They are sending me a copy of the issue that I'm in. Should be interesting...
Hey, I think this is my first published work ever. Woo hoo, I'm already more successful than half the people that call themselves writers . (LOL)
Note to writers: Posting a scathing response to my harmless joke will not qualify you as published!
OK, enough writer jokes. Actually I have the utmost respect for anybody that has the talent to write. Reading this page should make it painfully clear that I don't!
Permalink | Comments (0)July 28, 2001
Meteorites Don't Pop Corn
The official word from NASA on the fireball is published. The most suprising thing to me is that the fireball apparently never passed over Dulles Airport as it was over Pennsylvania while it was visible. That means it was never within 100 miles of me, yet it looked to be a large as a jumbo jet on final approach to Dulles.
Permalink | Comments (0)July 27, 2001
Scary Home School Article
Two homeschool related articles in the August American School Board Journal.
The first story is a surprisingly balanced overview of the homeschooling movement. The second article is the scary one. Go read it, then come back and read my letter to the editors of ASBJ. I have no idea if they will publish it and since I don't see letters to the editor on the web version of the magazine I probably will never know. Justing saying what needed to be said made me feel better though.
In her Aug 2001 article "Accountability for Homeschoolers", the author asks
the question, "Who is responsible." The answer is obvious, the parents are
responsible. And by every objective measure, the parents are doing a
fantastic job.
A 1998 study of 20,760 K-12 homeschooled children that were taking two
common nationally normed academic achievement tests found that the
achievement test scores of this group of home school students were
exceptionally high--the median scores were typically in the 70th to 80th
percentile; and 25% of home school students were enrolled one or more grades
above their age-level public and private school peers. Further, these
homeschooled students watch far less television than their public school
peers. Finally, there were no meaningful differences in achievement by
gender, whether the student was enrolled in a full-service curriculum, or
whether a parent held a state issued teaching certificate. The kids are
doing just fine, so what is the author so concerned about?
Ms. Talluto's primary concern seems to be the lack of paperwork required
when high-school age home school students take classes at her community
college. In fact, her entire article is an survey of form filing
requirements in various states. Can Ms. Talluto provide references to a
study that shows a positive correlation between academic achievement and the
number of forms filled out by the parent? I doubt it. However, there are
countless studies that show a very high correlation between parent
involvement and academic achievement. And there is no more involved parent
than a parent who has chooses to stay home, (in many cases forsaking a
career) to personally direct the education of their children.
Parents, everyday people without special training, without memberships in
special organizations and unions, and without doctorates in educational
leadership, are turning out well rounded, highly educated young adults that
are being welcomed into the higher education system, and succeeding once
there. Stanford admits homeschooled students at twice their overall
admission rate, Oglethorpe University in Atlanta actively recruits
homeschoolers, and Harvard admits about 10 homeschooled students each year.
The consensus among admissions officers across the country, a 1997 study
reports, is that home-schooled students are academically, emotionally, and
socially prepared to excel in college.
That, I believe is the real root of Ms. Talluto's concern. She is concerned
that the commoners will soon understand that the public education emperor
has no clothes.
However, if it will help her feel better, I'll file my next "Intent to
Homeschool" form in triplicate.
Chris O'Donnell
Leesburg, VA
July 24, 2001
Fireball
If you've seen the news reports on the fireball or meteorite that was seen all over the Northeast US on Monday, you'll know what I'm talking about. I saw it at about 6:05, I was near Dulles Airport in VA so my first thought was that I was seeing a jet coming down in flames. The thing appeared to be the size of an airplane, and it was very bright. It looked metallic, or at least it reflected light the way you would expect something metallic to reflect light. The amazing tail on it clued me in that I was seeing a fireball and not a plane, however it appeared to just vanish after about 3-5 seconds, causing me to doubt if I had really seen anything at all! I saw on the news that a fireball that visible in daylight is very rare -less than 1% of people on the planet will ever see one. Maybe I should have played the lottery last night :) That was a joke - I consider state lotteries to be a voluntary tax on ignorance so I don't contribute.
Apparently nobody has found anything on the ground yet. I hope they do
Permalink | Comments (3)July 21, 2001
The origns of the US Government Education System
Choice in Education - Articles
A fascinaing essay that describes the origins of public education, where it came from, and why it exists in the first place. I already knew the why it exists part, but it still gives you the heebie jeebies to think about just how well they have succeeded...
Permalink | Comments (0)July 18, 2001
Searching your way to O'Donnellweb
If you own a domain web site and don't this occasionally - you really should. Its quite fun in a vouyeristic kind of way. Download your raw access log and search it for words like Google, Altavista, etc. You'll be able to see what search terms are leading people to your site. The weirdest search that got somebody here this month was "Dental Hygene School."??? I have no idea...
A bunch of searches for "Sales Resume" ended up here. So many in fact that I suspect it might be some sort of automated headhunter tool. "Oracle sales" and "Sun Enterprise sales" came up a few times each too. Given the economy I guess its a good sign that somebody is searching to fill open sales slots for Sun and Oracle, or more likely a reseller.
I'm sure the people that come in via "Chris O'Donnell shirtless", "...nude", or "...sexy", etc. were quite disappointed though :)
Permalink | Comments (9)Zone Labs
I installed Zone Alarm a few weks ago on my home PC. It's a free personal firewall product. It is downright scary how often somebody is trying to port scan my PC, connect via NetBios, etc. And this is on a dial up connection! I always keep windows as locked down as possible anyway so I don't think anybody ever got in before - but seeing how often somebody is trying is very scary. I urge you to click the link above and install Zone Alarm on any PC you have connected to the Internet. Virus scanners are not enough - you need a firewall too, even on a dial up connection.
Permalink | Comments (2)July 16, 2001
Great CD if you appreciate Paul Simon or James Taylor
If you appreciate 70's folk musicians, Jim Croche, Simon, James Taylor, even the Beatles although they aren't really folk - then I have an artist you really need to check out. It's Adam Michael Rothberg and the CD title is "All the Whispering." Adam hails from Western Massachusetts and the only place I know of to find the CD is http://www.villagerecords.com. The CD features intelligent songwriting and straight ahead guitar based folk tunes that draw influences from the bands mentioned above. "The Breakup" is the best "Beatle's tune" I've ever heard by a non-Beatle. It's very easy to imagine John and Ringo doing this song. Buy this CD! And props to the guys at Village Records too. This is about the sixth CD I've purchased this year from them and in every case it was an artist I had never heard of previous to receiving their monthly newsletter.
Permalink | Comments (0)The Blog is back
Well, I'm trying the weblog thing again. This time I'm using Greymatter, which I spent a good deal of time this weekend configuring. It's server software running on my server so I'm not dependent on Blogger being up all the time. I just have this thing about software..I like to have total control. I needed to hack some of the Perl code to get this work, which is really interesting sinced I don't write Perl! It worked though. It's past midnight and tomorrow is Monday...technically it is Monday now but you know what I mean, so I'm outta here. Maybe tomorrow I'll post something of deep insight and relevance. Those of you that know me can stop laughing now :)
Permalink | Comments (3)