And while we're at it...

The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught. ~Henry Brooks Adams 

Amongst the more inane comments to come out of the discussion [?] on homeschooling was this to a homeschooler who graduated from Sarah Lawrence: Well, you would have done well in the Public system as well.  Even I know Sarah Lawrence is pretty top of the ant pile but I take exception to the thinking that assumes this kid would have done well anywhere.

I do wonder where people leave their brains some days.  Honestly.  The commentors don't know this girl's personality, inate  academic ability, distractability yadda yadda.  They know nothing about her at all excpet what she chose to reveal; just 2 things: she's a homeschool graduate & she graduated with a law degree from Sarah Lawrence.

*Sigh*.  The first thing any homeschooling parent learns is that no two children learn alike.  Not even siblings.   What suits one is probably poison to the other.  I wish it were as simple as some of these people would like to make it!  Teachers know this too but when you have 30 kids to teach you are going to make a number of sacrifices.  Too much originality is not going to be encouraged.

Liddy attended school.  We actually pulled her out the first time in preschool.  My boys did preschool at home.  When Liddy's turn came she had already done 2 years of preschool & the brand new preschool 2 islands over bored her to tears.  She was so distressed we pulled her out~  I did not confer with Dearest on this one.  She began grade one on cue at the local primary school ~ & to all intents & purposes Liddy was a model student.  She learnt to read & write & do math.  She didn't hit, kick or bite people who annoyed her [our boys did so BIG bonus, this one!]  She was social, helpful, sporty & apparently doing well all round.  Apparently.  I was not overly happy with certain changes I noticed.  Liddy, always passive aggressive, became much more so.  She became very reserved & lacking in confidence ~ not  traits of her earlier years!  She became exceedingly reluctant to express an opinion & when she entered High School she began begging us to take her out.  The Negative Peer Pressure [read socialisation!!!] was causing nightmares, sleepwalking, temper tantrums.  Her academic grades did not slip.  She was still a high achieving athlete.  But her personality was warping.

We pulled her out.  It was the best decision we ever made.  Not that adjusting to homeschooling was easy for any of us but within months we noticed remarkable changes in Liddy's personality.  She was making eye contact when addressed by an adult.  She was expressing her opinions more.  She was more confident & secure.  She was relating better all round to everyone she came into contact with.

Now my Star is a different kettle of fish all round.  Star was very much the child who did not want to play alone; the child who thought her siblings were there to entertain her; the child who set out to wow the world & expected plenty of acclaim while she did it!   And we did not put her in school.  I was, however, working part time at the time & I had an exceptionally good raport with the grade  1/2 teacher so every so often when Dearest was unavailable I got permission for Star to have a morning at school in a regular classroom.

Star is not one of my passive/aggressive ones.  Star is one of my ADD ones.  She was reading rings round the rest of grade one, who were only half~way through their alphabet.  She had moved from counting in ones to 100 to counting by 5s to 100. She was uninterested in the lessons so had a wonderful time doing what Star has always done best: talking!!! She doesn't need an audience.  Star has always had a strong auditory learning style so she just rabbited on & on...& on...&....

The teacher thought she was wonderful.  So bright.  So enthusiastic.  So helpful.  So obedient.  Star!!!  She wanted a dozen Star's in her classroom.  If only she knew!  At the time we planned on intergrating Star into school so these occasional outings were considered highly important guages as to how sucessful her intergration would be. 

The first one was an unmitigated sucess.  Everything had huge novelty value.  Star felt very grown up ~ & she knew she didn't have to stay forever.  The third one was a disaster.  No novelty value.  I was a little late arriving in the junior playground to pick Star up but she had her morning tea & I knew she knew what she was to do.  I expected to find her playing with her little friends & was prepared to let her stay for the afternoon session if she was keen.  She wasn't.

I found Star sitting by herself under a tree, her morning tea uneaten, the staff unconcerned by her isolation. [Obviously she was molly~coddled & just needed to *man up*].  We collected her things & went home.  My lively, inquisitive, talkative child was absolutely silent.  She was white & I wondered if maybe she was coming down with something when she took herself to bed & went straight to sleep.  I though we had just infected the entire school with some dread disease!

When she finally surfaced again, her usual perky self though still with huge dark rings under her eyes, I asked about her morning in school.  Mummy, Star said seriously, They are noisy & naughty.  I learnt later from the teacher it had been one of her less succesful mornings & the noise level had been pretty bad.  Star had ended up with a massive headache that took several days for her to get over completely.

Star, even way back then, had a musician's hearing.  She was, & is, extremely noise sensitive.  Days, weeks, months & finally years in such an environment would have damaged her hearing irreparably.  The child who one might have thought would best thrive in a school environment is the one who most needed not to be there but even Liddy, who in so many ways coped really well,  still did not perform to her best until we pulled her out.  She stunned us all with her first marks.  Unlike Star English was not Liddy's strong subject & she had only ever scraped Cs.  After one term of me on her case she was scoring As & A+s.  Her math went up although in that she was completely self~taught.  Her other subjects also came up.

It begs the question, doesn't it?  How much better might so many other children do if they too could come out of the schools & study in comparative peace & quiet at home?

I am not anti public education.  We need it because not every parent can, or even wants to, educate their own, but it is sheer arrogance to assume that every child can or should be in school; that every academically able child will do well wherever they are educated; that because you have had a bad experience either at school or at home that that is so for others & so people shouldn't have a choice.  That's what Hitler thought.  He knew the key to controlling the country was to control the youth ~ & he did.  It's why homeschooling is still illegal in Germany.  Hitler banned it so no~one could teach the youth an oppossing point of view.  And the west's educational system is based on this.  Worth thinking about, eh?

And now for something completely different...

This is idiocy taken to new & higher levels!

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/travel/travel-news/taking-the-most-direct-route-to-straddie-20120315-1v85m.html

I ain't finished yet...

Education ~ One of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought. ~ Bertrand Russell.

Jeanne over at A Peaceful Day linked to this article on FB this morning.  I left rather a rant on her page ~ & I haven't finished yet because there is one thing in particular I really think needs to be recognized.

In order I believe:

1. It is a parents right to raise their children as they see fit.  Atheists get to raise atheists, Fundamentalists get to raise fundamentalists & no~one has the right to interfere in that process.  We are all accountable to God for our choices but they should be our choices.

2. Education is a privilege, not a right.  Most of the world is bereft of what we would call education.  They manage.  People do.

3. When the schools are churning out students with 100% numeracy & literacy they might then have earnt the right to tell the rest of us how to go about doing this.  Till then they should stop using homeschoolers to get attention off their inadequacies!

Here is my point:  I worked the numeracy & literacy programme for 10 years.  I taught remedial reading, writing & arithmetic to upper primary grades. I also tutored outside of school hours.  The majority of children were entering high school inadequately prepared for it's rigours!  The majority.  Very few could read well enough to manage a Shakespeare text.  This view has been upheld over the years by enduring the sad mangalation of Shakespearean texts by drama students.  No phrasing.  No decoding.  No idea how to read for meaning ~ so they utter meaningless gibberish in a fast mumble hoping no~one will ask them what it all means!

Now here is the crunch.  I was employed, as were 2 other ladies, in a part~time temporaryy capacity to address the problems.  Wait for it.  Each child was allocated just 10 minutes of my time!!!! Then returned to the classroom.  Each child got 10 minutes maybe 3 times a week for 5 weeks.  When the funding ran out the programme ended! Yep.

It makes me so angry.  I do not blame the teachers.  They are caught in the system & forced to concede to it's constraints but how dare our government bleat about falling numeracy & literacy rates when they don't fund working programmes adequately!  Argh!  How dare anyone, anyone at all, dump on a parent who has struggled, failed, quit when our schools are doing such a miserable job.  I got told point blank one time that there will always be children who drop through the cracks; they can't focus on them.  What?  These are our children. How would you feel if that was your child?

The problem with the article is that it assumes something that just isn't true.  It assumes schools do a good job.  Some do an adequate job; they are probably a private school.  There's a reason parents scrimp & save to send their kids to these places!  Let's face facts: the stats for our falling numeracy & literacy rates are not coming from the homeschooling fraternity [our stats show our kids are excelling & outperforming state schooled children!].  Nope, the stats are coming from the schools, State and private!  Um, maybe someone should do something about that.  Seeing as most of our kids go to school 'n all.

I have not failed.  I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work. ~ Thomas Edison

We have not been busier than usual, just busy in different ways.Theo, who is changing jobs [not location just the restaurant he works in] landed for a week .  It is pouring.  We are supposed to be tidying up our end of term work.  I am trying to get a muffler fixed.  Dearest's little ebay business decided to take a sudden unexpected Ka~boom ~ which means more paper work for the staff [me] & we all have a sort of cold with sniffles & things.  I am too tired to think straight.  I am too tired to think much of anything at all.




I am looking forward to the end of this year.  Both Star & I are over the school thing ~ not learning, just the whole you have to do this because stuff.  Too stupid.  Unnecessary.  Pointless.  And in the long run none of it matters.  Truly.

All I want to do is cuddle my cats.  There is something very therapeutic about cuddling a cat.  It must be in the purr.  It rumbles all the way down into your soul.  So that is what I am going to do.

"Lost people matter to God, and so they must matter to us." ~ Keith Wright

Boxing Day, 1998. That was the year 6 lives got lost during the Sydney to Hobart.  There was so much white water & the seas were so big it made the Beiring Strait look like a kiddie's wading pool.



Even now I can't think about that race without feeling sick to my gut.  It brings feelings of panic & terror & a terrible helplessness.  That is my personal image of Hell.  Overwhelming.  All consuming.  Pitiless.  Merciless.

That is the sea the unsaved are tossed on & salvation is so great a thing that the thought of losing it is terrifying.  To fall back into that sea is to be lost indeed.

I have always believed that Once Saved, Always Saved.  Jesus Himself said that no~one could snatch us out of His hand.  My understanding of scripture was that there was only one possible exception & one really had to work hard to invoke it: the complete rejection of the Holy Spirit.  Given the very nature of the Holy Spirit I'm not even sure that's possible if one has been genuinely saved in the first place but I have run across plenty of Christians who believe that one can most definitely lose their salvation ~ though for the most part they are pretty vague about how that occurs.

The bible does doctrine well; I do not ~ & so I have never been really sure that I am correct doctrinaly in my beliefs.  I just couldn't envision a God who had gone to so much trouble to bring a person to salvation in the first place just allowing them to slip away again.  It makes no sense & I have always found God to be emminently sensible.

So Sunday my ears pricked up when I heard this being addressed because the preaching, while nice & juicy, just the way I like it, is explained in simple enough terms that I can actually understand what is being talked about!

I do like to be right.  I like even better when I understand why I am right! Happy Duckie!

A Little Church.

“God had only one Son and he made that Son a missionary.” ~David Livingston

Some lessons you never forget.

I remember being told once, by a man who would know, that he had seen churches pray & pray for revival & when it came they didn't recognise it & the very people it was granted to refused the gift because it was not what they expected.  How sad is that?

I have been thinking about that because I have been struggling.  We wanted a church ~ one that met certain criteria: biblical, gifts operating, service oriented, spirit filled, prayerful....because we've had a gut~full & then some of the half~baked nonsense that passes for Christianity in some parts.  In the process I forgot to factor in me!

I know certain things about me.  I know I am sound sensitive & so for most of my life I have tuned out extraneous noise: screaming kids; the t.v; the radio; background chatter.  As I have got older & have begun getting deaf I have become lazier because it requires a great deal of effort to hear certain sounds, certain pitches.  [Choir is exhausting because I have to concentrate so hard on what I have been busily ignoring for decades!!!]  Consequentially I recieve most of my information visually.  It is my primary learning style & I rely heavily on the use of my eyes to process information.

For the greater part of my life this has not been a problem when it came to church.  Quaker worship takes place in almost total silence.  If the silence is broken it is one sound, very quiet & considered dropped into the pool of silence like a small stone.  Otherwise I have been in very small country churches.  Twenty people max, Sunday morning.  The old hymns, which require no effort on my part to sing because I have known them all my life.  Very little hustle & bustle because it is the elderly who attend.

Now we are attending a larger church.  It meets all our critea.  What's more I got such a jolt of confirmation in my spirit when it's home page popped up on my computer screen I have never doubted that it is where we are to be for the moment.  And I hate it.

Too sad.

For one thing it is huge. 500 people easily at a Sunday morning service!  Can you imagine what that does to little backwater me?!  I get so claustrophobic.  The music is awful.  I don't know what key they generally choose to sing in but it's one I just can't pitch to at all ~ so I'm thinking F & it is like caterwauling because only the band ever manages to be on pitch!  Being in small sedate churches I have not had to worry about custody of the eyes ~ isn't that a lovely term?  Now I do.  With people bib~bobbing all over the place, even dancing up & down the aisles, I am visually over stimulated & most definitely not thinking about God.

The preaching is wonderful!  Honestly, I study & all too often I get frustrated because there is no meat to the sermon.  I have met my match! lol I come away refreshed, renewed & with something to think about & ponder for the whole of the week ~ so why on earth am I grizzling?  Because it's not what I expected!

I cannot see how I can contribute.  I do not feel I have anything to offer but I have not been allowed to fade obscurely into the background.  This has thrown me off~balance & consequentially made me very bad tempered.  When I get bad tempered I sulk. [Yes, I am sulking at God. ssssh.]     
when every face is a stranger's face I feel incredibly threatened & insecure.  Nope, not a people person.  Not at all.  Every person I meet is a potential Jack~the~Ripper.  I bet you didn't know that about me!  Seriously, I walk around town with my bag weighed down with books because I figure I can swing it like a weapon if need be!

God has been patiently waiting for me to break cover. *sigh*  It is getting better.  People are very kind & friendly.  Some faces are becoming familiar.  I am finding ways to cope with the size, the noise, the visual stimulation.  I am hanging on like grim death because I also know other things; things the Lord has shown me.  This is a church that is intent on preparing its people to bring in the harvest.  It is an End Times church prepared to "run a rescue mission within a yard of hell." ~ as C.T. Studd so happily expressed it.  It is a church that not only outreaches but disciples.  Biblically it is doing everything right.  I am not.  Working on it ~ but my flesh is screaming. Whoever thought church was such hard work!

Shark Attack.

“Oh the shark has pretty teeth, dear, / And he shows them pearly white. / Just a jack-knife has Macheath / And he keeps it out of sight.”  Bertolt Brecht

I live with water ~ lots & lots of water & in that water live certain things I can certainly live without ~like sharks. 

                                    We all have our shark stories.  Mine start early because my folks were boaties & I am not a good traveller.  The only thing I know for sure I won't get sick on is a train.  Unfortunately for me three out of 5 members of my family were prone to sea sickness & the only way to put of the evil moment when my stomach finally rebelled was to travel as far away from the rest of my family as possible ~ which meant I rode the bowsprit.  If you have long legs & ride the bowsprit your feet are prone to trail in the bow wave.  Trust me.  A shark's sense of smell is not over exaggerated.  Within an hour you would be guaranteed to see the first fin break the water. At which point I removed my feet.

I hate sharks.  I really really do.

Oh, I think they are amazing but cute & cuddly they are not.

When Star was really little we once watched quite a small shark separate a baby dugong from it's mother &  make a meal of it.  The ferocity of the attack is something neither of us has ever forgotten & for a long time, years in fact, Star wouldn't even put her big toe in the water of our bay because she knew what lived out there & it wasn't nice.

The boys, naturally, have had more than their fair share of encounters. They shot home one time, white faced & shaken because a monster was rubbing the bottom of the dingy & trying to rock it.  Another time they thought one was going to actually land in the dingy with them as it shot over their bow because sharks, like dolphins & whales, leap & jump & play in the water.  Can't say any of my sons were impressed at the time.  Sharing dinghy space with a live shark was not something any of them wished to experience in a hurry.

And Theo once met one at close quarters while out surfing.  He didn't hang round to get better acquainted.

However the best tale goes to Dearest who has dived & been an oyster farmer  ~ two occupations likely to bring you into contact with sharks ~ but his story occurred while doing neither of these things.  Rather he was on holidays at Blacks Beach up Mackay way standing on a sand spit & casting into the break for whiting on a receding tide.

I had just waded out to see how he was doing & was on my way back to the beach when Dearest noticed a shadow in the water.  Dearest is a bit of a crock these days but he used to be something of a daredevil back in the day & keeping a cool head when disaster & unexpected drama erupts is something Dearest does rather well.  Keeping a wary eye on the long shape starting to zig~zag towards him he placed his mesh fish basket  against his shins ~ though really any shark worth it's salt would have swallowed that in one gulp!  Then tucking his brand new & rather expensive fishing rod under one arm he armed himself with the yabbie pump & waited.

It's a good thing I was well on my way back to the beach by then because I swear I would have been sitting on Dearest's head gibbering at this point.  Even knowing a shark's weakest point is it's nose does not comfort me.

Dearest is brave.   He stood there with the water breaking around him & this long dark shape zig~zagging towards him & he waited till it rolled, which is what a shark does as it prepares to attack, then stabbed at it's nose with the yabbie pump.  He missed.

He had another shot.This time he smacky~doo~dahed that shark right on it's nose.  Dearest says there was the most almighty splash & the shark was gone.  Just the same Dearest stood there anxiously scanning the water & too terrified to move until the tide receded & he could step onto dry land but any time you ask him about this he points out he still had a firm grip on his rod when the dust finally settled.

The thing is I don't like sharks & being a boatie I've heard some horror stories from people whose boat had gurgled into the murky depths leaving them to fend for themselves in water where they couldn't *touch bottom* ~ so I was inordinately pleased to learn that something could take a shark on & win.  There aren't too many of those in the ocean.  Most things that encounter a shark are on the losing end.  However there are killer whales out there that have learnt how to turn shark into dinner.  In N.Z they herd them onto the beach.  In California they attack from underneath, flip them & this renders the sharks helpless & an easy meal.  So cool  Dontcha think?