Carnival of Homeschooling #456 - "Ozymandias" Edition

Welcom to the 456th Carnival of Homeschooling! This carnival's theme is "Ozymandias."

Doesn't it just make you happy to say the name "Ozymandias"? My voice becomes sonorous and commanding, and I envision stark desert scenes, which I love, having mostly grown up in the American Southwest.

Written in the early 1800s, the sonnet "Ozymandias" by Percy Bysshe Shelley deals with many themes in its short 14 lines. Among them are travel and history, the effects of time and the natural world, artistic creation, hubris, recording one's deeds, and the collapse of human power.

I met a traveller from an antique land

Christy submitted a post about the Borgia Family and Machiavelli, saying "I love the freedom homeschooling gives, the chance to follow interests and to use silly things like a comedy show as a jumping off point for a unit study. The Borgia Family lived in Renaissance Italy. They knew Machiavelli and Leonardo Da Vinci."

The Cates' daughter wrote an essay for college on her homeschooling experience and used it to help argue that homeschooling is a viable educational option.

April E. contributed ten lessons she has learned during the journey of homeschooling her high school students.

Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

No matter how powerful or enormous a monument, the forces of nature slowly erode it away. The blog What DID We Do All Day? includes a fun look at how one homeschooling family learned about erosion.

And speaking of science in general, occupational therapist Sharon Stansfield submitted some tips on how to help children with slow processing blossom when doing their schoolwork: "Children who process information slower than their peers are often very clever but need understanding and correct teaching methods to help them blossom. I give simple and important tips to use for teaching these children. The tips are just as useful for home-schooled children. Knowing the best way to bring out your child's true potential makes teaching and home-schooling so very rewarding."

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

While watching Dr. Who last night (Season 1, episode 3 for the Whovians out there), I was struck by how Charles Dickens, upon meeting a Time Lord, wanted to know just one thing about the future: "Would his books last?" Artistic creations, as ephemeral as they may seem, can long survive worldly powers, just as the sculptor's work in "Ozymandias" outlived the power of the real Ozymandias.

Real Life at Home has a post on "10 Reasons to Homeschool Your Creative Child." I can especially relate to the fourth point about conformity; my children's art appears very individualistic compared to that of their peers at the school they attend part-time.

A blogger I follow, author and linguist Katherine Beals at Out in Left Field, just posted about how her daughter wouldn't have time for all her musical pursuits if they weren't homeschooling.

And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'

Not all public school administrators are guilty of domineering behavior, but Dewey's Treehouse links to an account of a family in New Jersey that was (wrongly) told by an assistant superintendent that "policy" required them to conform their homeschool curriculum to the Common Core standards. Mama Squirrel points out that some parents don't want their children's education to be that narrow.

Homeschoolers in the thick of things seem to be a fairly humble lot (at least when not having to defend their homeschool choices to detractors); they want to give their children the best education they can and constantly wonder if they're doing enough. Those worries can be magnified when faced with the task of creating an impressive transcript recording our children's studies. To help keep perspective, 7Sisters gives us "Balancing Life and the Homeschool Transcript."

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Here at my blog, I wrote about how seemingly all-powerful and permanent institutions, including public school systems, can and do go into decline.

Susan Raber submitted a post on why "free stuff" isn't always the best choice. One reason for that is that we may come to depend on a free resource only to have it become costly or even disappear later.

That's the end of today's carnival. Thank you to all who submitted, and for those who want to submit to future carnivals, you can find out how here.

Declining institutions

As part of our homeschool history studies, we've been learning about ancient Egypt. Ancient Egypt experienced about 30 pharaonic dynasties over a period of nearly 3000 years. That means that each dynasty lasted on average for roughly 100 years. That's not very long. I have a grandmother who has been alive for almost 100 years. She's senile, but she is quite lively for her age.

One thinks of the pharaohs as having been very powerful because they ruled a wealthy, literate civilization and built enormous, long-lasting structures like Karnak and the Great Pyramid of Giza. However, the buildings that house a powerful institution can outlast the institution, be it a dynasty or a school system.

Six years ago, as a newcomer to my city I attended a school board meeting for my local school district in which they discussed needing to close some elementary and middle schools due to declining enrollment. At the time, I didn't have any school-age children, but I wanted to know what was happening in our local school district. I suspect the administration was making some poor decisions at the time, for while our centrally-located school district was seeing enrollment fall, the district just to the north was experiencing a very large influx of students, some of whom were "choicing" into it from my school district. (Colorado law has a school funding system where the funds follow students to whichever school will accept them.) One elementary school I saw up north had a playground filling up with modular classrooms.

Presently, my two homeschooled children are part-time students at a charter school housed in one of those closed-down district schools. The brick-and-mortar structure still stands; indeed, it looks like it has been there since the 1950s. But the local school district has declined in numbers and importance, and a new institution, a charter school that caters to a specific niche, has moved into its space.

No matter how large or powerful an institution is, it can go into decline. Among other things, wise decisions by competent people are necessary to maintain its strength. The repeated failure by school district employees and leaders to make wise decisions that satisfy parents' varied needs and/or wants can weaken--sometimes drastically--those public school institutions.

We live in a time when technology makes personalization of many services much easier. Service tailored to an individual is often expected. Search engines customize results to take into account your friends and location, Amazon.com sells 6.8 million products just in the category "iPhone cases," Google shows you ads based on your emails' contents and search history, and, by law, schools must create Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) for students with disabilities. It seems obvious that many parents will want to seek out educational services that fit their own philosophies and their kids' particular needs, but too many school districts remain too unresponsive to parents, be it for ideological or logistical reasons or just because they suffer from bureaucratic inertia. I think that is a primary reason for the current strength of charter school and homeschool movements. School districts still think they can offer a Sears* education to a society used to Amazon.com.

It seems hard to believe that the public school system could cease to be the power it was in my childhood, back when only rich people and Catholics were outside the public school system and most people watched only three TV networks and PBS. But choice is here to stay, both in entertainment and in schooling. The institution of public school as I think of it might be in irreversible decline already. (See law professor Glenn Reynold's ideas on a K-12 education implosion.) That idea is easier to accept when I consider that compulsory education became universal in the USA in 1918, the same year in which my still-living grandmother was born. If a pharaonic dynasty only tended to last a century, how can I expect the present public school system to survive much past that?

*Actually, I malign Sears. Even Sears now offers customers a chance to "Shop Your Way."

This post is part of the Carnival of Homeschooling.

Send in your posts for the Carnival of Homeschooling!

For years, I have been reading and learning from a wide variety of homeschooling parents through the posts submitted to the Carnival of Homeschooling. 

Next Tuesday, I will be hosting the Carnival. Please send in your homeschool-related posts by Monday night by following the directions here.

If you're looking for ideas for posts to submit, I'm going to have the carnival's theme be the poem "Ozymandias" by Shelley because my children have been memorizing it for the past three weeks. Among other things, the 14-line sonnet touches on travel, history (ancient Egypt), societal change (collapse of power), science (erosion), art (sculpture, persistence of art), and human nature (hubris, short-sightedness). It has also enjoyed renewed popularity recently because of its use in the TV show Breaking Bad. But any post about homeschooling is welcome!

Passive-aggressive behavior

From Wikipedia:

Passive-aggressive behavior is the indirect expression of hostility, such as through procrastination, sarcasm, stubbornness, sullenness, or deliberate or repeated failure to accomplish requested tasks for which one is (often explicitly) responsible. 

For research purposes, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) revision IV describes passive-aggressive personality disorder as a "pervasive pattern of negativistic attitudes and passive resistance to demands for adequate performance in social and occupational situations".

There are three people in my life whom I recall having heard label other people "passive-aggressive." Interestingly, these three people treated others harshly. I think their harsh treatment of other people temporarily brought out behavior typical of those with genuine passive-aggressive personality disorders.

The first person I heard lecture about the evils of "being passive-aggressive" was a high school music teacher who was very hard and critical. Multiple kids refused to continue in school music classes specifically due to his personality. He was so energetic when yelling at students that he once broke his directing baton on the edge of his stand. Since I sat near the front, it flew my way, and I still have the baton fragment (rather an odd souvenir from high school). I suspect he ran into a lot of people who responded in quietly hostile ways because he seemed so mean. That seems more probable than large numbers of people with passive-aggressive personality disorders being concentrated in his vicinity by random chance.

The other two people are my father and my husband's older brother. I have seen both of them bring out passive-aggressive behavior in my husband, ordinarily a well-meaning, helpful person in nearly all his actions and thoughts. Interestingly, my husband is an introvert, and if I'm reading it right, a recent study found that introverts are more likely to exhibit passive-aggressive behavior. My personal experience (and, yes, I'm introverted, too) is that it is not worth the hassle of open conflict all the time with domineering people, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to happily submit to everything they say or want me to do. Sometimes a little sullenness is justified when it's impossible to prevail via open conflict, particularly when dealing with "authority figures" who think they should always win because of pride and/or their position of authority. Does this work for me? It certainly feels healthier mentally than being a complete doormat or embroiled in frequent fights.

When encountering quiet resistance from a subordinate (or someone we treat as a subordinate), I think it is more productive to ask one's self, "Why is this person behaving hostilely towards me?" than to think, "Oh, that person is just being passive-aggressive." Odds are that, rather than facing someone with a personality disorder, we might be provoking the hostile response with unkind behavior.

Ancient Egypt

We made it all the way through the four volumes of the Story of the World during the last four years, and we have now started over with Volume 1. That means Ancient Egypt! We're doing the usual supplements - pyramids out of wooden blocks and Duplos (the toy, not the chocolate candy, alas), British Horrible History comedy sketches like "The Mummy Song", library books like You Wouldn't Want to Be Cleopatra, and library videos like Prince of Egypt and Reading Rainbow's "Mummies Made in Egypt." On Friday we are going to begin mummifying a chicken.

And my favorite part of learning about ancient Egypt: introducing my children to The Mummy with Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz.

This post is part of the Homeschool Carnival.