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ThatHomeschoolDad

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Posts posted by ThatHomeschoolDad

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. Here in CA, almost all of the school funding comes from the state general revenue fund and is given out based on Average Daily Attendance. So if a student moves mid-year from a charter school back to a district school, that ADA money follows him/her. Now where people get angry is when students who were previously in private schools (B&M or homeschool) enroll in a charter school and now the overall education budget has to be divided by a greater number of kids. So from a financial standpoint, the charters that are likely to attract students who would not otherwise be enrolled in PS are much more controversial than other charters.

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

  5. 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:

  6.  

    I'll chime in as a YEC.  Personally, I think the issue for us is not so much science v. religion, but rather the conviction that what is being presented to us and our children as "science" has been carefully edited to exclude the possibility of a Creator.  For example, I read recently about the discovery of a fossilized miner's hat (the existence of which, if the account is true, would support some aspects of YEC).  This is something that would never be presented in a PS textbook, not necessarily because the editors are Godless heathens bent on corrupting the young, but at the very least because it would -- how to put it? -- maybe "disrupt the narrative flow".

     

     

     

    Re: Miner's Hat...

     

  7. But I wonder if Mr. Ham believes Catholics fall under that whole 'religious' umbrella. We're pretty much the Whore of Babylon, aren't we?

     

    Because evolution doesn't fall under matters of faith or morals, Catholics aren't required to agree with what any pope says on that topic. Some do; some don't. We're a motley group.

     

    I avoided that debate like the plague, but couldn't get myself to stay away from this one thread. :huh:

    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.

  8. 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.

  9. Basically, why?  I hope this doesn't sound offensive, but it seems to me like a last ditch effort to prove the truth of Christianity - if we can prove the Genesis creation story, then all the rest will fall into place, that this is more about religion than science.

     

     

    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.

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