Lift Up Your Hearts!

"What is VPK?" asks an article in our city's magazine.

Pre-math, pre-reading and social skills.  How do I teach my child all this information before she enters kindergarten?  Many parents used to ask themselves that precise question not too long ago.  However, for the past four years, concerned parents have decided to enroll their children in what is called VPK, or voluntary pre-kindergarten education....VPK is free [that is, tax-funded]...regardless of family income.

Since the program was implemented, the results have been remarkable.  First, the program gives the child the opportunity to interact with teachers, that is, people other than their parents, in whose company they've been for most of their lives.  Their social skills improve as they learn to share, respect and communicate their feelings to adults and other children.  Second, it gives children the freedom to express their creativity, emotion and innovation:  They create cities from building blocks, show their feelings through paper and crayons and learn new ways to use everyday objects—a paper plate becomes a hat, a pipe cleaner becomes a coiled snake.  VPK also brings joy, happiness and excitement to the child's family—as well as the community—when our youngsters are seen developing their intellectual side and growing as individuals at an early age.

Precisely the skills and experiences which from time immemorial children have learned...at home.

I can accept that there may be a few aberrant families in which the children interact with no one other than their parents, have neither sibling nor playmate with whom to learn to share, and have no access to crayons, blocks, paper plates, pots and pans, rocks, sticks, furniture, blankets, and all the other paraphernalia with which children "express their creativity," i.e. play.  These children do, indeed, deserve all the outside assistance we can give them.  But if such families are not exceedingly rare, we are in bigger trouble than an extra year in school can begin to fix.  VPK is not a program for the extremely deprived; it is billed and funded as an important pre-kindergarten activity for every child.  It is presently voluntary, but kindergarten was once voluntary, too.  Technically kindergarten is still optional in Florida...unless you want your child to attend first grade, for which kindergarten is a prerequisite.

How much the world has changed in my memory!  Some for the better, some for the worse...but the trend away from home seems to me an evil one.  Our clothes are made in China and our meals in a restaurant; someone else mows our lawns and teaches our children how to play with blocks.  Is home no more than a place to sleep?

Jon provided the name; now all I have to do is figure out what "Classical Unschooling" is.  It could be confused with unschooling as it was practiced "in the good ol' days"—but for a great article on the "unschooling" label see Pat Farenga's post What's going on with unschooling?  (There's no permalink that I could find, so if you come to this post later you may have to search in his archives.)  What I mean for Classical Unschooling to be, however, is an approach to homeschooling—better yet, all of life—that combines the best of what I've gleaned from authors as divergent as John Holt and Susan Wise Bauer, a flexible plan that is low-stress yet high-expectation, creative yet disciplined, supportive yet challenging.

Liz at smithically schooled began the discussion, but it's a little hard to keep up with because if there's an an easy way to know when comments have been added there I can't find it.  (The Recent Comments feature is another reason I like LifeType on Lime Daley for this blog.)  It would be great if my highly intelligent and experienced blog readers would read and add to her discussion, which is why I'm making this post and sending you there.  I'll also post a comment here if I note that the discussion has progressed there (and hope others will do the same) so you can know more easily if there's been an update.

The usual disclaimers, I don't usually do "memes," etc.  But when it's books, it's hard to resist.  I found this one over at Percival Blakeney Academy.  The instructions are:

• Look at the list and bold those you have read—films don't count.
• Italicize those you intend to read.  ("Intend" may be a little strong.  How about "Would like to read someday, sometime.)
• Tag somebody if you like.  (I don’t like to tag people.  But I’d love to see other people’s lists and comments.)

I don't know who chose the books on the list, nor why.  It seems varied enough, with books old and new, and several I've never heard of.  And any book list that includes Swallows and Amazons gets big points as far as I'm concerned.  It could only have done better by including George MacDonald.  :)  My comments follow in parentheses.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien  (Absolutely one of the best series of books I’ve ever read.  I have read them, and The Hobbit, see #16, innumerable times and get something more out of them every time.  The movie misses nearly all that is wonderful about them.)
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (I no longer remember anything about it, however, except a couple of house and moor images in my mind.)
8. 1984 - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (Again, I don’t remember a thing about it.)
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (What is it about books we’re forced to read in school?  I remember nothing about this book either, only my anger in 8th grade that my class read The Caine Mutiny while the other was reading Catch 22, then the teacher made us read Catch 22 but let the other skip The Caine Mutiny.  As a consequence, perhaps, I remember absolutely nothing about this one and little more about the other.)
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (I’ve read some, but hardly all.)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (See #2 above.)
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (Unlike many folks, I wasn’t forced to read this in school, but I read it anyway because it is set in one of my home towns.  If you’re not from Wayne, Pennsylvania, don’t bother; there’s nothing else redeeming about it.)
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell (I passed this up at a time when it was a big fad amongst my friends; I’ve seen the movie twice but it hasn’t given me any reason yet to want to read the book.  Still, I think I might find it interesting for historical reasons.)
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (Saw the movie, can’t remember if I read the book or not.)
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (Worth reading, if only to know where “So long, and thanks for all the fish” comes from.)
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (Probably worth reading for cultural literacy reasons, but I don’t want to pollute my mind with its historical inaccuracies – the same reason I sometimes wish I hadn’t seen the movies Braveheart and Amadeus.)
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll  (Don’t miss this.)
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (Ditto.)
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis  (What I said about the movie version under #2, The Lord of the Rings, applies here as well.  Read the books first for their own delightful sake, then read Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia for some amazing insights.)
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (I answered this one already, see #33.)
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (It’s on my list because Janet read it in Japan.)
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving (On the recommendation of Janet’s English teacher; okay, but I wouldn’t recommend it myself.)
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (And all the others in the series as well.)
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding (I definitely don’t recommend this.  Get the Cliff Notes version, so you can understand all the cultural references to it, but otherwise don’t subject yourself to it.)
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley  (I had to read it in school.  I might like it more if I read it again.)
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (And many more of her books.)
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson (I don’t know anything about the book, bad Dad liked Bill Bryson, so that’s reason enough for me to italicize it.)
75. Ulysses - James Joyce  (I suppose I should want to read this, for cultural literacy reasons, but I never got past the first page.  I read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in school, and that was bad enough.)
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome (I love this series!  It’s much too neglected these days.  One reviewer dismissed it as being too unbelievable, because the siblings don’t fight.  It gets worse – they love and respect their parents.  What a shock.  I’ve seen no better portrayal of competent, confident, independent children in which the adults are also competent, reasonable people.  Besides, these are great stories.  Warning 1:  the stories are old, and there are one or two instances of words that were once acceptable in polite society which are no longer.  Warning 2:  reading these stories may give you an irresistible desire do go out and buy a sailboat.)
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker  (I read it when Heather was in high school.  Don’t bother.)
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte's Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (First in French, then in English.)
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams (You’ll never look at a rabbit the same way again.)
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo  (Mostly.  The only version I was able to get at the time was slightly abridged; it was still plenty long, however.)

Some of the ones that are neither bolded nor italicized I have no intention of reading, but most are that way because I don't know anything about them.  If there's one you recommend, please say so.  And I'd love to see other people's lists.  You can put one in a comment here, if you wish; if you make it a post in your own blog, please leave a link to it here.

What do you expect to find in a public library?  I would like—though no longer expect—to find a large selection of old, unusual, and out-of-print books, music, and videos, the kind I am unable to buy from Amazon or borrow from Netflix.  Shouldn't that be a basic purpose of libraries:  to be a treasure store of valuable materials outside of whatever happens to be popular at the moment, especially those not otherwise easily obtainable?  Unfortunately, most libraries seem to be divesting themselves of these materials in order to make more room for the the latest favorites.  To be sure, this is also a function of libraries, and I appreciate being able to borrow a book when all I want to do is read it; I prefer stocking our own bookshelves with materials I already know are worthwhile.  (One casualty of the libraries' jettisoning old books is that our shelves are overflowing; I can no longer prune our collection of lesser books on the grounds that I can always borrow them from the library if needed.)  Most libraries, I believe, are out of balance in the way they address both functions, and our culture is suffering for it.

Thanks to my sister-in-law, who should have her own blog because she and my brother send me interesting ideas much faster than I can write about them, and to the Percival Blakeney Academy blog, I now know that this phenomenon is not limited to libraries, but has had a major impact on the Oxford University Press Junior Dictionary.

The battle over which words to include and which to exclude is not new for dictionary makers.  With language constantly changing and growing, keeping a dictionary to a reasonable size requires excising some words when others are added. This is especially difficult with a children's dictionary, which must be extremely limited.  That said, I believe the Oxford University Press has fallen into the libraries' error, depriving children of important information in favor of what's new and popular.

Words taken out:

Carol, cracker, holly, ivy, mistletoe

Dwarf, elf, goblin

Abbey, aisle, altar, bishop, chapel, christen, disciple, minister, monastery, monk, nun, nunnery, parish, pew, psalm, pulpit, saint, sin, devil, vicar

Coronation, duchess, duke, emperor, empire, monarch, decade

adder, ass, beaver, boar, budgerigar, bullock, cheetah, colt, corgi, cygnet, doe, drake, ferret, gerbil, goldfish, guinea pig, hamster, heron, herring, kingfisher, lark, leopard, lobster, magpie, minnow, mussel, newt, otter, ox, oyster, panther, pelican, piglet, plaice, poodle, porcupine, porpoise, raven, spaniel, starling, stoat, stork, terrapin, thrush, weasel, wren.

Acorn, allotment, almond, apricot, ash, bacon, beech, beetroot, blackberry, blacksmith, bloom, bluebell, bramble, bran, bray, bridle, brook, buttercup, canary, canter, carnation, catkin, cauliflower, chestnut, clover, conker, county, cowslip, crocus, dandelion, diesel, fern, fungus, gooseberry, gorse, hazel, hazelnut, heather, holly, horse chestnut, ivy, lavender, leek, liquorice, manger, marzipan, melon, minnow, mint, nectar, nectarine, oats, pansy, parsnip, pasture, poppy, porridge, poultry, primrose, prune, radish, rhubarb, sheaf, spinach, sycamore, tulip, turnip, vine, violet, walnut, willow

Words put in:

Blog, broadband, MP3 player, voicemail, attachment, database, export, chatroom, bullet point, cut and paste, analogue

Celebrity, tolerant, vandalism, negotiate, interdependent, creep, citizenship, childhood, conflict, common sense, debate, EU, drought, brainy, boisterous, cautionary tale, bilingual, bungee jumping, committee, compulsory, cope, democratic, allergic, biodegradable, emotion, dyslexic, donate, endangered, Euro

Apparatus, food chain, incisor, square number, trapezium, alliteration, colloquial, idiom, curriculum, classify, chronological, block graph

Removing spinach to make room for chatroom?  Replacing devil with MP3 player?  Poultry with trapezium?  And what about block graph?  I'd love to know the new dictionary's definition, as all my dictionaries and Wikipedia failed me.  I suspect they mean a simple, graphical way of presenting data, and not the higher-level math of graph theory, or this definition I found via Google:  "a block graph...consists of a plurality of logic blocks interconnected by nets which carry logic signals between the logic blocks."  In any case, its inclusion at the expense of emperor seems bizarre.

On the other hand, they do include common sense for the first time.  I'd like to think that, like MP3 players, Euros, and celebrities, common sense has been included because it has become popular and commonplace.  But I doubt it.

A couple more quick takes, as I dig through the backlog.

Think Your Kid's Gifted?  You're Probably Wrong, from Geek Dad.  An unfortunate title, as is the similar title of the article on which he is commenting; I would have said instead, "You're Probably Right."  At long last parents are beginning to realize that children are not mindless lumps of clay, but are nearly all born brilliant.  (You doubt that?  Plunk yourself down in the middle of a foreign country and see how long it takes you to become fluent in the language.)  Finally people are realizing that what they do, or don't do, with their young chldren makes a difference, and that they need better opportunities than most of them get.  Why do some people feel it necessary to debunk the idea?  Probably because, being fallen humans, we tend to focus not on "my child is brilliant" but "my child is brighter than someone else's child."  Geek Dad catches the real issue, however.

It doesn't matter if my son (or my daughter, in a few years) is officially deemed "gifted."  All that matters is that my kids get the best education we can provide for them.  Based on his experience in kindergarten and first grade, I'm certain my son will do better in the G/T classes, and that is really the only reason that matters for my wife and me to push hard to get him into the program.

Whether or not your kids get fitted with the label "gifted" doesn't matter.  All that matters is that you do what you need to do to get your kids the very best education possible for your kids and for their specific needs.  That may or may not be the same education all the other kids are getting, or your next-door neighbor's kids are getting, and that's all right.  If you do what needs to be done to get your kids the best education possible, you've done your job well.

Easier said than done, especially when "best education" must cover social, spiritual, emotional, and physical issues as well as intellectual ones.  Although I have an obvious prejudice in favor of home education on all fronts, what really matters is awareness, flexibility, and freedom.  What is best now might not be best in three years.  Above all, make sure that the person making (and evaluating) educational decisions for your children is you (that is, you, your spouse, and your children together).  Not the state, not your friends, not habit and custom, and not even your well-meaning mother-in-law.  :)

And speaking of the genius of babies, here are three worthwhile discussions of young children and mathematics.  The initial question was "My two-year-old can verbalize the answer to almost any other factual question, and and clearly knows the answers to arithmetic problems I must check with a calculator.  But he can't verbalize the math answers.  Why not?"  From Doman Inspired Parenting: Math (Dots) and the follow-up, Math Dots; and from Life with a Preschooler: The Math Mystery.

"If you ask a fluent reader to explain how they read they would simple state that they can. It is possible that the mental manipulation of quantity develops to the stage where the entire process takes place at a subconscious level."

If math was simply about memorizing a set of facts—What is the capital of France? Who was the fifth President? What sound does the letter A make?—it would simply be a matter of recalling the correct answer, the corresponding fact. But math, in the way that babies can do it, is not about memorizing facts: it is a way of thinking and reasoning.

This brought to mind the stage Janet went through several years later, in which she balked at being asked to show her work on math assignments.  She knew the answer, period—and was right 99% of the time—but could no more put the workings of her brain on paper than she could fly.

Because I have often written about Germany's persecution of parents who believe the education of their children is best accomplished outside of the state public schools (this post will lead you to some of the other stories), it's a pleasure to be able to bring some good news as well:  Prosecutors are dropping charges against the Brause family, which had faced up to two years in prison and the loss of their children.  If this seems a "Well, duh!" kind of accomplisment, it is important to remember that it was not so long ago that we were celebrating such events as great victories in the U. S.

[T]he announcement came after the court received a detailed psychiatric report that there is no psychological harm to the children from homeschooling. The report also stated that the children have not been harmed [academically], which is evidenced by [the] exit exams [of the two oldest children] from high school

Lest we complacently conclude that the plight of homeschoolers in Germany is Germany's problem, not ours, American citizenship is not a sufficient defense if you live in Germany and want to teach your own children.  An American family living in Berlin was recently ordered to court because of their homeschooling, and under legal advice the mother and children have fled to the United States until the situation can be resolved.

I'm delighted to see evidence of progress anywhere in the world, and also for the reminder that "watch, work, and pray" never ceases to be necessary.

The History of the Ancient World:  From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome, by Susan Wise Bauer (W. W. Norton, New York, 2007)

Despite having some initial negative reactions to Susan Wise Bauer, I've continued to find her work delightful and invaluable.  (See my reviews of The Well-Trained Mind, The Story of the World, and The Well-Educated Mind.)  I haven't read more than a small part of The History of the Ancient World, but borrowed it from the library in order to determine whether or not to buy it for myself.  I've so enjoyed—and learned from—listening to Jim Weiss read The Story of the World, which was written for elementary-age children, that I wondered if Bauer could bring as much delight into a history book for adults.

Time does not permit me to read through the book, much less review it properly, but let's just say I wish I didn't have to take it back to the library as soon as possible to remove temptation.  The History of the Ancient World is delightful to read.  Much of the delight, I think, comes from the philosophy of her approach, which she explains much better in the introduction than I have time to write, or even to copy, here.  Bauer is interested in people:  their lives, thoughts, fears, hopes, dreams, actions, and relationships.  She minimizes the general and the theoretical in favor of the personal, and includes the myths and stories of a culture as well as verifiable facts.  The stories that have come down with a people from before recorded time should inform our historical speculations as much as potsherds from an archeological dig.

This approach no doubt will anger many, some because she finds historical value in passages from the Bible, and others because she gives similar respect to the ancient stories of other cultures.  To me, it makes for great story-telling.  The History of the Ancient World has earned a place on my wish list, perhaps for the next time Borders offers me a 40% off coupon, and I certainly hope Susan Wise Bauer is working on a sequel.

I've known for a long time that the plight of homeschoolers in Germany is dire, as I've written before (for example, here, here, and here); I've also known that the situation in Switzerland is worrisome, legal in some cantons, illegal in others, and sometimes in between.  The Swiss are careful to point out that they are not German so I have hope that they will distinguish themselves by moving in the direction of more liberty.  It wasn't that long ago, after all, that homeschooling in the United States was similarly at risk.  However, Principled Discovery has discovered some alarming news.  (Thanks, DSTB.)

According to the Tages Anzeiger, one of the most widely read newspapers in Switzerland, homeschooling is about to become severely restricted in the Canton of Zurich.

Private Education: Parents threaten with disobedience

December 4, 2008

Beginning next summer at the latest, parents will only be allowed to educated their children at home when they have a teacher’s certificate.  Eight families are resisting—with all means.  Tages Anzeiger

The article goes on to say that this new regulation will affect fifty families, but apparently only these eight families have chosen to fight.  The Education Director has thus far rejected all offers of compromise.  If they continue and do not win their cases, the families face fines of up to 5000 Francs (about $4,100) and a possible citation for disobedience of official orders.

Read the whole story.  Those with a working knowledge of German may want to read the Tages Anzeige article directly; I can only hope it is the translation that makes the language sound strident and authoritarian.

The most chilling words are in the law that was not passed, so perhaps the Swiss will be more resistent to educational tyrrany than the Germans.

Private schools should teach the same world view as taught in public schools.

That, alas, is what many people, even in the United States, mean when they talk about the "socialization issue" with homeschoolers.  It's not that they worry that homeschooled children won't learn how to get along with other people, but that they will learn to think independently and not conform.

Where there are tests, there will be cheaters, and if the teachers are being judged by the efforts of their students, there will be teachers who cheat, too.  In order to help their students on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test for writing, some teachers are having them memorize stock phrases with which to populate their essays.  Formulaic writing to the nth degree.  The practice is common enough that exam graders are finding the same phrases—odd phrases, such as "one quintessential, supersonic day"—on exams throughout the state.

I'm not sure which is worse, that the teachers might be cheating, or that they might actually think this is what leads to good writing.  And to think I felt guilty when our previously homeschooled kids shocked their first high school English teacher by not knowing what a "five paragraph essay" was.

There was an interesting column by Laura Vanderkam from Thursday's USA Today:  Tailoring school to the child.  From private tutors to online courses to hybrid forms, homeschooling is drawing in many who thought they never could or would.  Funny, though, how often the next generation mis-characterizes the ones that have gone before:

Once, people saw home schooling as a fringe religious or hippie activity. These days, many families see it as a way to challenge kids and give them time to pursue their passions.

[Ahem]  Excuse me, but "a way to challenge kids and give them time to pursue their passions" was exactly why we homeschooled more years ago than I want to admit.  Hippie religious freaks, hrumph.  The fringe is kinda fun, though.

At lunch today, Jonathan told me he wanted a quarter of a grilled cheese sandwich; he then amended that to "half of a quarter."  "So you want an eighth of a sandwich?" I inquired.  "Yes," he replied, and proceeded to ask Heather, as he had several times before, "What's half of an eighth?"  "A sixteenth."  What's half of a sixteenth?'  "A thirty-second."  Then followed a discussion of just what "one thirty-second" means.

After lunch we had some wonderful molasses cookies made by a friend.  There were just enough for each of us to have one, with one cookie left on the plate.  So I asked Jonathan what fraction of a cookie each of us would have if we shared the leftover cookie fairly.  This was confusing for him, so Jon simplified the question and began to lead Jonathan step by step to figuring out the answer.  Jonathan is adept at the concept of one half and one quarter, including the written form that he encounters in recipes.  However, this is a little hard to extend to one fifth, because there's no 2 in "half" and no 4 in "quarter."

After some drawing and patient discussion, Heather brought out their fraction circles for further exploration and clarification.  After Jonathan understood, at least to some degree, the concept of "one fifth" and how to write it, we went back to the original problem of sharing the cookie.  He knew he needed to cut it into five pieces, and began—as would many children—by cutting it into halves, then quarters.  "Now," he commented, "I cut this piece in half, and I'll have five pieces."

I then asked him which piece he would take for his own, hoping to force the observation that the pieces were not of equal size.  But he was 'way ahead of me.  "These two," he explained, pointing to the smaller pieces, "are for me and Noah.  The adults get the three big pieces."  After a brief examination of the one-fifth fraction circle pieces, with Jon explaining that to divide a circle into fifths you can't begin by cutting it in half, we enjoyed our fractional cookies.

It must be noted that while the adults and Jonathan were distracted by the fraction discussion, Noah had taken a more practical approach and put the entire cookie on his own plate.

Three years ago I read and reviewed Lu Hanessian's Let the Baby Drive, and recently my thoughts have been returning to that insightful book.  Today's Frazz brought it again to mind.

Hanessian's son began talking when he was 10 months old; combined with her habit of careful observation and her incessant efforts to understand him, this revealed amazingly sophisticated thought processes behind seemingly random or rebellious behavior.  Banging a spoon on his high chair tray, as infants do, he proclaimed, "Mah-mee!  I'm chopping wood!"  When he was three years old he went through a frightening phase of what to all appearances was open rebellion, but which she was able to trace to his terror that he might lose her, as he had "lost" his daddy during a two-week business trip, and as the water goes down the drain and never returns.  When she dealt with his fear, the misbehavior took care of itself.

When we began homeschooling, I tried to insist that Janet show her work when doing math problems, as I had done as a math tutor and college math Teaching Assistant.  If the teacher can't see how you got the wrong answer, what can he do but mark it wrong?  How can he understand where your thinking veered off course and steer you in the right direction?  However, my effort to elicit from Janet the thought processes behind her answers merely resulted in extreme frustration for us both.  Because I was a homeschooling mother and not a classroom teacher with 30 children to deal with, I was able to discover that, like Caulfield above, she knew all the answers, but could not express how she got them.  They were just there.  Much later she did develop the ability to follow her own thought processes and explain them in proper mathematical logic; in the meantime, by not being forced to learn by rote the educationally-accepted methods of doing math, she developed her own advanced ways of mathematical thinking, which served her well through her college math degree and beyond.

The connection between this and Hanessian's work is the realization that the actions of children, whether babies or students, have meaning and logic, if we will only take the time and effort to understand. I've been relearning that lesson, particularly as I observe two-year-old Noah.

Whatever you think about John Edwards, he isn't stupid, and choosing to admit his adulterous affair while our attention was focused on the Olympic opening ceremonies was probably a smart move.

Russia isn't stupid, either.  They couldn't hope to invade another country without generating some controversy, but doing so while the eyes of much of the world and even more of the news media are on events in Beijing gives them a good chance of being ignored, at least long enough to accomplish their purposes.

Jim Balk was my World Cultures teacher in high school.  I don't know what was supposed to be covered in a course with that title, but we didn't learn much about the cultures of the world.  Somehow I would have expected a broad survey course, which this wasn't.  Whatever I've learned about ancient Greece and Rome, Chinese history, African civilizations, and the history and culture of almost anywhere else in the world—which isn't much—I had to learn outside of school.

What Mr. Balk did instead was cover in detail two areas of the world of special importance in the late 1960s:  the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.  No doubt he figured that if his students were going to have opinions on the events of the day they might as well be informed by the history, religions, customs, and politics of the region.  He was also big on current events, and tried to make us lazy, self-centered teens pay attention to events of significant import, such as the American civil rights movement, and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

I wasn't one of Mr. Balk's greatest successes, I'm sure.  Oh, I got A's in his class—I knew how to do homework and take tests—but didn't develop an appreciation for history until long after I graduated, and am not much better than I was back then at paying attention to the news.  (To be fair to myself, I think I might do better with the latter if news reporting were less about hype, gossip, entertainment, sensationalism, and trivia.)  But I actually learned in his class, learned both facts and ideas that are with me to this day, which is a lot more than I can say about any other of my history classes.

Therefore it is not surprising that the Russian invasion of Georgia made me think of Mr. Balk.  If I were in his class today I know he'd be making me keep a diary of the event.  He'd force me to turn my eyes from the Olympic glories and pay attention to an event that may turn out to be as significant as Germany's pre-World War II acquisition of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia.

This is a joke, right?  It doesn't surprise me that some crackpot with "Dr." in front of his name should decide that we could solve the widespread problem of students' appalling inability to spell by merely accepting their mistakes as "spelling variants."  After all, professors of education have promoted weirder ideas, and Ken Smith is only a lecturer in criminology who is fed up with wasting his time trying to correct the failures of his students' spelling teachers.  It's not our children's fault they had the misfortune to be born into an era of standardized spelling.  Dr. Smith's frustration can't be much more than mine as I try to decipher the writings of my intelligent, well-educated, and highly respected colonial American ancestors, who couldn't even spell their own names consistently.

What makes me sure of the intended humor is this passage in the article: Dr. Smith said there was no reason many commonly misspelt words were configured the way they were. The word 'twelfth', for example, would make more sense as 'twelth', he said.  'How on earth did that "f" get in there? You would not dream of spelling the words "stealth" or "wealth" with a[n] "f" (as in 'stealfth' or "wealfth") so why insist on putting the "f" in twelfth?'.  Since a moment's thought about both the origin and the pronunciation of "twelfth" would reveal the answer, Smith must be pulling our legs, perhaps making his point in the spirit of Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal.

As the story spreads, however, some folks are finding the idea of this Irish baby fricassee more palatable than not.  All I can say is that my friends who teach college math should have thought of this years ago.  Instead of complaining that your students can't add two and two and get four, much less construct a simple proof, why not simply accept 2+2=5 as a variant sum?  And who are you to decide what's "true" and "proven," anyway?

I hate to give such horrors any more publicity, so if you already view Planned Parenthood as evil incarnate, don't follow any of the links on John C. Wright's post, Footnote to Modern, Ever-Changing, Ever-Evolving Moral Standards.  If, on the other hand, you still cling to the hope, as I did for a long time, that the omni-present organization might not be utterly irredeemable, you owe it to your children to take a look (with them out of the room, of course—preferably out of the house).  I wish I could cleanse my brain of those cute, Sesame Street-like videos, but sometimes it's useful to know just how bad the situation really is.

I like the idea of socially responsible investing, but this has reminded me that whatever harm might be done by an undesirable gnat stock amongst those in our mutual funds is dwarfed by the camel damage paid for with our tax dollars.

Oh, by the way.  In case you miss it (which I recommend), take my word for it that when the folks at Planned Parenthood use the word "abstinence," they mean something entirely and disturbingly different from what you, I, and the dictionary do. So define your terms carefully (and make them define theirs) before conceding agreement on any point.