eternalsummer
-
Posts
5,309 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
1
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Events
Blogs
Classifieds
Store
Posts posted by eternalsummer
-
-
I'm conservative, and I never watch Fox (in fact, we don't have a tv, but I wouldn't if I did, it's just entertainment like the rest of cable news)
I use google news, which slants left, but has broad enough sources not to matter much
for really breaking news, 4chan/pol
-
I know nothing about unschooling, but I can say that there are definitely some kids for which some things just will never come naturally. I guess you'd have to decide which things you are absolutely committed to having them do/learn (versus which things you are comfortable leaving up to their interest/need). Some of it is developmental levels, and if your kid is not completely normal (and what kid is, really) in some ways, his/her developmental level for a certain thing might not correlate with age.
For example, I have never yet met a baby who was happy to be left in a crib in a room by himself. This makes sense; evolution has got to favor the helpless infant who insists on being by mother's protective side until he's capable of defending himself from (or at least escaping) a bear, or whatever. So insisting that a baby will just figure out how to put himself to sleep at 1, or 2, or 3, is kind of silly - sure, he might catch on, but why fight nature?
Now, if a kid is having the same problem at 10, you might say, well, he's not at the same developmental level as his age-mates, and he's not going to complete this task (call it sleeping independence) on his own, because his body/mind are never going to tell him it's okay. And then maybe you want to either force the issue, and teach him some overt coping mechanisms, etc., or figure out how to work around it, or whatever.
I can see the same thing with unschooling - there have got to be some kids who are just never going to develop certain traits/learn certain things without a good deal of encouragement or even outright coercion, Say you have a kid who is addicted to video games - hey, there are *adults* who are addicted to video games, and a ton of them who are addicted to the internet! This is not an education issue, it's a parenting issue (imo) - we don't unschool, per se, but we restrict tv use by not having a tv, and video game use by not having a video game player, and tablet use by not having a tablet, and cell phone use by not having smartphones, and computer/internet use by not having computers that are available to kids except for little unpredictable bits of the day.
-
If you add up CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, Huffpost, etc., it will probably even out Fox.
Furthermore, there are more conservatives than liberals in America (but more liberal media than conservative media)
-
But your daughter is profoundly gifted, isn't she? I can see it working for kids like her, but I am always curious to see how unschooling is motivating for "average" kids.
I have the opposite concern; I have 2 school age kids, and both are more or less highly gifted (dependent on subject, to an extent). I have this fear that if I just let them go in their own directions (they're 8 and 5), I'd be failing to nurture their gifts. What if they never got interested in math, or writing, even though they've got the capacity for that? Wouldn't I be denying them the potential development they don't even know they have?
So currently we do a sort of hybrid; the things I'm really afraid of neglecting - math and writing, basically - I insist on, and at their level (Life of Fred is good for this as they don't even see it as math, half the time). Everything else I have left more or less to interest, although I read them SOTW daily. My daughter is learning Attic Greek and my son is playing minecraft, and they have probably 3 hours a day of actual structured school work, if that.
I lean sometimes toward more freedom and less structure, sometimes I think ack! and start making plans for 10 online classes next year.
Also, I think the relative business of the parent doing the homeschooling might have some impact on the quality of any kind of schooling, but especially present in unschooling. My husband and I run a small business from home; it takes up a lot of my time. I also have a baby and toddler. I feel that if I unschooled, I'd never have time to provide all the enrichment, conversation, engagement, observation, mentoring, etc. necessary to properly educate/nurture 2 gifted kids. With some structured curriculum, I can feel like I've done some educating even on busy days.
I love the careful and deep explanations of unschooling I've read here, I just suspect that (in my case anyway) it could easy slide into not-schooling, because of how busy we are and how easy it would be to neglect and say to myself, oh, they're doing fine.
-
Or the non-stop "Mom, do you want me to make you a water park? Watch me make it. Tell me what you want. It will only take an hour or so. Then we can make another one for dad."
Luckily I have two of minecrafting age so they spend a lot of time making things for each other. I just get the rundown at the end :)
I confess I tried minecraft and couldn't figure out either how to do it or why I would ever want to.
-
Math is a tricky one, I think, because it's one of those things where we don't use a ton of higher level math in real life if we don't go into a STEM field; fractions, basic functions, number sense, etc. will get you through most of life just fine.
But if your kid does want to go into a STEM field, and it's quite a lucrative and wide-ranging field, and you haven't gotten past basic fractions by 15, when the kid starts to think about career options, it seems to me (as a not-quite-unschooler-but-certainly-not-a-traditional-homeschooler) that it would be really hard jump that far in a shortish time.
But I might be wrong about that, maybe an unschooler who unschools math can educate me :)
-
1
-
-
well I tried that and it didn't work. Try dafont.com
http://www.dafont.com/theme.php?cat=603&text=notebooking&fpp=100
-
have you tried what the font? and identifont?
-
most of these are legitimate regional pronunciations
I can't stand rather, though - used instead of whether
-
On a side note, taking a daily multivitamin is mostly pointless and you should probably stop, unless there's a concrete reason you have a shortage of something.
-
...and particularly those mind-numbing Minecraft recitations off your chest by late afternoon.
...
yes! Somehow I thought it was only mine who were determined to give me a half hour explanation of how they built a hot dog stand and water park, or whatever.
-
I have a 1 year old who loves to eat books, and I am totally irresponsible about turning books back in on time (or ever). It is cheaper, in the long run, to just buy the books from amazon or the thrift store.
-
In our house we've been emphasizing "natural skill, passion, hard work" as the three-pronged path to mastery. Any two will work. So in my house (and my DD is fast approaching my DS in many areas) we can say, "She probably had a little more natural skill, and also she really loved the subject. It's natural she moved ahead a little more quickly. But you also love it and you are willing to work hard, as well as having some natural skill yourself. You can do wonderful things too...but you have to keep working hard and keep loving the subject."
This is a good approach (except of course with the recognition that some natural skill is required - I could have all the passion and hard work ever for basketball, but I could never be in the NBA)
-
That is excellent information, thanks :) This board is probably the most useful thing I've found since we started homeschooling.
-
So he has a 2250 SAT, which is in the 99th percentile overall and slightly higher than Harvard's median SAT of 2237 for the class of 2017. So yeah, he seems like he'd probably be competitive against the general admissions pool.
But the median SAT scores for schools that have affirmative action are not accurate representations of what median scores would be without affirmative action.
That is to say, if he got in (and by the numbers it seems pretty obvious that he did) partially because of his race; you can't say that his SAT scores would be competitive even if race weren't considered - because if race weren't considered, and students were accepted race-blind, the average SAT score would rise, right? That's the whole point of affirmative action, to allow in students that are not qualified according to merit (as the school defines merit - generally grades, rigorous courses, SAT scores, etc.) to meet quotas for racial diversity.
-
The reason Asians have higher SAT scores is not because there are more Asians. They have higher *average* SAT scores.
-
xylitol, seriously
xylitol xylitol xylitol
my daughter had two cavities at 6 months (!!) and I read up about it on the internet - seems that there is a bacteria, which she probably got from one of us biting off a piece of something and giving it to her, and it colonizes. No amount of brushing will kill the bacteria (and thus stop the spread of the cavities) unless it has a bacteria killing agent in it, and xylitol is such an agent
I just dabbed xylitol gel on her teeth 5x a day or so for 2 months, and the cavities never spread or got worse.
-
We're pretty new to homeschooling, and not that connected to the local homeschool groups/community (they're exclusive and we don't qualify); my two school age (8 and 5) are also gifted, so I'm looking for ways to connect them to both friends and peers who have similar interests.
We live near Kansas City, MO, and I haven't been able to find anything about local homeschool groups that participate in academic competitions, or how to register for these things, or where to find them, or anything.
Does anyone have any information about specific contests/competitions they've entered and loved (or at least liked), and how to get involved? Who to contact, where to start? All subjects are possible I suppose.
Also, to be honest, I'm looking for something both to show my daughter (8) that there are other kids like her and that there are other kids who might even be brighter at some subjects. Her isolation is making her think that she's alone (which is not true, right?) and that she's the smartest kid that ever existed, which is a long way from true (she's HG, but certainly not PG).
Any info would be so appreciated :)
-
No, but the Inaugural address by FDR in 1933 is a remarkable one. (http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/froos1.asp) "True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.
The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit."
And not wholly inapplicable to today, I think.
-
5th grade.
Before that, we moved every year, so by the time the school district tested me and etc. we were about to move again, or there were no local resources for actual gifted classes. I was surprised to find out I was smart.
But at that point I thought I was just kind of above average - it wasn't until middle or late high school that I realized it was more than that.
A large high school was a very good thing.
-
never
We read it as part of the IB program in PS when I was 16, and no one liked it, pretty much. I found it really hard to access (although it might be easier if you're asking for a boy); there was little in it that I could recognize or relate to, and it was super depressing.
But if you're determined to read it, I'd say it's about a 9th/ 10th grade reading level?
-
It's just that the argument goes too far, right?
I mean, if I wore a shirt around with a swastika on it that said "Black people are monkeys," or something similarly offensive, I can't expect people not to be angry, and while I (in theory) have the right to wear the shirt, I at least have to admit that I'm either deliberately angering people or being unnecessarily callous. Similarly, if I wear super revealing/immodest clothing, I have to admit that I'm either deliberately causing lust or at least being careless about it. If I believe either (in the first instance) that offending people without cause is bad or (in the second instance) that lust is a sin and encouraging sin is wrong, then wearing revealing clothing is more or less on par with wearing a racist shirt, and both are stupid.
However, the argument goes too far, and I agree with you here, when you say that if a black person sees the racist shirt and beats you up or shoots you, it's your fault for wearing the shirt. That's insane (but it does make sense not to wear racist shirts in black neighborhoods, because after all, you don't want to get beaten up). Similarly, when you say that if a man rapes you because you're wearing a short skirt, it's your fault for wearing the skirt, that's insane too (but also similarly, it makes sense to avoid putting yourself in that position if you can).
-
I think tattoos are wrong (for people in my scoeity/culture). I think dyeing your hair is wrong. I think makeup, once you're out of the trying to get a husband stage, is dumb. I hold positions on most social and cultural issues (abortion, gay marriage, women in the workplace, divorce, interracial marriage, etc.) that are quite conservative, but I am not religious at all. I think eating dairy, especially from cows/goats/etc. that had their offspring taken and either killed (males) or raised on milk replacer (females), is morally repugnant. We don't compromise, ever, on eating food that was raised inhumanely, and we don't let our kids compromise (this causes a lot of consternation about birthday parties, etc., where our kids don't eat the cake provided). I could go on.
-
Oh, I realise the USPS won't reimburse the seller even if you bought insurance through the USPS (though if you buy it through a third party insurer they will reimburse, fwiw). And often these things can be found - I had something shipped to me marked "delivered" that never arrived (it eventually went back to the seller, who reshipped it).
It is different as an individual than as a business. If I bought from a business (even a small one), I'd expect them to carry the responsibility of getting my goods to me. If I buy from a random person on Ebay who is clearly not a business, I'd recognize that I'd be taking more of a chance.
Anyone else at a complete loss for next year?
in Accelerated Learner Board
Posted
I just don't know where we'll be with a lot of things - we just started homeschooling, and the pace is so erratic, it's hard to say