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Xahm

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Everything posted by Xahm

  1. Native English speakers can easily id an American accent, but it is much, much trickier for those who don't speak English natively or who hear an American speaking/attempting to speak another language.
  2. I'm not going to attempt a complete answer to this question, but I think it would need to include the idea that no one can know everything with any depth, but that everyone ought to have an area or two they have mastered with some depth. I hope to help my kids attain a broad overview of the knowledge that is out there, enough to have a good idea that there's a lot they don't know and to be able to identify when something is way off base. In addition, I plan for them to have the skills to learn more about a topic when it becomes necessary or interesting to them. They also need an area or two in which they have gone in depth, and hopefully this area aligns with future career goals. Two people who are both well educated might have very different knowledge bases, but they should be able to have a fascinating conversation with one another.
  3. As a teen, I got a lot out of reading The Problem of Pain and A Grief Observed, both by CS Lewis. One is a reasoned look at theology, one is an account of going through a terrible pain. Together they seemed more honest and helpful than either could have been on its own. I'm not sure you could get a Sunday School class to read one whole book, let alone two, but you could bring in excerpts
  4. All of us have colds with perhaps a touch of the flu, so there is constant coughing and crankiness. The coughing puts me on edge, which I know isn't their fault, but my goodness! Just cough it up and move on! None of them really knows and is willing to blow their nose effectively, either. Ugh! So we are all staying home, mostly inside, and trying to get along and get to bed early. Since at least two cousins we spent time with last week came down with the full blown flu, we're trying to be grateful we haven't.
  5. I think you can have her sign in with a regular account instead of a kids account. If there is anything on the kids account she actually wants to access, she'd have to sign into that separately.
  6. He was recertified, so they must have done some checks. I hope he's an absolutely fantastic and resilient animal who will be absolutely fine. I've just heard about the injuries on some of those that have been apprehended with the help of dogs, and it makes me nervous about all of them, but especially ones who have experienced trauma.
  7. Is there a smaller con somewhere near you that you could attend? A friend recently went to one near here and said she enjoyed it even more than the huge famous one that is near here because everything was much more relaxed and friendly, even if the panels weren't star-studded. Likely not a help for Christmas, but I thought I'd put the idea of there since I wouldn't have thought of it on my own.
  8. My husband is a police officer. One of his fellow officers was killed in the last year, and the officer's k9 unit was badly injured and lost an eye. People are currently rejoicing that this dog is back on the job. While I'm certainly glad the dog is doing well, it seems to me retirement is appropriate in such a situation. The police dogs in our country have been known to err on the side of being too aggressive and occasionally attacking bystanders rather than perpetrators. A dog that has been trained to take down those it perceives as aggressors, has experienced the trauma of being shot, and has lost sight in one eye does not seem like a dog in a position to help the public good by policing. It seems like a second tragedy waiting to happen. Dog people, am I way off base here? Are dogs able to overcome such issues? Full disclosure: My emotions may be interfering with my judgement as at the time of the shooting, the hospitalization and recovery of the dog overshadowed the loss of the human officer in the local news coverage, and that saddened me tremendously, though I'm sure it's comforting in many ways to focus on the survivor, even, or especially if, the survivor is a dog.
  9. Did she clarify what she meant by "the whole passive voice thing"? I've met lots of people who believe it is a firm rule that you should never use passive voice, that it is simply wrong. My husband has even met someone who argued with him that sentences such as "The man was eating lunch" are passive due to the presence of the word "was" and so are also not allowed. If she has run into that, I sympathize with her.
  10. If someone managed to graduate from Princeton and actually thought that all those who graduated from Yale were idiots, then yes.
  11. Very true. I was giving that as one example of the results I saw. I don't think that all students of the classics would be as arrogant as many of those I saw were, and I think that other types of education that promote themselves as The Best and Most Proper will lead to the same flaw.
  12. In some ways I like the Classical idea of teaching great writing by imitating those writers, before eventually breaching out on your own. I think that can be a great method to learn writing but also to learn humility. Look first to the skilled, not first to the random scribblings you made in your first grade journal. I went to a college which recruited many home schooled and private schooled individuals, so I met a disproportionate number of these and found that In practice, those I knew who learned by this method rarely achieved either great writing or humility by the end of high school, though some got smoothed out after freshman year of college. A few were good writers, but most were still imitating and were not skilled at choosing which aspects to imitate. For example, when attempting to write a newspaper article, one repeatedly wrote thousand word essays that hid their point at the end and used diction appropriate to a philosophical treatise, but utterly inappropriate to the job at hand. When given constructive criticism, he dismissed it out of hand, underling to see that there are different styles of worrying appropriate to different circumstances. Instead of humility, there was extreme arrogance. Students entering university studies after a "classical" education had been told of the superiority of their education for so long that they scoffed at anything that wasn't included in their version of classical. One boy told me Dostoyevsky was not a great author, simply based on the fact he wasn't in the Western Canon and hasn't been studied in this boy's program. All that experience makes me wary of "classical" education. I'm sure there are better examples than those I met, and there are aspects I will implement, but on the whole, nope.
  13. I hope I can get to that, but it would require me being a tidier person than I'm currently capable of being. It's getting easier by the day, but my husband was gone for military stuff during most of my fourth pregnancy and the first six months of this baby's life, so I'm working on shifting out of "survival mode" habits and finding our new normal. My seven year old is a neat person, and I think the six year old will be, too, once he gets his own room. We are shifting furniture around now. I'm also caught in my mind as I don't want to make tidiness so much the goal that they get overly upset when little brother dumps something out which he shouldn't. Eventually that won't be a concern either, but we have probably two or three more years of that being a distinct likelihood.
  14. I don't have any help to offer the op, but I'm reading about the different parenting strategies with interest. My kids are 7, 6, 3, and turning one in a few days. I have at least three different parenting strategies going on due to the different needs those ages bring, and I expect we will need to change considerably in coming years as well. We come at parenting with a "raising kids to be competent humans" approach. There are times with little ones where we have to impose our will and demand obedience, but that's not a useful long term strategy for us. We try to have few rules and explain those rules well. For example, no, our kids don't have to make their beds, but we do remind them they might be embarrassed when friends come over, and if things get too messy, friends won't be allowed in their rooms at all because things get broken in messy rooms. When my kids balk at tooth brushing, I remind them they only have to brush the teeth that they don't want holes in, and that works to motivate them (though one doesn't use tooth paste because he can't stand the texture, and the literature I've read suggests that vigorous brushing and drinking fluoridated water should be fine) My freshly turned six year old is in a stage now where he likes to loudly proclaim what he is or isn't going to do and that he is in charge. It's funny because my now seven year old did almost exactly the same at about the same age. I disengage until he's calmer, then we discuss whether he's ready for adult responsibilities. It's easy for him to see he's not, then we discuss. My husband and I have a policy of not arguing with drunk people or children, which really means don't argue. Find a way to step back and get calm, then discuss when people are ready. (He's a police officer, which is where the drunk people come into play. He says it's amazing how many people, including police officers, will let themselves get dragged into arguments with drunk people.) About once every couple of months I have a conversation with my older two about how it's my job to help them grow into competent humans beings who make good choices. I can either do that job by working with them or by forcing them to do xyz, but I absolutely have to do my job. There may be some grumbling still, but they see it will work better for everyone to cooperate, so they do. The three year old is getting there. I keep things shorter with him. He doesn't want to go to bed, I remind him he doesn't want to be cranky. If he still refuses, I say, "oh, you are the mama now? I'm hungry, can you cook me some more food? I need milk, please get me milk!" Generally he giggles, gets the point, and complies. Occasionally he's too tired to be rational so I pick him up, put him in bed and give him cuddles as possible. On those days he's usually asleep within there minutes of being still. The baby is different, of course. That's where I see a big difference between my parenting and that if some friends. I see a lot of people big into NO! and others keep everything out of teach unless it is specifically made for baby. A few others just ignore problems. We try hard to teach early on. I hold the baby while I'm working on the stove. We look together at the flame and I talk about how hot it is. We are near enough to feel heat. I keep little hands from darting into danger, but I will let them get slightly uncomfortable. I try to say things like "Ouch, hot!" Or "gentle hands, that could break!" when something could be dangerous instead of NO for everything. (Or the dreaded "be careful!" I say it myself sometimes, but really, that's the most useless thing to yell. It distracts the poor kid while giving them no useful information.) Mostly, my kids are hyper rational at an early age, so I parent what I have. This appalls some of my friends and family, some of whom hold the idea of "if you don't teach them to instantly obey you, they won't learn to obey God/the government and will be bounds for hell/jail." Thankfully it had worked well enough and my kids are naturally polite enough that they are well behaved kids and casual aquaintences believe us to be far stricter than we are.
  15. That's sad. Our library system is good about keeping books. They'll pare down, of course, so if they get several copies per library of a big release, eventually they'll have just 3 in the system and you have to request a copy, but you get it within the week, generally. We have a big teen space with both computers and lots of books. The next county over is just sad. The shelves are always near empty as they don't keep anything that isn't either a new release or commonly assigned in school.
  16. I live in the Atlanta area, and we always closer for big ice storms, which tend to bring down lots of limbs and power lines, but recently schools have lived in fear of a storm popping up mid day and having kids caught on buses our at school. A couple of years ago, during my daughter's one semester in public school (Kindergarten), they decided mid day to close schools abruptly. Like, we got sent a text telling us schools were closing on twenty minutes. We were able to get our kids, but it was a real mess. I know one mom with a daughter the same age as mine who is homeschooling in large part because the school lost her child that day. She got misplaced in the shuffle to separate bus riders from car riders, and when her mom showed up it took them half an hour to find her.
  17. I try to avoid it, but occasionally I feel a real need to do something. I sometimes yell at my kids and have to apologize, but usually I'll make a hooting sound out stamp my feet in a crazy dance. Those things start off angry but turn silly. They don't always make me really get all the way to the point of laughing, but my kids laugh, which generally puts them in a good enough mood they are no longer pushing every button I have. I've been avoiding getting to that spot very well recently, but last year, when I was heavily pregnant with three young kids running around and a husband about to deploy at New Year's, I was kind of a mess. There was a lot on my plate that no one could take off for me, and there were lots of emotions and hormones I just had to deal with. It wasn't a great time, and my goal was just to not emotionally scar the children (or physically, but I was thankfully no where near risking that).
  18. Would they like some kind of speakers and music playing device set-up? I would say a stereo, but I think that term is well out of date at this point. Whatever they call such things these days.
  19. We'd move into the expensive, largely walkable, section of town with a great University, museums, interesting enrichment activities, sports with kids whose parents put academics before sport, etc. We'd have a French tutor come in three or four times a week. Someone would clean and cook for us. We'd have a giant yard and an area to host a good group of kids, so we'd have people over to play on a regular basis and be able to recruit "classmates" for foreign language and other things where it helps to have a small group. I'd have time, thanks to the maids, to self study math and other things, but we'd also get tutors whenever it seemed beneficial. We'd travel a lot and host exchange students to help broaden my kids' understanding of culture s around the world.
  20. It sounds like this is something you are working out, but I want to say I share your trouble a little. It's hard, especially with gifted only/oldest kids to have reasonable expectations and know what growth looks like. I struggle with this, too, and have had to apologize to my oldest a few times. When my oldest was fine, I hated hearing, "she's still so young!" but that didn't make it less true. I knew I'd be intense with my kids, which is why I have four little ones to spread the intensity over. Right now there is virtually no chance of me not being needed in any given moment! I'm not sure that I could recommend this particular approach to forced laissez faire parenting, though.
  21. You made me curious, so I looked up the common core standards for high school geometry, and proofs are included in the requirements.
  22. I started to think this, then I married a police officer and I hear the saddest of stories, and I can't claim that anything I experienced compares. Not just abuse things, but people calling the police in their son for violently destroying the house and dh rolls up with back up and finds out the son is five and had dumped his chicken nuggets on the floor. I hope that kid has Mr Rogers or Daniel Tiger to show him a glimpse of regular life and teach him to manage his emotions because the adults in his life clearly didn't. My dh stayed for about an hour and taught some deep breathing to the kid and talked with the parents about more effective parenting strategies (their method for when he yelled was to yell louder so he could still hear them yelling at him). He does a lot of that kind of thing while policing, and there are so many families where no one knows what to do with emotions at all. Some of them turn abusive and more just continue a cycle of dysfunction, often criminal dysfunction, that likely mirrors what some here have experienced and that others of us can barely imagine.
  23. We have delayed the big Thanksgiving meal that is supposed to be at dh's grandmother's house. His grandfather is in the hospital. He has Parkinson's and can no longer swallow, which means big decisions have to be made, thankfully not by me. The hope is that he will be home (though on hospice care) by Sunday and we can have a big Thanksgiving dinner there around him. I think his grandmother will be hoping for a lively distraction then, or at least I hope so. My kids are young enough that they will either be almost oblivious to impending death or else sobbing puddles at the thought of someone dying. They don't have much in between.
  24. In college I was known for being very protective of my personal space, but few people realized that, to me, touch expressed too much affection to be given lightly. Now with for young kids including a nursing baby I'm pretty touched out all the time, but I know it's really important for them so I keep going. I look forward to when it can be less frequent, as in not constant, and therefore more meaningful. Right now, in fact, all four kids are in bed with me trying to find part of me they can press up against.
  25. I feel like we are that family since we are bringing just a salad, but it's because all the older family members claim absolutely everything and everything I suggest gets shot down. Possibly my mother in law doesn't trust me not to bring something unusual, like vegetables that haven't been boiled beyond recognition or slathered in cream of mushroom. I'm pretty sure they are happy to do it and not holding it against me and that it will be my turn in a few years.
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