Late in her toughest semester ever, Kelly draws a comic. Late in his toughest semester ever, Christian comments on the comic on Facebook.
Category: Art
Day 585 of 1000
This is the seventh 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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We took the scriptural admonition to “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it” very seriously. We wrote about what we did in this regard fairly extensively. An example of that is here, but if you search the word “worldview” on this blog, you will find a lot more. We believe the kids would have floundered in college had we not made the effort, not only to describe why we believe what we believe, but to describe the beliefs of other prominently held worldviews and why we do not believe them.
The kids were prepared for some of the silliness that masquerades as higher learning in their English, Art Appreciation, and even their Biology classes. You can read about some of the fun they had with their commie, drug legalization fanatic, English professor who made outrageously false statements about Christianity and Christian morality, but changed the subject through non-sequiturs whenever confronted with serious arguments. The professor had taught at the community college a long time and from everything the kids could tell, he had taught this same introductory writing class in the same way for over a decade. It was hard to decide whether his ignorance was an outgrowth of laziness or something more sinister. You can read about it here, here, here, here, here, and here. The sad part about this class is that they learned nothing about writing that they did not already know.
The Art Appreciation class was even worse in that the instructor reveled in abjectly immoral imagery. The students were encouraged to break convention in morally objectionable ways. It was totally unnecessary. The really good part about this class is that the kids really did learn about different kinds of art and they were required to go to the North Carolina Museum of Art, something for which we are very grateful, because we have been back there many times since they took the class.
We viewed this worldview training the preparation that helped the most in allowing the kids to function well both socially and academically in their liberal arts classes. The great thing, though, was that it was often not necessary to defend themselves with respect to their worldview. They had History and New Testament classes where the professors were symapthetic to a Christian worldview. The worldview training helped there, too.
The odd part, to us, was that very few students arrived at either NCSU or Wake Tech Community College with any kind of coherent well-taught worldview.
Day 570 of 1000
Kelly is starting to practice for her new daily comic strip. You can see her old one here. Kelly will reconstitute her old blog at KellyJeanChapman.com to complement her comic strip. We are not sure where we will put that yet, but will keep you posted. We will send out an email to the old mailing list so people can sign up again if they would like.
Day 568 of 1000
I talked to my buddy Eric last night. He described some very interesting ideas about the internet and blogging that has me thinking I might be able to improve my efforts. He gave me some homework and I plan to do that, but it also got me to thinking that maybe it would be a good idea to spin back up my comic book aggregation and web publishing software (BleAx). Kelly really would like to spin up her comic strip efforts again this summer. She is not sure she wants to continue with Betty Blonde even though she has two years of strips under her belt. I would like to have a side project I can do from my hotel room and this sounds like a good one. It will take me awhile to get back in the saddle, but I think it will be a lot of fun, especially if Kelly is wanting to publish strips again.
Day 416 of 1000
This is a photograph of my nephew, Matias. His father, Lorena’s brother, Lauro is a passionate artist. Tom Layman, a good friend of Lorena’s family painted during his frequent overnight visits to their home. Lorena believes that is when Lauro caught the fever. He started to take art classes whenever he got the chance and used many of his electives during his engineering degree at ITESM to study art.
Lauro travels a lot so he does not get to paint as much as he would like these days. Still, he does what he can, even working with an oil painting app on his iPad during his frequent flights. You can see his art bio here and some of his paintings here. The funny deal is that the kids made friends with a like-minded guy named Darren out in California this summer who they connected with Lauro via Facebook. Darren also has a young son and an online web site.
Here’s betting neither of these apples fall too far from the tree.
Kelly has been working on her portrait skills by sketching her friends. Really, she wants to cartoon, but she has such a heavy school load that she cannot work it in other than about one drawing per night and a few on the weekend. She figures if she keeps up her drawing skills for the next couple of years she will be ready to dive in again on her cartooning during graduate school. Kelly started drawing a set of comic strip characters based around a little girl named Betty Blonde since she was nine. Then she drew and published a daily comic strip for two full years starting when she was fourteen. You can check it out here: Betty Blonde
Here are Kelly’s multivariable calculus notes that she texted to me from her review class.
Day 106 of 1000 (214.1 lbs.)
I have talked previously spoken about my buddy Stepan from Russia here and here. Stepan has a family to whom he is very devoted. He is very interested in assuring his two little girls (ages 1 and 3) get the best education possible. His oldest daughter started Suzuki violin at age one with a teacher who is serious. The teacher told Stepan that her students should NOT play anything other that what they given so they would get in the habit of playing ONLY in the most correct way. Stepan liked that.
The three year old started preschool earlier this year. As is their wont, the teachers at the preschool had them do some fingerpainting. Stepan was not happy.
He said, “The only thing they do there is have fun. She already knows how to use a brush. Fingerpainting is NOT art.”
He has begun to notice that schools in the United States, public and private, are not so good. From the time Stepan was very young, he went to school to learn. There was no fun or self-fulfillment about it. He believes that life is a lot more fulfulling if you accomplish something. The only way to accomplish things is to work hard and not necessarily have fun. He believes the only way his daughters can get a good education here in America is through “home education.” I concur with the bulk of that.
It reminded me of when I asked him “How are you doing?” one morning when he came into work.
He said, “We never say that in Russia.”
I asked, “Why not?”
He said, “Because, in Russia, it is usually bad.”
“Well, what do you say, then?” I asked.
“We wish people health.”
Day 103 of 1000
Lorena put some decorations on the dollhouse and got a little unsolicited “help”.
Day 102 of 1000
Lorena, Christian, and I made our way to the Community College last night to see the final performance and art show for the fine arts program. Paintings, pencil drawings, charcoals, and sculptures were displayed outside the music performance room. The chorus and the story-telling classes provided the performance arts. It was wonderful. There was a pretty good sized crowd to see it all. They dynamic of the community college is very fascinating. It is obvious that Kelly’s chorus professor and the story-telling professors take their jobs very seriously and derive great joy from them. Kelly sang with the chorus and with one small group of Mexican students who sang “We Are the World” in Spanish. Christian got some great pictures–I will put up a few of them this evening. Wake Technical Community College has an impressive facility, the student body is eclectic and fascinating to watch. It was all pretty impressive and very, very fun.
Day 96 of 1000
Gladys, Lorena, and I went to the Rembrandt exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of Art (Hat tip: Andrew). I do not have time to go into any detail. Just suffice it to say it was AWESOME and we highly recommend the audio tour. Rembrandt was an absolute genius and we are thankful for having had the chance to see this once in a lifetime exhibit.
Now that we found out NCSU is going to make dramatic tuition increases, Christian has decided he is going to make do with the equipment he had. RWDub’s Reviews will be quite happy to know he uses Linux Mint on a USB stick to run the computer and persist his data between boots. There is no money even for a hard drive. It is good thing we had that old cardboard box from when we could afford to buy stuff from Amazon. We are going to have dig up a mouse somewhere, too.
Christian takes very cool note in his Physics and Calculus classes. He invented his own font (with serif) and is good at illustrating complex things. Here is an example:
