Now, with extra rabies!

May 28, 2009 by ModSchooler.

Our big adventure this week (so far) was seeing a very ill raccoon doing the Zombie Raccoon Stagger down the middle of our neighborhood streets.   Luckily,  we were in the car and the kids noticed it before I’d pulled away, as the neighbor’s children were outside playing and hadn’t noticed the critter lurching in their direction.  We were able to warn them to get inside in time.

I assumed rabies was the disease, but it could also be distemper.  I didn’t know this, but raccoons can get both feline AND canine distemper.  Good reason to keep your housepets up to date on vaccinations, as those are pretty damned contagious.

We called security (our development has a private force of some usefulness), but they opted to call the State Police to come out.  Unfortunately, since we’re in the boonies, it took long enough for them to arrive that Zombie Critter had gone into the woods.

I sent an email to local public radio WAMC show “In Our Backyard”, (which has the eminent NY State Wildlife Pathologist Ward Stone as the resident expert and co-host) to ask for advice on how to handle these situations in the future, and to get some good references so we can educate the community responsibly, not just scare everyone.  Hopefully he’ll respond, because our development is taking a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach that’s really wigging me out.

Posted in General Homeschooling | No Comments »

Testing time

May 28, 2009 by ModSchooler.

Tis the season for standardized testing.  Since we’re in New York State, the requirement is to start doing either a written annual assessment or standardized testing at the end of the year, beginning in 4th grade.

My son is ending 5th grade, and we opted to report testing this year.  I’ve used the CAT-5 complete battery for him in 3rd grade to get acquainted with the format, and to see just how this whole teaching-my-own-kid-at-home thing was actually working.  The CAT tests are not achievement tests, they are nationally-normed standardized ones, so it gave me a picture of where we stacked up compared to the rest of the country.

This time, I’m using the CAT-E, which tests just English Language and Math skills.  The boy is already complaining and wanting to “get it over with”.   I wonder if that will translate into actually applying himself or just marking things to get done…

As much as I don’t like having to report to the district, or anyone, I do like having the option to test against national norms.  Sometimes you can feel very much adrift, and it is nice to see some numbers to validate the work we’ve been doing.  And if the numbers are really abysmal, it serves as a good objective tool to ‘remind’ the student where they need to apply themselves more.   Sort of a counterpoint to me cussing…

Posted in General Homeschooling | No Comments »

Soap Making!

March 22, 2009 by ModSchooler.

I did some research on the basics of cold process soap making, and found that the only ingredients needed to actually make real soap are oil/fat, lye, water.  That’s it.  I was inspired to try it after learning about some colonial ancestors that lived nearby during my latest genealogy kick.  So, we have history, science, and math in one fun project!

There are tons of resources for recipes on the web, but after information overload, I decided to focus on the basics, and use the lye conversion chart at Magestic Mountain Sage.  This enables you to plug in what oil you are using, in whatever amount, and the conversion program spits out the amount of lye you need to add, along with basic soapmaking directions.

I found the pure NaOH (sodium hydroxide) lye made by Roebic at Lowes.  Red Devil is another brand, though some people report not being able to find pure lye (no additives or fragrance, etc.) at the retail store anymore, I had no problem at Lowes.  YMMV.

I used 32 oz. canola oil, straight from the Wesson bottle.  I measured the lye on my kitchen scale (used a paper plate to hold the granules), and added it to the 10oz. water in a large wide-mouth canning jar, and stirred.  I was outside, wearing gloves, eye protection and upwind of the jar to avoid the nasty fumes.  It gets really hot when blending, and you let it cool while getting the other items ready.

I heated the canola oil to 125f  in a stainless steel pot.   When the lye/water mixture had cooled to 125f, I slowly poured it into the oil, and stirred with a plastic slotted spoon to get it combined.  At that point, I switched to my immersion blender, and blasted it for about 30 seconds on and off.

The mixture became more opaque and started thickening.  By about 15 minutes, I’d reached “trace”, a thick custardy texture that supports blobs dropped off the spoon.  At that stage, I poured the glop into my “mold”, which was a silicone baking dish (9″x9”)

Normally, at this stage, you would leave it to cure for 24-48 hours, then cut it into bars, set it in a dry place and leave it to cure for a few weeks.  BLEAH!!

We opted for the quicker oven processing, whereby you preheat the oven to 170f, put your poured soap in, turn the oven off and let it sit for 12-24 hours.  The idea is that the saponification process is rushed along a bit more, and you can use the soap right away.  Our bars are now cut, and on a rack wrapped lightly in cheesecloth (to keep any stray cat hair off the finished product), and left to dry out and harden up more.

I did take a few bars right away, undried, to use as the base for liquid soap.  Simply enough, you grate your soap (I used my food procesor’s grating blade, it’s like grating mozzarella), measure it, and add double the amount of water to it in a big stainless steel pot on the stove.  Heat it up, mix it with the handy immersion blender, let it cool.  I stirred in some glycerin, and bottled the liquid in five different recycled soap dispensers we had around the house.  (for 3 cups soap shavings, I used 6 cups water, 1 T glycerin, and each dispenser got 5 drops or so of essential oils - peppermint, spearmint, lavender, and tea tree oil respectively - NOT all together in one, blech!).

The kids loved this project, and especially enjoyed suiting up with splash goggles and gloves :-)  Stirring was fun, but the blender is even better.   I’m hopeful that this will inspire less bathtime battles.  Yeah, wish me luck on that.

 Soap Making Instructions from Love To Know Crafts

Cold Process - Oven Process from Soapmaker on a Budget

What is Saponification? - Green Mountain Soap Company

Soaps and Soapmaking Theme Page - links to articles, history, etc.

Posted in Home Ec, Science and Math Resources, Neato!, Try This At Home, Hacks, Tweaks and Mods | No Comments »

Website: How to Grow Crystals

November 13, 2008 by ModSchooler.

I haven’t tried any of these recipes yet, but for an exhaustive collection of “grow your own” crystal concoctions, this looks to be a good source. Link: How to Grow Crystals

For inspiration on just how far you could take all this, check out this whole apartment covered in crystals.  TimesOnline: From Bedsit to Paradise

And here’s a video!

Posted in Science and Math Resources, Neato!, Try This At Home | No Comments »

Ancient Rome 3D on Google Earth

November 13, 2008 by ModSchooler.

For Google Earth users, you can add the new gallery Ancient Rome, circa 320AD, to explore 3D models of the city under the reign of Constantine the Great.

And here I was all impressed with the galleries from TV Fool that lets me see TV broadcaster signal strength in 3D glory!

NY Times: Exploring Old Rome Without Air (or Time) Travel

Google Earth

Posted in News, Literature and History Resources, Neato!, General Homeschooling, Try This At Home | No Comments »

Free Speech and Separation of Church and State

November 11, 2008 by ModSchooler.

On Wednesday, 11/12/08, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a Utah case where a religious group, the Summum, is trying to get the town of Pleasant Grove to allow them to donate a monument to the local park across from City Hall.  Said park already has a big ol’ granite Ten Commandments, the Summum want to pay for and install a Seven Aphorisms monument of a similar size.  Hilarity ensues!  Get it, ensues!

Posted in News, Commentary & Reviews | No Comments »

More Dawkins for Kids - Letter to his daughter, age 10

November 10, 2008 by ModSchooler.

I missed this from a couple of years ago, and in light of my previous post about his upcoming book, I thought it’d be good to share.

To my dearest daughter,

Now that you are ten, I want to write to you about something that is important to me. Have you ever wondered how we know the things that we know? How do we know, for instance, that the stars, which look like tiny pinpricks in the sky, are really huge balls of fire like the Sun and very far away? And how do we know that the Earth is a smaller ball whirling round one of those stars, the Sun?
The answer to these questions is ‘evidence’.

Sometimes evidence means actually seeing (or hearing, feeling, smelling….) that something is true. Astronauts have traveled far enough from the Earth to see with their own eyes that it is round. Sometimes our eyes need help. The ‘evening star’ looks like a bright twinkle in the sky but with a telescope you can see that it is a beautiful ball – the planet we call Venus. Something that you learn by direct seeing (or hearing or feeling…) is called an observation.

Often evidence isn’t just observation on its own, but observation always lies at the back of it. If there’s been a murder, often nobody (except the murderer and the dead person!) actually observed it. But detectives can gather together lots of other observations which may all point towards a particular suspect. If a person’s fingerprints match those found on a dagger, this is evidence that he touched it. It doesn’t prove that he did the murder, but it can help when it’s joined up with lots of other evidence. Sometimes a detective can think about a whole lot of observations and suddenly realize that they all fall into place and make sense if so-and-so did the murder.

Scientists – the specialists in discovering what is true about the world and the universe – often work like detectives. They make a guess (called a hypothesis) about what might be true. They then say to themselves: if that were really true, we ought to see so-and-so. This is called a prediction. For example, if the world is really round, we can predict that a traveler, going on and on in the same direction, should eventually find himself back where he started. When a doctor says that you have measles he doesn’t take one look at you and see measles. His first look gives him a hypothesis that you may have measles. Then he says to himself: if she really has measles, I ought to see… Then he runs through his list of predictions and tests them with his eyes (have you got spots?), his hands (is your forehead hot?), and his ears (does your chest wheeze in a measly way?). Only then does he make his decision and say, ‘I diagnose that the child has measles.’ Sometimes doctors need to do other tests like blood tests or X-rays, which help their eyes, hands and ears to make observations.

The way scientists use evidence to learn about the world is much cleverer and more complicated than I can say in a short letter. But now I want to move on from evidence, which is a good reason for believing something, and warn you against three bad reasons for believing anything. They are called ‘tradition’, ‘authority’, and ‘revelation’.

First, tradition. A few months ago, I went on television to have a discussion with about 50 children. These children were invited because they’d been brought up in lots of different religions. Some had been brought up as Christians, others as Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs. The man with the microphone went from child to child, asking them what they believed. What they said shows up exactly what I mean by ‘tradition’. Their beliefs turned out to have no connection with evidence. They just trotted out the beliefs of their parents and grandparents, which, in turn, were not based upon evidence either. They said things like, ‘We Hindus believe so and so.’ ‘We Muslims believe such and such.’ ‘We Christians believe something else.’ Of course, since they all believed different things, they couldn’t all be right. The man with the microphone seemed to think this quite proper, and he didn’t even try to get them to argue out their differences with each other. But that isn’t the point I want to make. I simply want to ask where their beliefs came from. They came from tradition. Tradition means beliefs handed down from grandparent to parent to child, and so on. Or from books handed down through the centuries. Traditional beliefs often start from almost nothing; perhaps somebody just makes them up originally, like the stories about Thor and Zeus. But after they’ve been handed down over some centuries, the mere fact that they are so old makes them seem special. People believe things simply because people have believed the same thing over centuries. That’s tradition.

The trouble with tradition is that, no matter how long ago a story was made up, it is still exactly as true or untrue as the original story was. If you make up a story that isn’t true, handing it down over any number of centuries doesn’t make it any truer!

Most people in England have been baptized into the Church of England, but this is only one of many branches of the Christian religion. There are other branches such as the Russian Orthodox, the Roman Catholic and the Methodist churches. They all believe different things. The Jewish religion and the Muslim religion are a bit more different still; and there are different kinds of Jews and of Muslims. People who believe even slightly different things from each other often go to war over their disagreements. So you might think that they must have some pretty good reasons – evidence – for believing what they believe. But actually their different beliefs are entirely due to different traditions.

Let’s talk about one particular tradition. Roman Catholics believe that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was so special that she didn’t die but was lifted bodily into Heaven. Other Christian traditions disagree, saying that Mary did die like anybody else. These other religions don’t talk about her much and, unlike Roman Catholics, they don’t call her the ‘Queen of Heaven’. The tradition that Mary’s body was lifted into Heaven is not a very old one. The Bible says nothing about how or when she died; in fact the poor woman is scarcely mentioned in the Bible at all. The belief that her body was lifted into Heaven wasn’t invented until about six centuries after Jesus’s time. At first it was just made up, in the same way as any story like Snow White was made up. But, over the centuries, it grew into a tradition and people started to take it seriously simply because the story had been handed down over so many generations. The older the tradition became, the more people took it seriously. It finally was written down as an official Roman Catholic belief only very recently, in 1950. But the story was no more true in 1950 than it was when it was first invented 600 years after Mary’s death.

I’ll come back to tradition at the end of my letter, and look at it in another way. But first I must deal with the two other bad reasons for believing in anything: authority and revelation.

Authority, as a reason for believing something, means believing it because you are told to believe it by somebody important. In the Roman Catholic Church, the Pope is the most important person, and people believe he must be right just because he is the Pope. In one branch of the Muslim religion, the important people are old men with beards called Ayatollahs. Lots of young Muslims are prepared to commit murder, purely because the Ayatollahs in a faraway country tell them to.

When I say that it was only in 1950 that Roman Catholics were finally told that they had to believe that Mary’s body shot off to Heaven, what I mean is that in 1950 the Pope told people that they had to believe it. That was it. The Pope said it was true, so it had to be true! Now, probably some of the things that Pope said in his life were true and some were not true. There is no good reason why, just because he was the Pope, you should believe everything he said, any more than you believe everything that lots of other people say. The present Pope has ordered his followers not to limit the number of babies they have. If people follow his authority as slavishly as he would wish, the results could be terrible famines, diseases and wars, caused by overcrowding.

Of course, even in science, sometimes we haven’t seen the evidence ourselves and we have to take somebody else’s word for it. I haven’t with my own eyes, seen the evidence that light travels at a speed of 186,000 miles per second. Instead, I believe books that tell me the speed of light. This looks like ‘authority’. But actually it is much better than authority because the people who wrote the books have seen the evidence and anyone is free to look carefully at the evidence whenever they want. That is very comforting. But not even the priests claim that there is any evidence for their story about Mary’s body zooming off to Heaven.

The third kind of bad reason for believing anything is called ‘revelation’. If you had asked the Pope in 1950 how he knew that Mary’s body disappeared into Heaven, he would probably have said that it had been ‘revealed’ to him. He shut himself in his room and prayed for guidance. He thought and thought, all by himself, and he became more and more sure inside himself. When religious people just have a feeling inside themselves that something must be true, even though there is no evidence that it is true, they call their feeling ‘revelation’. It isn’t only popes who claim to have revelations. Lots of religious people do. It is one of their main reasons for believing the things that they do believe. But is it a good reason?

Suppose I told you that your dog was dead. You’d be very upset, and you’d probably say, ‘Are you sure? How do you know? How did it happen?’ Now suppose I answered: ‘I don’t actually know that Pepe is dead. I have no evidence. I just have this funny feeling deep inside me that he is dead.’ You’d be pretty cross with me for scaring you, because you’d know that an inside ‘feeling’ on its own is not a good reason for believing that a whippet is dead. You need evidence. We all have inside feelings from time to time, and sometimes they turn out to be right and sometimes they don’t. Anyway, different people have opposite feelings, so how are we to decide whose feeling is right? The only way to be sure that a dog is dead is to see him dead, or hear that his heart has stopped; or be told by somebody who has seen or heard some real evidence that he is dead.

People sometimes say that you must believe in feelings deep inside, otherwise you’d never be confident of things like ‘My wife loves me’.
But this is a bad argument. There can be plenty of evidence that somebody loves you. All through the day when you are with somebody who loves you, you see and hear lots of little tidbits of evidence, and they all add up. It isn’t purely inside feeling, like the feeling that priests call revelation. There are outside things to back up the inside feeling: looks in the eye, tender notes in the voice, little favors and kindnesses; this is all real evidence.

Sometimes people have a strong inside feeling that somebody loves them when it is not based upon any evidence, and then they are likely to be completely wrong. There are people with a strong inside feeling that a famous film star loves them, when really the film star hasn’t even met them. People like that are ill in their minds. Inside feelings must be backed up by evidence, otherwise you just can’t trust them.

Inside feelings are valuable in science too, but only for giving you ideas that you later test by looking for evidence. A scientist can have a ‘hunch’ about an idea that just ‘feels’ right. In itself, this is not a good reason for believing something. But it can be a good reason for spending some time doing a particular experiment, or looking in a particular way for evidence. Scientists use inside feelings all the time to get ideas. But they are not worth anything until they are supported by evidence.

I promised that I’d come back to tradition, and look at it in another way. I want to try to explain why tradition is so important to us. All animals are built (by the process called evolution) to survive in the normal place in which their kind live. Lions are built to be good at surviving on the plains of Africa. Crayfish are built to be good at surviving in fresh water, while lobsters are built to be good at surviving in the salt sea. People are animals too, and we are built to be good at surviving in a world full of … other people. Most of us don’t hunt for our own food like lions or lobsters, we buy it from other people who have bought it from yet other people. We ‘swim’ through a ‘sea of people’. Just as a fish needs gills to survive in water, people need brains that make them able to deal with other people. Just as the sea is full of salt water, the sea of people is full of difficult things to learn. Like language.

You speak English but your friend speaks German. You each speak the language that fits you to ‘swim about’ in your own separate ‘people sea’. Language is passed down by tradition. There is no other way. In England, Pepe is a dog. In Germany he is ein Hund. Neither of these words is more correct, or more truer than the other. Both are simply handed down. In order to be good at ‘swimming about in their people sea’, children have to learn the language of their own country, and lots of other things about their own people; and this means that they have to absorb, like blotting paper, an enormous amount of traditional information. (Remember that traditional information just means things that are handed down from grandparents to parents to children.) The child’s brain has to be a sucker for traditional information. And the child can’t be expected to sort out good and useful traditional information, like the words of a language, from bad or silly traditional information, like believing in witches and devils and ever-living virgins.

It’s a pity, but it can’t help being the case, that because children have to be suckers for traditional information, they are likely to believe anything the grown-ups tell them, whether true or false, right or wrong. Lots of what grown-ups tell them is true and based on evidence or at least sensible. But if some of it is false, silly or even wicked, there is nothing to stop the children believing that too. Now, when the children grow up, what do they do? Well, of course, they tell it to the next generation of children. So, once something gets itself strongly believed – even if its completely untrue and there never was any reason to believe it in the first place – it can go on forever.
Could this be what happened with religions? Belief that there is a god or gods, belief in Heaven, belief that Mary never died, belief that Jesus never had a human father, belief that prayers are answered, belief that wine turns into blood – not one of these beliefs is backed up by any good evidence. Yet millions of people believe them. Perhaps this is because they were told to believe them when they were young enough to believe anything.

Millions of other people believe quite different things, because they were told different things when they were children. Muslim children are told different things from Christian children, and both grow up utterly convinced that they are right and the others are wrong. Even within Christians, Roman Catholics believe different things from Church of England people or Episcopalians, Shakers or Quakers, Mormons or Holy Rollers, and all are utterly convinced that they are right and the others are wrong. They believe different things for exactly the same kind of reason as you speak English and someone speaks German.

Both languages are, in their own country, the right language to speak. But it can’t be true that different religions are right in their own countries, because different religions claim that opposite things are true. Mary can’t be alive in the Catholic Republic but dead in Protestant Northern Ireland.

What can we do about all this? It is not easy for you to do anything, because you are only ten. But you could try this. Next time somebody tells you something that sounds important, think to yourself: ‘Is this the kind of thing that people probably know because of evidence? Or is it the kind of thing that people only believe because of tradition, authority or revelation?’ And, next time somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them: ‘What kind of evidence is there for that?’ And if they can’t give you a good answer, I hope you’ll think very carefully before you believe a word they say.

Your loving,

Daddy

I like how he breaks down the logical fallacies of arguing from authority, tradition, and revelation, and how evidence is key to testing arguments.  I still am not convinced that all kids swallow what they’re taught to believe whole.  Based on my own firsthand experiences and observations, I see kids as looking for answers, and noticing contradictions, and having a more nuanced appreciation of “real” and “pretend”.  As mentioned before, child development studies have backed this up.

Now, I will agree that how questions about contradictions are handled makes a huge difference.  I just can’t give Dawkins a pass on what appears to be his insistence that kids uncritically absorb every parental bromide, and that they will not question it when anything contradicts what they’ve been taught.

I’m not sure how it is in the UK, but another point I’ve noticed in my own interactions is that most people who consider themselves to be religious don’t actually have a good grasp of the core teachings related to their faith.  I’m not sure how many American Catholics would say that they totally believe that communion wine turns into *actual Jesus blood*, or that everything the Pope says is truly the infallible word of God.  So, the while the “tradition” angle is potent, “we’ve always gone to church X” doesn’t necessarily translate to true belief, or even understanding, of the nuances of their particular “brand”.

It seems to me that there is more elasticity in people’s minds on issues of “real” and “false” as it relates to religion, and my preference is to teach my children to recognize that.  If human beliefs were so easily programmed, and immutable, I don’t think we’d see the variety that we do.  So, along with a lot of cultural education, we learn about human cognitive quirks, to help explain it all.

Link to Dawkins letter on Rational Responders’ site

Posted in Commentary & Reviews, General Homeschooling | No Comments »

Dawkins to pen children’s book

October 31, 2008 by ModSchooler.

Richard Dawkin’s is working on a book for children.  That should be fun.

Now, I love me some curmudgeonly Atheist commentary on occasion, but I do find it hard to think that his book would be something my kids would get into.  Of course, it isn’t out yet so we’ll wait and see.

Teaching kids to look at things scientifically isn’t actually a heavy lift.  They are already little investigators from the get-go.  It’s hard wired, and actually seems to need to be taught OUT of them.   Remember when you got to study Greek and Roman myths?  Did *anyone* in your class ask the teacher “Wait, how come we call these myths now if this was the real religion at the time?” or some variation on that theme?

Dawkins is concerned about scientific principles not being emphasized enough to young children, and I agree.  With his concern about teaching kid’s fairy tales,  I think he’s overlooking, or ignorant of, cognitive research and childhood development studies that have shown that kids fantasize as part of their overall growth, and that they do in fact have a good innate sense of real vs. unreal. I think it could be a fabulous book if he’s aware of this and manages to lighten up and play a little.  If not…ugh.

I do agree with Dawkins that it is fundamentally wrong to “respect” religion.  I find the better concept to be “tolerate”, and teaching that is tricky but not impossible.

We use the bonus category of  ‘pretend’ to deal with teaching actual facts, yet still allow play and flights of fancy.  We decided from the start to teach that Santa, the Easter Bunny, etc. was pretend, but that some people get a little carried away with it and like to have their kids believe they are really REAL, and they get very upset if you go about telling them they are not.

This was the perfect segue for teaching that people also really believe other things that aren’t at all real, and get pretty attached to that, so it’s polite to just not point out that they’re lying to themselves.   This approach works for religion, pseudo-science, “new age” philosophy, etc.

Here are some reality-based books for kids that I recommend, click through for age recommendations and more info:

Critical Thinking:

Maybe Yes, Maybe No: A Guide For Young Skeptics by Dan Barker

How Do You Know It’s True?: Discovering the Difference Between Science and Superstition by Hy Ruchlis

Maybe Right, Maybe Wrong: A Guide For Young Thinkers by Dan Barker

Alexander Fox and the Amazing Mind Reader  by John C. Clayton

Atheism:

What About Gods?  by Chris Brockman

Just Pretend: A Freethought Book For Children by Dan Barker

Evolution:

Eyewitness: Evolution by Linda Gamlin
Our Family Tree: An Evolution Story by Lisa Westberg Peters

Life on Earth: The Story of Evolution  by Steve Jenkins

Posted in Literature and History Resources, Science and Math Resources, Commentary & Reviews, Books, Audio, Video, etc., General Homeschooling | 1 Comment »

Spore and chess

October 31, 2008 by ModSchooler.

I decided to take the bait and get Spore.  My 5th grader is spending every second he can on the game. From microbe-level engineering to tribal conflicts, he’s really getting into making choices and changes.

As for the 6 year old, she’s just watching and commenting while he takes the active role.  That reluctance to try things on her own is something I have to work out a way to change.  She’s holding back in chess club as well, and it’s hard to tell if she genuinely isn’t understanding the game, or is just really into being passive and non-confrontational.

She’s sick today, so we’re taking the afternoon off, and I’ll be researching the issue further on my own.

Posted in Science and Math Resources, Commentary & Reviews, Games & Toys, Books, Audio, Video, etc. | No Comments »

Site maintenance issues

September 22, 2008 by ModSchooler.

For some reason, the formatting on the first page here is weird as you get to the older entries.  Troubleshooting time spent so far has yielded little info as to why this is happening.  Obviously, it’s going to take some deeper poking around.

Which means, if I get more spare time I’ll get to work, but if I don’t then it’ll just have to look stoopid and weird for a while

Posted in Admin | No Comments »