Kelly, Christian, and I took a short hiatus from our read of Jesus Under Fire to read through The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick)
Month: May 2010
I got a nice new Dell e6500 laptop last month. We got it all set up with a nice new screen and a docking station. We use Carbonite, the service that unobtrusively and continuously backs up all the files on your computer so that if anything goes wrong you can get everything back. You pay a reasonable fee for each computer. We bought three years of service for one computer where we keep all our photos, videos, important documents, etc. We backed up all our files on a couple of external drives, moved them to what will now be our homework* computer, a Dell Vostro we got last year. That left us with two computers we can use for whatever we want!
One of the computers that is now free is my old laptop, a Dell Latitude D620. The other is a Dell something or other desktop that was our old homeschool computer where we had the Carbonite service. Our plan is to solve an ongoing contention for computer resources. The old homeschool computer is where the kids always did Rosetta Stone language Spanish and French. It is also where Lorena (Mom) liked to talk to use Skype to talk to Grandma Conchita in Mexico. Our plan is to move the language programs over to the homework computer (the Vostro). Then we will load Ubuntu 10.04 and Skype onto the old homeschool computer because Lorena thinks Windows XP is more complicated. We were thinking of loading Linux Mint on the computer instead of Ubuntu in deference to our buddy Lyle, but Lorena knows what she likes and she’s the one who cooks for us.
Finally, Christian is going to load Fedora Linux on my old Dell laptop. Fedora 13 was officially released yesterday. He and Kelly will use that computer and their little eeePC netbook for college mobility. There are few other things we want to do like load mySQL on Lorena’s Skype computer so we can use it for learning SQL, but those things will have to wait until we have a little more time. Hopefully, that will happen before school starts again in August.
*I first wrote homeschool, but we are done with that now–it is like a
new year has started and I keep putting the old year on the checks I
write.
I remember the excitement of figuring out my own schedule for the first time when I was in high school in Klamath Falls. There was central planning in junior high just like in the Soviet Union. They told you where to go and what to take and you just did it. It was great to get your schedule, but it was not the same as if you had picked it yourself. Then, when I went to college at Oregon State, it was truly a free market arrangement. I was on my own. I had to make sure I got all the classes I needed with all the needed prerequisites for future classes or I would not graduate on time. It was scary, but even more exciting. Kelly and Christian are in the process of that transition right now. They will move from a centrally planned (by me) schedule to a free market schedule they will have to navigate for themselves.
I loved walking over to Gill Coliseum to stand in line, hopefully with a cute coed, to get the coveted computer cards that guaranteed the slots in the classes I needed. It was very frenzied, but very exciting with ready made conversation. Did you get all your classes? What time do you get out on Friday? Do you have any 7:30 AM classes. What is your PE? Now it is all done on line. That is kind of sad in some ways because there is not as much of a people element to the process, but still very exciting. I will help them pick classes for awhile, but Kelly and Christian will have to talk to their advisers, go online to sign up, juggle their schedule when stuff does not work out, write the checks to pay the tuition, then figure out how to get their textbooks at a cheap price.
Both of the kids have planned their work and study schedule to a certain extent this year, Kelly a little more than Christian. They are going to have to do that, too, but it is a different problem than that of planning class schedules that have both short, medium, and long term ramifications. We will add to that burden by assignment of one CLEP test per semester, too. We will start the process this weekend. My plan, I hope I can stick to it, is to stay two arms lengths away from the keyboard. With my old eyes, I will not be able to see the screen so well, but will be available to answer questions. I will let you know how it goes.
My participation in the day to day operation of the homeschool ground to a stop when we decided to graduate Kelly and Christian from homeschool at the end of the year to put them in college. I did a bunch of administrative stuff like prepare transcripts, order test results sent to the college, plan schedules, and that sort of thing, but the reading, correcting, planning, explaining math, and the things we did together stopped. That ending was quite abrupt. The kids transitioned from school work to end of year testing and that was it.
All that happened just a couple of weeks ago and what followed was not that pretty. Without something planned to put us together for a purpose, we went different directions. Kelly often drew her Betty Blonde or read up in her room. Christian wrote code on his computer. I worked on my side programming projects and planned for college, mostly on the computer. Lorena is the only one who did not change her routine. We were all together, but did our own thing. Yesterday, we decided we did not like the way things were headed.
We decided we would try continue to read aloud together in the evenings when I get home from work. The kids like to have something to do with their hands while I am reading. Of course, Kelly always has a new Betty Blonde she needs to draw so that was taken care of. Christian decided he wants to knit something while we read so we ran down to JoAnn Fabrics after meeting yesterday and bought some yarn for a new project he has in mind. I found a good book on the historicity of Jesus
The advising staff has been very accommodating at Wake Tech, our local community college. When we decided to put Kelly and Christian there for a couple of years instead of starting right in at Campbell University (mostly for budgetary reasons), we had to figure out the process pretty quickly. I started by ordering the official test scores (ACT and CLEP) to be sent there. Then, I found out Christian cannot attend as a dual enrollment student (college during high school) until he reaches 16 years of age. I investigated a little further and found that he can enroll as a regular student as soon as he qualifies. I decided to go ahead and graduate both the kids from high school if they met all the criteria required by Wake Tech.
A high school transcript that shows he studied a specific number of classes in a specific set of subjects areas and a qualifying ACT score of above 21 is what was required. Both the kids qualified easily on the ACT score and had taken all the required high school classes, so all that was left was the needed high school transcripts. Fortunately the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) has a set of sample transcripts on their web site. I down loaded one of the samples and modified it to build a transcript for each of the kids. One thing I learned from the Home School admissions officer at Campbell University is that it is a good thing to grade classes on a 5.0 scale for those classes where the student is studying college level material. For us, that meant all the classes for which the kids had taken and passed CLEP tests, I could grade on a 5.0 scale while the rest of the material I graded on a 4.0 scale. That put both of their GPA’s above 4.0. I had to either hand carry the transcripts into the academic adviser at Wake Tech so they knew it was my official transcript and not something the kids made up.
The staff was very helpful. Based on Kelly’s ACT score and CLEP tests, she did not have to take any placement tests. Christian has to take a placement test just for math. He is preparing for that right now. One thing I found out about the CLEP tests is that even though most Community Colleges accept almost all of them, only about two-thirds of the four-year, state universities here in North Carolina accept the bulk of them. The rest of the state universities accept a few. In addition, even though all the classes the kids might take are accepted by previous agreement with the state universities, the bulk of them are accepted only as elective credit. Only about a quarter of the classes are accepted as direct equivalents to the classes the kids will need for their four year major. That means, we have to be very careful about what the kids take so the credits will transfer in a meaningful way. I will talk more about that later.
Note: This post is one in a series on how we prepared our homeschooled children to take various College Level Examination?Program tests. The introductory post for this series explains why we take these tests, what parts of the preparation worked for us, and what parts of the preparation did not work.
The CLEP test: PreCalculus
Primary study materials:
Secondary study materials:
Discussion:
Every one of the math programs we used to educate the kids during homeschool contributed to Kelly’s performance on this test. We started with Singapore Math and did that through sixth grade. That broke down for us in the seventh grade when we switched from Singapore Math to Teaching Textbooks. I described what we thought about the change from Teaching Textbooks here. When we hit Precalculus, Teaching Textbooks broke down for us, so we did another investigation and moved on to Thinkwell math. You can read about our thinking when we made that change here. As always, we got the REA CLEP book for Precalculus to use in conjunction with Thinkwell for the actual test preparation. Thinkwell was much broader and more detailed than the REA book, so after finishing the Thinkwell course, the REA book did its usual great job of narrowing down the sections of Thinkwell to revisit just to prepare for the test. Of course, the REA tests were excellent as test preparedness metrics, too.
Results:
Kelly was sixteen years old at the end of the tenth grade when she took this test and had a scaled score that, according to the REA book, would give her a B if the course were graded.
What we would do differently:
We really felt pretty good about how Kelly did on this test. The thing that might have moved her into the A category would have been more practice. She has a firm grasp of all the concepts, but it takes lots of practice to avoid the ciphering errors and remember all the minutiae of this broad and minutiae filled subject.
Our friend Troy graduated from NCSU with a Bachelors Degree in Civil Engineering on Saturday. We were privileged to attend about the best graduation I have ever attended. All the speakers appeared to be grateful and humble. Even more importantly, there speeches were brief and interesting. The crowd was respectful (with the exception of a few appropriate and well-justified digs at UNC). It is quite a thing to just get through the math required to earn a Civil Engineering degree. Then, when you add Statics, Dynamics, all the Physics and Chemistry, and the big project classes, it gets even uglier. These were the guys that were willing for, even relishing the hard work of really “getting” science and design. The huge payoff is that now they have it. The degree shows they have endured the pain and employers, having been through that same pain themselves, value it.
Lorena, Kelly, Christian, and I talked about it a lot on Saturday evening and Sunday. It DOES pay to do something hard. Troy put a link to this video on his blog a few days back. It is awesome–EXACTLY what I have been preaching to my kids for several years now. You can do ANYTHING you want, but doing something hard first opens a lot of doors that are hard to open when you get older. My theory (and that espoused in the video) is that if you want to be a Sociologist, study Applied Math, Statistics, or Engineering first.
Congratulations Troy!
Over at Mother’s Journal, Lynn has a quote that reminded me of my mother.
The only disability in life is a bad attitude.
I would be rich if I had a nickel for every time I heard my mother say “Attitude is everything.”
We talk about that a lot in our household. I am daily reminded that maybe, if I modeled a good attitude a little better, it might be easier to teach the kids about it. The older I get, the more I realize the truth of these two statements. Implementation is the hard part.
My buddy Andrew over at the GaugeCam project has gotten me addicted to Virtual Box. I recently got a new computer (Dell Latitude e6500, 8Gig RAM, Core 2 Duo). I have Windows 7 installed and I like it, but I have a need to run both Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux 10.04, too. Andrew showed me how to install them both in Virtual Box. It might be just a passing fad, but it fills a huge hole that has existed in my computing world for a long time. I had not looked at virtualization for several years. The last time I tried it, the things I wanted to do were either too expensive or not possible with open source/free options. So I ended up dual booting between Windows XP and Ubuntu.
Lately, I have been doing some cross-platform development on Linux with QT Creator and OpenCV. I had to reboot the computer every time I wanted to test something out in Windows. Now, I can develop in whichever OS I want and test it out in a window that runs the other OS. All the stuff I use including all the hardware just works. I recommend it highly. I have only been doing it for a matter of weeks now, so I have not seen the snags that I know will raise their ugly heads, but the overcoming of a years long headache has me in a rather euphoric mood for the time being.
We have a full, but short summer planned. Swim team practice starts at the YMCA in late May. We go to Oregon in June. We swim and hang out at home in July. It is all over in August when Lorena, Kelly, and Christian start school. My goal for the summer is to read a few books, do a little exercise, write a little code, and just enjoy the summer without the need to do our annual book purchase and year-long homeschool planning. We still have to sign up for classes, but that is easier than developing a lesson plan and buying materials for an entire year worth of teaching. After eight years of homeschool this is a new thing for me. I LOVED doing that, so I will miss it, but it is nice to have a break, too.
Lorena and I split a Whiskey River Burger at Red Robin to celebrate Mothers Day after meeting on Sunday. We liked it so much we decided we are going to do the same thing again next year! Christian and I started the weekend with biscuits and gravy at Pam’s Farmhouse restaurant on Saturday morning. It was Troy’s idea to go there before our twice monthly GaugeCam work session at Dr. Birgand’s lab in the Biological and Agricultural Engineering Department at NCSU. We think this is a tradition that could continue for years. After the lab session, we met Youngin, Lorena, and Kelly at McDonalds for lunch, then spent an hour or so at the Crossroads Barnes and Noble before going home to work on school stuff and a new computer setup at the house.
Kelly drew Betty Blonde and studied for her Precalculus test, so we did not get to work on her fall semester schedule as we had planned. We talked about it quite a lot and came up with what we think are good ideas, but we did not write anything down yet. The innovation, kind of inspired by a comment by Deanne and her daughter’s studies is our thinking on what Kelly might do for languages. She wants to get a non-Germanic, non-Romance language started before she gets out of her bachelors degree. We are trying to figure out how to make that all work out in the time we have available.
Kelly speaks Spanish well since we speak it most of the time at home, but wants to continue through Rosetta Stone for about fifteen minutes per day. She currently studies French every day for about half an hour. Our current operating plan is for her to continue to study French on her own while she is at the Community College, take the CLEP test for French after a couple of years, then go up to Quebec to immerse herself in French for the summer before she goes to NCSU. We have French speaking friends who live in Quebec City, with whom we were very close when we went to church with them in South Florida. We think that might work out well.
We looked into the available languages at NCSU. They have a lot available, but the thing that looks most appealing is their two year Russian program. She needs to look into that further, but it might fit the bill. I think Christian might like to try that, too. If they get two years behind them at about the same time, it would be great to get them over to Russia for a semester or two.
Linux scarves! I am seeing this as a huge positive trend not to mention leading edge fashion
statement. VERY impressive. Lyle’s blog post is here. I could not resist pointing to the image from my page. You guys pretty much have Ubuntu covered. On a related topic, we installed the new Ubuntu LTS (Lucid Lynx) 10.04 release on two computers so far (a third to follow possibly as early as tonight). It just keeps getting better. We use the LGPL released QT Creator and QT libraries (Thank you Nokia!) on Ubuntu for cross platform programming for both Windows and Linux. It is just awesome. Click the green scarf to go to Lyle’s blog. Christian’s effort is the picture on the right.
I hand carried Kelly and Christian’s high school transcripts into the Wake Tech Community College yesterday. The government schools and I think even the private schools have a way to do all that electronically, but they like to have the transcripts in a sealed envelope or hand carried to the adviser for homeschools. That is really understandable. They have no way to know whether it is valid or not. We also took in all the ACT and CLEP score documents. The adviser was able to enter them into the system and get us going even though none of it will be official until the scores arrive from the official sources in a couple of weeks.
The adviser with whom we worked was very nice. She has one boy currently attending Wake Tech. Her second boy just finished up his Bachelors Degree at UNC Chapel Hill in Physics and was accepted at Boston University for his PhD. It was fun to talk to her about that. Christian initially declared for pre-engineering associate degree, but after we talked to the adviser, looked at schedules, and discussed it all for an hour or so, we decided to rethink his plan a little. There is little room for anything other than engineering classes in the engineering program at both Wake Tech and NCSU. Christian and I both want him to be able to take a few electives in things like graphic design and programming.
I called my old professor and very good friend, Carroll Johnson from my Masters Degree at University of Texas at El Paso. Carroll said that since Christian probably will attend graduate school, his Bachelors degree field did not matter so much as the courses he takes. He said a Physics degree would allow him to go in a lot of different directions. That was good advice, so Christian and I tried to put a schedule together for a Physics degree. After about an hour, we realized that the course offerings at Wake Tech were insufficient for him to graduate in four years. He would have to go directly to North Carolina State University to finish according to that schedule. That is not possible, so we were back to square one.
Originally, when we worked with Campbell University, Christian was going to study Mathematics. It was not a perfect match for what Christian wanted to do, but it was not bad either. We decided to take a look at NCSU’s math offerings. We were amazed to find a program that appears to fit Christian’s undergraduate interests better than either Physics or Electrical Engineering. The Applied Mathematics Bachelors Degree program provides a 15 elective credit block for as a major for application of math and a 12 “anything” elective block. We think it will be a perfect way to prepare Christian for a broad range of future options at the same time it lets him follow some of his passions that are not so technical.
Our transition from homeschool to college is happening fast now. Kelly has one CLEP test this month and one in July. That is the end of her homeschool. We visited Campbell University, a wonderful little Christian school south of where we live, but decided not to go there at the last minute. We decided to spend a year or two in the community college that is five minutes from our house for three main reasons. First, it is WAY cheaper. Second, we found that North Carolina State University has a very good Statistics program. Kelly would have studied Applied Mathematics with a concentration in statistics at Campbell, but that was not what she really wanted to do. When we investigated the Statistics program at NCSU it just fit a lot better.
The third reason is Christian. His plan was also to attend Campbell, mostly because that would solve a lot of transportation problems. He always wanted to study physics or engineering, but thought an undergraduate degree in math with a lot of science would be sufficient to get him into a good engineering or physics graduate degree. That all changed for the better when we decided NCSU was the best fit for Kelly. They have a plethora of engineering programs and a good physics department. He is already doing volunteer research work in one of the Biological and Agricultural Engineering labs there, so aiming at a degree there was an easy choice to make. He is leaning toward electrical engineering right now, but does not really need to make a decision on that for a couple of years.
With all that in mind, Lorena, Kelly, and Christian all went to Wake Tech yesterday afternoon to talk to admissions/academic advisers. The upshot is that both of them will graduate from the Chapman Family Homeschool on June 15, 2010. They have both been accepted as full time students at Wake Technical Community College for Fall Semester of 2010. We are excited to get started on this new phase of their education.
Oh yeah, I do not want to forget to mention Lorena will be going to school with them, too. Full time!
Just when I was thinking I did not have much left to write, I get loaded up. First, my cousin Trisha started a new blog and she is off to a STELLAR start. She recently received her Masters Degree in Elementary Education and is substitute teaching for awhile in some VERY interesting places while she looks for a full time position. One place where she has applied is a place called Fields, Oregon, population 22 with a 2 hour drive to the closest grocery store. The crazy part about it is that Google Maps has a street view of their “downtown” and there is a “downtown” bypass. I will have more to say on all this later.
View Larger Map
On a second note, I had jury duty yesterday. It was interesting to say the least. There are too many stories to tell them all here. I was in the jury pool for an armed robbery. They called up at least 50 potential jurors and, by the time I left, they had gone through at least 25 of us without finding a pool of 12 they liked. I think the assistant district attorney liked me, but I was asked if I knew anyone who had gone through an armed robbery or theft or anything like that recently. Well, Lorena’s home town is struggling with all the drug cartel violence in North Mexico, so I told them about our close friends (Benjamin and Rita) who have been through two armed robberies, one of which included a pistol whipping. Then I told him about the home invasion at my in-laws house that happened last week and the hand-grenades that were exploded at the U.S. Embassy in Monterrey in November when my Lorena and the kids were only two blocks away.
I forgot to tell them about our friends, Daniel and Lila, whose daughter’s drug trafficking murderer was on the street again only one day after committing the murder. I also forgot to tell them about the shoot-out in our friend Iraklio’s neighborhood that took the lives of 11 drug cartel members and two kidnap victims. The defense attorney asked me if I had negative feelings about gangs and if I could separate my feelings about gangs from my judgment about the people on trial. I asked him if he thought that drug cartels counted as gangs.
He said, “Yes, I think they probably count as gangs.”
I said, “Yes, I believe I could judge them fairly based on the evidence presented.”
I told him I thought I could judge them based on the evidence, but he threw me off the jury anyway.
I actually enjoyed myself, met some nice people, and had my confidence restored, if not in particularly in lawyers, at least in the legal system. While it is not necessarily a pretty sight, you can see why it is a good system relative to whatever else is out there.
We started the transition out of homeschool this month. It really caught me by surprise. We always had a plan, so I do not know how it snuck up on us so fast. I will talk about all of that in another post. In our plan, Kelly will be a half-time homeschool student until the end of the 2010 when she will transition from a half-time load at college to a full-time regular student. Christian’s plan is to spend half-time in college and half-time in homeschool through the end of the school year. We are still organizing all this, but we believe we have most of the permissions we need from the college to move forward with our plan. There are only a few CLEP tests left to take. Kelly will take the ACT once more while Christian will take it twice. I will try to describe the whole transition with the help of the kids. There are many things to consider. Volunteer work, internships, summer programs, athletic activities, etc. We look forward to making this all happen.
Special note: The last four or five weeks were busy with travel, work, visitors, and test preparation. It was a challenge to write, not only because of the busyness, but because of my own attitude. I had planned to back way off on the blogging as the kids transitioned out of homeschool. Yesterday, though, I ran into Lynn from A Mother’s Journal at a church event. We had a very brief visit in the hallway that inspired me to get back into the blogging habit after this short hiatus. I realized there are still a lot of things about which to write and that I like to write. Thanks Lynn!