I have maintained two blogs for some time, one because there were advantages to homeschoolblogger that aren't available to blogspot.  I am, however, finding it difficult to work on and fine tune two blogs, and so I am no longer going to post here, but at http://lifetimelearning.blogspot.com.  There you will also find a link to my blogs which have been recorded for radio.

Thanks for reading, and please come to see me at Lifetime Learning

I grew up in the space age.  I am just old enough to remember my father getting me out of bed to watch the “giant leap for mankind”.  As a teen, I gazed at the stars with a telescope and still wonder what’s out there.  I’ve cheered the space shuttle, and agonized over the disasters.  I’ve wondered what’s beyond what I can see with a naked eye.

Yet, in today’s world, I cannot help but wonder what we are doing spending billions and billions going back into space.  The Europeans are heading to the moon again.  We are hoping to reach Mars. 

There is much news about global warming, but very little news about what they’re doing about it.  Alaska is melting, “which may be triggering a self-perpetuating climate time bomb”, Greenland is dumping fresh water into the ocean which may cause Europe to cool, and any day, you can drive to the nearest big city and see a dirty, brown cloud over it. 

Yah know what I think?  I think the people in power, those with money, those in Congress, are planning to leave.  Yup, and though I’m fit for space flight, (Are you?  Take a quiz.) I haven’t the more than 20 million dollars it takes to book a berth, like this woman. And do you think they’ll take us peons?  No, you’ll have to pay for a spot.  The scientists and politicians, they know this planet is doomed, and they’re planning to colonize somewhere else, only they’re not saying, and they’re not taking you!

So here’s my plan.  Let’s take all the billions of dollars they are spending on the space station and space programs, and use the money on alternate energy programs.  We can start with the government buildings.  They sure use a lot of hot air.  We could install solar panels on the houses of lower income people, so they can use the money for more interesting things, like food.  We could build light rail systems.   Now there’s a novel idea.  We could actually move away from dependence on oil!

Let’s take some of those billions and feed the starving babies I see in the news, give medicine to the AIDS victims, who leave those babies orphaned.  Let’s use some to give people clean drinking water. Let’s use it to save what we have now, instead of trying to find a way out. 

My father said he is tired of having to press “1” to hear an automated system in English.  And so opened the door to the topic of illegal immigration.  He didn’t disagree with a local politician who promises that, if given my vote, he’ll see that a wall is built along our border to stem the flow of people sneaking over in the night. 

And whom, I asked him, do you think will build that wall?  The Mexicans, of course.  No one else would work for low wages in the hot Texas climate doing thankless work.  And did he think that the builders wouldn’t know every inch of it and tell their friends the best place to cross over?

Does he think a wall will stop them?   An image flashes of  National Guardsmen atop the wall with vats of boiling oil.  These people are willing to cross the ocean in a boat made for half the number of people on it to get to our shores.  They are willing to risk death in the back of a hot truck.  Come to think of it, when did a wall stop anyone?  The Appalachian, and later Rocky Mountains, natural walls, did not stem the flow of white settlers into Native American territory even at the risk of a deadly attack.  

No, the wall is a breadcrumb thrown from our politicians’ tables to appease us, make us think they have a plan.  At the same time, their gardens and houses are kept by Hispanic people.  They clean our barns and build our fences.  They become part of our community. 

Until and unless we admit our need for such workers, and try to become part of a solution to the problem that makes them leave their own part of the world to support their families, they will come. 

Dad thinks they’ll take over “the world”, his world.  And maybe they will.  Maybe, hundreds of years from now, everyone in this part of the world will speak Spanish, just as hundreds of years prior, no one spoke English here.  In the meantime, I’ll try to learn a few Spanish words and bring a smile to the face of someone far from home.

William reports that he cannot possibly eat his dinner, as his belly is full, but there is room for one doughnut.  Two more days until his cast comes off!!  Yeah!!  He is nervous about having it removed given his history with cutting implements.

Tomorrow, we'll be going on an archaeological dig at the Farnsley-Moreman Landing.

My new word for the day:  metacognition.  That is, if it is a word, as I don’t find it in my Webster’s Dictionary.  I got this out of our county newspaper this week.  A well-meaning teacher wrote about how to teach children to read.  In a quarter page article, she at length described metacognition as the key to teaching children to read.  That is, children must be taught to think about one's reading while reading.  During and after reading, teachers will get the kids to work through the process of reading by letting them ask questions and by modeling how to ask questions.  Even the thought of sitting through this makes my eyes glaze over. 

Contrast this with David Albert in Homeschooling and the Voyage of Self-Discovery:  A Journey of Original Seeking in which he writes:

“Let me let you in on a dirty little secret.  All children, in a literate culture, learn to read.  “

With the exceptions of children with developmental or learning disabilities, children in abusive situations or children in literature poor environments, all children will learn to read.   Granted, they will learn at different ages, in different ways and for different reasons.  Some children learn early, pleasing their parents with their genius.  Others, at age ten, barely read and worry the adults around them until one day, they pick up high school level material that interests them and off they go! 

How do I personally know this?  William asked the other day for a "maz-a-gine" with just words to read while he ate his lunch.  (At age four, he knows a few letters, and definitely cannot read in the traditional sense of the word.)  He asked me to give him one without pictures.  I tried a Highlights Magazine.  No, it had drawings in it.   Smithsonian?  It has only a few photos.  No, he wanted one that had just words. 

I had to laugh.  He’s seen his sisters sit and read as they ate their lunches, and was imitating them, looking at words that as yet had no meaning.  But surrounded by books and maz-a-gines, he knows reading is a desirable and valued activity, even if he can only imitate it.

I am often asked how I got my girls to be such avid readers.  I remember being laughed at for reading to Lauren while she was still so young that she could not sit up.  And as they got older, anytime they wanted lap time, we read and read and read.  I took crates of books from the library, which we visited weekly.  They saw me read, they saw their dad read.   

As David Albert says:

“Children cannot be taught to read; at best, we make it possible for them to learn to read (and that’s probably being charitable)”

And

“We do not have to train children to learn, or even account for their learning; all we have to do is avoid interfering with it.”

I had the pleasure of attending traffic school last night.  Yeah, yeah, I did go last year, and it didn’t take.  All I can say is that

1.  The class was full
2.  We were all innocent (overheard from conversations around me)
3.  (Learned in class) Our county has government money to target motorists because of excessive fatalities (on the Interstate, which is NOT where I was pulled over).  They’ve expanded this to catching anyone two feet over the change in speed limit.

The class wasn’t overly painful, except for the loss of my evening.  The “professor” fancied himself a stand-up comic and liberally peppered his presentation with jokes on driving, marriage, and women.  His sarcastic jokes on marriage might explain why at 60-ish, he’s never married.   I sat unsmiling, the reluctant student, forced to class but unwilling to participate.

Yet, I did pick up a few useful tips and facts that I’ll share with you:

Seatbelts:
In KY, they can now pull you over for not wearing a seatbelt, and you’ll be fined for each person not wearing a belt in your car.  You can, however, legally jump on the back of a motorcycle, no seatbelt, no helmet, and no leather clothing to protect your skin, and careen down the highway at 65 mph.  Does this make sense?

Car seats:
In our fair state, children under 40 inches must be in a child safety seat.  Good law.  Saves lives.  Yet, you can take a  child, put it on a motorcycle, no helmet, and be perfectly legal.  Make sense?  You cannot put the child in a dog crate secured in the back of a pick-up truck.  (Some deranged fool was pulled over for this.  I’m glad to be duly warned.)

Buses:
Back to seatbelts, a woman angrily asked why her child’s bus had no seatbelts.  The instructor, very tell-it-like-it-is, said that belts in a bus make it difficult to remove that number of children quickly from a vehicle, and you can’t count on the children being able to get the belt undone, due to injury or not knowing how.  Therefore, no belts make it easier for rescuers to get them out, or for the children themselves to walk out.  Self-releasing devises, such as are used in amusement park rides may not work if the vehicle is damaged, nor fit the variety of passengers.  And, he added that if he did have children, they’d never see the inside of a school bus.

DUI
Though no one there could have been cited for DUI, as you must go to court, they spent a good deal of time on DUI or DWI.  Did you know you can be arrested for DUI even if riding a bicycle or horse? 

Good Tips:
Finally, here are a few tips I heard for the first time and thought ought to be sent on a postcard to every driver:

1. Car seat:  Tape a paper to the back of the car seat with that child’s name, vital information and health insurance written on it.  If in an accident you are both injured, that child will be sent to a Children’s Hospital while you are sent to a more general hospital.

2. If you have other children in the car not in a car seat, you should have the same information on paper on your visor, in the glove box or someplace easily noticed, maybe in an envelope marked “In Case of Emergency”.

3. You should have a pair of good scissors in your car for cutting the straps holding in the car seat for quick removal.

4. You should never remove the child from the car seat until medical personnel have examined the child.

5. You should never drive through our county going even a little over the speed limit.

I’m thinking of becoming a Quaker, maybe Amish, though I don’t think I could give up my computer or dh his blackberry.  Okay, Quaker it is.  Aren’t they pacifists?  I want to have a clear history of pacifism long before my son (or for that matter, my daughters) is old enough to be drafted into the army.   With a new war or threat every few months, I don’t see how drafts will be avoided in the future.

It’s not that I don’t support our troops, I do.  But each and every face I see, killed in action, is a knife to the heart.  Each and every man and woman once laid as a babe in the arms of a woman like me, loved intensely, hope filling a heart for the child’s future.  Each life ended is the end of those possibilities cut short.  I can hardly stand to watch the news, but I look at their faces and try to absorb the meaning of their sacrifice.

I’m having a hard time with these wars and their effectiveness.  A email acquaintance living in Israel wrote:  “Unless and until we/someone gets rid of the terrorists, or disarms them, then Israelis are not safe in Israel, Lebanese are not safe in Lebanon, and Americans are not safe in America....”

What scares me about this statement is that I feel, deep down, that this will never happen.  It would seem that terrorism is here to stay.  There will always be terrorists, whether it is a man shooting Jews in America, or terrorists in Lebanon, there will always be extremists.  The difference will lie in how the world deals with those terrorists.  As long as we deal with them country against country, rather than humans united against terrorists, there will be war.

I can hardly stand to read the paper or look at news magazines.  Photojournalists bring to my home the photos of men and women holding their babies, their little boys and girls the same age as my William, heads bandaged, arms bleeding.  Anguish fills the faces of the parents.  And I think of my William, and the despair I would feel to not be able to protect him from falling bombs. …and the anger I’d feel at the bombers’ country for hurting my innocent child.  I go to him and hug him, thankful that for now, he’s safe and wondering what I, just an ordinary mom, can do for those children not safe.  And I wonder how to become a Quaker.