I went through a period like that. I turned the corner after sleeping 10 hours a night for a month. Things I do to prevent a recurrence (which I also did alongside sleeping for 10 hr/night to get out of it): *light therapy from Sept-Apr (I have problems with SAD, and untreated it really makes the brain fog and low energy so much worse). *daily exercise (outdoor walk and some stretches; I want to add in some strengthening work) *vitamins (omega 3s, a multi, and a B complex) *relatively low-carb, high protein, moderate fat diet (carbs, esp without exercise, make my brain go all mushy) *more sleep than I used to get (I used to aim for 7-8 hours, but now I aim for 8-9) Also, when I start to feel foggy/tired while doing sedentary "uses brain more than muscles" things, and it's probably not a "need sleep" matter, I try to get up and do something fairly mindless but relatively active (and useful). For me that's usually house-related chores - put away the dishes, straighten the table, put away a load of laundry or something. Bonus if I can go do some simple outdoor chore and get some fresh air and light. I'm not always very good at doing this, but it helps a lot when I do. I find that for me (where depression is often my biggest enemy), I can get into a vicious cycle where I'm unable to think so I quit doing thinking things and so become less able to think; likewise I feel low energy so I quit doing things that take energy and so become even more low energy. Breaking the cycle by forcing myself to get up and *do* something mindless but active (instead of going to a even-less-thinking-required *sedentary* activity) helps me in both mind and body.

I had my dd do multiplication this way for a while, because there was too much going on at a time for her with the standard algorithm - she'd always make at least one computation mistake per problem, and it was demoralizing. Figured it would do her good to separate out some of the moving parts (so to speak). After a week or so, she went back to the standard algorithm and did fine. I was absent the day my class learned FOIL, and it felt like I'd missed being initiated into the secrets of math or something. I didn't know what the teacher meant when she said to FOIL something, and when I'd ask a fellow student, they'd say (in accents of horror), "You don't know how to *foil*!?! Why, you can't do *anything* if you don't know how to *foil*!" But for some reason they never followed that up with an explanation of what FOIL was :-/. Very frustrating. Eventually I got clued in, and after all that build-up it was *so* anti-climactic. "It's just multiplying terms??? That's *it*?!? What kind of fundamental math secret is this!?!"

The tax rates in our house (in IL) are about 9.7%, but the assessed value is about 1/3 of the sale price of the house. So I guess that's more like 3.3%. ETA: The assessed value doesn't have anything to do with the sale price - it just happens to be around a third. The assessed value fluctuates some each year and I have no idea what it is based on.

IP lines up with each *chapter*, but not with each *lesson*. When I did just the textbook and IP, I did a chapter in the text and then the corresponding chapter in IP. (ETA: If the student can't go through a whole chapter of the tb without additional practice, then ime probably it would be better to use IP *alongside* the wb than as a *replacement* for the workbook.) Now I use the tb and wb together (dd needed more computation practice even though she got the concepts fairly easily), and do IP a semester behind, to both review and go deeper.

The Messengers: Discovered, by Lisa Clark: https://www.amazon.com/Messengers-Discovered-Lisa-M-Clark/dp/0758654561/

One book I've read that has helped me is "How (Not) to be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor", by James K. A. Smith. It's an accessible introduction to Charles Taylor's "A Secular Age", which addresses the question of why it was that in 1500 Christendom it was almost impossible *to* doubt God's existence, but now in the 21st century West, it's nearly impossible to imagine *not* doubting God's existence - that in 1500 Christendom, God's existence was mostly unquestioned, while now God's functional absence is now the default assumption - and how that change in assumptions has changed the nature of belief. It's very helpful wrt uncovering a lot of secularizing assumptions that even most believers assume, that change and undermine their beliefs - so that you can examine those assumptions and see if you really *do* believe they are true. It's best paired with a book that discusses the faith from a non-modern-secular viewpoint - so that once you've become aware of your secular blind spots and that they materially affect how you live your faith, you can learn about the faith from an alternate, non-secularly-influenced viewpoint. Ideally this means reading old books (just like C.S. Lewis advocated) - reading the Church Fathers, or the Reformers themselves (and not just their contemporary interpreters). (I used Smith's book combined with Taylor's actual book, with all its extra words ;), to try to be able to understand the medieval Catholic assumptions well enough to be able to read my tradition's confessional documents (Book of Concord) with *those* more-historically-accurate assumptions instead of importing my modern secular ones.) It can also include reading contemporary books by people who have explicitly worked to divest themselves of their secular blinders. C.S. Lewis' "Mere Christianity" would be a great one for that - it's not quite contemporary with us (so provides a different POV in that sense), plus Lewis was a medieval scholar who was well aware of, and critical of, the impact of modernity. And wrt a good old book, C.S. Lewis' bit on reading old books that I linked above was as an intro to St. Athanasius' "On the Incarnation", and that would be an excellent book to read.

I haven't used Abeka, but people I respect think it's a strong program. From my quick read-through of the syllabus, it does look like it's main focus is on learning all the phonograms ("special sounds") - which is a *great* foundation for reading. Their charts ought to provide you with everything you need to sound out any syllable you come across :thumbup:. Looking over the syllabus, Abeka phonics does also teach syllable division and common prefixes and suffixes, which is the basis for reading multi-syllable words. But they might not explicitly highlight the process for reading multi-syllable words - they don't highlight it in the detailed scope & sequence, in any case, even though all the building blocks are there. One option is to go back through all Abeka's syllable division work and prefix/suffix work - any lesson that involves multi-syllable words. Another option is to go through ElizabethB's free Multi-syllable Phonics materials. There's a *ton* of good stuff at that link. A pp mentioned REWARDS - I've done that with my oldest, and it is very good. New it's a bit pricey; I got an older edition used on Amazon for not too much (student book; teacher guide). Here's their basic procedure for working through long, unfamiliar words: 1) Underline all the vowel sounds, saying the sound as you do (and Abeka's charts would be a big help in doing this). This tells you how many syllables there are: number of vowel sounds = number of syllables. 2) Circle all the prefixes and suffixes, starting from the outside in. (So for prefixes, start at the beginning of the word and work forward; for suffixes, start at the end of the word and work backwards.) 3) Divide the base word into syllables (this part is implicit in REWARDS - usually it's pretty intuitive with the vowels underlined and the prefixes and suffixes identified - but you can make it explicit, too). 4. Loop your finger under each syllable, saying each part as you go. (If your dd was having problems reading each part, Abeka's charts would help here, too.) 5. Read the word at normal speed. In the lessons, they learn multi-letter vowels sounds (with a focus on being flexible, trying the first sound for that spelling first, and if it doesn't make a word, trying the next sound), prefixes and suffixes, and then practice the whole procedure step-by-step on a set of words (even if the student could read them on their own). Later they add in reading practice, where you only go through the whole procedure on paper if you are having problems with a word; otherwise if you can read the words without working through them on paper (the goal) you can. Toward the end, they have reading passages, where they pre-teach harder words. The All About Reading method I linked earlier has these steps: 1) Divide the word into syllables. 2) Label the syllable types (do this if you've learned the types in Abeka; if you haven't, then I'd skip this step - it's a short-cut to figuring out which sounds to use, but you can figure them out using your Abeka charts at the next step, too.) 3) Decode each syllable just like you would a one-syllable word. _____3a) Touch each letter/phonogram in the syllable and say the sound, using your Abeka charts to figure out the sounds as needed, just like Abeka taught you. _____3b) Go back to the beginning of the syllable and blend the first two sounds together, running your finger underneath the letters as you say them. _____3c) Go back to the beginning of the syllable and blend all the sounds together, running your finger underneath the letters as you say them. 4) Go back to the beginning of the word and slide your finger under the word, saying the sounds of the syllables. 5) Say the word at a normal speed. There are lots of similarities between the REWARDS method and the AAR method (and ElizabethB's method, too) - because they are all teaching you to do the same thing: phonetically read multi-syllable words. *AAR focuses more on identifying and blending the individual sounds in each syllable; *ElizabethB focuses more on practicing the common syllables to automaticity (it's a lot like AAR, only instead of decoding each syllable, you just say each syllable; if you have problems, you look up your handy syllable chart and use that to help decode it); *and REWARDS focuses more on isolating the base word and identifying the vowel sounds, and assumes the rest of decoding is automatic (which makes sense, since it is aimed toward older students). It might help to pick one of the methods and practice it yourself. Open a book, and every longish word you come to, write it out (on paper or a whiteboard) and work through it step-by-step. After you've done a dozen or so words, hopefully it will start to click with you. You can try all the methods and see which you like best, or which one clicks with you (once one clicks, the others will probably click shortly afterward). If none of them click with you even after you've worked through 20-30 words each, then you might want to go ahead and pick a program to buy - because often it helps to see it all broken down and worked through step-by-step (the Wise Owl Polysyllables a pp mentioned follows basically the same approach as ElizabethB's materials). Does that help any?

It's not so much "practice makes perfect" as it's "perfect practice makes perfect" - if you keep practicing your mistakes, then you are cementing your mistakes instead of fixing them :doh. So if it were my kiddo, I'd want to make sure her reading practice was training her in *how* to correctly distinguish between phonograms, and *how* to tackle unfamiliar words, especially multi-syllable words. As soon as she starts to make a mistake, you want to stop her and walk her through the *right* process to think through the word. Which means *you* need to know what process you are going to walk her through ;). My top criterion for determining whether I should use a formal program or instead do informal practice of what we've already learned is: do *I* know the process I want *her* to use well enough to walk her through it explicitly? If *I* can't explain what I want her to do in nice, clear, explicit steps, then that's when I pull out a formal program. Not just so *she* can learn what the program teaches, but also so that *I* can learn how to *teach* it. One benefit of well-written programs is that they teach *me* how to teach the subject. And once *I've* learned what the program is teaching, then I can apply it to *anything* they are doing - I'm ready to use that method, and walk her through the method, on *any* bit of reading material that comes our way. Looking at her particular errors, she confused b/p; my middle dd does the same (she also confuses b/d), and whenever she does, I have her make the letter with her hands (one hand for the stick, the other for the ball) - to feel which side of the stick the ball is on (for b/d) and to feel whether the ball is at the *top* or the *bottom* of the stick (for p/b). She also confused m/n (or m/nn) - you could make those letters with your hands, too. (For n, thumb pointed down, palm curving around for the hump, and other fingers pointing down. For m, do that with both hands and hold them together for two humps. For two n's side-by-side, make an 'n' with each hand and hold them with space between them.) For the wh/th confusion, I might have her walk through identifying them each and every time you come to them in her reading, *before* she even makes an attempt at reading them. "This letter is? This letter is? When they are together, they say? So the whole word is?" Wrt working through unfamiliar words, the basic process is breaking the word into syllables, and then reading it syllable by syllable. (If she isn't able to read a given syllable, then you'd break it into phonograms and walk through it phonogram by phonogram, blending them together just like you did in reading one syllable words.) Here's a pdf from All About Reading that summarizes the process: http://downloads.allaboutlearningpress.com/downloads/AAR_Blending_Procedure.pdf . Here's a video showing the same process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjBUcsVdyL8 . If you want a little more help without needing to buy a whole 'nother program, ElizabethB has free syllable division instruction and practice on her site, The Phonics Page: http://www.thephonicspage.org/On%20Reading/WellTaughtPhonicsStudent.html . But instead of using letter tiles to walk through a word, you can use a notched card to uncover only one part of the word at a time (whether one syllable or one phonogram) - and it pairs nicely with walking her through distinguishing between the above letters (or any combo she often has trouble with). Reading using a notched card also helps prevent guessing (as it sounds like she did with staying/stayed - she didn't really process the ending but guessed using context clues) - it's a common way to teach kids to slow down and really focus on what's on the page phonetically. What you do is to cut a little rectangle out of a corner of the card, as tall as a single line of the book she's reading and about an inch wide. Have her slide it along as she reads, uncovering each word as she goes. If she starts to get a word wrong, stop right there and have her start at the beginning of the word and uncover each individual phonogram one-by-one, sounding out as she goes. It helps kids slow down and *pay attention* to each bit of each word, and to reinforce reading left-to-right and sounding out to decode (instead of guessing or filling in the blanks with what you expect to see). Long story short (too late ;)), I'd want to do more than just "more of the same" practice - I'd want to target the practice toward helping her learning how to correct herself. And whether that's best done with a formal phonics review, or with informal practice of phonics lessons during her reading practice (paired with phonetic spelling) depends not just on how many holes the child has in her knowledge (after a certain point, going back through a program works better than fixing individual holes ad hoc), but also a lot on how experienced the *parent* is at practicing phonics in the context of reading without a formal program. Personally, I've had to go through a formal program at least once before I felt ready to teach through informal practice. And a notched card, paired with stopping and working through trouble spots slowly and explicitly, can be a useful addition to most any practice or program.

As it was explained to me by a flight attendant, when I was politely trying to explain that what she said I couldn't do was actually allowable per the airline's rules, when onboard the plane, there is *no* arguing or disobeying allowed wrt a flight attendant's instruction, even if your action itself would otherwise be legitimate. If the flight attendant doesn't allow it, then that's the final word wrt this flight, period. If you want to insist otherwise, you have to leave the plane (and so miss this particular flight) and get it sorted out away from the plane. Or else suck it up for this flight and complain after the fact. There's no room for "refusing illegal orders" *and* "remaining on the plane for this flight" - either refuse and deplane, or suck it up and fly. And in this case, since the order was to leave, the options were to leave or leave: either deplane willingly or be deplaned by force - which does rather suck. But I don't think general you have a leg to stand on wrt your right to both refuse to follow an illegal order *and* remain onboard the plane.

The question is confusingly worded imo. Given the book's answer, I think they mean to ask "what fraction of the *stamps* were left," not "what fraction of the Canada stamps were left". Wrt the question as written, I agree with the 11/12 answer - if you give away 1/12 of your Canada stamps, then you have 11/12 of your Canada stamps remaining. But that's trivial and probably not what they meant to ask. If you try to answer what I'm thinking they *meant* to ask, given the answer key, then here's how I'd do it: The canada stamps are 3/7 of the whole. 1/12 of the canada stamps are given away, which is (1/12)*(3/7) = 1/28 of the whole. So there are 1-(1/28) stamps remaining, which is 27/28. Does that make sense?

This is the bible my church gives to 3rd graders: https://www.amazon.com/Faith-Student-Bible-ESV-Pamela-Nielsen/dp/0758626991 - it has twelve pages of maps, and the intended age range is 8-14. This is the bible my middle dd has: https://www.cph.org/p-18169-my-very-first-holy-bible-esv-translation.aspx - it has eight pages of maps. It has over 120 color illustrations and retellings of 120 Bible stories in addition to the full ESV text of the Bible, to make it a little more accessible to younger readers as well (age range is 5-12). It has a simplified set of cross-references that connect common doctrinal verses to the narratives - I've found them helpful myself.

Not that this excuses police overreaction, but I wonder if there's a significant mismatch between civilian organizations having a policy of calling the police at the *first* sign of problems - "taking no chances" - while the police are assuming they are called as a *last* resort, when authorized-only-for-police force is required. And so you get this huge gray area of problems that *might* go bad but could also probably be de-escalated by either police or the civilians involved - except that too much of the time neither civilians nor the police see "de-escalating charged situations that *might* (but haven't yet) end in violence" as an integral part of their "job". Civilians are trained to call the police at the first sign things might go bad, and the police go in expecting to use force to resolve the situation, instead of de-escalating the situation so force isn't needed. That's a structural problem that's not going away anytime soon :(.

It sounds like not realizing there was a problem (needing to accommodate 4 deadhead crew members) until they'd already had all the passengers board the plane, so the presumable "usual" method of not boarding *any* passengers till they sort out the too-many-people problem was already not an option by the time they knew there was a problem. At that point, there's no good solutions, only least-bad, and I can see starting with asking for volunteers. But going to involuntary bumping over better bribes or finding alternate transportation for the crew - it sounds like they screwed up by the numbers on that. It was probably official policy, but policy that probably assumed people weren't already *on* the plane and needing to be deplaned. And then calling for police to remove a passenger who refused to listen to flight attendants is also probably policy - especially since the instruction he was refusing was to leave. And the police seemed to assume the whole thing was beyond de-escalation when they arrived and so didn't bother. Obviously in retrospect this was *not* the least-worst option. But "what went wrong?" seems more structural in nature - each individual decision in the chain was policy, but together they added up into something disastrous - than being anyone's conscious decision to do something obviously against common sense. I really don't know what to do once you've gotten yourselves into the situation of needing to involuntarily bump already-boarded passengers for unrelated-to-the-passenger reasons. There's no good choices then. But the automatic escalation that happens when "arguing about being bumped" becomes "refusing to listen to a flight attendant" becomes "getting the police called on you to forcibly remove you from the plane" - I don't know if there's a reliable way to stop the process in its tracks once it begins. Or if the only sure way is to avoid getting to that point in the first place.

Per this article, they actually allowed the man to re-board the plane: In that case, the whole thing would have been for nothing in the end.

I take yours and others' point - it's not the same thing as a courtesy flight. Then I'm back to they just shouldn't have boarded *anyone* until they'd sorted out the overbooking situation. And that since it was still fundamentally United's fault and United's problem, they should have offered a whole lot more carrots before resorting to a stick. Especially because the fact of all this happening on board the plane, with all the restrictive rules about arguing with airline employees, made the random kicking off of understandably upset passengers into a *huge* nasty thing. Refusing to board people is a whole 'nother thing to forcibly *un*boarding them.

Yeah, and refusing to obey a flight attendant on a plane - even politely arguing with them - can be automatic grounds for ejection from a flight (as I was told by a flight attendant once when trying to politely explain that what I wanted to do was within airline policy - didn't matter, I had to shut up and do what they said, or get off; continuing to argue would get me ejected).

It actually would make *less* sense to me, because I'd have expected airline employees to be the first ones *bumped*. It's like why the hosts of a party (and their families) don't serve themselves till last - if they run short of something, then they want to inconvenience *themselves* before their guests. Making a huge to-do over kicking off a customer for the benefit of an employee is the exact *opposite* of how it should work, kwim?

I don't understand why they let too many people board in the first place. When I've been on overbooked flights, they just didn't let *anyone* board the plane until they'd gotten enough volunteers. They knew from the number of people who checked in for the flight that there was too many - they didn't let it get to the "too many people on the plane" point in the first place. And that was back before computerized check-ins, too.

I see the question of "when can a test accurately measure IQ" (aka when you can be fairly confident that "what the test says the child's abilities are" matches what the child's abilities really are) as *separate* from the question of whether IQ is fixed or not (aka the question of "are the child's real abilities fixed or changeable?"). AKA "accurate by age 8" means that the result on the test ought to be an accurate reflection of the child's *current* abilities. If IQ is fixed, then the child's current abilities would be an accurate reflection of the child's *future* abilities. But if IQ *isn't* fixed, then the child's current abilities *wouldn't* necessarily be an accurate reflection of the child's future abilities - but the test could still be an accurate snapshot of those abilities at this current point in time. Basically, the question of whether a test can take an accurate snapshot of a person's abilities at a given point in time is one thing, and the question of whether a person's abilities are fixed for all time or are changeable is another. You can have fixed abilities that can't be accurately measured, and changeable abilities that *can* be measured (and the change tracked over time). Whether you can accurately measure something doesn't determine whether that something can change over time. Does that make sense?

In its "clean" state, achieved at least once each day during clean-up time, ours has water bottles and a few cloth diapers (which we use as all-purpose towels, good for wiping hands/faces/surfaces/floors). Right now it also has: *a snack bowl *a pair of socks *an old keyboard the kids play with *one of my books *a songbook for devotions *a DVD case (for the DVD in the player) *a small velvet sack with "jewels" inside *a wristband *a rough draft of dd10's b-day invites *a rolled-up piece of paper That's pretty typical. It's functions as an all-purpose work/play space in living room; we pick it up each evening and each day it gets cluttered up again. Anything "pretty" would get moved or knocked down or hidden - it's a working space for us.

Sometimes people *understand* unschooling's philosophy about education and people and the nature of human flourishing - they still just disagree with it. I don't think intrinsic motivation flowers best when left alone; rather, most people do better when their intrinsic motivation is externally cultivated - along with self-discipline. (I also don't think that internal motivation, unconnected to anything larger than our own desires, should be *the* guiding force in human lives.) Without self-discipline, internal motivation is dependent on our being emotionally motivated - and no matter how much we want to learn something, we don't feel like learning it all the time. A lot of my "changing goals" was a result of not having the self-discipline to persevere when the going got tough. I *wanted* to learn them, but that wanting just wasn't enough without the necessary skills. And that's the point of a lot of the posts in this thread: external factors *do* matter. External factors *do* affect "intrinsic" motivation. A kid who wants to catch-up on math faces a lot of difficulties, and motivation alone - while necessary - isn't enough for most kids. And often kids don't know what they don't know. I quit a lot of things because I "just wasn't motivated enough". In hindsight, what that really meant was that I hit more difficulties than I was able to handle on my own. (And "not achieving their goal in a set time", when that set time is widely accepted, is a much bigger difficulty than many individualist hs'ers give credit for - we don't live in a vacuum.) This thread lists a lot of potential difficulties inherent to catching up in math - expecting motivation alone to magically trump them is placing a very high burden on motivation, more than it can handle for most people.

One pp seemed to be talking about conscious, on-purpose "gaming the system" - where the student figured out how to fool the system into thinking he'd done the work when he hadn't. But my dd does another sort of unconscious, "accidental" gaming the system (no experience wrt TT, but on other things): where she manages to learn how to do the assignments *without* learning what the assignments were meant to teach :svengo:. She's very good at pattern matching, and sometimes she finds patterns that allow her to figure out the assignment-maker's intent and uses that to figure out the answer instead of analyzing and using the actual content. Usually she doesn't even realize she's doing it - I have to stay on my toes to catch it early and then modify my teaching or the assignment to (try) to ensure she's learning what I *wanted* to be teaching her with that work. (Trying to teach her to read with phonics was a continual exercise in her visually subverting the phonetic point - it took me a long time to notice, and then several iterations before I could eliminate all the outside clues she was using to read *without* sounding out.) For an example that I'm doing on purpose with my youngest: after we read our Bible story in devotions, we ask each kid a question. Ds is just starting to learn the stories and how to answer questions, so when he doesn't know the answer, we give him three choices, where the first two answers are *always* wrong, and the third answer is *always* right. He's picked up on the pattern, and so he knows the third answer is the right one, even if he doesn't actually *know* the answer, kwim? Here we're doing it on purpose to help him learn things he doesn't know - but if a program has those sorts of patterns on *accident*, then students who are good pattern matchers and are good at reading the assignment-maker's mind can learn how the program does things instead of learn what the program teaches. I've seen people saying that TT can be more prone to that than some programs.

I wonder the same. I delayed formal math with my oldest until she was eight. I had bought into the win-win unschooling-inspired reasons for delaying math: that kids learn it faster when they are older and with all their informal math experience, they will actually end up *ahead* of their peers, even though they started later. But she turned out to be 2e, which I didn't properly grasp until we had started formal lessons, and we are not magically starting late and ending ahead. We are working hard and thoroughly (aiming for depth over speed) and a result we are not really making up the time - we make a little over a year's progress in a year's time. And I'm feeling it as I'm staring 7th grade pre-algebra in the face - outside timetables matter more to me now then they did when I so blithely delayed math in the firm belief that there were no trade-offs, that of course my smart girl would catch up and surpass her ps peers effortlessly. She *is* smart, but learning math is effort-ful, and my naive belief in hs delaying-magic trumping steady work over time has (shockingly ;)) proven false. I'm just thankful it was only to age 8 - with tweaking and careful effort, we can be on target for 8th grade algebra. Also, wrt delaying masking learning issues (and how sometimes early difficulties that prompted delaying could be a sign of learning issues): I delayed in part because steady, disciplined work over time was hard for *me*. And I conflated delaying *formal* math with delaying *steady, planned, disciplined* work on math. "Informal math" meant "when I feel like it math" - which happened, but happened inconstantly. In the younger grades, steady effort over time working on informal, experiential math might well be better than steady effort over time working on formal math. But the message I heard and embraced was that *incidental* math that happened "naturally" through living life - no intentionality required other than intentionally avoiding formal math :rolleyes: - was inherently superior to steady effort over time on formal math. Obviously avoiding learning to work steadily over time didn't magically help my ability to work steadily over time; rather, it was just going ahead and making a steady effort to do daily math, working though the difficulties on both our parts, that helped us both to get better at teaching/learning math.

WRT the foundation for character training, my understanding of building character has been formed by virtue ethics (which is similar to how the Circe Institute thinks of it). So character is built from the outside in: what you do (practicing virtue, or practicing vice) forms who you are, and who you are forms what you do. (As I understand it, Laying Down the Rails has a similar habit-training view of building character.) However, practicing the virtues, forming a good character, isn't an end in itself, but is a *means* to an end - namely, the end of living a good, worthy human life. But not everyone has the same idea of what constitutes a good, worthy human life - different religions, different traditions aim toward different ultimate ends - and so not everyone has the *same* virtues. Because the foundation for why *these* virtues (and not others, or just not bothering to build character at all) is rooted in why *this way of living life* (and not others). So your answer to "what is the point of life? how should people live life and why?" is the foundation for "what are the virtues that guide you in the path of good living? why should I be virtuous even when it's hard and unpleasant in the short term?" (Answer: because it is good in the long term, because it is *how* you life a good life - and for that answer to be compelling, generic you needs to be able to clearly explain both what a good life *is*, why you should live that life, and how these particular virtues form you into a person who is increasingly capable of living that good life.) It's easy to jump right into the nitty-gritty of teaching specific virtues, cultivating particular character traits - without ever thinking about how it fits into the larger picture. *What* does good character even look like, and *why* should we act that way? All those virtues and character traits embody a particular view of what it means to be human and how humans ought to live. I'm Christian, and our answer to "why be kind?", for example, is rooted in the Bible. God created us for a reason - to live in communion with Him - and His Law tells us what that life looks like. (It also tells us that we failed to live in communion with God, that we failed to live a good life, and what God has done to save us and bring us back into communion with Him through Jesus' life, death, and resurrection - and the reality of our restored communion with God in Christ materially shapes how we handle our continuing failures to live in communion with God.) So the answer to "why be kind?" is "the Golden Rule", is because "we are to love our neighbor as ourselves" - and the answer to "why care about God's Law?" is because we are God's redeemed people, and we ought to do what His redeemed people are to do. I root most of my character training in the Ten Commandments, which in my tradition (Lutheran) are considered as a summary of all the Law, the core of "what has God given us to do? What does it look like to "love others"?" The explanations of the Commandments in Luther's Small Catechism do a great job of explaining both the negative (don't do this!) part and the positive (do this!) part of the Commandments, and along with the rest of the Catechism form the core of my character teaching. We're Christians, and so character training is part of "learning how to live as Christ's people" and is rooted in what it means to live as Christ's people and why we should therefore live that way. Does that help any?

I definitely do think redshirting wrt ps is absolutely the best thing (and, honestly, by putting him in pre-k instead of K this year, we *already* made that choice). And I'm inclined toward thinking that, in light of that, red shirting him in our hs is probably the best bet, too. We put him in pre-K instead of K mainly for social reasons - and those hold in Sunday school and other outside activities just as much as in ps. (Just got his spring progress report - he has come such a long way :). But that mostly means he has entering K skills now.). Which is to say, I don't think he's "caught up" to his age peers yet - his pre-k peers are indeed his peers - and so sticking with red shirting him across the board seems like the best fit for now. If he catches up, we can modify then.