Rember the EuroStudent Hipster in Kelly’s Science Fiction class? Remember the commie, pro-drug, 1960’s throwback from Christian’s and Kelly’s and English Composition class? The day the commie spent the entire “writing” class making inane, irrational arguments about the existence of God (e.g. You cannot use the fact of object moral values as an argument for the existence of God because that is in the category of ethics, not religion. Jesus could not have been God because God is supposedly infinite and, as a human, Jesus had to be finite.). Well, the two of them were seen talking earnestly together on campus. Hmm…
Year: 2011 Page 5 of 11
Day 66 of 1000
Kelly signed up to write an article earlier this semester for the Wake Technical Community College Voice student newspaper. They went Since then, she has written a second article for this paper and an article for The College Fix, a national college news website. Yesterday, she got her second assignment from The College Fix, so she is getting lots of writing opportunities now. For the article below, Kelly wrote about futurist Rick Smyre‘s of Communities of the Future and his visit to WTCC. Christian took his camera and got some great shots of the event, so he got a byline, too.
Day 65 of 1000
We were amazed back in 2008 that a Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit came to the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences with tons of artifacts. Duke University loaned some old, old bibles from their collection to add to the exhibit. That was one of the highlights of our homeschool year. Then, last spring Christian and Kelly were both required to go to the North Carolina Museum of Art as part of their Art Appreciation class at the community college. Lorena and I took them one Saturday. The collection their is amazing. Now, the Art Museum has brought Rembrandt in America to Raleigh for a three month stay. Grandpa Milo, Grandma Sarah, and our dear friend Gladys are coming for Thanksgiving this year, Maybe we can all go see Rembrandt together. Another hat tip to Andrew. We do not know how he finds all this stuff, but we are glad he does. Maybe we can get he and his bride to tag along with us. Just sayin’.
We also love the North Carolina Museum of History. Our favorite visit there was about North Carolina’s rich pirate history–Blackbeard and all that. We need to start watching all of these museums a little more closely for these types of opportunities.
There is something really good you can say about Muammar Gaddafi without getting into any of the recent ugliness over in Libya. Kelly tells me that he is one of the funnest and easiest guys in the world to draw. She did this drawing for me very rapidly. The other really good thing about him is that you can spell his name just about any way you want and no one gets mad or corrects you because no one else knows how to spell it either. Really, I wrote this post because I wanted an excuse to put up this really cool caricature that Kelly drew.
Day 64 of 1000
Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education, will visit Christian’s and Kelly’s school this week for an invitation only town hall. It is amazing how many dignitaries from the White House, including President Obama himself, have visited Raleigh over the last little while. It is also amazing how some categories of people are unwelcome at these “non-political” events. They even seem to be picking up the pace with more visits scheduled all the time. Renee Ellmers visited Wake Tech last week. She is the U.S. Representative from the district just south of us who took on Bob Etheridge, the guy who got caught on video grabbing and choking someone who was asking him about his support of Obama’s initiatives. It is amazing that she walked the campus with the school President and made herself available to everyone.
My cousin Trisha who teaches at a VERY small school in Nevada, several hours from a grocery store, pointed out a law about how teachers in her state have to swear they have never been a principle or second in a duel. I think that is pretty limiting, especially in places as civilized as Austin, Nevada. She needs to write about it on her blog rather than just post it on Facebook. For a good read, I recommend her whole blog. There is an especially good story about how there are no air compressors at the gas stations in Austin so it puts a real crimp in your style when you have two flat tires.
Day 63 of 1000
This weekend was a wildly eventful weekend for the Chapman family. Lorena, Kelly, and Christian all had a ton of homework and I needed to come up to speed on some new technology. We finished all (or most) of that, got sick on a carnival ride at the North Carolina State Fair, and went to Sunday meeting. We had a very good weekend, but the most fun of the whole weekend, by far, was Lucia’s visit on Friday night. Lucia is Troy and Youngin‘s little one year old girl. She was with us for several hours and did not even come close to a whimper let alone cry.
We learned lots of things about Lucia. She LOVES peas (Lorena’s chicken a-la-King is loaded with peas) and tofu. She loves to read and count (one page of one book in particular). She speaks baby sign language. AND you can see from the picture she is a big fan of NCSU. A brilliant and beautiful child on all counts.
I think I scare little kids, so I back way off when they first arrive. It usually takes an hour or so for them to warm up to me if I work at it slowly in a non-aggressive way. Lucia wanted to be held by Lorena and Kelly and was very attracted to Christian, but had warmed up to me pretty early in the evening. She would bring me stuff and talk to me about it, read a book, let me feed her some peas–all that good stuff.
It is such a joy to be around a happy child and to watch and help them learn. I miss that a lot. I hope we get to do that again soon.
Day 62 of 1000
The kids are completely swamped with homework. I am completely swamped with the need to learn more about SQL and data mining. We are broke (and still a little big dizzy) from having attended the North Carolina State Fair yesterday. So, breaking our normal routine, we went home for lunch (rather than Wendy’s) after church and ate leftovers. We left Mom to study for her Financial Accounting class, and made our way into the stacks rather than to the first floor conversation area of the library where there is a lot more college drama, but a lot less studying. Now we are hard at work in the fourth floor stacks with photographic evidence that we are on task.
I decided that I needed to upgrade my Ubuntu to 11.10, load up MySQL and find myself a project that has to do both with SQL and BleAx to kill two birds with one stone–SQL and BleAx. It is really three birds because every time I go over to our buddy Lyle’s blog, I get Linux envy.
Update: I updated VirtualBox to v4.1.4 and Ubuntu to 11.10. I turned off that horrible Unity thing that the Ubuntu guys want to impose on us, I struggled for about 5 minutes to get full screen mode going again in VirtualBox with GuestAdditions. Now I am installing MySQL Server, MySQL Client, and MySQL Administrator. I am not sure that is exactly the right thing to do, but it will probably get me started. We will head home to the house in about five minutes.
Day 61 of 1000
The wildest ride Lorena ever let the kids take at the Linn County Fair in Albany, Oregon was the Ferris Wheel and that required a lot of whining and complaining. So when we walked by the Fireball at the North Carolina State Fair, Lorena was aghast when I told Christian we ought to take that one. Back from my carnival riding days, I remembered that I could handle the rides that made me go end over end much better than I could handle the spinning rides. Every spinning ride always made me sick. I remember getting sick on the Teacup ride at Disneyland back in about 1973 with my cousins Ann and Neil. It almost wrecked the day.
Still, I had a good level of confidence that I could handle the Fireball. I was wrong. The Fireball is a vertical circle with cars that swing back and forth until they eventually do a complete loop or three around the inside of the circle. Then the go the other direction and do a couple of completes in the other direction. We convinced Lorena that we should go on this ride, bought our tickets, then boarded the Fireball. I was good for the first half of the ride. Christian said he wondered why he agreed to do this with me for the first half of the ride, then got calibrated and really enjoyed the second half of the ride–he plans to do it again next year.
It was the great for the first half of the ride. I screamed, waved my arms in the air and thoroughly enjoyed myself. About half way through the ride I got that sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach and knew I had only about a 50/50 chance of not vomiting on everyone before the ride finished. I hung on for dear life through the loop the loops after the swinging was over than breathed hard to get as much oxygen as possible through the loop the loop the opposite direction. I threw off the seat-belt and restraining apparatus as soon as it was freed to run out to one of those pristine, clean port-a-potties you only find at state and county fairs to relieve myself of my breakfast.
Still, Lorena was able to record my LAST carnival ride for posterity. Here it is:
I use the QT libraries for most of my hobby projects (BleAx), volunteer projects (GaugeCam), and even some of the projects I do at my day job. My buddy, Andrew, just wrote me a note to let me know that it has been announced that The QT Project is up and running as a true open source project. That is awesome good news and means QT has a very good chance for a much longer life. Nokia has been very good about all this. A lot of us consumers of these wonderful libraries are thankful to them and all the other developers and users who have worked so hard on this.
Day 60 of 1000
Life is good for everyone. Christian needs to take Differential Equations next semester. The only place where it is available this semester is at a campuses on the other side of town at 6:30 in the evening on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It is about a thirty minute drive from our house. Lorena did not want him to go there alone at night, so I found her a Managerial Accounting class (she is in Financial Accounting right now) that takes place at the same time so they can drive together. Kelly needs another science class. The only class that might have worked at the campus close to our house was Introduction to Geology. She would have had a difficult schedule. It turns out there is an Astronomy class at the same time and the same campus where Lorena and Christian will go.
This is probably the best schedule we have ever had. Kelly has a Fridays free. Christian has three classes that he loves and two that he tolerates as opposed to the other way around. Lorena has the next class in the accounting sequence. That will leave me at home alone to work on my database skills. That is a good thing because I need that for my work. So now the only issue is where the classes get too full and one of them cannot take it. I hope it all works out.
After Mitt Romney’s drubbing in the Las Vegas debate and Herman Cain’s ever increasing lead in the polls, Wintery Knight is asking how much longer Romney can hang on–a very good question.
I noticed that Luke has linked to one of our posts from the Other Posts of Note section of the Sonlight blog (Thanks Luke!). He has a link there titled What are Other Posts of Note? I followed a link in that explanation to a post at the Molding Minds Homeschool blog. There was a wildly interesting education video embedded there. I have embedded it here.
Day 59 of 1000
I wrote a post a little over a year ago about Katie Davis and her amazing Amazima Ministries. Kelly and I have read per personal blog ever since. There is a separate blog that belongs to the ministry, too. Katie Davis went to Uganda on a mission trip when she was still in high school. It so profoundly affected her that she went back to stay at age 19. She is now 22 and the adoptive mother of 14 little girls. That does not tell the half of it. Her story is truly inspirational and now she has written a book. I highly recommend you watch the promotional video on the Kisses for Katie page at Amazon.
Kelly told me about this book last night. The whole family had a wonderful talk about it. The following quote is the first paragraph from the book’s foreword by Beth Clark:
People who really want to make a difference in the world usually do it in one way or another, and I’ve noticed something about people who make a difference in the world: They hold the unshakable conviction that individuals are extremely important, and that every life matters. They get excited over one smile. They are willing to feed one stomach, educate one mind, and treat one wound. They aren’t determined to revolutionize the world all at once; they’re satisfied with small changes. Over time, though, the small changes add up. Over time, though, the small changes add up. Sometimes the even transform cities and nations, and yes, the world.
The whole family talked about this last night. Lorena and I plan to talk more about what we will do as the kids move on to college. Kelly expressed the thought that she was not doing enough and felt a little condemned by the whole topic. I felt the same way. The reality is that none of us are ever doing enough. The truth of her statement, though, is that we tend to focus on ourselves. With all our college entrance stuff, we have remained focused on ourselves and not others. We all agreed the best things we have done, the things that brought us the greatest sense of accomplishment and joy, were tied to the times when we saw someone’s specific need and worked to help them.
We live in a narcissistic, Facebook obsessed world where everyone wants everyone else to know about the great things they do. We decided that we did not want to feel bad about what we have not done. Even that is narcissistic. It is better to do something. Katie Davis wrote this book. She is currently touring the US talking about what she does and the needs and plans of her ministry. It this brings attention to Katie Davis for a short period, but, at the end of her tour, she will go back to Uganda and be a mother to 14 little girls. There is not a lot of glamor in that. There is a lot of very hard work and heart break associated with her day to day life. But there is a lot of joy, too. I think the part I like best is that none of what she says or does is about her. Read the book. Read the blog.
Update: Lorena just texted me to remind me that the narcissism extends well beyond Facebook to include many, many blogs, probably including this one in particular.
Day 58 of 1000
We caught the last half hour of the Republican Presidential Debate in Las Vegas last night after church. Kelly made the comment that she wished Paul Ryan would have been there. I agreed with her. We also agreed that CNN and hard-left commentator, Anderson Cooper, famous for his extreme partisanship should not be in same building as a Republican debate, let alone moderate one. Still, I would vote for any of the people on the stage, with the possible exception of Ron Paul, over Obama (I think I would move to Mexico to help the fight against the drug cartels if that was the choice). It would be awfully hard to cast a vote for Mitt Romney, but I would hold my nose and do it. Any of the others would be great.
On another note, I removed my browser bookmark to National Review’s online blog The Corner. The whole Hugh Hewitt style, establishment Republican thing they have going completely gags me. I decided they are not worth reading on a regular basis. If they are not in my bookmark list, I will only get to their page by following links from the pages I regularly visit or by manually typing in the address–it will not be often. For politics, I will will stick with The Other McCain and Free Republic with a little Michelle Malkin, Ace of Spades, and Wintery Knight thrown in when I have some extra time.
Update: My buddy Stepan, the PhD Chemist from Moscow State University in Russia and I talked about politics this morning. I explained to him how it was Ronald Reagen and his Star Wars, low gas prices, and booming economy that shortened the life of the Soviet Union. He made the first cogent argument against that idea I have ever heard. He said, “You cannot prolong the life of someone who is already dead.”
My current task at work is to learn how to use Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services Report Builder 3.0. It is a tool to create reports from an SQL database. I really need to start work on a project that involves images and features from images in a MySQL database. I have done a very little bit of that already, but I need to get more comfortable with it so I can build a database of images and features for work with the R statistical programming language. It seems like more and more people require that now to facilitate data mining of the images. It is hard work, but very rewarding to learn this kind of stuff. I have an old computer at home I think I will set up to do that.
Day 57 of 1000
Lorena goes to Costco about every other Saturday morning. She drops Kelly, Christian, and I off at either at NCSU either at the D.H. Hill Library to study or in one of the Biological and Agricultural Engineering to work on GaugeCam. She stayed with us this past Saturday to attend the prospective student open house. We listened to an inspirational talk on scholarship opportunities at the Stewart Theater in Talley Hall, a gorgeous facility, then made our way over to a building named SAS Hall, another gorgeous facility. SAS Hall is named after the famous statistical software company founded at NCSU to analyze agricultural software. The Mathematics and Statistics department are housed there.
We went to SAS Hall because to talk to the undergraduate advisers. It was all very impressive. We walked up to the math table on the first floor of the building and started talking! The Math professor with whom we spoke was amazingly helpful. The professor could not have been more gracious. He spent ten minutes with us and, because Christian’s situation is so unique, asked that we set up a meeting to speak with him about Christian’s possibilities at a one on one meeting in early November. He then walked us over to talk to the main Statistics adviser. We went through almost the exact same process again. The Statistics adviser spoke with us for about ten minutes, then, because Kelly’s situation is so unique, asked us to set up a one on one meeting in early November. They acted genuinely interested in helping us, something that has not been my experience at some other large state universities.
We were all very inspired by the visit. My impression of the campus is that it is much more compact than the schools I attended (Oregon State University, University of Texas at El Paso, and Texas A&M University), but we were only on one of the two campuses. The reality is that I am still not very clear about what is where. Nevertheless, it is a beautiful campus with amazing facilities and very friendly and helpful people (so far). Kelly and Christian will spend most of their time in the same building even though they will probably only have one or two more classes together after they leave the community college. We have lots more paper to fill out based on what we learned on Saturday and there are several other schools with whom we need to talk, but we certainly liked what we saw at NCSU.
Day 56 of 1000
My friends know I am not a big fan of Steve Jobs. I am even less of a fan of Wired magazine. I might write about that someday if I can generate enough enthusiasm to write about boring and tired cliches. That being said, my buddy Andrew, as is his wont, sent me an amazing article–a Wired interview of Steve Jobs–from 1996. Steve Jobs hammered the National Education Association for stifling educational innovation and advocated for school vouchers. I recommend you read the whole thing. Here is a partial quote from the interview in response to the question, “Could technology help by improving education?”
It’s a political problem. The problems are sociopolitical. The problems are unions. You plot the growth of the NEA [National Education Association] and the dropping of SAT scores, and they’re inversely proportional. The problems are unions in the schools. The problem is bureaucracy. I’m one of these people who believes the best thing we could ever do is go to the full voucher system.
I have a 17-year-old daughter who went to a private school for a few years before high school. This private school is the best school I’ve seen in my life. It was judged one of the 100 best schools in America. It was phenomenal. The tuition was $5,500 a year, which is a lot of money for most parents. But the teachers were paid less than public school teachers – so it’s not about money at the teacher level. I asked the state treasurer that year what California pays on average to send kids to school, and I believe it was $4,400. While there are not many parents who could come up with $5,500 a year, there are many who could come up with $1,000 a year.
If we gave vouchers to parents for $4,400 a year, schools would be starting right and left. People would get out of college and say, “Let’s start a school.” You could have a track at Stanford within the MBA program on how to be the businessperson of a school. And that MBA would get together with somebody else, and they’d start schools. And you’d have these young, idealistic people starting schools, working for pennies.
Nobel Prize winning economist, Milton Friedman, should be credited with the introduction and popularization of the vouchers idea. Here is a Reason magazine article an interview of Friedman by Nick Gillespie from 2005 that describes the idea and some of its history. Friedman was 93 at the time of the article and is now gone, but the ideas he expressed it first in his 1955 article titled “The Role of Government in Education” are just as fresh today as they were when he first wrote about them. These ideas are really starting to take hold in states like Washington D.C., Indiana, Arizona, and Wisconsin. They work.
I have a lot of hope for the future of public education in America. Our children prospered in homeschool, but we were forced into it by what we considered to be a failed government school system where we lived. We might never have homeschooled our children had a decent school been available to us. The less the government is involved in running, managing, overseeing, and monitoring the schools, the faster they are going to get better. There are two huge impediments to this happening–the teachers unions and the current teacher education system in our universities. If we get those two huge, self-serving bureaucracies eliminated and/or competing in a free market arena, the kids will be much better served.
Day 53 of 1000
Charles Murray authored a book titled Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality. It is about the bankruptcy of the American education system. He is a big proponent of the idea that it is bad to get a Bachelors degrees that costs tens of thousands of dollars in communications, sociology, or some other soft field where the few available jobs do not pay enough to retire debt incurred to get the degree in the first place. He and Peter Thiel, one of the founders of Pay-Pal, teamed up to defeat two academics from Duke and Northwestern University on the topic “Too Many Kids Go to College“.
I think Murray and Thiel have a very strong case, but the thing that caught my eye in the article was this statement by Murray during the debate:
When I agreed to debate on too many kids are going to college, I thought of college as being four-year colleges leading to the BA. I didn’t think of it as a whole range of community colleges and the rest. Anyway, that’s the way I’m going to argue tonight because if the proposition were that too many kids are trying to get more education and training after high school, I wouldn’t have accepted the position on the affirmative. Almost everybody needs more education after high school. What they don’t need is to chase after this fraudulent, destructive, antediluvian thing called a BA. The thesis of my argument really is that the BA is the work of the devil.
I think Murray has it just about right. A BA is OK for some kids, but a whole lot more kids need to do self-learning or get their education in apprenticeships and community college certificate programs. I think he has it just about right. Kelly got very high score on her college entrance ACT, has the right ethnicity, does volunteer work, knows the right people, and could probably get into one of the Ivy’s. Her cousin has degrees from both Dartmouth and Harvard. One of Kelly’s schoolmates is a high school senior who is dual-enrolled with Kelly at the community college. He is applying to ALL of the Ivy’s as well as Duke, Stanford, and some other big name expensive colleges.
Kelly asked me, “Should I be applying at the Ivy’s, too?”
Her question was answered for her when she saw this image from Dom Giordano’s Facebook page. She can go to Stanford or an Ivy for grad school on a teaching or research assistantship. Which would I rather have as an employee, a self-satisfied, entitled kid with an Ivy League education or this guy? It is a no-brainer. I want this guy:
Update: It appears the 99% Occupy crowd is active in Eugene, Oregon. Seems about right.
Update II: More education sob stories from NRO.
Update II: More education sob stories from NRO.
Right after I posted about Kelly’s and Christian’s college professor, over at Truth Has a Chance, Giles posted about another profoundly ridiculous manifestation of cultural hegemony at an Oregon State football game. This only serves to discourage the very people the football team should try to encourage: the people who pay to watch the football game and are even willing to pay extra for the privilege of buying a ticket!!! Sad, sad, sad.