Day 622 of 1000
We attend a special meeting of our church today where we will see a special friend of ours visiting from Texas who is here to help with the meeting. The family will drop me off at the airport on the way home so I can fly to Arizona. Everyone in the household plans to study like crazy as the last finals will be over before the end of the week. All of this on the American pseudo-Holiday, Cinco de Mayo.
Christian found this and forwarded it to me. This kind of thing is the reason we homeschooled our children.
Day 621 of 1000
Here is an amazing story over on ZDNet about a personal 3D printer from 3D systems that will be available from Staples at the end of June. The 3D printer can only print within a 5½” cube and the expendables are pretty expensive, but it is changing the game pretty dramatically. Now that working 3D printable guns are possible, this makes it even bigger news. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for a 3D printer to be available that costs less than $1000 and can print one of the Defense Distributed designed guns.
Christian studies for his Real Analysis final.
Day 620 of 1000
This is the first in a series of three posts about things that have helped me develop and sustain a career I love. The first post is about how to stay in close touch with people with whom you have worked. The second post is about how to give away free work whenever you can. The third is about how to invest significant efforts in helping previous employers, people who can never help you, and “the least of these.”
I have a career that I love. Beyond my wildest expectation, it gets more enjoyable every year. It did not start out that way. There are several simple things I wish someone would have explained to me about career and life that I did not realized until I was in my forties. This is the first of two posts about the rules I believe got me here. Of course, the rules are not the only thing–you have to know how to do the job, but the rules set things up for my success. The first set of rules has to do with staying in touch with colleagues and are listed at the bottom of this post. The second has to do with giving things away (yes, that means for free) and life-long learning. First, a little about my background and career path.
Education
Through no fault of my own, I have a great career doing work that interests me with good people. At some level I have always known it was by the grace of God because I certainly did not plan it that way. I (barely) finished a degree in Business Administration with a concentration in Marketing in 1978. I got pretty bad grades and when I got out, surprise, it was really tough to get a job. I was a microcosm of what happens to people who study non-STEM degrees today with the exception that college was pretty cheap at the time, I was not saddled with a lot of debt, and I (again) got pretty bad grades.
I worked for awhile at nights in the mail room at a large technology company running computer reports around their multi-building campus. It was truly a dead end job, so I decided to go back to college and get a technical degree. If I had had a brain in my head, I would have done the leveling classes to get into a Masters degree program. No really great school would have accepted me because my grades were so bad, but knowing what I know now, it would have been pretty straightforward to get accepted at a good regional University as a probationary student long enough to prove that I could handle the degree. I already had a lot of the math and chemistry, so it would not have taken long if I worked hard. Later in life, I actually worked with a woman who did exactly that to get into a Masters program in Mechanical Engineering with an English degree and no math.
Career field
So, I went to a technical college and got a two year associate degree in something called Computer Systems Enginneering Technology. It was kind of a cross between computer programming and electronics. With that, I got a really good job at a company named Triad in Silicon Valley training technicians how to work on specialized computers specifically designed for auto parts store. After I had been there a couple of years, a friend told me about a program where I could pay in-state tuition in Oregon while I went to school for a semester in Guadalajara. It sounded great, so I headed to Mexico.
I made no job plans before I went to Mexico, so when we got toward the end of the semester, I started to worry because I had no money. Thankfully, my Mom, Grandma Sarah, was way ahead of me. She saw a want-ad in the newspaper for a technical writer at a robotics company named Intelledex in Corvallis. She sent my resume, I went to the interview when I got home, and they gave me the job. At that time in 1983 there were hardly any industrial robot companies, but one had been started in Corvallis by a group of the engineers and scientists who worked at the Hewlett-Packard ink-jet printer facility. Within a couple of years, I had moved over from the robots to work on something called machine vision. A machine vision system is a computer that has a camera connected to it. The system captures images of things that are happening on conveyor belts and workstation tables to guide robots, check the quality of assembled parts, and that sort of thing. That is the field in which I have worked for the last thirty years.
I stayed at Intelledex for eight years as a technical writer, trainer, applications engineer, and regional sales manager. I got to know enough about machine vision that one of our customers, the University of Texas at El Paso, invited me to start and run a vision laboratory to develop machine vision systems for use in factories in Texas, New Mexico, and Northern Mexico. While I was there, I was able to take the leveling classes I needed to enter and complete a Masters degree program in Industrial Engineering. We were successful enough that, I actually got invited to lecture to the faculty at the National University of Singapore about the program and some of our systems got deployed as far away as Israel. After that I got invited to Texas A&M to start a similar program there and to start a PhD. That program and the PhD never progressed very far because marriage and real life got in the way and lead me back to machine vision with Motorola, another of our old customers in Florida.
What made my career take off
It should have dawned on me that the reason I had the educational opportunity at UTEP and the job opportunity in Florida was because of connections I made in my work with the robot company. I left Motorola to start a business that was pretty wildly unsuccessful and needed to go back to work. I really did not know where to go, so I went back to the well and called some of my old Intelledex friends. They said, of course we will hire you. That was really a wake-up call. The people that rehired me were now at a different company, ESI in Portland, that had purchased the machine vision part of Intelledex. I realized the people I worked with before were not only just workmates, they were friends who valued what I did. Not only did we enjoy working together, they valued me for the contribution I could make.
The next big event in my awakening was initiated by the dot-com bubble. I got caught in a mass layoff due to business conditions and I found myself on the street. That really set me on heels. I had a mortgage to pay and a family to feed. I wracked my brain and called everyone I could to find a job. One of the guys I called was a camera salesman. He said he knew of a job in, of all places, Corvallis. I called the guys and guess what? It was populated with some other of my old compatriots from Intelledex. By now I start to clue into the fact that I have friends out there. It really irritated me that no one emphasized the importance of staying in touch with workplace colleagues. My rules for a great career were an outgrowth of that epiphany.
Right now, the shoe is on the other foot. Some of my old Intelledex compatriots work for me as contractors. It is nice to be on the other side of the equation and reinforces the knowledge that a job helps both the employee and the employer.
Rules for a great career
Final anecdote
I received an email two days ago from what I will just call an unfriendly acquaintance. He and his wife both work in the same field as I. He saw I had a connection with a company that might be able to give work to his wife. He essentially had to swallow his pride and ask me for a favor. I will derive great joy from introducing his wife to the CEO of a company that very well needs someone like her. This will help an old friend (the CEO), create a new friend (the wife), and turn an unfriendly acquaintance into a friend. The CEO is already on my contact list, but the (hopefully) ex-unfriendly acquaintance and his wife will now be on my contact list whether the job works out or not. I plan to contact all three in the next couple of weeks to see what happens.
There is an absolutely execellent blog post over at the Sonlight blog on the importance of teaching children to fail. This is something about which we frequently speak in the Chapman household. Sarita Holzman reminded of us of one our absolute most favorite Sonlight books, Carry On, Mr. Bowditch. It is a book about the life of a man who lived in Colonial America who, when he was young, did not have a lot of advantages in terms of education, but availed himself of everything within his means and perserved in educating himself to the benefit of the shipping world, even today. We also liked it a lot that he was a multilingal math guy. Part of failing successfully is not looking back, but learning from the failure going on in the best way possible under the circumstances.
My cousin, Trisha, teaches at a school with somewhere in the range of 30-40 students in the (very) small town of Austin, Nevada. She writes an absolutely fascinating blog called RollCallTales about a school that is so small, the principal works at another school over two hours away and all the teachers teach multiple grades. I think Trisha’s oldest students are in third grade. Austin is a ranch community so her students live a long way from town, only go to school four long days per week because many of them travel a long way to get there. These are kids who know a lot about rural life in a cowboy culture. Trisha has unique challenges and chronicles them in an engaging manner. It is one of my first stops in the blogosphere every day.
Trisha is a teacher because she loves to teach. She is not one of those teachers who believes all teachers are underpaid although she, like the rest of us, would like to earn more money. She is one of those teachers who is not in it for the money. She recently turned down an offer for a job with significantly better pay in a town where she could actually buy groceries without making a three hour drive. She did not turn it down because she loves being so isolated although I do not think that bothers her so much. Nor did she turn it down because of the stellar staff at the school or in the district (they might actually be stellar, but that is not the point). She turned it down because of the kids. This post on her blog about the state tests her kids must take exemplifies her passion for her work.
Trisha loves to write, has an eye for all things quirky, and loves to record interesting anecdotes, events, and images that describe the human condition. She has a hilarious story of riding in the car with two little girls in the second or third grade from her class on the way to a field trip to a museum. One of the little barrel-rider cowgirls used her horsey plush toy as a prop to explain to the other little girl how to preg-test a mare. The picture that accompanies this post is one she put up of a message the janitor left in her classroom one evening when the whiteboard had no writing on it. Her writing is interesting day in and day out.
Trisha currently lives above the town saloon that is only open for a few weeks per year when people flood into the town for an annual festival. She lives in an amazingly picturesque place that most of us would love to visit but that requires people with robust spirits to inhabit all year long.
Day 619 of 1000
This is the fourth in a series of articles about why we used Sonlight Curricula in our homeschool. Here is a page that holds an introduction to the series and links to the other posts in the series. We bought core packages for what would be third through tenth grades in a traditional school. Kelly used the program from fifth through tenth grade. Christian used the program from third through eighth grade. This series mostly describes what we did for all the subject areas except math, music, and art. I have already written pretty extensively on this blog about what we did for math and plan to do a future series on our art art program. We bought most, but not all of our core materials from Sonlight and followed their curriculum guides with a fair amount of rigor. Like most other homeschoolers, we deviated in minor ways where we saw fit.
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I have written what I have to write about the Sonlight history program in other places so this will be a brief overview of how it served us and a link or two to the posts that go into more detail. In a nutshell, there were some things we absolutely loved about how Sonlight handles history, but there was one part of the program-the Joy Hakim series for US History–we found totally unsuitable for our needs both in terms of the quality and depth of the history coverage. We made the mistake of buying the stuff that did not work for us before we sufficiently checked it out because our previous experience with the Sonlight History curricula had been so stellar.
In a nutshell, the things we really liked about the History program is that the Literature and History books and study guides are so will coordinated with each other. As mentioned above, we started back into homeschool when one of our children entered third grade and the other entered fifth grade. The curriculum we picked for the third grader featured The Land Mark History of the American People Volume I. I started reading it aloud to Christian, our third grader, but after the first chapter, it was so excellent, we started over so we could include our fifth grader in the reading even though she was working her way through the equivalent of what I think is now called the Eastern Hemisphere.
So in the final analysis, we highly recommend the first two-year pass through US History called Introduction to American History I and II. We loved the wonderful one year pass through the Eastern Hemisphere and the two year survey of World History I and II. We strongly recommend skipping the one year American History in Depth. We used the provided Literature books, but found something to replace the Joy Hakim books with what we believe was a much better written, more in-depth, interesting, and honest account of American History. The adjustments were required to allow us to better prepare our children to study History in college. We write more about our thinking on this material here, here, here and here.
Day 618 of 1000
This is the third in a series of articles about why we used Sonlight Curricula in our homeschool. Here is a page that holds an introduction to the series and links to the other posts in the series. We bought core packages for what would be third through tenth grades in a traditional school. Kelly used the program from fifth through tenth grade. Christian used the program from third through eighth grade. This series mostly describes what we did for all the subject areas except math, music, and art. I have already written pretty extensively on this blog about what we did for math and plan to do a future series on our art art program. We bought most, but not all of our core materials from Sonlight and followed their curriculum guides with a fair amount of rigor. Like most other homeschoolers, we deviated in minor ways where we saw fit.
We believe the homeschool curricula from Sonlight is good, but not great. The clarity of the explanatory materials was always excellent as were the laboratory materials and experiments. We worked our way through all of the science materials and benefited greatly from them. We just felt the materials did not go deep enough. The supplemental materials we used can be divided into two categories. The first category is the material before Apologia Biology which ran from the third grade up through the seventh grade and included Apologia Physical Science. The second category included only Apologia Biology and Apologia Chemistry because our kids started college after that.
We found a set of materials that perfectly complemented the science during the younger years. Sometimes it did not perfectly coordinate with the Sonlight materials in terms of what the kids were studying at a given time. This was the case because the material was interesting enough that we read the text together as a family in the evening and the kids did the experiments on their own during the following school day. The name of the program is Real Science-4-Kids from the Access Research Network. I cannot recommend these books highly enough. They benefited the kids greatly through a systematic look at at Biology, Chemistry, and Physics. The program features real experiments done in the way working scientists do science rather than the demonstration type experiments which are fairly normal in most junior high school science curricula. We do not recommend using either program in isolation. We derived great joy and learned a lot by combining the programs.
We believe the Apologia Introduction to Biology and Chemistry curricula are stellar, but again, we did not think they went deep enough. To mitigate that concern, we decided to have our daughter Kelly supplement her Biology studies through preparation for the CLEP (College Level Examination Program) test for college credit. One of her CLEP enhanced units was Biology where she used the REA CLEP Biology preparation book in conjunction with Exploring Creation with Biology from Apologia. I have written in some detail about how we did that for Biology in this post which is part of our series on CLEP testing, so I will not got into that in any detail here.
Conclusion: By complementing the Sonlight materials with other excellent materials, we believe our children well prepared to go on to college level science. That has been manifested in a good level of performance in Biology, Chemistry, and Physics at the University Level.
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