One issue is enough to *break* my vote, but it alone isn't enough to *make* my vote. I have a "litmus test" issue - if a candidate is against it, then that's enough to remove them from consideration for me. But among the candidates that are for it, then I look at other things to decide who to support. (In an ideal world, anyway. Candidates who pass my litmus test are thin on the ground right now - the idea of being able to choose between several seems like an unattainable luxury, and of the few who do, most have a host of other issues that collectively break them. I mostly just don't have a candidate because of it.)

Are you asking why the second is "Stay in the garden often" while the first is "Always frighten bad wolves" - why the different adverb placement in English when the Latin had the adverbs in the same place? English adverbs are pretty movable iirc: "Always frighten bad wolves," "Frighten always bad wolves," and "Frighten bad wolves always." "Often stay in the garden," "Stay often in the garden," and "Stay in the garden often." =>All those would be possibilities. My best guess is that they picked the most "normal" sounding of the possible English choices - the one that sounds the most natural to a native speaker's ear (assuming that the Latin adverb placement was also the most "usual" placement - so if there was no special emphasis in Latin, you are trying to also have no special emphasis in English; if there *is* a special emphasis in the Latin, then you want to try to replicate that special emphasis, as much as possible, in the English translation). "Always frighten bad wolves" is to me the most natural-sounding of the choices for the first sentence, and "Stay in the garden often" does sound more natural to me than "often stay in the garden" - that second wording seems like an awkward sort of command. But I think it's more a matter of style than just grammatical correctness - picking the best of the possible grammatically correct choices. IDK, that help any?

I think they want to be thought of as separate because they believe that: a) there *is* a difference, and b) that difference *matters* and so is worth maintaining. And, yeah, that implies c) that the alternatives are in some way detrimental and sub-optimal, although this could be judged on a spectrum, noting areas of agreement as well as areas of disagreement, instead of making a blanket judgment that everyone-not-us-is-100%-bad. And how you treat people who you somewhat agree with and somewhat disagree with - where the agreement matters but so does the disagreement - that's a related-but-separate issue. I'm not an unschooler, but I have experience with trying to maintain the tension between holding to distinctives-that-matter - and the uphill battle in trying to convince others that they *do* matter - while also trying not to get all insular and cliquish and everyone-who-doesn't-100%-agree-with-us-is-100%-wrong and so has nothing but badness to offer - without then forgetting why the distinctives *do* matter and *are* worth preserving over against similar-ish-but-also-different neighboring groups. A bunch of people who agree with you that your distinctives are good but disagree with you that your distinctives are in fact *better* than other similar-ish groups' different distinctives, or who mostly hold to your distinctives except when they don't - they really mess with your group's ability to hold those distinctives. And, more significantly, a critical mass of conditional instead of unconditional commitment changes *everyone's* ability to understand and live those distinctives, even people who are all-in. IME, the people who yell loudest about how we are all right and they are all wrong are those who have only a very surface understanding of why this matters, and they substitute volume and passion for deep understanding. But people who argue that they agree with us on the topic but don't agree that it matters - they don't have more than a surface understanding either, only they don't think there's any other understanding to be had. And too many people working off just a surface understanding limits the group to only a surface understanding - everyone comes to think that's all there is, loses the knowledge there is more and loses the ability to deepen their understanding - and the only difference is how much you think that surface understanding matters. And then you have lots of yelling with no change :(.

And there's also the difference between someone who's a vegetarian for health reasons and someone who's vegetarian for ethical reasons. If you're a vegetarian for health reasons, then if a strict vegetarian diet isn't leading to the best health results for you, there's every reason to modify it to include some meat if that results in better health. But if you are a vegetarian for ethical reasons, then whatever problems you might have, eating meat is just not an option - because eating meat is *wrong*. Unschooling for educational reasons versus unschooling for ethical reasons - it's a similar thing. Unschooling *so long* as it's the best way (and stopping when it isn't the best way) is just a different kind of commitment than unschooling *because* it's the best way. And as helpful as "unschool as long as it's working" people find the "unschooling or bust" people, it doesn't always work out well in reverse - it would be very frustrating to go to your unschooling support group with your problem and hear a bunch of "unschool as long as it is working" people advise you that it is time to give up instead of helping you find a way to make it work, kwim?

It doesn't help that unschooling can both refer to a way of educating and to a way of life. It's why radical unschoolers coined the term radical unschooling in the first place - to distinguish themselves and their practice of whole-life unschooling from people who just unschool "school" or who unschool the unstructured parts of the day but not school or life in general. Think of it this way, maybe: I say I teach tolerance in history, because how else do I describe emphasizing the contributions of minorities and teaching from several different viewpoints?...I wouldn't call myself an tolerant homeschooler, but I would describe it as teaching them tolerance in that one subject. Someone might say, if you believe tolerance is important, why aren't you teaching it in *all* your subjects, why aren't you living it out in your whole life? Is it possible to genuinely teach tolerance in history while otherwise living an intolerant life? Does a person who is only teaching tolerance in history while otherwise living an intolerant life - is their understanding of what it means to "teach tolerance" have *anything* in common with people who teach tolerance in everything and live tolerance in everything? So someone who lives tolerance in their whole life might quite naturally think that the "teach tolerance in history but otherwise live intolerantly" person fundamentally doesn't understand what tolerance *means*. Living ethically is an all-the-time thing. And radical unschoolers see unschooling as part of living ethically - that the same principles that led them to unschool also impact how they live *all* their life. And so people who see unschooling as basically one method of many for cultivating knowledge, instead of the practice of a certain kind of ethical living applied to education - that's a totally different understanding of what unschooling is. It's borrowing practices developed to support one philosophy, separating them from the beliefs that prompted them and the results those practices were trying to cultivate, and dropping them into a different set of beliefs that are using these practices to attempt to cultivate a different set of results. It's like Christians borrowing from Eastern meditation techniques to enhance their prayer life - you can argue whether or not eastern meditation is compatible with Christian prayer and argue about whether it's even possible (or desirable) to completely divorce the meditation techniques from their original context and plop them down in an entirely new context - but whatever those Christianized meditation practices end up looking like, they mean something very different from what they meant in the original Eastern religious practice, no matter what the surface similarity. Clear as mud? ;)

WRT reading good literature is enough to pick up proper sentence structure and do well on standardized tests - not in my experience. I got very little grammar as a kid - basically the eight parts of speech in elementary and that's it. I read a ton and did pick up a lot of intuitive knowledge of grammar, and generally wrote well enough by the "does it sound right?" method. And that was fine for the state tests, and mostly good enough for AP essays (although I did feel hampered being limited to intuitive guess-and-check to fix iffy sentences, and it seriously limited my ability to do the language analysis on the AP English Language and Composition exam - multiple choice was fine, but my analysis in my essays was mediocre at best - brought my score down to a 4 and I was happy to get it). But what it *wasn't* good enough for was the PSAT. My year was the first year they had a writing portion, chock-full of grammar usage questions, and my "does it sound right?" intuitive-only knowledge was simply not at the same level as my math and verbal knowledge, and that brought my score down. I missed making National Merit Semi-Finalist over it (one bloody point!). But more important than scoring low on the PSAT is *why* I scored low on the PSAT - my intuitive-only grammar skills were much weaker than my formal-and-intuitive math skills and I knew it and disliked how that limited me. Because if I didn't intuitively see the answer, there wasn't anything else I could do - I was stuck. And even when I knew the answer, I didn't know *why* it was correct - only that it was. It's extremely frustrating to stare at an iffy sentence, going back and forth between all the choices I could think of to fix it and have them all sound wrong - to be forced to re-phrase the sentence entirely because my intuitive knowledge of that grammatical structure is lacking and I have no way to correct it, because I don't even know how to describe what it is I'm not getting. I just don't have the language or concepts to go with my intuitive knowledge. The way I look at it, formal grammar knowledge and being able to diagram sentences - that's equivalent to knowing how to add/subtract/multiply/divide and what it means - procedural and conceptual knowledge. Give me 2300/54, give me (a^3+a^2 +3a +6)*(a+4) - I know just what to do and why. Being able to apply that formal knowledge to word problems and math problems in daily life - that's like using your grammar knowledge to analyze and explain what a sentence means and to construct sentences that say just what you want and you know just how you did it. It combines intuitive and formal knowledge, so that you both *feel* the rightness or wrongness, and also are able to formally analyze and explain what goes into that rightness or wrongness. Trying to analyze what makes this sentence good and that sentence mediocre - and what to do to turn the mediocre sentence into a good one - when all you have is intuitive knowledge? It's like trying to do word problems with a basic knowledge of what the add/sub/mult/div signs mean combined with an intuitive knowledge of the addition and multiplication tables - if you see 4 and 6, you know it's probably 10 or 24, and you can usually figure out which it is in a given problem. But sometimes the answer is 2 or 1.5 - and while you know it's not 10 or 24 (and you could rewrite the problem into one that *does* have an answer of 10 or 24), you have no tools to figure out what the answer actually *is*.

I wonder if it has to do with whether generic you is unschooling in service of a different higher good (the higher good is the higher priority and you fit your unschooling into that), or whether the goals of unschooling *are* your higher good, your unschooling convictions are your *core* convictions and underlay everything else you do in life.

WRT "unschooling for everything but math isn't possible" - it's part of "part-time unschooling isn't possible". And ime, that's because unschooling is often seen as a lifestyle, a way of living out particular convictions about the nature of kids and humanity and the right way to treat each other in light of those inherently moral convictions. And so unschooling "part-time" is comparable to following the Golden Rule "part-time" or being kind and generous "part-time" or not stealing "part-time". Unschooling when you can but giving up on unschooling when it's hard or seems impossible or when unschooling prevents you from accomplishing something else - that's making your unschooling convictions secondary. (And generally when people set aside their moral convictions when it's hard or inconvenient or their morals prevent them from accomplishing something "more important" - it says something about how much - or little - they truly value those convictions.) Saying you are a part-time unschooler is like saying you are a Christian on the weekends (but not during the week) or you are a Buddhist after school (but not during school) or you are a Muslim during everything but math class. And incorporating some unschooling practices into your otherwise not-unschooling life is more like borrowing a practice or two from a religious tradition than it is actually being part of that religious tradition. Radical unschooling, ime, is much more like a secular way of moral living than it is a schooling method.

Agree that bad evacuation experiences cause people to be more hesitant about leaving. My parents are in a cat 3 evacuation zone, close to the cat 4 zone, and they stayed for Alicia (a cat 3) back in 1983 in part because of friends' bad evacuation experiences for a previous hurricane that didn't hit (18 hours from the south side of Houston to the north side). My mom had said never again, actually, wrt staying for a cat 3, after Alicia (idk why). But they did stay for Ike (forecast to make landfall as a 3), after Dad carefully studied elevation maps and was sure they would be fine even for a worst-likely-case storm surge - and the whole Rita evacuation may have played a part. I know my mom hated not knowing what is going on with her house when she left. But, at least for my parents, while they are more likely to stay when the stay/go decision is at the margins - when they are at the edge of the evacuation zone but they judge their particular location to be safe enough - they go when they are well within the likely storm surge predications. My dad's always said that a direct hit from a cat 5 would completely destroy our house - and that they weren't willing to risk staying for a cat 4. It's a risk assessment, where they prefer to stay if possible but aren't going to willy-nilly ignore evacuation orders either. Also, just a comment about opening up both sides of the road for an evacuation. Talking about Rita again ;), it apparently took 8-10 hours from the time they made the decision to open the contra flow lanes before they were actually open to evacuation traffic (all the usual traffic was off and kept off). I hadn't properly realized that it would take that long to implement.

:lol: The amazing power of hype and seeing evacuation as a no-risk always-safer-than-staying choice? And the determination to learn from Katrina gone overboard - "don't take any chances, not a single one!!!" - and then learning that everyone leaving whether they need to or not doesn't solve all your hurricane problems and in fact creates new ones. On a separate note, about people with crappy jobs that they can't afford to lose and having to take a personal day or unpaid leave if you want to evacuate without the company closing for the storm: My dh worked for a non-profit in Brevard county. We got a tropical storm that flooded the county, and they *did* close the office and told the employees not to come in. And then he was required to use his personal leave time to cover that day off that *they* ordered. I was 8mo pg at the time and he was carefully hording his extremely limited time off for the birth, and that cut it in half. I was *so* mad - it still makes me mad now, eight years later.

Thing is, in the Houston area, a worst-case direct hit from a cat 5, with the eye going straight up the I-45 corridor right over the heart of Houston (which is what was predicted/feared with Rita) - the vast majority of Houston itself is still *not* in any evacuation zone. (I grew up there as a kid - I stared at the evacuation maps a lot.) But when Rita was coming, and the dire worst-case scenarios were being hyped, the *mayor* of Houston was all "leave to be on the safe side" until the gridlock was well and truly underway, and then he moderated his statements to be "only leave if you are ordered to". If the mayor of Houston himself didn't understand that the majority of his city was better off staying put even for a direct cat 5 hit, is it any surprise that no one else did, either? (And this was literally 3 weeks after Katrina, and that did play a huge part in the overwhelming "leave if there's any doubt at all" hype.)

Evacuating isn't a risk-free proposition, though. Not just in terms of jobs and money and property, but also to your life. I was reading about Hurricane Rita last night - my parents live south of Houston and I remember how it was right after Katrina and everyone was evacuating to be on the safe side (my parents left - first hurricane they left for (they are on the edge of the cat 3 evacuation zone, and had stayed for a cat 3 in the past; Dad's done his research about their house's elevation and how big of a storm surge it would take to reach them)). And all the hysteria about "cat 5 = death" that caused tons of people who were well out of the evacuation zones, even for a cat 5, to "leave to be on the safe side". And of the 120-odd deaths in the U.S. from the storm, over *100* of them were from the evacuation itself. Seven directly from hyperthermia, and the rest from hyperthermia aggravating underlying conditions. (And there was the bus fire that a pp mentioned.) And a lot of the gridlock was from people who were *not* in mandatory evacuation zones leaving "to be on the safe side". During the evacuation it was 24-36 hours to Dallas and 12-18 hours to Austin and San Antonio. People ran out of gas, gas stations ran out of gas, people were filling their gas tanks with diesel just to not be stuck - all in 100 degree temps - it was at least as nightmarish as staying and having to make do without power and running water. Honestly, evacuating the Houston area is just a nightmare, as 1-2 million people south of the city have to leave *through* the 2.5 million people *in* the city (most of whom don't need to leave, even for a cat 5, as per evacuation maps), and there's probably no good way to ever make that not disastrous. But all the hype about "leave or die" and the idea that you have to be 100s of miles from the coast to be safe, and the resulting people who ignore the govt-issued leave times and leave early or leave unnecessarily "just in case" are not helping. ETA: I'm not saying to ignore mandatory evacuation orders willy-nilly - I've seen the pictures of the west end of Galveston (not protected by the seawall) and the Bolivar Peninsula after Ike (smaller than Rita was supposed to be - a strong 2), and a ton of buildings are just *gone*. Whole neighborhoods were destroyed on the Bolivar Peninsula. Sometimes you need to take the lesser risk of evacuating. But it's a *lesser* risk - not *no* risk.

Circle the problems that probably (in your judgment, based on past experience and/or the amount of work you want shown) don't have enough room for her to do all the necessary work, and have her do the circled problems on another sheet, and the rest in the book, maybe? Also, idk if this is an issue, but I've had a lot more success giving my kid graph paper to do her "overflow" math work on than lined paper. Also, do you have a clear standard for what work needs to be shown? You need this, this, and this for type-A problems, and this and this for type-B problems, and so on? My dd is a reluctant writer and needs lots of space (more than she's given, much of the time), and in addition to giving her a graph paper math notebook to work in when needed, I also have requirements for what work has to be shown for word problems (all equations plus the answer written out in a sentence, and planning to add a bar diagram requirement; I don't require calculations to be shown - if she can figure out the answer to the equation in her head, that's fine). It took awhile to get her used to this, but it helps a lot to have a clear standard for what needs to be shown that you can point to, including having her go back and add in that work if she skips it.

My dh plays video games, and he says that basically, unreal engine is what you make of it. It's a platform for making games - you could make a first person shooter, but you could also make a ton of other types of games. He wouldn't have a problem with a 12yo using it. Does that help any?

I wondered the same thing. He doesn't think homeschoolers ever design their own instruction? :smilielol5: ETA: Or, maybe he doesn't think that homeschoolers have the necessary skills and contacts in the community to be able to provide the immediate feedback in everything and to be able to give our students genuine real world practice. Which would be a fair point. A lot of that can be made up by outsourcing to teachers *with* the relevant skills and contacts, but it's not the one-stop-shopping experience of his ideal ps. I do wonder how many public schools are capable of providing this - some, certainly, but more than 10% or 25%?

Google directed me to "rapid instructional design." Seems to have been first developed in the early 2000s, and emphasizes practice, feedback, and experience over presentations. The four components are: *Preparation (giving a big picture introduction and arousing interest), *Presentation (which is supposed to be interactive and discovery-based instead of lecture-based), *Practice (the chance for the learner to actually *do* what they are learning and receive real-time feedback), and *Performance (the chance for the learner to use the new skill in a real world task, ideally meaning an actual real thing done in the real world itself, as opposed to a real world task adapted for use in the classroom). And this approach is supposed to speed up learning and allow for more rapid progress.

Here's a good link: http://www.thephonicspage.org/On%20Reading/Resources/Sight%20Words%20by%20Sound1.pdf

IDK about LOE, but ElizabethB has the Dolch list arranged by phonetic patterns - I've used it to teach them to my middle dd.: http://www.thephonicspage.org/On%20Reading/Resources/SightWordsbySoundNew.pdf Eta: hmm, the link doesn't seem to work at the moment - will give ElizabethB a heads-up about it.

Can you just share videos like that with family and not with all your FB friends? (I'm not on FB but I had a vague idea you could group your friends into different categories and only share things with a particular subgroup of friends.)

I think it's that the rules are different in longer, Latin-derived words. (Also, that the rules are more like guidelines ;) - "rules of thumb" than "laws of language". Some people might get this intuitively, but it took me a long time to realize that phonics rules are *models* of language, not the *rules* of language. AKA the language came first and the rules - the model - came second, as a way to try to understand and explain and make explicit what reality was doing. And with English borrowing from so many other languages, it's can be easier and more accurate to think of a model for the Germanic layer and another model for the Latin layer and another for the Greek layer and such.) I've found that a good rule of thumb for multi-syllable Latin-derived words is that all the vowels in non-accented syllables are usually short (and many get schwa'd anyway), so try first with a short sound, and switch to a long sound on the second try if short doesn't make a word. (One thing I appreciate about Rewards is how it emphasizes trying the usual sound first (what the rules suggest) and if that doesn't make a word, to try the next most common alternate sound. Success isn't predicting the sound correctly from the rules on the first try, but is being flexible and aware, so if the most common sound doesn't work, you notice right away and go straight to trying the next most common sound. The rules are about making your first try an informed guess instead of a random stab in the dark, not about eliminating the need for guessing between multiple correct possibilities altogether.)

Lutheran here, and we *strongly* encourage baptisms during the service - it's pretty extraordinary to do a private baptism, and would be only when circumstances do not allow for baptizing in the service (such as emergency baptisms).

You can be excommunicated for teaching heresy and refusing to recant it, though. That's very much concerning things you believe - but also has to do with how you act in light of what you believe (which reinforces the "they're inseparable" position).

I disagree with the author that Christianity in general is more focused on orthodoxy than orthopraxy. Although the contemporary understanding of my tradition (Lutheran) is definitely far more focused on orthodoxy, but that's not true of our tradition as a whole, and I think our current lopsidedness is to our detriment. (Honestly, I kind of blame modernism and the Enlightenment for driving a wedge between orthodoxy and orthopraxy and making this whole question possible in the first place. Lex orandi, lex credendi - the law of praying is the law of belief. Orthodoxy and orthopraxy are two sides of the same coin - you live what you believe and you believe what you live - the whole modern division between them drives me bonkers.) My tradition (Lutheran) defines faith as trust - faith in Christ is not about intellectual assent to the truths of the Bible, but about *trusting* that God will honor His Gospel promises to forgive people through Christ. And it's not an intellectual trusting, but a heart-mind-soul-body trusting - clinging to Christ where He is found, given to us, for our salvation in Word and Sacrament. And it is separate from both right doctrine *and* right living - we see both orthodoxy and orthopraxy as (necessary) *fruits* of faith (although lack of right doctrine and/or lack of right living can lead us to quit trusting in Christ for salvation). But my tradition has kind of lost the sense of orthopraxy being a *necessary* fruit, and so we've ended up emphasizing right doctrine by default. But even so, we still hold that upholding right doctrine, having right doctrine, is a necessary-but-not-salvific *fruit* of faith - not part of faith itself - even as we've unfortunately downgraded orthopraxy to a not-as-necessary fruit of faith. A lot of us are working to have a more orthodox, historical understanding of the equally-necessary-but-not-salvific role of orthopraxy, though.

Awhile ago on the boards there was a big interest in the 60's New Math, and I found it interesting the big gulf between the impression of New Math I got from the (overall favorable) discussions here (emphasized the rigor and the mathematical precision and the conceptual focus), and the impression I got from people whose main memory of it is the Tom Lehrer parody (abstract and obscure conceptual understanding over practicality and actually getting the answer right), and the impression I got from my grandfather, who actually taught it and in fact was instrumental in getting his school district to adopt it (teaching the whys as well as the hows, and teaching how to *think* not just how to get the answer). And it never made sense to me, how people were always saying the "reform math"/"new new math" of the 90s/00s was just like the 60s New Math, because my impressions of 60s New Math was formed by people who loved the mathematical precision of it, while my impressions of the Reform Math of the 90s/00s was formed by people who hated the *lack* of mathematical precision in it. After thinking about it, I think of 60s New Math as an overhaul of school math written by mathematicians without enough input from educators, while 90s/00s Reform Math was an overhaul of school math written by educators without enough input from mathematicians. Both were pretty "out with the old, in with the new", though - rejected the old ways and built up a new, better way from scratch - hit (fun) understanding over (unfun) memorizing - although I think the mathematicians of the 60s New Math assumed memorization would automatically happen (did for them, after all), while the educators of the 90s/00s Reform Math assumed memorization wasn't necessary. And all the "new math" approaches of the past 50 years - where "new" means a self-consciously different-from-the-old-not-so-good-ways (so includes 60s New Math and 90s/00s Reform Math, as well as today's Common Core) - all faced significant pushback from parents and teachers who didn't understand the new approach and were unwilling to take on faith the experts' assurance that the special all-new all-better way of approaching math (which made no sense to them) was in fact genuinely better than what they had learned. Honestly, I think a lot of problem with the various "new maths" is how they presented themselves as breaking with the old, bad past - instead of showing how they were an extension and improvement on the past. They made it into an either/or thing - accept all the shiny new and reject all the old bad - and so if you didn't see the past as all bad, thought it was basically solid, you were effectively forced into rejecting the "new math", because the "new math" overtly set itself up in opposition to the old ways.