h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

[lilil]
was once admonished by instructor for wearing trousers to college class after having walked a mile through deep snow to get there

[still not here]

Daughter number 2 (age 10) is impatiently awaiting both Lemony Snicket's and JK Rowling's latest offerings. I tried to get her to read Pullmans's His Dark Materials, but she didn't go for it. Maybe I'll try again.

Garius, you make good points. I just know that I would be a poor home-schooling parent. I love my child to death, but there are moments when I don't like her very much, and frankly, both of us are a bit too alike for me to be able to teach her. Well, that and she loves math and science, both of which I suck at!

Of course, the fact that the public school here has no art, and no music, means we will be looking for a private school as soon as possible. My mother just about choked on her own spit, she was so mad, and she's agreed to help us pay for it.

I once had a teacher pin me to the wall with his hand because I informed him that we had watched the same filmstrip 3 days in a row. He told me he didn't like smart##ses in his classes.

There's something to be said for getting rid of tenure.

Hi all:
I am pleased to announce that (having spent the day in bed asleep) my tooth is hardly hurting at all! Still daredn't eat though - but the good news is I've lost that last little bit of weight to put me in the "ok" category of the weight charts the s use!

Courtesy & Gw7en:
...last year when I did my music technology course (which incidentally I didn't finish but still got a certificate for what I had passed) I was 31 and surrounded by 16 - 21 year olds....maybe it's an unusual case but I found them open-minded, intelligent and interesting company. They responded to teasing about their dress sense very well too!

GL:
I thoroughly enjoyed and wholeheartedly agree with your schooling rant! If/when P and I decide to have children, home schooling will be top of the list of education options

{[caer csd] I would be too much of a push over for home schooling, any excuse for bunking off and we would all be heading for the High Street and a spot of window shopping.

Glad you're feeling better and thinner Candi. Our bathroom scales must have succumbed to the humidty in there as they don't register lbs anymore, just stones, which had me fooled for a couple of months. I then switched the scales over to kilos and got an unpleasant surprise after doing the maths! Back to the elipitical exerciser and crosstrainer thing that H made me buy and rarely uses himself!}

I'd be more enthuiastic about home schooling if it wasn't so dominated by the Christian far-right here in Montana. If anyone watched PBS' Frontier House last spring, then prepare to be surprised. The Clune family, the ultra-rich Californians, decided to home school their children once they came back to the 21st Century. The Clune kids, Justin, Aine, and Conor, didn't want to go back to public school--they felt they wanted to spend more time together as a family and that the California school system didn't satisfy them. This I found out courtesy of Mark Glenn, the Tenneessee husband on the show, whom I met a few weeks ago here in town. Mark loved Montana so much he quit his job and moved back.

{[caer csd] Mark Glenn is , we loved the way he went feral and left that harridan! I hope he is really happy in his new life.}

Candi -

I find the 16 - 21 year olds open minded and interesting to speak with. It's just that when I have worked for 10 hours and then go to school it's a little hard to listen to some of them talking about how hard it is to juggle 3 classes a week.

That rant set aside, the insights of a generation that has not been jaded by the "real" world are definitely interesting.

Courtesy

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I was extremely annoyed to discover that my education was inferior to that of my classmates when I went to college - turned out that the teaching in my school had been very lax to say the least - all of a sudden my top grades weren't worth much but rather average, and I had to work very hard to catch up with the others...

This was the time (late 70ies) when some schools (mine, among others) tried a new sort of pedagogy involving democracy and participation - ha! How smart was that, letting a bunch of study-tired 15-year-olds have influence on the lessons?

Ti, that sounds like the alternative teaching methodology used by one of my elementary schools. They were trying to find a better way to teach. The method they employed was, simply put, terrible. They had an "open plan" classroom that incorporated three classes of the same grade into one common area. The teachers then would have three ratings of students; good, average and poor. That made it quite visible who the "smart kids" and the "dumb kids" were. A lot of the students were berated because they were "dumb" (myself included) to the point of making some parents pull their children out of the school. It was, without a doubt, the worst schooling experiance that I ever endured.

On the flip side of that, I had a classic education, where we were expected only to regurgitate what the teachers told us, and to drive any hint of independent thinking out of our minds. When I got to college (the first time, in 86), there were kids who were talking about things I hadn't even begun to think about, and I felt really out of the loop.

So maybe the problem isn't the education part, but the system part. Grind 'em out and hope they float.....

ignore my empty post. It just is a momument to the education I got before the 5th grade...


I guess in one way I was lucky that we moved around so much when i was a kid. I only had to endure that particular school for one year. I do wish I had maintained relationships with people for longer than a year or two before I hit highschool. My four years of public highschool were the best education I have had. I was exposed to a great deal and I was lucky enough to find the two best teachers in the world. Ruthie campbell and Jill Sorenson taught me that I could like to write and how to write respectivly. Too bad they did not teach me better grammar .

My youngest stepson had a learning disability. He was put into special ed clsses that were intended to just maintain order - not teach them anything. I remember one p/t meeting we went to where they showed us his math worksheets. They had 100 marked at the top of each sheet. When I looked at them about half of the answers were wrong. I told the teacher that if he had a wrong answer, it should be marked wrong. The teacher told me that they gave all of them 100's to make them try harder. I didn't understand it then and I still don't. We found him a private school that expected him to work like everyone else, and he did much better.

The results of the meeting were rather lukewarm, but for a good reason! On Tuesday, the superintendent was presented with 610 signatures (gathered in ONE DAY) protesting the removal of our kids from the best school in the district to the worst, all for the non-existent kids of wealthy families. I guess he got the message, because this morning, right before the meeting, he issued a press release announcing that that option was no long viable.

You'd be happy to know, Caer, that Mark not only quit his job and moved back here, but he divorced Karen. What happened was that he felt empty after returning to the modern world (remember how he said that he could live in 1883 with the other families for the rest of his life?), this spring the owner of the ranch on which Frontier House was filmed called him up and invited him out for the month of May. He stayed at the cabin of the producer, which was right down the road from the filming site. Anywho, June rolled around and the rancher asked him if he would help with chores (cattle drives, fencing, et al.) on the ranch for the summer and Mark agreed. When he has free time he gives lectures across the country on what the experience was like and he's writing a book (naturally! ). In the meantime, through mutual friends, he met Ronnie. She organized a march across South Dakota earlier this year to protest treatment of wild mustangs (the Bureau of Land Management, on whose land they graze here and there throughout the West, mostly in Nevada, Wyoming, and Montana was selling them off for dog food). They hit it off and now they're shacked up together.

He's a really genuine, warm guy--he walks right up to people and shakes their hand, introduces himself, and actually listens to others--and very handsome IRL. He's filled back out again, and is somewhat less "feral". He's very proud of the fact that he doesn't own a cell phone, a beeper, or any other annoying trappings of modernity that keep us tied to technology. Or, as he said "if you want to talk to me you have to do it face to face!"

[[d'E]]
[[]]

(those are cards for cardboard cutouts)

Well, I don't know, GL. Not that I'd dispute that homeschooling doesn't have it all over school in a lot of ways, but I think you might be being a bit harsh. The main problem is that it's a one size fits all thing, which, well, doesn't fit all. And can't really.

On the other hand, I'm quite interested in hearing you expansions. If you don't know it already, I'll give you some ammo to add on the subject of exam design

And really should have found that last LED...

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Off to the dentist to sort this tooth out properly (happily still pain free]