Eclectic Amateur

Two of the advanced students in our co-op‘s Stage Combat class, showing off at the end-of-year performance.

Well. I had a definite “how did I get this old so soon?” moment this week.

At our homeschooling co-op, this semester there is a fencing class. The instructor knows that, back in the day, I did a bit of fencing. So, this week he says to me “Come on, Zach — my equipment’s your size, you can suit up and help give the kids a workout.”

How could I resist?

But, then I made my mistake. I started to make my disclaimer, that I hadn’t actually fenced épée much ever, and beside, I hadn’t actually been in a bout since …

And realized that the correct ending of that sentence was “… since before any of you kids were born.”

Ah, well. As the saying goes, “old age and treachery beat youth and skill every time.” The results? Let’s just say that for these young padawans, “much to learn, you still have.”

New blog! (OK, not that new, but I’m slow…)

Our friend Mary Lund is now blogging at A Homestead Daughter about her life as, well… it’s pretty obvious from the title, now isn’t it?

Today is the one-year anniversary of Pope Benedict XVI’s Regensburg Address.

As part of our homeschool co-op responsibilities, I find myself about to teach a class on logic.

Using Son #1 as a guinea pig for the class, I ran through the intro with him last night, and needed to find some explanation of why logic and reason matter, and most especially, why they should matter to us as Christians.

My shower-powered inspiration this morning was that I’ve already seen such an explanation, and just need to look up Regensburg. It was a nice coincidence to find out that today is the talk’s anniversary.

Go, read. It’s more lucid (and more important) than anything I have to say.

Another stealth homeschooling endorsement:

The mindset that leads to consolidation in agriculture, so evident in the chicken business, has also taken place to an alarming degree in human culture, especially in consolidated schooling. Just as we herd more animals into confinement buildings, we herd more children into classrooms. Then we have little choice but to follow the rule of the chicken factory: one size fits all. And we justify both kinds of concentration camps with that all-American article of faith: it’s cheaper per unit; we can’t afford to do otherwise. Then we wonder why we must de-beak the chickens and frisk schoolchildren for firearms.

From All Flesh Is Grass, by Gene Logsdon (p. 137)

Seen on a local homeschool email list (names withheld to protect the guilty):

Mom #1: .., it is always refreshing to hear about other homeschoolers losing steam these last few days/weeks. Shall we just move school outside and forget the cleaning?

Mom #2: That’s exactly what we did today! 🙂 Too beautiful to stay inside. We read together on the lawn, worked on grammar, and the kids bossed each other around in Latin … homeschooling at its bestest. 🙂

Quick! What wild-eyed, harebrained, impractical radical recently made this statement to the press?

The U.S. educational system, K through 12, has essentially failed.

If you guessed co-founder of Intel (and Presidential Medal of Freedom winner) Gordon Moore,you would be right. Here’s the context from the interview:

EET: Craig Barrett [who in May will become Intel’s next chairman, replacing Andrew Grove] has been talking a lot lately about the problems in our educational system. What do you think?

Moore: The U.S. educational system, K through 12, has essentially failed. Our universities seem to be the envy of the world, but even there we are not getting the number of foreign students we used to get. And they tend to go home [after getting a degree], whereas they used to stay.

Yet Another Reason to Homeschool™, I think.

To be fair, Moore is not actually endorsing homeschooling here. He’s “just” diagnosing the existing K-12 system as fundamentally broken.

Being a homeschooling dad definitely forces me to retain the “Eclectic Amateur” title. How else could it be, when in the same weekend I end up having to explain both the intricacies of presidential primary mechanics and help with tabulating and calculating body mass ratios for various dinosaurs for my eight-year old?

Bringing those two things together, has anyone else noticed that while the Political Graveyard exists for dead political dinosaurs (thanks to the good work of Larry Kestenbaum), there does not seem to exist a similar site to catalog dinosaur fossils? Am I the only one who thinks that it would be a nice resource to have available on the web for questions like “how many Diplodocus skeletons have actually been found? How complete were they? What was their size variation? Where were they found and where are they now?” As far as I can tell, these are questions whose answers can not be Googled and seem to require Serious Research from Serious Professional Paleontologists to answer.

How many rocks did CBS have to turn over to find a case of “homeschooled” kids dying from neglect?

How much coverage have they given Terri Schiavo?

And which one of these stories is front page right now at cbsnews.com?

Screwtape and friends must be working overtime.

God have mercy.

After a great off-peak field trip, you can go to McDonald’s with the other homeschoolers and no one orders their kids a Happy Meal®.