Month: September 2006 Page 1 of 2

Homeschool day 25 of 180

We have what will be about four more years of homeschool with our daughter Kelly and six more years with our son Christian. We very much enjoy our homeschool and the extra time we get to spend with our kids, but we have been thinking a little bit about what we are going to do when our homeschooling time is over. Lorena knows what she wants to do and is working on it now. She is going to school with the idea that she will work full time at something like home restoration when she finishes. That is a grand plan because she loves to do that sort of thing, she is very good at it, and there is potential to make a very good living at it. It is a little more difficult for me though. I love my job and want to continue in it as long as is financially necessary. My responsibilities as I see them include getting my kids through a masters degree (they are on their own for their Ph.D.), assuring that our retirement is funded, and paying off the mortgage on the house. After that, all we really need is day-to-day living money. Everything could change in an instant, but if it continues as it is now, all of those goals will be accomplished within a year or two after Christian finishes homeschool. I think that puts me in a similar situation to many other of my fellow baby-boomers. I will be well short of sixty with not much that I need to do to meet the minimum requirements to sustain house and home.

Lorena and I have talked about what we ought to do when the kids are gone. We know that right now our focus needs to be on them so that they are prepared spiritually and educationally to contribute to society. We know, though, that will come to a relatively abrupt end and we will be left with time on our hands with which we want to do something meaningful. That time will be disconcerting for us under any circumstance, but particularly so if we do not have any idea about what we want to do. We have seen many people fill their time with travel, hobby projects, outdoor activities, and all sorts of other things that do nothing more than take up time. It is our sense that we want to set some goals. Lorena has done that to a certain extent. She has a long term goal and is going to school and working to realize that goal. I however, need to figure out what it is that might make a meaningful contribution. I am very seriously thinking about taking on an open source software project that has to do with manufacturing, but that is just a thought with no end goal that has any specific way to contribute. My thought is that investing some time in identifying some way contribute will also set an example for Kelly and Christian. There are different times in life for which we need to prepare. Doing that preparation with an eye on contributing something meaningful to others has great value both for the doer and the receiver.

Homeschool day 24 of 180

Yesterday afternoon, before we went to our Wednesday evening bible study, Kelly wrote something in preparation for her book. It was very, very good. We have talked about how J.R.R. Tolkien spent many years preparing to write his books. He wrote a history of the Middle Earth, developed the characters, and even invented languages and their alphabets before he ever started to write the stories themselves. To that end, Kelly wrote a few paragraphs about the characters she has imagined for her story. I have said it before. She has a wonderful voice. She wrote about a small incident to get a feel for her characters and how they interact. It was good enough that it could even make it into the story. The point, though, was to develop her characters and start building a file on each of them. She is off to a great start.

As the teacher, I need to think of some ways to help her make the writing process creative, effective, and efficient. Tonight, we need to set aside some file space for notes, story ideas, manuscripts, character descriptions, etc., etc. Even though I think it is a bad idea to spend a whole lot of time on the computer, I think this might be a case where the computer would be the best technology for the job. Writing is easier to edit and archive on the computer and Kelly types faster than she can write by hand. I will make the rule that all the writing needs to be on the downstairs computer on OpenOffice.org Writer. Maybe Santa Claus will be able to afford a new small laptop for writing and homeschool tasks that we can keep downstairs. On the other hand, a bigger monitor would be nice for upstairs, too.

Homeschool day 23 of 180

Learning math can be quite difficult. Lorena, Kelly, and Christian are all taking difficult math classes right now. We are learning that it is best to work on such things while one is fresh. We are looking forward to getting through this term that ends at the end of the year. Lorena will have all the math she needs to get a degree in business, home studies, or one of those types of degrees. Kelly will have finished all of her pre-algebra and introductory algebra to move on to Algebra I. Christian will be close to finishing with Singapore Math and will be able to move on to Teaching Textbooks like Kelly. In the meantime, we are going to go through several months of math that require a lot of time and effort while we are trying to juggle everything else that we have to do. Dad needs to be escpecially helpful and patient explaining all of this. We will pass through these kinds of challenges periodically and that is good. Sometimes life can be about just knuckling down and getting stuff done. We are in one of those now.

Homeschool day 22 of 180

As Kelly noted yesterday (Please notice the prepositional phrase with which I start this post!), Lorena started her calculus class and Kelly and Christian started their swimming classes yesterday. Then, after she got home from her class, Lorena took Christian to his cub scout meeting. I think she really enjoys those meetings–maybe as much as Christian enjoys them and Christian enjoys them a lot. In addition to a full load of home school, the kids are ekeing out as much use as possible of the good weather of early fall to play outside with the neighbor kids. I thnk they are working on a spy movie or some such thing. They are going to have me film it with the mini-cam as soon as they are ready.

Last night, Kelly and stayed home while Lorena and Christian went to the cub scout meeting and I kind of blew it because I was a little tired from work. Kelly has a very good idea for a book that she is going to write as part of her homeschool work this year. I should have taken the time we had together to start going over her idea. She is quite a talented writer, I just love hearing her ideas and working with her on them and I need to encourage that as much as possible. Christian has cub scouts again next Monday, so I am going to make sure and set aside the time to work with Kelly on her book. You cannot write a book unless you start putting ink on paper.

Christian wrote and installed his first program on his Lego Mindstorm robot!!! It worked great!

Homeschool day 21 of 180

We finally had Christian’s birthday party on Friday evening. We started out by meeting Grandpa Milo, Grandma Sarah, and Aunt Jean at the Burgerville where Cousin Kylee works for dinner. Afterwards, we went over to Grandpa Milo’s house to open presents. Christian got a Lego Mindstorm robotics kit, some clothes, and a planetarium globe that shows that planets in a GRAND way on the walls and ceiling of a 12 feet by 12 feet room. We had a great time. While we were opening presents, Uncle Warren (Miss Turbone) called us and invited Christian and I to see the University of Idaho-Oregon State University football game. We met Curt Nichols there at the tailgater, so Warren, Curt, Christian, and I walked around the campus and reminisced about old times. We walked into the bookstore, the Memorial Union, the main quad, past the library, Dixon Rec Center, etc., etc. It was a good time. What was better, though, was sitting and watching the game with Christian. He figured it out pretty quick and we mostly just sat and observed all the strange things that happen at a college football game.

I do not have much time to write this morning but today we start swimming lessons and Mom starts calculus.  I can’t wait but we will have to work hard and get things done quickly if we want to do well today. Yesterday we went to our first Gospel Meeting with Kent Williston.  That was lots of fun.  Tommorow we will go to my piano lesson.  That’s about it!
-Kelly

Homeschool day 20 of 180

I had quite an interesting experience with Kelly and Christian yesterday evening. Christian is currently working on the last two books we are planning to use from Singapore Math. The concepts are pretty difficult to understand the first time through and they require practice. It can be pretty frustrating in the middle of the learning process, but it is very satisfying after the light comes. The next step in the process is algebra. The kids really start into algebra at the end of their Singapore Math program. Next comes Teaching Textbooks. It spends the first two months on pre-algebra which is mostly review for Kelly. She is a little frustrated with that because it seems to0 easy for her. Imagine being frustrated with not being frustrated. I have explained to her that even if it seems very simple, it is very important to practice everything she has learned so she is very clear on it as she moves into algebra. She only has a couple more weeks until she moves into the real algebra section of the program. It should be pretty straight forward for the rest of this year, but start getting more difficult through the early to middle part of next year. Christian will continue to engage with difficult concepts while he finishes the Singapore Math through the first half of this year. Then he will move into Teaching Textbooks.

Both Singapore Math and Teaching Textbooks are super programs that have served us well. If I had to choose math programs over again, I would do it exactly the same way. After we finish Algebra I, Algebra II, and Geometry, we will move into calculas using a different program. Our goal is to have them ready to go to the community college for calculus starting their junior year in high school. They are on track to do that fairly easily right now.

I have nothing to write about. I just wanted to try out this new “preformancing”thing dad got us. It lets us write posts without having to fumble around with the website. It has a lot of new features: Strikethrough,

Quotes

BIG, BOLD, Italics,, Underline,COLOR

and small

Homeschool day 19 of 180

Sometimes people ask us what we do in our homeschool. Most of the time they are just curious or being polite. Of course we do the math, grammar, writing, science, history, spelling, Spanish, and cover all kinds of different academic subjects. Along with that we do lots of other interesting things. The kids practice their musical instruments every day and go to private music lessons once per week. They both perform in recitals, competitions, and other performances. They go to swimming lessons a couple of days per week. We make trips to the aquarium, zoo, wild animal park, beaches, museums, and things like that once or twice per month. Christian is in cub scouts. We do extended project work on research papers, magazines, and craft projects. Kelly is going to write a book this year. Christian is learning how to program in C#; we have not found him a project yet to go with that, but we have some good ideas. Lorena starts a calculas class this semester, will start jury duty in October and November, runs the household, and is planning to start a business after the first of the year. I work full time and have a side business that takes additional responsibilities. Add fellowship meetings, gospel meetings, bible studies, and everything associated with that and there is not a whole lot of time left for anything else.

The only way we can get everything done is by setting priorities. Homeschool has to be high on the priority list or not everything would get done. The kids get up in the morning at about 7:00 am. Before breakfast, they are scheduled to make their beds and straighten up their rooms, practice their instruments for 45 minutes, memorize their bible verses, and then start into their academic subjects until breakfast is ready about 8:45. They are usually well into their academic subjects by 8:30 as they watch the neighbor kids head out to catch the local government school bus at a little before 8:30. The kids work on individual subjects until 12:30 or 1:00 when they break for a half an hour for lunch. After lunch, they continue with their individual work and do things together like read aloud, perform science experiments, and do arts and crafts projects. In the afternoons on Mondays and Wednesdays they go to swimming lessons. On Tuesdays they go to Kelly’s piano lesson. On Thursdays they go to Christian’s Guitar lesson. They study on the way to lessons and on the way home. They generally finish with their academic work between 3:00 and 4:30 in the afternoon when the neighbor kids are getting off the bus from school. Lorena supervises and helps the kids as the need it all day long.

I usually get home from work about 5:00 pm. The kids play from when they finish their work until dinner at about 6:30. I work on correcting their work from the time I get home until dinner. After dinner, we spend an additional hour or two reading aloud together, going over new material for the next day, testing, doing spelling work, etc. It works for us. After having done all this for three years, I do not know how the government school kids learn anything at all. Most of the neighbor kids spend an hour on the bus to and from school plus several hours in recesses, lunch, standing in line, and just waiting for attention from the teacher (hopefully) or an unqualified teacher’s aide. In addition to the greater amount of time with better supervision that our kids spend in school each day, they also go to school more days than our local government schools. Ostensibly, the schools are in sessions with kids on the premises 175 days this year with the kids in school between around 9:00 and around 3:15. We do 180 days per year, not including weekend and summer field trips and projects.

Homeschool day 18 of 180

I love to write vision, robotics, and statistical process control programs in C++. I honestly believe that one of the great successes of Microsoft was that they have always provided a way for programmers to solve difficult technical problems while hiding much of the tedium of the build process behind their IDE. mind you, there is still a lot of ugliness their, but it is possible to write programs in my subspecialty without knowing a lot about the ins and outs of the different compiler and linker switches and so forth. The reality is that the more you know about such things, the better and faster you can program, but it is not absolutely necessary.

In my latest project, I want to program a Linux computer to perform a process measurement and control task using a mechanical system to deliver the parts and a camera to inspect the parts. i had two false starts with the Anjuta and Eclipse IDE’s that lead to extreme frustration. I have always been a fan of Gnome and GTK+, but I want to have as little as possible to do with automake, configure, anf all those other tools required to do Linux programming. I want to be able to do my work and gradually work into the knowledge of all those tools, not vice-versa. I have found that KDevelop is the tool that best allows me to do that. I finally went back to KDevelop last night and had a program up and running within twenty minutes of the time I got the program installed. Impressive. I have not used KDevelop for a couple of years now, but I am very, very impressed with its capability. It was good before, but it is way more robust with more features and integration with additional tools than when I last used it.

I cannot help but think that ease of program development is a huge advantage in the adoption and proliferation of Linux.

Yesterday I went to piano lessons and my teacher, Mrs. Hickenlooper, helped me with the hymns that I am trying to learn. She also gave me a new piece instead of my Bach piece. The Bach piece was too difficult but this new one looks like fun. Mrs. Waldo put up a comment yesterday asking Christian and I if we would be able to go over and play some music for her Mother at the home where she lives. (is that right?) I was thinking about it just this morning and I cannot wait to go over there and play. I will practice my songs this morning so that I can play them well when I go over.

I am reading an awesome book called The Dark Frigate. it is a Newberry Award winning book and although the old English and the Scottish accent is hard to translate it is a wonderful novel.

Homeschool day 17 of 180

One of the things we got for Christian on his eleventh birthday was a subscription to a set of tutorials to learn C# programming. He is doing the tutorials for twenty minutes per day as part of his homeschool. Yesterday he started into if-else loops. He has quite a ways to go, but by the end of the school year he is going to be doing some serious programming. That has gotten me inspired to get back in the saddle to continue work on Linux programming. I have decided to write a program to inspect and measure rosettes as they come off of our manufacturing line. I am going to try to use Video4Linux to capture images with a webcam, Gnome as the UI, and Eclipse as the IDE. I will write my own vision and SPC algorithms. I will also have to figure out a way to talk to some digital I/O to control lights, know when a part is ready to be inspected, and tell when to reject or accept a part after inspection. The point is not so much to have such capability, but to keep learning new things. If I can get this done, I will be set to do full blown machine vision and robotics programming with Linux. That will be fun and maybe even profitable. In the meantime, Christian will have come way up the curve with his programming and we might embark on a robotics project that we can do together.

Meanwhile, Kelly and I need to sit down and make a plan on how we are going to proceed on her book. Maybe I will let her take the first crack at the plan and then we can refine it together.

I don’t know what to write about but I have to get back to work anyway because I have lots of schoolwork to do and I didn’t get an awesome start so I will probably write more later, I hope you all liked my blog post, goodbye!

Homeschool day 16 of 180

I spent yesterday afternoon scanning photos into the computer. We have about thrity rolls of film that are anywhere between five and ten years old. Lorena developed the first eight last week and will develop another eight this week. I love these photos. While I was doing it, I went to Pandora on the internet to listen to a radio station playing music I selected. The way the website works, you enter songs and people you like and it starts playing songs.  You can give each song a thumbs up or a thumbs down to refine the type of music that will play in the future.  It works very well.  Some of the groups I selected were Etta James, the Kingston Trio, the Righteous Brothers, Simon and Garfunkel, Enya, the Monkees, Three Dog Night, and Bob Dylan.  I got into a fairly nostalgic mood.  I printed out a couple of photos to take to work for my cube wall and just generally had a relaxing time.  I am blessed.  Truly.

Homeschool day 15 of 180

If the last couple of days are any indication, Kelly is going to make this blog MUCH more interesting than it has been when I was doing most of the writing. Mostly, I have been writing to keep a record of our life that we can put into a notebook and read when we get old. It is also great for keeping track of homeschool. Now, though, Kelly has discovered a several blogs she really likes and I believe are safe for her to read. We talked about it last night and we are giving some thought to how best to go about this. Kelly is twelve, loves to write, and spends a lot of time writing and illustrating stories, plays, poems, reports, and all kinds of other things. She types over 60 wpm. That is fast enough to get thoughts down on paper as she thinks them through. She has been developing a wonderful writing voice and enjoys refining and modifying it to fit different writing objectives.

My thought is that we should spend a year or so just writing on whatever topics come to mind so she can polish her skills and develop good writing habits. I have been thinking about what she might write and have come up with a list of writing categories we will try to update as we get new ideas. As we go along, we will try to gravitate toward a more specific theme with the idea of adding features and user functionality.

We use WordPress as our blog software. Up until now Kelly and Christian have been writing their web posts using the WordPress editor. I have switched over to use a FireFox extension called Performancing. I like it a lot and will add that to the home computers for the kids to use.

I am really looking forward to seeing how this goes.

I was reading the Bible this morning and I turned to John 19 and started reading. I read through the rest of John because it was so good. I never really read any books of the Bible thoroughly save Matthew and Genesis. John was amazing. He said that Jesus did so many things that even the world itself could not contain the books that would be written. He also said that these things are written that we may believe in God, that we may find life in His name. It was pretty interesting. One thing that I didn’t understand too well though is the fact that Jesus told the disciple whom he loved to take care of his mother I think, and in later chapters he speaks of the disciple whom he loved also. But it says in the 21:20 that “The disciple whom Jesus loved following, who had also leaned on His breast at the supper, and said, “Lord who is the one who betrays you?” and then if you read up to the 24th verse it says “This is the disciple who testifies of these things, and wrote these things; and we know that his testimony is true” Was John the same disciple who took care of Mary? I don’t know. But it sure was interesting reading that chapter.

That article that I read yesterday got me thinking. One of them started when he was 13 and they all talk about deep, debatable subjects. I wonder what I can talk about that is deep and debatable. Perchance you would enjoy hearing of the Chapman Acadamy of Homeschool Dictionary? Well there is a link to it on this page. It only has three words, phrases and definitions but I already have an idea of another one. We should not use apostrophes when we type. They are crude and terribly primitive. Examples: They’re, it’s, don’t etc. etc. etc. This is how they should be written: They are, It is, do not. Now there is a deep and debatable subject. Oh, I have a question for the five people that read this blog, It has to do with titles and apostrophes: Where do the titles Mrs., Mr., Miss, and Ms. come from? Do they stand for anything? Just a question. Okey Dokey, I’d better get back to school now…

Homeschool day 14 of 180

When I was growing up, the only venue available for aspiring writers was the print media: books, magazines, newspapers, etc. Now there is the web. The amazing thing is that, if you write well and actually have something to say, you can have a huge readership over night. Literally. The article in World Magazine was great because I have been trying to inspire Kelly and Christian to write more on the blog. The goal for now is just to get them to write–the only rules being to avoid writing things that are either unsafe or inappropriate. If that works out, it will be a good time for them to start researching and writing on topics that interest them, followed by focusing the topics so that readers will know a little bit about what to expect when they come to the blog. The goal would be to develop their writing skills and then give them their own blog that has the personality they give it. This is not only a good thing for the writer in the family (Kelly), but for the scientist (Christian), too. One of my very favorite blogs is by a blogging scientist.

Homeschool is going well. We’ve gotten into the full swing of things here and I’m reading some great books. We met some new neighbors the other day and we hope to meet many more now that we are seeing so much development around the neighborhood. Today we are going to meeting at the Myer’s and I have to read the chapter (don’t tell anyone) I just read a magazine article about 6 homeschooling teens who have their own blogs. That made me jump off of the sofa and sprint upstairs. I spun onto Dad’s chair and lunged for the mouse. I clutched it and tapped the mouse. Here I am now typing away and using my verbs like I’m my writing book says I’m supposed to do. Ok that’s it for now. If you see me, remind me to blog some more!

Homeschool day 13 of 180

Giving blood is a very satisfying thing.  The people who gather to give always seem to be in a great mood and you get to wear a sticker for the rest of the day telling the world you did a good deed.  I love it.  Life seemed a little rough yesterday in that cube-city helplessness kind of way, but giving blood surely turned that around and I was thankful for it.