On the Light Side: Reasons to Ban Homeschooling

Kudos to whoever wrote this. As a former middle school teacher, now a homeschooling parent, I have to say that I got an immense kick out of it.

TOP 10 REASONS TO OUTLAW HOMESCHOOLING

1. Most parents were educated in the underfunded public school system, and so are not smart enough to homeschool their own children.

2. Children who receive one-on-one homeschooling will learn more than others, giving them an unfair advantage in the marketplace. This is undemocratic.

3. How can children learn to defend themselves unless they have to fight off bullies on a daily basis?

4. Ridicule from other children is important to the socialization process.

5. Children in public schools can get more practice "Just Saying No" to drugs, cigarettes and alcohol.

6. Fluorescent lighting may have significant health benefits.

7. Publicly asking permission to go to the bathroom teaches young people their place in society.

8. The fashion industry depends upon the peer pressure that only public schools can generate.

9. Public schools foster cultural literacy, passing on important traditions like the singing of "Jingle Bells, Batman smells, Robin laid an egg..."

10. Homeschooled children may not learn important office career skills, like how to sit still for six hours straight.


Found on the Internet.

A statement of philosophy that I expect is true for all homeschoolers.

Making music

More and more each day, the piano belongs to her.

We've had an electric keyboard ever since I bought one for my wife, to honor the lessons she took in college when we were dating. But with our time consumed by children, by jobs, and by a thousand other things that steal our lives in bite-size pieces, the keyboard sat in the bedroom, and eventually in the living room, a silent member of the family whom we always meant to know better.

We are, after all, a musical family; heck, we're a musical species. Music is so essential to being human that studies have shown a mental link not only between music and speech, but also between music and mathematics, so that becoming "fluent" in an instrument can have other benefits.

At the start of the year, I sat down with Oldest Daughter and outlined a course of music study that would involve practicing piano for at least 30 minutes a day. After all, she had been puttering about with the keyboard for years. It was time to get serious.

The initial lesson was simply to pick a song she knew, start with C-natural, and figure out the tune from there. In the five months since, she also has learned how to begin the song at a different key, and (lately) to play with both hands at the same time, her left hand two octaves lower than her right. Once she is more comfortable with these skills, it'll be time to take it to the final lesson, and learn which chords go with which notes.

Today I heard her play "When Somebody Loved Me," from "Toy Story 2." A couple months ago, it was "Castle on a Cloud" from "Les Misérables." These are songs with fairly straightforward melodies, I suppose, but she's at a place now where she can work out increasingly complex base melodies in increasingly short times. It took her days of practice to work out the notes for "Holy, Holy, Holy." Today she had  Jessie's song worked out in about five minutes.

The progress she has made is obvious even when she goofs off. Five months ago, she gave herself breaks by running her fingers up and down the keyboard in an irritated glissando or by hammering away at the keys in a raging flood of frustration. I would patiently try to wait it out, but invariably either she would walk away on her own, or I would need to remind her to focus and try again.

Now when she takes her leave of the song that's frustrating her, I hear a more delicate ripple of music as her fingers explore the keys on their own and weave the foundations of what one day could become actual songs. She's discovering the distance from one note to the next, and in finding that, she's closing the distance from her soul to the keys.

Some day, if she wants, Oldest Daughter will take formal lessons from an instructor, and she will learn to play piano the formal way, with scales, with metronomes, and with sheets all covered with quavers and breves, with cleffs and staves, with sharps and flats, and with a score of Italian phrases. When she picks up that key, she'll find that it unlocks the discipline and the knowledge that lead to vast new storehouses of musical knowledge that she'll be able to tap whenever she wants. That'll be good.

Until then, though, I think she's discovering the more powerful, more enduring thing. She's learning how to make music, all on her own.

On the Light Side: Things Kids Teach You

Things I've learned as a parent:

1. A king-size waterbed holds enough water to fill a one-floor, 2,000-square-foot house 4 inches deep.
   
2. If you spray hairspray on dust bunnies and run over them with inline skates, they can ignite.
   
3. A 3-year-old's voice is louder than 200 adults in a crowded restaurant.
   
4. If you hook a dog leash over a ceiling fan, the motor is not strong enough to rotate a 42-pound child wearing Batman underwear and a Superman cape. However, if you tie it to a paint can, it is strong enough to spread paint on all four walls of a 20-foot-by-20-foot room.
   
5. You may have to make a few throws before you get a hit, but you should not toss baseballs into the air when the ceiling fan is on. A ceiling fan can hit a baseball a long way.
   
6. Glass windows do not stop a baseball hit by a ceiling fan. Not even if they are double pane.
   
7. When you hear the toilet flush followed by "uh-oh," it is already too late.
   
8. Brake fluid mixed with Clorox makes smoke, and lots of it.
9. If you show an 8-year-old how to use a magnifying glass for wood burning, she may try it on other things.
   
10. Certain Legos will pass through the digestive tract of a child.
    
11. "Play-Doh" and "microwave" do not belong in the same sentence.
    
12. Super Glue? It really is forever.
    
13. An 8-year-old can pick a lock with an old driver's license, even when her father can't.
    
14. No matter how much Jell-O you put in a swimming pool you still can't walk on water.
    
15. Pool filters do not like Jell-O.
    
16. A DVD player will not play a movie if you insert the spinner from Chutes & Ladders.
    
17. Garbage bags do not make good parachutes.
    
18. Marbles in gas tanks make lots of noise during driving.
    
19. You really do not want to know what that odor is coming from.
    
20. Always look in the oven before you turn it on. Plastic toys do not like ovens.
    
21. Ever let your daughter play with the phone while you take a quick trip to the bathroom? Don't. 9-1-1 can get there really fast.
    
22. The spin cycle on the washing machine does not make earthworms dizzy.
    
23. It will, however, make cats dizzy.
    
24. Cats throw up twice their body weight when dizzy.
    
25. Eighty percent of men who read this will try mixing the Clorox and brake fluid.

Found on the Internet.

1,000 Blank White Cards

You have an hour to go with a group of homeschoolers, and the kids have already played Nomic twice. What do you do? You play 1,000 Blank White Cards, of course!

Like Nomic, 1,000 Blank White Cards is a game that seems tailor-made for homeschoolers. Originating in Madison, Wisc., 1,000 Blank White Cards is a game that provides a basic game structure but otherwise allows the players to create the rules as they go. In this case, they do so by filling in blank cards with whatever sort of action, illustration, penalty or other play that they want.

Aside from the creative aspects, the game is fairly basic. Play begins to the dealer's left and continues clockwise, with each person playing a card on either herself or another player, although players are allowed to respond to others' play with further cards. You're allowed to create, alter and even destroy cards however you want, and you can even create cards that evoke the spirit of other card games.

Another group I played 1,000 Blank White Cards with, for instance, saw cards arise with things like "Lose 50 Points If You Don't Have a Water Card." This immediately led to someone creating a "Water" card worth 20 points, and that in turn to a third, "Anti-Water" card. The potential for silliness abounds.

I introduced the game today to Oldest Daughter's logic club after we had completed the day's exercises in critical thinking. I handed each of the students five completely blank cards, explained the basic rules, and let them indulge themselves. Once they had completed their cards, I shuffled the deck, mixed in a few more blank cards, and dealt the first hand.

We played this last weekend at a friend's house, and since everyone playing was in her mid-30s or later, the cards were silly but tilted toward the witty. We had a few cards that said things like "Swap cards with the person on your left" and "Trade places with someone else," but the majority said things like "Sing a Happy Song About Leprosy" and "Tell a Story About Your Teddy Bear." (I interrupted that one with a card that said, simply, "Shut up.")

Play today reflected the age of the players accordingly. They created a lot of cards that involved mildly humiliating or annoying tasks like "Crawl Like a Worm for a Minute" and "Hop Up and Down Until the Game Ends." (I saved that player after a few seconds with a card that read, simply, "Game Over.")

There were a number of cards that referred to specific players, like "Give Card to Joe," which led to some creative arguments among players as to which card should be given to Joe, that card or another one.

The phenomenon I found most interesting was the way players began creating cards to adapt their playing strategies to one another. Fifteen minutes into the game, there were cards being played that read in part "Play Right Away," thus allowing them to interrupt on someone else's turn; or "Card May Not Be Edited," so the player could be guaranteed her way. (Unfortunately for her, someone else played an Override card that allowed the card to be edited anyway.)

The game was a hit, mostly because the kids kept making one another do silly or embarrassing things. I am curious how things would have gone had someone played my card "Elves Attack Your Village. Lose 50 Points," especially since I always add nifty illustrations to my cards, but no one played that, so we never got to see whether a game would develop with points as a goal, or around a fantasy theme.

The game broke up when everybody had to go home, but I sent the kids packing with starter decks that consisted of the cards that they had created and the cards that were specific to them. (I have no use for a card that says "Mourn Billy's Lost Dignity," for instance, since there are no Billys in my family, though Billy's family may use it at some point.)

As they left, one of the moms told me that Nomic has been spreading. Not only has her family played it, she's seen her children teaching their other friends how to play it as well.

And now they have something else to share.

Karate summer camp

If you're looking for a summer camp experience for your kids that will get them moving and maybe even develop a passion for fitness, I can vouch for senseis Mercee and Dovi, who run the program at True North Martial Arts. My second daughter attended summer camp with them two years ago, and enjoyed it so much that she soon became a regular student.

Camp will run from 9 a.m.-2 p.m. weekdays, beginning June 25 and continuing through August. The cost is $150 per week with discounts for multiple weeks, plus registration. (Read more about the camp.)

Sensei Mercee, who owns True North, was an instructor at the former Family Kickboxing Academy on North Fourth Avenue in Highland Park. That school closed in Feburary, but he has brought the same culture of respect, discipline, and fun to his new academy, at 320 Raritan Ave.

Classes are come-when-you-can on Mondays through Thursdays, with kids' sessions beginning at 4:15, 5:15 and 6:15 p.m. Classes for adults start in the evenings. The first lesson is free.

Book club: 'War of the Worlds'

Does your child love to read? Would you like her to read a little bit more? Good news! I'd like to extend one final invitation to join our Monday morning book club as we tackle H.G. Wells' classic novella "The War of the Worlds," beginning at 11 a.m. June 4.

Along with Jules Verne, Wells is widely regarded as one of the progenitors of the science fiction genre. "The War of the Worlds," published in 1898, is one of the first novels ever to tell of an invasion of the earth from outer space. Since it was first published, the book has never gone out of print. It's inspired a number of movies, a TV show in 1988, and (most famously) a radio broadcast by Orson Welles that caused panic in New Jersey and New York.

Our first discussion is set to begin at 11 a.m. June 4, at my house. We're still welcoming new readers, so feel free to come, even if you've never come out before. Because we're getting close to summer camps, I'd like everyone to have finished the first nine chapters by our first meeting. (That should be doable, because they're so short.)

As noted, this is the last selection for the book club this year. We'll be resuming after Labor Day, when my daughter has requested that we give it a focus on science fiction. Feel free to contact me for directions, or with any other questions.