Just came across a great blog post on Slate HERE. I like this guy's style because he seems to genuinely try to be reaching out -- a good thing when attack has is all too easily the go-to mode.

My dad had a mechanical drafting pencil back in the 70's with a lead as thick as a wood pencil, and it needed a special sharpener that sorta sanded the point. I could see something like that working, but generic mechanicals just snap the leads too often for us.

Tricky, since that he IS processing, the way his particular brain wants to process, and you don't want to stop that. It could turn out that the positives will come about well afterward, which is pretty normal, IMO. You may have to wing it, working in little conversational side roads about positive details about negative events. Hard to do when exhausted already. Either way, know that just being the listener, regardless of the content, is a huge, valuable, and mostly under-rated role. That you are doing it is more service than anyone can appreciate in the moment.

Wasn't that biosphere place vacant? The one that housed 6 or 8 people for a year back in 1990 something? I want to say Arizona...

I cheated on one chemistry quiz in 10th grade, got caught, and it so flipped me out I never did again, not thru college. I was such a straight arrow, as a coping mechanism in hindsight, but still. Looking at cheating as a trend would have to include a host of factors, just as in any other trend. Reduced parental oversight & increased distraction stemming from more work and more gadgets? Check. Media celebration of cheaters who face little consequence? Check. Increasing test-centric education models? Check. Parent obsession with college admissions, especially to a small group of selective schools? Check (in my area, at least). There's more, to be sure. Prob lots more. Edited to compensate tiny keyboard + thumbs = Middle English Spelling.

Aren't cleatus what you wear on yer feetus to play soccer? I am so not a jock. Maybe Greek soccer, I mean football.

FWIW, KLEIO (or Clio) was one of the nine muses - goddess of music and dance. Kinda cool spelled with the "i."

Saxon since first grade - now in Alg 1. We do all the probs, but have split them into 2 sessions here and there over the years, or even 2 days. Speed ebbs and flows depending on the concept at hand, but in general, the slowdowns are widely scattered, and we still do a whole book a year.

I've done this one for years. Very dense, great for carving. Subbing almond extract for vanilla might do what you want. http://allrecipes.com/recipe/whipping-cream-pound-cake/?sitepref=ar

And in NJ we have something like 600 districts funded by local property tax. Why? Because we're insane.

We have a Discovery Streaming subscriptionvia DW's school, but any more, it's prob 50/50 for what I get there and what I get from YT. Academic content has just exploded on YT.

Music Mind Games is great. I used it way back in DD's one year of PS K. http://www.amazon.com/gp/other/aw/d/0898985617?cache=ab97dde1b4fd8759db70ea3dcdccfdae#ref=mp_s_a_1_1&qid=1391961735&sr=8-1&precache=1 There are lots of manipulatives for sale by the author, but I made most of my own. A good program for active, visual kids.

It was WTM for us. It was face-out on a library shelf, and DW picked it up just out of curiosity. Had she not been a born researcher and career educator, it might not have happened.

I'll grant that it is a lot of prep, to be sure. Definitely not a plug-n-play thing.

I like it. We should do a Tri-Wizard's Cup!

I'll throw out the main concern I've heard from PS teachers (DW's profession). In a nutshell, if you take the allotted public funds (pick a number...$5k) out of a school's budget and divert them to a charter for Student A, but student A washes out of that charter (because charters don't have to take or retain every student), when student A dumps back into the public system, those funds are not likely to follow the kid back, especially if it's mid-year. Now you have a reduced budget to educate a student who could not be accommodated in the charter, and once money goes, it's hard to get back. Ramp that up to many students, and the economics grow kinda quickly. Extreme cases push that right over the edge, like the two kids who moved into DW's district at once who each needed outside residential placement, at a cost of nearly six figures a kid -- granted, that's a rare circumstance, but public schools have to take up that slack -- charters don't. It does not seem to be an issue here, but then, leafy NE NJ is supposed to be full of "really good" districts (LOL). All the newer HSers who moved here "for the school" tell me that. :tongue_smilie:

BFSU all the way K-8. Nothing is more complete.

I'm always sure to have my peek-toe platform pumps shined when DW gets home. It's so important to maintain gender boundaries while raising an impressionable teen, you know?

Are you kidding? A FOUR BAY garage? If you don't want it, could you mail it to me in pieces? TAKE IT!!!!!

Scratchy. That's my feeling -- thinner diameter lead is scratchy.

Morris Classical Academy, because we're in Morris County, NJ, and it sounds just pretentious enough to fit in with the private schools around here. Logo is a unicorn on a blue shield, as per DD's request - see blog link below. So far, I used CafePress to make a car sticker. Tshirts or othet swag may be next.

Re: Miner's Hat...

Which comes right back around to who gets do decide what the right kind of Christian is, which doesn't sound very Christian. Orwellian, yes.

Eat at the Bourse, do the liberty bell and constitution hall, run up the art museum steps like Rocky, and maybe actually go to the art museum while there. Camden aquarium is supposed to be super. Ditto Franklin Institute. With a dancer, make a pilgrimage to Baums, right across fron the hospital.

The "attack" or "prove" issue is key, IMO. From the Slate article I posted in the other thread: But Ham is insidiously wrong on one important aspect: He insists evolution is anti-religious. But it’s not; it’s just anti-his-religion. This is, I think, the most critical aspect of this entire problem: The people who are attacking evolution are doing so because they think evolution is attacking their beliefs. A parallel argument came up in an older thread about America's deep individualism and distrust of authority, which I argued might be a sort of self-selection thing, genetic or otherwise. People in general will push back and/or retrench when they perceive attack. Arguing with stats and facts, which makes perfect scientific sense, does no good, and actually only strengthens the "siege" response. Build your own network and your own universities, shut the gates, and sure, everyone outside looks like Hun. Perhaps we do it even more, based on our history and/or composition of temperaments, aided by our massive land resources and not having been invaded, which means not ever having to really adopt or adjust to another incoming culture, at least not on the massive scales that transformed Europe. Or, the flip side...We're big and fractured, which encourages tribalism (religious, political, etc), because there's simply more psychological comfort in tribes, which is needed even more if other factors, like, say, job security, are in flux.