My son is football these days. He eats and sleeps and breathes football. He loves Sunday. The only problem he has with watching football remains what I have always hated about watching football: the junk the networks decide to advertise during the breaks.
Do I really want to see a man lying in a pool of his own blood, CBS? Hey Fox, is Stewie's obsession with Bryan's saliva really worthy to show to millions of young football fans? It's disgusting, you network half-wits! The NFL has Play 60 ads airing right next to this stuff because they know the kids are watching. I have a hard time believing that the networks don't know their own demographics.
I've harped on this issue before--and I don't want to turn this into a gripe blog, but these ads are killing my love for the NFL. Taste and restraint in selecting the ads needs to return not soon, but now.
My favorite tool to teach geography, besides actual maps and globes is the amazing freeware of Google Earth. In the history of the world, no tool has been made that comes close to this fantastic software for teaching kids the majesty, the marvel and the mystery that is our earth.
My son's math book used a table of the world's more prominent mountains. Everest, Fuji, the Matterhorn and Colorado's own Pikes Peak were in that table. To spice up the day, we just switched to geography and used Google Earth to view satellite imagery of all these mountains and more. For example, with Mt. Everest, we saw how it was merely the tallest of many peaks clustered around it, while at Mt. McKinley, we viewed its solitary wonder. Looking closer at Denali, we saw the glaciers.
"What is that? A highway?" my son asked. He couldn't believe that what he saw were rivers of ice from year after year of snowfall actually running down a mountain valley, carving its sides like a sanding belt and carrying a pile of sludge to a--I'm getting excited too...Can you tell?--moraine and usually creating a tarn (lake). His eyes nearly popped out of his head when I told him that he had swam (swum?) in a glacial tarn only a year or two ago. I took him to Grand Lake. I popped inside the photo bubble to show him the small beach we stayed at and the small harbor he and I had braved. He still remembered how cold it was, and was it ever!
Today, my son learned about glaciers because we had the flexibility that he never, never would have had in a class-based school. Oh, he would have learned about glaciers, tarns and moraines eventually, but once the test was done, he'd have forgotten them. My son and daughters are too bright and too unique to shovel into those schools. You know what? Your kids are too.
Today was a good day homeschooling. I love these days.
I've been having a lot of theological discussions with my eldest daughter, a lot of it revolving around knowing God's will and whether this event or that event was God's will. Is a baby born to a single parent God's will? Is the death of an innocent child? She was trying to reconcile God's role in these sorts of situations. Did He cause them? Did He allow them? Why does good come from a "bad" or immoral situation and why does evil come from a positive and moral situation?
Just a little, light-hearted discussion about fate, God, good and evil. If anyone thinks parenting is a breeze, try weaving a free-will defense into a conversation with a 12 year-old. I think that despite my help, she actually understands a good deal.
Helping her process through stuff helps me process too. It's so easy to get all twisted up inside over friends who lose their young child for seemingly no reason. Showing my daughter how God chooses to limit Himself actually lets me re-explore the abstract concepts and reconnect it to the concrete examples. It doesn't answer every question, but it gives me the basis for asking the right questions in a meaningful way.
The more I look at parenting, especially after trying to explain such things, the more I realize that God designed it for us to identify--even if it's just a little bit--with Him.
For the past 15 years, I have been trying to get hold of a CD of an album that I purchased on cassette when it was brand new. It was called Kaleidoscope by Keith Thomas published on the Dayspring label. Here's the track listing:
Te Deum
It's Only Natural
Pinwheel
Imagine
Home Away From Home
Arms Of Love
Suspicious Heart
Kaleidoscope
The reason I'm looking for it is that one track was used in our wedding and it was a beautiful song. This year marks our 15th year together and it makes it a sentimental treasure. The rest of the album has some great instrumentals and a few vocals that are beautiful messages that years after hearing it, still impact me.
Because my life here has been good to me/As I pass through, You supply me with all I need/Life here has been good to me, in this home away from home...
and another,
Maybe I'll fly/Maybe I'll fall/You'll be my friend/Right through it all/I've got Your arms of love around me...
Simple messages, those, but they are so very profound as I age and bear witness to these simple verses. At the age of 17, I needed the messages they gave me. At 35, they are reminders and promises.
Now ask me if I can find it. Yahoo! doesn't have it. Someone is selling it used over at Amazon, but at a high price that if you know us, you know I couldn't afford this even saving for a year. Does anyone reading this blog have this or know where I can find this for a more reasonable price?
I find this interesting in that the homeschool students passed, but the public school teachers admitted that they could not. The bias against homeschoolers is truly scary sometimes. Intellectual abandonment? I guess the kids showed them.
Ronald Reagan was right. No more dangerous words in the English language have been spoken than, "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you." The danger comes when fallible humans think that they can make it their business to help other fallible humans. They may be able to, but because they're fallible, their help is not perfect for the situation and often it fails to solve the majority of the problem.
Take for example, our government-regulated, low-flow toilets. Unless you have a "pressurized" system, these toilets frequently require extra help disposing of solid waste. They were legislated because people thought we were flushing away perfectly good tap water that could be conserved. While the road to hell is paved with good intentions, I'm convinced these toilets are at the rest stops along the way.
Another example is our Social Security Disabilty Determination system, a well-intentioned debacle that is all but killing those it was intended to help. In summer 2006, I filed my paperwork with the SSD system. Every doctor I've been to in the last two years has agreed that I am disabled. Yet, here we are, leaving the summer of 2008 and I still don't have a favorable decision. Mired in red tape and bureaucrats, this government system tries to help those people who need it, those who have worked until an injury or illness made it impossible, but in the end, SSD drives those same people into bad credit, bankruptcy and yes, even suicide because of their ineptitude.
It is a difficult thing to admit, especially for left-leaning Americans and outright socialists, but the government is very poor at improving peoples lives. It's the reason so many talk about faith-based initiatives. Those organizations that realize the nature of man and work with it instead of against it will find greater success. They are morally driven to help people and are less vulnerable to corruption (key on less vulnerable, not invulnerable).
If you are looking to the government, you are already desperate. If you are hoping for real help and maybe some validation for your suffering, the government will likely be unable to provide it. Instead, try doing what the faith-based people do. They look to God as their Provider and their Source. They take God as their ultimate supplier, not the government because they know that the government is made up of broken people whose desire to help is choked in a monolithic culture of bureaucracy. They know that God will work through them and take care of those who wrong them. In short, they work for the Big Guy and He takes their work seriously.
It's encouraging to look at all the comments posted at Marsha's blog. It's even better being able to see what HSB is doing to reach out to one of their own. There isn't much you can do to make life easier for a bereaved family, but they're doing all they can.
Death stinks. There are other ways to say it, but I consider this a family blog. Death really is the worst. It means a separation, a heart-rending loss of staggering proportions. It's a leaving, a departure and a goodbye that makes the breath catch in our throats. How can human hearts survive it?
But somehow, the sun manages to come up the next morning. It's Death + Day 1, and if we sleep at all, it's in spite of a heart that rages against the loss. Hope for anything is beyond the horizon and it's a cold grayness that descends over everything. How long this lasts is anyone's guess, but it seems forever until the music returns to the notes, the flavor returns to the food and laughter returns to the heart.
Somehow, the joy of life will return. Things will be different, but it will return.
Chrisitians have a hope that this world doesn't truly grasp. In a way, most of us don't grasp it either. When Jesus referred to his own death, He said,
You will grieve, but your grief will turn to joy. A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world. (John 16)
Right now, we feel the pain. We know nothing but the pain of the process. The hope of Christians is that this pain will eventually be forgotten in the joy of our homecoming. This hope is very distant while enduring the pain of death, but nevertheless, it exists. Someday, it will be fulfilled.
What do we say to those profoundly affected by loss? We mourn with those who mourn. We stand by them, shed tears, and live beside them for as long as they need us. I've written more about this before as recently as May. I don't want to turn WW into a grief blog, but this just seems like where we're at lately.
Another one of my friends--Marsha Drews--has lost her child in a completely unexpected and traumatic way.
Right now the questions are one word. How? Another? God?
I don't get it. I just don't get it. How can the death of a child do anything but carve a gaping wound in the heart of a family? This is not ...it just ...I don't know.
When I can coherently type, I'll let you know. Please pray for Marsha and her family.
Dave Long, a county commisioner in northern Colorado, opines that Preschool Is No Longer An Option. Mr. Long states that in order to be ready for kindergarten, children must already qualify under a long litany of criteria. According to his article, every child entering kindergarten must already:
Be able to get along in a large group of children.
Be able to sit still and pay attention.
Be interested in learning.
Be potty trained.
Know numbers one through 15 and the letters of the alphabet.
Recognize and be able to identify the letters in their first name.
Recognize shapes including circles, squares, rectangles, triangles, ovals, hearts, cones and stars.
Be able to identify body parts, including eyes, nose, mouth, ears, ankles, etc.
Recognize the eight basic colors.
Be able to hold a pencil and scissors the correct way for hand preference.
Know basic manners and social skills.
Be able to tie their own shoes.
Be able to follow two- or three-step directions, showing the ability to remember and follow though.
Entrance exams for Kindergarten? When I was a child, this was what kindergarten was for. It was for getting ready for school by learning how to hold a pair of scissors, how to read my own name, and how to tie my own shoes. I should mention that I failed that last part of shoe tying until the middle or end of first grade. Thank God for velcro!
So today's students are going to preschool to learn what I used to learn in Kindergarten. This leads me to a very important question How is it that today's students spend more years in school and yet graduate from it knowing less than the children of my generation? More importantly, how are students who are homeschooled until they are 18 know so much more and test so much higher than their public school peers*, despite the extra year advantage given the school students?
The question now is obvious: Is preschool really no longer optional? Or is it just an attempt by a broken system to try to fix itself without adding more grades, like 13, 14, and 15? Should we really be pushing children out of their homes at the ripe old age of 4? Are they ready for such stress, or is this just the system's Rumplestiltskin solution, saying "you didn't teach the child anything! Now, give me your baby!"
Parents in Colorado need to know that they have a better choice. They have a low-cost alternative and one not nearly so heart rending as giving your child to a preschool. Keep them home and let them learn the entrance exam for Kindergarten in their own way and on their own schedule. Homeschoolers retain the home field advantage and produce top students in record time.
This morning was one of those golden moments in homeschooling that we've missed quite a bit over the summer. Yesterday, my wife was teaching our 9 year-old (Quarterback) and 12 year-old (Narniagirl) how to diagram sentences. Today, my 5 year-old daughter (Katiebelle) comes in, waaay before her brother and sister are up, and she has--on notebook paper in purple marker--diagrammed the title of her "school" book, Come On, Snoopy. She even had her rocket ship for compound subjects and verbs, but she called it her jet. I guess that's what Snoopy used to catch up.
This is the same daughter that watches Prince of Egypt and later starts singing snippets of "Let My People Go," but instead of the repeated line "Thus says the Lord," she sings, "Upset the law, Upset the law..." It worked for her.
"What is that? A highway?" my son asked. He couldn't believe that what he saw were rivers of ice from year after year of snowfall actually running down a mountain valley, carving its sides like a sanding belt and carrying a pile of sludge to a--I'm getting excited too...Can you tell?--moraine and usually creating a tarn (lake). His eyes nearly popped out of his head when I told him that he had swam (swum?) in a glacial tarn only a year or two ago. I took him to Grand Lake. I popped inside the photo bubble to show him the small beach we stayed at and the small harbor he and I had braved. He still remembered how cold it was, and was it ever!
For the past 15 years, I have been trying to get hold of a CD of an album that I purchased on cassette when it was brand new. It was called Kaleidoscope by Keith Thomas published on the Dayspring label. Here's the track listing:
