Field Trip to Texas

We have mostly recovered from a field trip to Texas last week. My husband's work sent him to the SXSWedu (South by Southwest Education) conference in Austin, Texas, so we decided to all go along.

We saw the longhorn cattle in Fort Worth, the Alamo and the River Walk in San Antonio, and the Texas State Capitol in Austin. We also visited relatives and friends and spent some unplanned time getting the car serviced.

River Walk in San Antonio, Texas

For my animal lover, dd9, we made sure to go to SeaWorld San Antonio. I know there is a lot of controversy right now about orcas in captivity, especially due to the recent documentary Blackfish, but I think she is too young to try to sort through the competing claims of that issue, so I haven't shown it to her. Personally, I consider it valuable for some well-cared-for animals to be on exhibition to the public. If it weren't for the existence of zoos and similar places, my children probably wouldn't love animals nor be concerned for their welfare. Not everyone can (or probably should) go chasing whales and dolphins around on tour boats.

Old stuff

On Friday, we were learning about Texas history and geography. I found a 10-minute video online from the 1950s about the Southwest states (Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma) that was quite interesting for its historical value. For starters, it is all in black and white. That's unusual to my children. When talking about agricultural products, it shows a line of black men picking cotton--calling them "Negroes", incidentally, which is a term my children never hear--but nowadays cotton is mechanically picked in the USA. Cotton is only picked by hand in developing countries. It's sobering to realize that my mother and father grew up in a country that was similar in many ways to today's developing countries.

Among other fun parts of the video, all the people, male and female, walking down city streets wear hats, and the women are all in skirts. It talks about the large herds of Angora goats being raised in Texas to meet the demand for mohair; I'd bet those herds are quite a bit smaller now. The Northeast is described as being the source of manufactured goods for the Southwest; nowadays, it seems we get most everything manufactured from Asia, especially China.

Venezuela and Communist Ideals

Venezuela has an enormous amount of wealth in oil reserves, but the people there don't even have enough toilet paper. I sincerely hope that they oust Maduro soon. They're never going to get a perfect president, but surely they can get one that doesn't destroy businesses like nationalizing Chavez (who enriched himself to the tune of a billion USD by the time he died) and Maduro have done.

If there is one thing that last century's history teaches us, communist systems do not work for long. Even voluntary communes (kibbutzim, United Order, Brook Farm, etc.) fall apart or move away from communist ideals over time. People are, on the whole, beings that look out for their own interest. People need to be able to profit from their labor and investment, or they will not labor or invest. People need free markets, or they will create black markets.

Happies

My baby just turned two. She says "Please!" when she wants something, draws "happies" (happy faces) on pieces of paper (we think she might finally have figured out that she really isn't allowed to draw in books, especially library books), and likes to dress up in dresses and pretend to be a ballerina.

I love seeing my children grow up. Sometimes the process seems so slow--I blame pregnancy and postpartum fatigue for that--but as I put old-fashioned clip-on earrings and a grown-up necklace on dd9 last night for a church "tea party" (no actual tea, just water, but lots of sweets and flowers), I had a momentary vision of her in ten years, a lovely, fun-loving, and self-assured 19-year-old dressing up for a special evening.

I think she actually will be a confident young woman. I'm very grateful for the chance to homeschool/part-time public school her these past few years. She has an Aspie streak and exhibits social delays similar to those which made some of my school years miserable, and I think our current schooling arrangement is going to allow her to skip a lot of that misery herself. Children need socialization time in a group setting of peers, but it's torture for some children to have to be in those situations 35+ hours a week (much more if one counts extracurriculars and social media interactions). I didn't really start recovering from my "pariah years" in grades 5-6 until I was homeschooled for a semester in 8th grade. Sometimes kids just need a break. Emotional wounds are like scabs in that they need to be left alone for a while in order to heal.

Weaving

Dd9 learned to weave on a cardboard loom at her part-time school program today. She was so delighted with the product (a little 2x8 inch four-color weaving) that she taught dd4 and dd6 to do it this evening. They spent around 2 hours or more on it. Dd6 was very frustrated several times, but dd9 patiently helped her, as well as doing most of the work on dd4's weaving. 

I would have never attempted this craft with such young children, but dd9 can sometimes be quite dogged about things she is interested. Glad it worked out well tonight!

Learning disabilities

I'm torn when I hear that someone has been diagnosed with a learning disability. It's clear that some people's brains work differently from others, and it's important to know what those differences are in order to help them work around or better utilize the brains that they have. But, on the other hand, the practical effect of getting a learning disability label often seems to be a long-term lowering of expectations for the labeled person, which is unfortunate.

Other people have covered this subject far better than I could. For instance, Bright Hub Education gives a summary of the pros and cons of being labeled with a learning disability:
Pros - IEPs, extra learning support, and specialized instruction
Cons - low self esteem, low expectations, and peer issues

At the end of the Bright Hub Education summary, the author gives a few ideas of what can be done to lessen the cons of being labeled:

Teachers can help prevent the negative consequences of the label by taking a few proactive steps to minimize the chance of problems occurring. Counselors and teachers should talk with learning disabled students and their parents and explain that a learning disability does not take away a student's value, that each person learns at a different pace and in a different manner and the school intends to provide the specialized education required to help the student achieve success. Parents and teachers should also be careful not to lower their expectations for the student and instead offer positive encouragement. Finally, teachers should talk to the class about learning disabilities and how different paces and styles of instruction are used. Open classroom discussions about learning disabilities can help to create an understanding between peers.

Those sound like laudable ways to address the problems, but I don't think they are as generally effective as educators and parents hope they will be. How can parents and teachers not lower expectations when they're being told that a child is not as able at learning as his/her classmates? And positive encouragement can backfire when used with children who are insecure about their abilities. Anti-bullying programs are associated with a increased rate of bullying, which makes it questionable whether open class discussions about learning disabilities will decrease bullying of those with learning disabilities. Schools may "intend" to provide "the specialized education required to help the student achieve success" but might fail at actually doing so due to lack of qualified personnel and resources.

Given that homeschooling helps a parent address both low self esteem (no classmates to compare one's self with) and peer issue worries, I can see why many parents choose to homeschool children with learning disabilities. At home, they can provide individual educations and extra learning support to their children, and they can independently seek out the specialists that their children need. It's a lot of work (and money to pay for the specialists), and I'm impressed by their efforts on behalf of their children.

Typical Sunday Morning

My husband is reading the Sunday comics online, dd9 is reading a Rose is Rose comic book, dd6 is reading an art workbook of projects, and dd4 and dd1 (almost 2) are playing with each other and play swords. Everyone is dressed for church except for mom. Mom is reading news on the internet. On Sundays I like to see what's new in archaeology discoveries. For instance, a mystery Pharoah was just found, and they've carbon dated the Adena mound in Ohio to around 2000 years ago.

When I was a kid, our family did very similar things on Sunday mornings...except for the internet bit.

Creation, Days, and Faith in God

One thing I watch with great sorrow is how some religious, usually Christian, homeschoolers and curriculum publishers consider it necessary to obsessively dwell on one of the many interpretations of Genesis 1, particularly the meaning of "day" as used therein. The Hebrew word for day, "yom", can be used to mean an indefinite period of time, just as our English "day" can. Why is it necessary to rigidly require that it mean exactly the period that it now takes our earth to rotate one time? And why is it necessary to tie that rigidity to faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ?

First, the actual text of Genesis 1 makes it very questionable that a "day" of creation, as used therein, is a rotation of the earth taking 24 hours. It clearly states that the lights of the firmament (i.e., sun, moon, stars) weren't even in place and defining the days and years until the "fourth day" of the creation.

Second, the word "yom", as has already been set forth by others, is used to mean several different lengths of time in the Old Testament, including an age or even eternity. There is not just one possible interpretation of "day" in Genesis 1.

Third, faith in Jesus Christ rests on belief in his divinity and his power to redeem mankind. It doesn't rest on the Bible being a science text, which the Bible never claims to be. Faith certainly doesn't require that we dismiss as evil conspiracies the honestly inquiring minds of men and women with the objective, replicable results they have discovered just because those results fail to line up perfectly with our interpretation of the Bible. There's enough real evil in the world to deal with; we don't need to be turning scientists into bogeymen.

Fourth, the body of scientific knowledge grows as people pursue scientific knowledge, and so does the body of spiritual knowledge also grow, if we are willing to accept it. For example, when Jesus tried to tell his apostles--some of whom were apparently loathe to accept it--that his Messianic mission involved his imminent physical death, that went against their understanding and hope of what the Messiah was to be, yet with Jesus' resurrection his apostles came to understand that Jesus was accomplishing a far more important work than they had anticipated. We humans don't know all of God's ways.

Fifth, what are children to do who have grown up on a diet of math, spelling, reading, grammar, and sort-of science textbooks that dogmatically tie every good principle they're teaching to a literal 144-hour creation and young earth? When they grow up and find out that there are several ways of dating objects that show the world to be much older then they've been told, will they feel like they have to choose between Christian faith and the demonstrable marvels of modern science? Why make it so hard for them to embrace truth, be it revealed by God or man, for the sake of one interpretation of "day"?

Online M.Ed. from Western Governors University

My husband just finished all the requirements for an M.Ed. in Instructional Design from Western Governors University. He will be receiving his diploma through the mail in a week or two. He could go to an actual graduation ceremony, but it's in Georgia in less than a month, so he's going to pass on "walking." It's such a relief to have him finally done with the degree. This is his second time working towards a master's degree in this field; the first time he did all the coursework for an master's degree in Educational Technology at a brick-and-mortar university in the Philippines but was unable to finish the final project due to our having moved from Asia to South America. (That's a long, expensive trip.) Because he has both online and classroom experience in seeking very similar degrees, I thought it would be interesting to interview him about his studies.

Q: How long did you work on your master's degree from WGU?  A: About two years, but I took two breaks.

Q: How long did you work on your master's degree at the university in the Philippines?  A: About two years.

Q: Which program required more effort from you? Please elaborate.  A: I would say probably WGU did because the assignments, as far as I remember, were more difficult. Well, there was one assignment at the Philippine university that was difficult--it was the design and creation of educational software; all of the others were less memorable and not really challenging. Several of the WGU assignments, especially those leading up to the capstone, involved doing more work and things I'd never done before, such as task analysis and conducting a research study.

Q: Did you think the WGU graders were too easy or too hard or just right?  A: I think some of the graders may have been too light, or maybe I'm just too hard on myself. One of the graders did return an assignment saying it was missing a component, which was in the appendix where it was supposed to be per the instructions, so I just resubmitted it and it was approved then.

Q: How much time each week did you put into your master's degree studies and assignments during the periods when you were enrolled?  A: It varied from 0 hours some weeks to 3-5 hours a day, so 18-30 hours other weeks. [WGU students enroll for six months at a time, and students go at their own pace but must complete at least four classes per term.]

Q: How much did your WGU master's degree program cost in total?  A: A little over $12,000, most of which was paid for by my employer.

Q: Who are the people that you work with at WGU?  A: Each course has a course mentor, then there is a student mentor who stayed with me through the entire program. Previously, some of my colleagues who did degrees through WGU were allowed to change mentors. The student mentor's job was to communicate with me on a regular basis, weekly at the beginning, to ensure that I was making goals and making progress. The mentor has a set of questions to ask each week. The student mentor was supposed to answer questions that I have about processes and offer encouragement and assistance. There was also the capstone advisor, who was also the capstone content evaluator; that is like a thesis advisor. There were also the task evaluators, with whom I didn't really have contact except that they evaluated my assignments for correctness.

Q: Did you miss having physical classrooms, interaction with peers, and personal interaction with instructing professors?  A: No, not really. I didn't have a lot of friends in college [undergraduate]. I had people I knew, but not that I really hung out with, except for roommates, who I really didn't choose.

Q: Do you think more socially-inclined people would have difficulties with WGU's online nature?  A: Perhaps, but WGU does have online communities for each of the courses and each of the programs, so students can post in forums for a bit more social interaction. I did not use them; I found them to be less helpful initially, so I did not visit them again.

Q: What kind of students would not benefit from an online education program?  A: Slackers. People who need a teacher following up on them. People who need handholding or cannot work independently may not have as good of an experience.

Q: But you had a mentor....?  A: Sometimes I can be a bit of a procrastinator, and knowing that I had a phone call at the end of every week or two helped motivate me.

Q: As a person who sometimes makes hiring decisions yourself, would you consider a WGU degree a better qualification than one from a brick-and-mortar school?  A: Not necessarily. If the job called for skills that one could attain through social interaction at a brick-and-mortar school, I think that would be more beneficial than an online degree. But a WGU degree shows that a person is more likely to be able to work independently on projects and not need as much handholding.


I've told the kids to call their daddy "Master" once in a while now that he's got the degree. :)

ADDENDUM: My husband says I didn't ask him what he liked about not having to be in a brick-and-mortar school. He liked not having to deal with drama from classmates who thought assignments were too hard.

Homeschool Music - No Tiger Moms Here

I really want my children to have the ability to read music and be able to learn whatever instrument they are internally motivated to study. I would also like them to be able to appreciate the finest and/or funnest music out there. I have no desire to force them to practice long stretches each day and go through the tears and fights that so often happen when children are forced a la Amy Chua (The Tiger Mother).

What that looks like in practice for our family is this: each school age child is expected to do five minutes on two different instruments (a page of music theory from a workbook counts as an instrument) every normal school day with any needed instruction given by me, a book, or an internet video. That's basically it. I did run a small children's chorale for 2 months with other homeschoolers this past fall to give them a group singing experience, but that was quite temporary. My children progress slowly, yet steadily, in primarily piano and violin, with excursions into the recorder, bandurria (a Filipino mandolin-like instrument), and trumpet. If any of our children becomes desperate for lessons, she will get them...so long as she is willing on her own to put in the practice time that professional teachers will require.

Ask me in a few years how this has worked out. For now, there are few tears associated with our music studies, and that is more important to me than creating virtuosos. Besides, I have just one sibling who majored in music performance, and she literally does nothing with it now. Encouraging my children to be music performers for any reason other than their own unstoppable, internal drive to do so just doesn't seem practical.

Realpolitik

As a former Foreign Service Officer, I found this excerpt from Story of the World, vol. 4 thought-provoking:
"Remember those polite messages that one country sends to another by way of an ambassador? Diplomacy looks courteous and well mannered, but usually one country agrees to the polite messages of another country only because both countries know that a war will start if it doesn't."

While I think war might be overstating the negative consequences of non-cooperation in most cases--other measures such as lessening of foreign aid, visa difficulties, trade obstacles, embargoes, and generally un-accommodating behavior are more likely in today's world--Susan Wise Bauer exhibits an acceptance of the German version of Realpolitik, the idea that political actions must be realistic and accept the reality of power as a governing force in politics as opposed to unrealistic political actions based on ideology. In the wake of this past year's foreign policy debacles--of the top 10 international winners of 2013, none are are the USA or Americans--the State Department might need to re-evaluate whether its foreign policy moves are based on political reality or merely hopes that other countries will share our goals. It is interesting to note that Germany did make it on the list of 10 winners in 2013.

Flu

My oldest sister (age 46) is hospitalized in intensive care due to influenza A. She is intubated, sedated, and probably going to spend a month or two in the hospital. And that's with the doctors being "cautiously optimistic". This is just from the flu. They checked, and it's not H1N1.

This sister is about as perfect as mortals come. She is an intelligent, generous wife, mother, sister, and community member. She looks out for her health, having followed the self-denying principles of The China Study for years. She doesn't smoke or drink. She exercises regularly, and as far as I can see, her only underlying health "condition" that could have contributed to her getting so sick is that she has seemed a little underweight due to her energetic focus on healthy eating and exercise.

I know illnesses like hers are relatively rare in middle-aged adults, but that is no comfort when they happen to someone I love. The best case scenario at present is that she loses a month of her life to hospitalization. I don't know whether she got the flu vaccine this year, but if there's a reader who's been thinking of getting it, I would encourage you to get the vaccine sooner rather than later. A fever for a day or two as your immune system develops immunity (the flu shot only has dead virus, and you can't get the flu from it) is nothing compared to full-blown, put-you-in-the-ICU flu.

Christmas and Cousins

We had extended family here for nearly a week this Christmas. It was my husband's brother's family, which includes three children of the same ages as our oldest three children. We all had a great time! Cousins tend to play well together, I've noticed; I think there must be some genetic compatibility that is reinforced by the cousins having parents who were brought up similarly.

Sometimes my children, like any normal American child, express a little sorrow at not being able to have some material luxury, and I tell them that instead of giving them those extra luxuries, we gave them their siblings. When they are all grown up and their toys are ruined and forgotten, they will have each other. Siblings know where you came from, and if you have enough of them, you're (almost) guaranteed to always be on good terms with at least one of them. In a land of convenient friendships and an age where marriages too often don't last, my children will always have their sisters to care for and to be loved by. I can't imagine any ballet classes or My Little Pony collections that could outweigh that future blessing. And some day they'll bring their children together and get to enjoy watching the next generation of cousins play happily together.

Memories

I remember a short couple of months ago when the Republicans were evil for "shutting down" Congress in an attempt to get the Democrats to delay the individual health mandate, the same mandate that the President just announced will be delayed for people who buy the allegedly "garbage" insurance they had before the PPACA.

I remember being told in school about how Hollywood studios "blacklisted" Communists from getting work in Hollywood and how that was a terrible thing. Now when a known Christian expresses his beliefs about sin in a non-work setting, his TV network suspends him from being on his own reality show. So Communists, who literally did want to foment revolution, were OK, but people who actually believe in their traditional faiths deserve to lose their employment?

I remember that Raul Castro is starving his people and find him unworthy of a smiling handshake from the president of a country that has taken in so many refugees from the Castro regime.

There are many other facts that I remember. Who knows if a Google search would turn them up easily and accurately? The internet, at least the easily accessed parts, can be used as a 1984-style "memory hole" by those who control or can game the search engines. We all need to learn facts for ourselves and teach them to our children.

Christmas Party

Our congregation ("ward", as we call it in LDS terminology) had a great Christmas party this morning. After a breakfast and some Christmas carols, we wrapped presents for a family affected by this year's flooding in Colorado and gathered a bunch of canned food up to be distributed to people in the mountains who were affected by the floods. At the end, all our kids got to fill little stockings with candy to take home.

Decorations were simple, everyone pitched in to work and clean up together, and we didn't have to line up our children for their chance to tell Santa what toys they wanted. Our children have plenty of toys already, so I'm not a fan of that greed-encouraging tradition. It's never too early to start teaching that it's more blessed to give than to receive.

Snowy day sewing

A few days ago, I checked out a book on basic sewing skills with secret hopes that my children would get interested in the subject. It worked!

Dd6 started looking at the book first. Soon she just had to make a little kitty-cat pillow, on which I ended up doing most of work. Then dd9 read part of the book and asked me to show her how to use the sewing machine. Since it is very cold and snowy today and the girls had already finished their usual assignments, I agreed. After I showed her some basics, dd9 sewed a few seams.

Then dd6 wanted her turn on the machine. I helped her sew a "pocket" (just two squares sewn together at three of the sides), then I settled down to an afternoon of watching from afar while tiredly (I'm still morning sick :p) looking at blogs and Facebook.

Dd6 just proudly came up to me and showed a little kitty baggy that she made all by herself. Here's a picture of it.

Yeah, I'm a proud mommy.

And in the time it took me to get this blog post up, dd9 made her own little purse, although she didn't include an applique kitty on the front. :)

Carnival of Homeschooling #413

"I like geography. I like to know where places are." 
         
    - Tom Felton (the actor who played Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies)

We went to Cost Plus World Market last week to get chocolate Advent calendars, and my six-year-old daughter fell in love with and just had to have two globe Christmas tree ornaments. I gave in and bought them for her as a Christmas present because I thoroughly sympathize with her. After all, we did just have her older sister compete in a geography bee. It's neat to look at a globe and think about all the foreign and fascinating places, landscapes, cultures, and peoples represented by each different colored patch.

When the eye falls on Massachusetts this week, we in the USA remember the Pilgrims, who left their home of England and eventually made their way to North America in pursuit of freedom of religion, as well as the Native Americans who helped the newcomers survive as they adjusted to a new land. Joesette of Learning Curve recently studied this subject with her children: Early Settlements Unit - Part 2, Plymouth Colony. Her post includes a list of many helpful resources on the subject.

Celeste of Joyous Lessons in northern California shares some Charlotte Mason-friendly ways to celebrate Thanksgiving at Cooking Up a Thanksgiving "Feast".

The blog Home School vs. Public School asks What Are You Thankful For?, discussing why we had the first Thanksgiving and asking us all "What are you thankful for?"

Henry Cate at Why Homeschool submits this post on a few reasons he is grateful to be able to homeschool.

Up to the north, the Canadians celebrated Thanksgiving over a month ago. One homeschooled Canadian living on a farm shares her thoughts on Canadian Thanksgiving in this post.

Down in Australia, Chareen talks about the experience of Homeschool Burnout on her blog Every Bed of Roses. I like how her very first suggestion to help with burnout is to get enough sleep!

In New Jersey, the Liberated Learner blog author explains why she homeschools in How I Got Where I Am and The Problem with Schools and Parents. She makes a good point about the statistical impossibility of everyone's neighborhood public schools performing as well as they are claimed to; for more information on this subject, I recommend looking at the test-related research done by physician John Jacob Cannell.

While some study geography as a major in college, it's definitely one of those subjects that can be learned on one's own now that we have the internet and easy access to copious amounts of information. For the autodidact, whether to attend a formal college institution (and thus incur very formal, non-dischargeable student loan debt) is a fair question, as Barbara Frank discusses in her post Flashback Friday: More Thoughts About College.

One subject that helps with geography is mathematics. From Homeschool Math Blog, we have the Value of Mistakes, an encouraging post about brain plasticity--the huge potential for our brains to grow--and then what it means for learning of math: EVERY student CAN learn math. Students need to have a growth mindset where they value mistakes and see them as opportunities for brain growth and learning.

My husband and I lived for two years in the Philippines when I was posted at the U.S. Embassy in Manila. We had a wonderful experience living there and love the Filipino people for their warm friendliness. While the Philippines are accustomed to natural disasters, this year has been a particularly trying one for the Visayas, the islands that make up the central part of the Philippines. In October, there was a very destructive earthquake, mostly impacting Cebu and Bohol. Then on November 8, Typhoon Haiyan (called Yolanda in the Philippines) blew threw the Visayas, leveling the coastal city of Tacloban and ravaging many other places, leaving around 5,200 dead and so many more homeless (you can donate to typhoon aid through the Red Cross). Because my mind has been on the Philippines, I searched out some Filipino homeschooling bloggers. Filipinos tend to work all over the world and generally speak English very well, making their blogs useful resources for the readers of the homeschooling carnival.

Athena, a Filipina from Batangas City who currently lives in Ruwais, a city in the Abu Dhabi Emirate on the Arabian Peninsula, talks about how she applies the SWOT matrix to evaluating goals and objectives in homeschooling her children enrolled in Preparatory for English Language Arts. SWOT analysis is "a structured planning method used to evaluate the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats involved in a project or in a business venture" (definition taken from Wikipedia).

Several other Filipino homeschooler blogs include:

• Beyond the Silver and the Gold - a homeschooling, work-at-home mom in Metro Manila.
• Filipino Homeschooling Journey - a mother to young children; her list of people's responses to her decision to homeschool is very similar to what we would hear outside of the Philippines, except for the bit about school tuition fees.
• Nanayisms - a homeschooling mom who talks over curriculum choices and has some fun travel posts like this post on Tacloban City's food scene three years ago. I wonder what happened to these restaurants when the typhoon hit.
• Some Kind of Mom Sense - Jenn Punzalan, a pastor's wife in Metro Manila writes in this post about what she and her husband can teach their children from Typhoon Yolanda.
• Rocking Homeschool - this blog from Metro Manila has some great science experiment photos! 
• Homeschooling Adventures (in the Philippines) - this family lives in Bukidnon on the island of Mindanao, which was mostly off-limits to US-government personnel when I lived in the Philippines due to domestic terrorism, but homeschooling benefits from field trips there just as much as anywhere else.

Learning about the world with my children is a wonderful adventure. Thank you to everyone for their submissions to this week's carnival (I hope I didn't miss anyone's!) and may you have a happy week of gratitude no matter where you live.



To submit a blog post to future Carnivals of Homeschooling, please use the information posted here at Why Homeschool.

First Time at a Geography Bee

Thanks to a homeschooling friend, I found out about a local-level geography bee put on by homeschoolers, and dd9 participated in it this week. She did a prep class with some other homeschoolers for an hour or so the week before and then some map reviewing at home. That's basically all we did to "study" for the bee. It was by no means a high-pressure event for her.

She ended up enjoying the geography bee and doing relatively well (4th place). I like that she could be in a real contest where she got to experience a bit of the adrenalin of competition and make some successful educated guesses. I also like that it reinforced to her how much she has been soaking in during our home studies of world history, literature, and science.

I wonder if there are other academic competitions I should look into for the future. I only did school spelling bees as a child. (I still remember getting out on "cataclasm" in sixth grade because my copy of the spelling words list made it look like "cataciasm" due to a defective "l". Stupid copy machine.)

Homeschool Carnival will be here next week!

After years of reading the Carnival of Homeschooling, beginning with when I had preschoolers and I was collecting ideas for "real" homeschooling down the road, I finally volunteered to host a carnival myself. It will be the 413th such carnival, and will be published here next Tuesday.

If you know of a blogger (or are a blogger) with a homeschooling-related post that you'd like to share in next week's Carnival of Homeschooling, please use these simple directions to have them submit the post to me before Monday night. Because of my international experience, I would love to receive submissions from people all over the world (USA, too, of course!). And because I love the Philippines, where I spent two years when we were just starting our family, and share their sorrow over the destruction caused by Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan), I'm hoping to have a segment focused on Filipino homeschoolers, who are more numerous than the average U.S. native might expect.

Hope to hear from you and your homeschooling/blogging friends soon! In the meantime, this week's Carnival of Homeschooling should be up soon at the blog "Every Bed of Roses".

You never know where a good idea will come from

Today I was fascinated to find out about Jorge Odón, an Argentinian car mechanic who came up with a new way for birth attendants to address the problem of obstructed labor, which is a major cause of death of both newborns and their mothers throughout the world. 

The germ of the idea was given to him by a YouTube video that showed how to use a plastic bag to get a cork out of a wine bottle. Then in the wee hours of the morning, he realized that the same principles involved could be used to help with childbirth; he told his wife, and she dismissed it as craziness and went back to sleep. But he was a tinkerer and didn't give up on his idea. Now it's been enthusiastically welcomed by the World Health Organization and has just been licensed for production by an American company. Here's an excerpt from The New York Times article about Sr. Odón's invention:

With the Odón Device, an attendant slips a plastic bag inside a lubricated plastic sleeve around the head, inflates it to grip the head and pulls the bag until the baby emerges.
Doctors say it has enormous potential to save babies in poor countries, and perhaps to reduce cesarean section births in rich ones.
“This is very exciting,” said Dr. Mario Merialdi, the W.H.O.’s chief coordinator for improving maternal and perinatal health and an early champion of the Odón Device. “This critical moment of life is one in which there’s been very little advancement for years.”
About 10 percent of the 137 million births worldwide each year have potentially serious complications, Dr. Merialdi said. About 5.6 million babies are stillborn or die quickly, and about 260,000 women die in childbirth. Obstructed labor, which can occur when a baby’s head is too large or an exhausted mother’s contractions stop, is a major factor.
In wealthy countries, fetal distress results in a rush to the operating room. In poor, rural clinics, Dr. Merialdi said, “if the baby doesn’t come out, the woman is on her own.”

A car mechanic came up with this breakthrough! Of course, it required medical specialists to help him develop it for use on actual women and babies, but still, Sr. Odón is a car mechanic! I had my girls watch his TEDx talk (I recommend clicking on the CC button to see English captions unless you understand Argentinian Spanish) in hopes of helping them realize what people--including them--can do if they'll learn and think and be open to finding/creating solutions to problems.

I was saddened to see some of the comments on the NYT article. Some people were basically saying, "The world is overpopulated anyway, so why do we want to save more babies' lives?" Besides the heartlessness they show, don't they realize the economic costs to families who are already poorer for a woman's pregnancy (lost work, illness, etc.) only to face losing a baby and possibly the mother? Moreover, when people are relatively certain that they and their children will have long, healthy lives, they tend to choose to have smaller families. Human beings, besides being driven to procreate, are very risk averse; once we know we'll have our desired progeny and find ourselves enjoying a certain standard of living (which goes up when the females don't go through ten pregnancies, of which four end in tragedy and the last in a fistula), we tend to want to keep that level of prosperity.

Calvin, the unprofitable student

Calvin and Hobbes is online! Apparently the whole comic strip is now available for free viewing at GoComics. :) :) :) Purely as a commentary on K-12 education issues in the USA, I present the following strip:

(borrowed from GoComics at
http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2013/10/30#.UoLrbRHn8dU)

OK, I lied. It's for giggles, too.

Getting older, little by little

Dd9 has been intentionally calling me "Mom" instead of "Mommy" for the past few days. I asked her why, and she responded, "It makes me feel older."

Is this how it starts? Is she going to be discovering loud, obnoxious music and going through moody fits before I know it? I've never been the type to find that "time just flies!" (Being in the midst of morning sickness really s-l-o-w-s down life, actually.) Still, I wasn't quite prepared for one of my children to stop calling me "Mommy" yet. Maybe she'll give it up soon....nah, not this rather dogged child.

On the other hand, my little 20-month-old girl is just delighted to have me draw happy face after happy face for her. Her extra joy when I add a nose or a hat on one is so sweet.

New Research on Ginger and Vitamin B6

Both ginger and vitamin B6 will help reduce the nausea and vomiting suffered in early pregnancy, per this recent study out of Iran. (Apparently they still do other science besides working with uranium.)

Abstract
Objective. Comparing the effectiveness of vitamin B6 (40 mg twice daily) and ginger (250 mg four times daily) in treatment of pregnancy nausea. Methods. In a clinical trial in health centers of Qazvin University of Medical Sciences from November 2010 to February 2011 on pregnant mothers, the effects of vitamin B6 (40 mg twice daily) and ginger (250 mg four times daily) were evaluated in treatment of pregnancy nausea. Results. In both groups, treatments with vitamin B6 or ginger led to significant reduction in MPUQE score. Scores of symptoms at the day before treatment in vitamin B6 and ginger groups were  and , respectively, and reduced to  and , respectively, in the fourth day of treatment; however, mean changes in the two groups were not significantly different. Mean changes of MPUQE score in ginger and vitamin B6 groups were  and , respectively, showing no significant difference (). Conclusion.Vomiting was more reduced in vitamin B6 group; however, this reduction was not statistically significant. There was no significant difference between the two groups in nausea occurrences and their duration. No side effect was observed in either group.

I'm no longer wearing the anti-nausea bands all that much, but I'm drinking ginger ale and taking 50-80 mg of Vitamin B6 daily. I was reviewing our family newsletters from 2011 (my last pregnancy), and I am doing SO MUCH BETTER this time around.

More correlation/causation confusion

According to this article in the The Wall Street Journal, the higher a person goes in math during high school, the more they will earn.

Mr. James also found math imparted career gains to students who did not go onto college. “The more math one takes, the more one earns on average, and the more likely one is to have a job,” he writes.

Either Mr. James or the author of the article is confusing correlation and causation in a big way here. It's even more plausible to me (and many of the WSJ readers leaving comments) that those students with involved and/or wealthy parents, higher IQs, and more diligence are making it through higher levels of high school math. Such kids would most likely do better in their careers anyway and not because they took a couple more math classes.

I would love for it to turn out to be true that more math classes => career gains. But the research discussed in this article doesn't prove that at all.

Vitamin B6 & accupressure bands

I started taking 50-60 mcg Vitamin B6 daily (half in the morning, half at night) eight days ago. I also started wearing accupressure anti-nausea bands six days ago. I don't know if I'm experiencing a placebo effect, but here at the end of my eighth week of pregnancy, I have yet to throw up. That's very unusual for me.

Sure, I still have morning sickness. I'm tired much of the time, and my odor sniffing abilities rival those of Gus on Psyche. But I'm not hanging over the toilet. :) Maybe I'm having a boy and so the hormones aren't as strong this time around. Or maybe Vitamin B6 and the wristbands really are helping me. If they are just placebos, I don't want to know because then the placebo effect might go away!