Month: March 2013 Page 2 of 3

Day 575 of 1000

This is the third in a series of posts on the benefits of skipping high school and going straight to college.  The introductory post and index to all the other posts in the series is here. You can see their undergraduate results and post-graduate (PhD) chase here. I try to keep the results updated as they occur.

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Kelly’s path to college started when she was 13 years old and she took her first CLEP test.  She got a 68 on the Freshman College Composition test.  A 50 is required to receive college credit.  I have written a series of posts on how we used CLEP to organize and assure good depth of coverage for some of our homeschool classes.  At the time, we did not really think of these tests as something that might contribute to Kelly’s early entrance into college.  That did not happen until we enrolled her in the local community college full time at age sixteen.  We found that the 44 hours of CLEP credit accepted by the community college meant she only needed one more semester to graduate with a college transfer Associate of Science degree.

We could have graduated here from community college and sent her straight on to NCSU where she could have graduated 3½ years early, but only if she wanted a liberal arts degree.  There were several reasons we did not do that.  First, she was young and the community college environment was not so overwhelming as the much larger NCSU.  Kelly and Christian entered Wake Tech Community College at the same time and took most of their classes together so they were not completely on their own.

Second, we wanted Kelly to get a hard degree rather than just a liberal arts or business degree.  Our thinking was that since she was so young, she could get a masters degree in liberal arts or continue with something harder after she finished her undergraduate degree.  A hard, math-oriented degree is a better base for almost everything.  The problem with the hard degree is that she did not have the prerequisites she needed to get through the degree as fast as she could get through a liberal arts degree.  That is why we decided to leave Kelly in Wake Tech with Christian for the full two years even though she could have graduated after one semester.

We continued with a few homeschool classes in combination with the community college classes and used Kelly’s graduation with her Associate degree as her high school graduation.  She continued to take the ACT college entrance exam each year to remain in compliance with North Carolina law that requires yearly, nationally normed, standardized tests.  The last time she took the ACT before she applied to NCSU, she received a 34.  The 34 was a very high score that helped her win the Dean’s Scholarship for the Physical and Mathematical Sciences department when she was accepted there as a Statistics major.  Christian did well on the ACT, but nowhere close to a 34 as he was only an eighth grader when he took his final ACT exam.

Kelly is scheduled to graduate from NCSU in spring of 2014.  This is about a year and a half later than would have been possible if she wanted to leave with a weaker degree and spend most of her school time on her own.  We believe it was a very good move for Kelly to spread out her college over six years rather than just four.  She almost certainly would not have gotten a scholarship, but more importantly she is getting a broader education and will finish with a degree that pays more than average and for which there are a lot of jobs.  She will have many more credit hours than are required to graduate and will be well prepared to go on to a graduate degree in either statistics or a specialization area.

She should be able to complete all this two years earlier than the normal trajectory she would have followed had she stayed in a traditional school.  We have no illusions that we are are smarter than other people nor do we believe that we work harder.  We did not even plan particularly well.  We probably could have gotten her through more quickly with higher educational achievement, but that would have been at the expense of some loneliness and family time that we value so highly.  We are pleased with the way this all went particularly because Kelly and Christian shared the time together, made friends together, and were a great support to each other during the whole process.

The success of our plan probably had to do with tenacity and being the tortoise rather than the hare in the execution of our plan over many years.  It had almost nothing to do with any brilliance of planning, parental guidance, or brilliant execution.

Why would anyone ever want to go to a college where cows never wander around on campus?  Kelly took both of the pictures below in the Brickyard at NCSU today.  If they do n0t have an Ag school, it is highly likely they are not studying anything important.

Day 574 of 1000

This is the second in a series of posts on the benefits of skipping high school and going straight to college.  The introductory post and index to all the other posts in the series is here. You can see their undergraduate results and post-graduate (PhD) chase here. I try to keep the results updated as they occur.

[Previous post in series]
[Next post in series]

Our kids both skipped high school, but they took different paths to do it.  It would be nice to be able to say we planned those paths based on the kids’ abilities, desires, and needs, but that would not be anywhere close to the truth.  The reality is that, when we started our homeschool, one of the furthest things from our minds was the idea that it might be a good thing to skip high school.  We did plan some of the stuff that allowed the kids to get ahead, but a lot of things happened serendipitously to bump us along toward that end.  We did not realize that a move to college out of junior high might be a worthy goal until college was already upon us.

It is interesting that the kids had such different trajectories.  I think all of this started when Kelly passed here first CLEP test for college credit at age 13.  I have written a series of posts about how to use CLEP testing both for college credit and to assure the coverage of the homeschool course material is sufficient for future performance in college.  We used CLEP testing extensively with Kelly, but sparingly with Christian, the reason having mostly to do with timing that I will discuss in future posts on the trajectory of each of them.  The upshot is that Kelly received 44 credit hours for 10 CLEP tests when she entered the community college while Christian only received 18 credit hours.  When they entered Big State U (NCSU in this case), Kelly received credit for 23 hours plus foreign language proficiency waiver based on her ACT and CLEP tests while Christian received no credit for CLEP, but got the foreign language proficiency waiver.

The 23 credit hours Kelly received gave her a huge leg up going into both Wake Tech Community College and NCSU.  She was able to schedule more elective courses and take light loads that allowed her to do other things.  Christian had to focus hard just to get all the classes he needed.  In the end, Kelly took a little extra time to get her degree, but was able to win one of the prestigious Dean’s scholarships at NCSU and came out with a broader educational experience and an Associate of Science degree from the Community College.

A second thing that happened was Christian’s participation in the Duke TIP testing.  As part of that program he took the ACT (college entrance exam) when he was in the seventh grade.  He could have taken the SAT, but the ACT was accepted by the North Carolina Department of Non-public Education as a nationally normed standardized test with respect to homeschool.  Christian did well on the test.  He got a 22 which was sufficient for statewide honors.  That would not have been good enough to get him into NCSU, but he was only in seventh grade at the time, so it got us to at least think about the concept of putting him into college a couple years after that.

We are very happy with both of these paths.  I do not believe Kelly would have prospered as much if she would have followed a path similar to the one taken by Christian.  The same thing is true for Christian.  It would have been a mistake for him to follow Kelly’s trajectory.  I will try to explain why I think this is true en the next couple of posts in this series about the different paths each took.

Tom is a really nice guy, but that is part of the problem. I had my whole family convinced (and it’s true) that Wendy’s is truly fine dining.  We made the really big mistake of leaving our kids with Tom and his wife, Sharon, for a weekend.  They wrecked 15 years of hard work by taking them to a gourmet pizza house and some snooty sushi place.  Now the whole family is wrecked.

It would not be so bad if the guy was not so tall and handsome.  Every time I see his full head of hair it makes me want to gag.  Today he took us to a French restaurant to eat Quiche Lorraine, Monte Cristo sandwiches, and Beignet pastries.  They were really good, but there is no way I am going to admit that in public.

Day 573 of 1000

We bought tickets for Lorena to visit her father and mother in Monterrey for a week at the end of the month.  Her grandmother Rosenda (Lauro’s mother) is 96 years old and Lorena needs to see her.  We would all like to go, but we cannot afford to miss the work and school.  We hope to get some pictures of all the cousins, aunts, and uncles.

The rest of us will stay here and hang out with our good friends from Indiana.  We are fans of homeschool, but really appreciate this family who we belive really does it right.  I am sure my blog posts for the weeks following will be heavily influenced by the conversations we have.

The drive down from Prescott to Phoenix was absolutely gorgeous this morning. And when I got close to Phoenix hotair balloons were everywhere. It was beautiful!

Day 571 of 1000

I will spend the whole day traveling today.  This has been quite a productive trip to Prescott, but I cannot wait to see my family again in Raleigh.

Day 567 of 1000

We had one of those company events that, on one level is enjoyable.  We had the chance to spend some time with the people with whom we rub shoulders all day, but for whom you have no idea how they live their non-work lives.  I work with some genuinely nice people and generally enjoyed myself.  At the same time, the venue of the event was a little out of my comfort zone.  The odd and interesting part was that, after dinner, one of my colleagues (and a pretty good guy) began to emphatically explain his ideas about “christianity”.  The reason I did not capitalize the word Christianity and put the scare quotes around it, is because his ideas were so far removed from generally accepted knowledge, even for most liberal scholars, that I was aghast.

The idea was that the so-called Gnostic gospels were contemporary with the New Testament canon and that neither the canon nor the doctrines of Christianity were established until the Nicene Council of 325 A.D.  The sad part is that Kelly and Christian ran into this same kind of nonsense in one of their (of all things) English classes in college.  It does not take a whole lot of investigation to realize that, using the most charitable take on this possible, these are fringe views held by fringe scholars.  It was a lively discussion and I promised to send him some references.  This was really not so much a discussion about Christianity, but a discussion about what we know from history about Christianity.  The following is an excerpt from a Tim Keller article about the DaVinci Code novel that gets the idea across:

Helmut Koester of Harvard has argued that the Nag Hammadi Gnostic-Jesus texts were written very early, almost as early as the Biblical gospels themselves. And Elaine Pagels, who did a doctorate under Koester at Harvard, has popularized this view in The Gnostic Gospels and the more recent Beyond Belief:The Secret Gospel of Thomas.

But this is very much a minority view across the field of scholarship. N.T.Wright says, “It has long been the received wisdom among students of early Christianity that the Gospel of Thomas…found at Nag Hammadi…is a comparatively late stage in the development of Christianity.” (New Testament and the People of God, p.436) The great majority of scholars believe the Gnostic-Jesus texts to have been written 100-200 years after the Biblical gospels, which all were written within the first 30-60 years after Jesus’ death.Why this consensus?

As N.T.Wright points out in The Resurrection of the Son of God, the early Christians were all Jews. Jews had a thoroughly different world-view than that of the Greeks or the gnostics. They believed firmly that this material world was made good (see Genesis!) and that despite sin God was going to renew it and resurrect our bodies (Daniel 12:1-2.) Jews had no hope (or concept) of disembodied souls living apart from the body.What does this mean? We know from the Pauline letters, some written only 13 years after Jesus’ death, that all the early Christians claimed to have met Jesus and that he was still alive. But it would have been impossible for Jewish believers to claim “Jesus is alive” without also believing he was raised physically from the dead.

Helmut Koester and others posit that the first Christians believed, as the gnostics, that Jesus was only ‘spiritually risen’ and decades later the idea of a bodily resurrection developed. But N.T.Wright shows that Christianity could never have arisen as a movement among Jews unless the original believers knew Jesus had been raised bodily from the dead.This means in turn that the attempt to create a Gnostic-Jesus must have been much later.The writings could not have represented an early but repressed true version of Jesus-faith.Wright asks: “Which Roman emperor would persecute anyone for reading the Gospel of Thomas [since it so closely reflected Greek thinking]?….It should be clear that the talk about a spiritual ‘resurrection’ in the sense used by [the gnostic writings] could not be anything other than a late, drastic modification of Christian language.” (Resurrection, p.550.) There is far, far more that could be said in criticism of the thesis that the Gnostic-Jesus is older than the Biblical Jesus. But I’ll stop here.

I will probably send him a couple scholarly volumes by NT Wright on what we know about this historically.  I think they might actually get read.

It is snowing hard and the wind is blowing here in Prescott.  It sounds like there will be a good amount of accumulation tonight and nasty driving conditions through the weekend.  From the National Weather Service:

Strong Winter Storm System to affect Northern Arizona today through Saturday.

A strong Pacific storm system will move across northern Arizona with periods of heavy rain and heavy snow through Saturday. Snow levels will continue to lower through this event. The Heaviest accumulations will be above 5500 feet with lighter accumulations as low as 4000 feet by Saturday afternoon. Expect winter driving conditions with slick roadways and low visibilities due to snow and blowing snow.

Winter Storm Warning remains in effect until 6 pm MST Saturday above 5500 feet.

Winter Weather Advisory remains in effect until 6 pm MST Saturday between 4500 and 5500 feet.

Timing: snow showers will continue in the mountains with snow levels lowering through the afternoon. Rain is expected to change over to snow in the Prescott Area mid to late afternoon. The period of heaviest precipitation is expected through mid evening. Lighter snow intensity is expected Saturday.
Snow accumulations: 10 to 15 inches above 6000 feet, 5 to 10 inches between 5500 and 6000 feet, and 1 to 5 inches between 4500 and 5500 feet. Locally greater amounts are possible.
Other impacts: slick roadways and severely reduced visibilities due to snow and blowing snow.

Day 564 of 1000

One of the silliest statements made about the first chapters of Genesis is that it is just a creation myth.  A blog that I read regularly reviewed a book titled The Bible Among the Myths that (pun intended) dispels that myth.  The review is worth a read and I plan to order the book.  Here is the section of the article that hooked me:

The Bible Among the Myths extends the question: how could they have been so utterly different from every other culture in history? For the contrasts are great. Oswalt identifies these common (if not universal) features of myth, in contrast to the biblical view of

• Cyclical time: there is a lack of definite beginning and no clear direction to reality (with no one to give it direction). The Bible speaks of history with a beginning, with progress, and with a destination.
• Nature symbolizing the divine. The Bible specifically rejects this.
• The significance of magic, specifically the use of ritual and/or manipulations of matter to cause predictable results in the realm of deity. This, too, is nowhere to be found in biblical religion.
• Obsession with fertility and potency, often expressed in religious (temple-based, even) prostitution of every base description. God is not sexual, nor is the religion he revealed.
• Polytheism: obviously not the case for biblical theism.
• The use of images in worship: expressly forbidden in the Ten Commandments.
• Eternity of chaotic matter: see above; not so in the Bible.
• Low view of the gods, who are more powerful than humans but no better ethically; the Bible depicts God as perfectly holy, just, loving, and righteous.

There is considerably more: I would rather leave you wanting to know more than thinking you had the gist of it covered here. These differences in substance obtain in spite of certain similarities of form between the Bible’s account and others.

I have heard the myth goofiness a number of times, but I really never had a good response.

It was pretty painful when I had a close, non-Christian relative dismissively tell me, “Everyone knows the first chapters of Genesis are myth.  They fit the category.  Scholarship is clear on that.”

I did not have an answer then, but even in this short blog post, it is very clear the first chapters of Genesis do NOT fall into any reasonable definition of the category of myth.  I highly recommend the book review and plan to review the book itself here when I finish reading it.

Day 563 of 1000

I have always been an avid reader and a little bit of a news junky.  I read the newspaper at breakfast every day when I grew up in Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah’s house.  I think I must have started in about the third grade because we moved to Klamath Falls in the middle of my fourth grade year and I remember feeling a sense of stability after the move because I could still read the Oregonian.  I think it was a pretty good newspaper back then.  When Lorena and I moved back from Florida to Oregon, it was excited about being able to read the Oregonian again.  I was very sorely disappointed.  We signed up for an inexpensive three month trial because we were new in town.  Whatever we paid it was not worth it.  We found that, just like the NPR news shows, almost everything reported in the Oregonian was unreliable and had a hard left wing bias, so we quit taking the paper.

After that, I read the Wall Street Journal over lunch every day at work.  I also listened to the local news radio station and talk radio.  Of course, we did not have a television, so that did not fit into the picture.  When news become more accessible on the internet, I started reading that a lot, too.  In the early 2000’s, we moved to Albany, Oregon where there was quite a good small town daily newspaper.  It was really nice to have a broadsheet newspaper to hold in our hands or lay on the table while we read it every day, but when we moved away from Oregon to North Carolina, that was no longer available.  The newspaper here in Raleigh is truly abysmal–at the same level of incompetence and bias as the Oregonian and that is saying a lot, so we are paperless again.

Something really good happened after this last election.  Leading up to the election, I was consuming news at an elevated pace as is my usual course.  When the election was over it dawned on me that the vast bulk of the time I had invested in following all the election events was wasted.  Ninety percent of the “news” I consumed was trash talk between highly partisan factions of my own party with only ten percent real information that described what was going on.  At that point, I decided I was going to quit investing so much time on trying to figure out who thinks what about the news–they were ALL wrong on both sides of the political divide this election.

That decision improved my life dramatically.  It made me think about my stated world view and rethink (again) what is important in that light.  It has been great not to get worked up about the latest political outrage.  I still keep up on the news every day.  I even read two or three political blogs of the people I find most trustworthy and interesting, but I only do that once or twice per week.  My life is the better for it.

Day 562 of 1000

Kelly “the beloved” (she is always loved, but not always “the beloved”) was an absolute champion over the last couple of days helping her mother prepare for a Western Civilization I class.  She helped Lorena make flashcards, practice essays, memorize answers, and everything necessary for her to do well on the test.  She was also a BIG cheerleader.  We appreciate it a lot.  Lorena thinks she did really well on the test.  After the test they all went down to the YMCA to work out, then ran down to Starbucks to celebrate their hardwork.  I wish I could have been there.

I saw one of the most ridiculous bumper stickers I have ever seen on the way into work this morning.  It said, “Well-behaved women rarely make history.”  My thoughts immediately went to Mary the mother of Jesus, Florence Nightingale, and Mother Theresa.  The statement does not apply to men either.  I think well-behaved people are the only ones who make any kind of history worth making.  I suppose it depends on to whom one conforms their behavior.  If the conformance is not to God, it is bad behavior.  I looked up the author of the quote.  The “scholar” who made the quote is a Harvard History professor who characterizes herself as an active feminist and Mormon.  It follows.

Day 561 of 1000

When I checked into the Marriott Residence Inn, they told me I had acheived “elite” status.  Now I am silver.  In two or three more trips, I will be gold and should hit platinum sometime this summer.  They did not have my previous room so they give me a MUCH bigger room with two beds.  Pretty amazing.  If I have to be away from home, this is not a bad place to be.

Day 560 of 1000

I drove up to Prescott this morning after arriving in Phoenix on an evening flight. It does not feel good to be away from the family, but we do good work and we expect to make significant progress ove the next couple of weeks. The kids are at home for all of spring break this year because I have to work and Lorena’s spring break is different from the kids. That is OK. Kelly has some excellent projects in mind and Christian can devote some time to his undergraduate research project. The reality is that they have been going to bed between one and two AM every morning for quite awhile. This is probably the toughest semester of their undergraduate careers. What the really need is to rest, get some exercise, and recharge their batteries.

Day 559 of 1000

The best Statistics columns in print and on the internet are currently written by a guy named Carl Bialik, the Numbers Guy at the Wall Street Journal.  Both Kelly and my buddy Andrew pointed me to this article titled Data Crunchers Now the Cool Kids on Campus where one of Kelly’s classmates from NCSU was interviewed.  Some times Kelly has some trepidation about whether she started in the right major.  The further she goes the more that fear is allayed.  She loves statistics and she really is “getting” the material.  I think whichever summer internship she takes will reinforce this even more.