Surreal moments in homeschool History and Psychology

I ordered three new CLEP preparation books for Kelly and Christian last week:  Biology, Psychology, and Sociology.  They were sitting on the coffee table in the family room last night, so Kelly picked up the psychology book and started reading it.  She read for a short bit then stopped and started laughing.

“I found Mom,” she said.

Then she went on to read a short section that said one of the signs of obsessive compulsive disorder is that those who are so afflicted check several times to assure doors are locked, the stove is turned off, excessively wash their hands, etc.  I am sure Mom does not have OSD, but it was still pretty funny.  Since Kelly just finished her CLEP Spanish test, we needed to decide which book to study next, so we sat down to take a look at the books and mull it over.  We were a little surprised that the Psychology and Sociology study books were so thin and did not look particularly difficult.  When we went through the Biology book, we saw that Kelly’s Apologia Biology program covers a lot of the material that is represented in the test questions.  We decide to hold off on the Biology until the end of the year to use both as a review and a way to get three more college credits.  Since Kelly had already started reading the Psychology book, we decided it would be next.  She will prepare for that test starting today.

We have noted that the U.S. History and Western Civilization CLEP tests require a lot more work than any of the other tests for which we have study materials.  Christian and I talked about that shortly before we went to bed last night.  He told me he was studying Charlemagne.  He recently learned that Charlemagne’s empire was contemporary with the Byzantine empire.  I did not know that.  I asked when Charlemagne lived.

He told me, “the 700’s.”

I mentioned that the play Pippin had something to do with Charlemagne.

He said, “Pippin the Short was Charlemagne’s father.”

He told me a bunch of other stuff about this era and it was quite interesting so I looked the thing up on Wikipedia.  Pippen the Short (born on my birthday in 768) was indeed Charlemagne’s father, but the play Pippin was about Charlemagne’s son.  Charlemagne’s Frankish empire was contemporary with the Byzantine empire.  He lived in the 700’s.  It is necessary to learn a veritable ton of interesting facts to pass those CLEP history tests.  I think Christian is on track to do well.

Special Note:  The Robert and Eric to which Betty Blonde referred today are our ministers who are staying with us for a few days.

Update:  There was another big layoff at the old company (ATS) where I worked in Corvallis yesterday.  Many of those laid off were engineers.  We are very thankful to be in North Carolina.