Category: Book

I finished the Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus, Volume Three by Michael L. Brown on the trip to Oregon and started reading Volume Four today. These books have been major eye-openers for me in many ways, not only about Christianity from a Jewish perspective, but about Christianity, whole cloth.

I ordered a book titled The Farm at the Center of the Universe by Guillermo Gonzalez and Jonathan Witt that arrived while we were gone. It is a young person’s novel about scientific and other evidences for the existence of God. I got this one just because it looked like it could be very, very good. I hope to have time to read the second one this weekend.

I am doing a pretty good job of upping my reading game, but will have to put more effort into finding more good books. I have several that are pretty heavy reads, so I need to find some new ones that are both interesting and worth reading. Sometimes those ends are at cross purposes with each other.

My latest treadmill book arrived today: Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World (Peter Zeihan, 2020). I am not sure how good it will be and it is a little bit out of my normal reading domain, but a friend recommended it so I am going to give it a shot. If I have ever read a book on geopolitics, I do not remember it. Maybe this will be a genre into which I can dive for awhile.

I have determined that about two hours is about the limit for my ability to write productively. I can do that a couple of times per day, but I need a decent break between sessions. I do not know how prolific writers do it. Maybe it is something I will learn how to do longer, but I can see this first effort is going to be a grind. It feels great to have written, but the process is pretty brutal. My plan for moving forward is to try to write for an hour or two per day, then spend another hour, later on, going back to rewrite.

I got reviews back from three of the four people I sent my introductory chapters. I was really glad I did that because the introduction is profoundly better for the advice I received. Actually, the concept for the book is morphing into something I think is a lot better, too. More universal than just a book about homeschool.

Current book

• Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony
  • Author: Richard Bauckaum
  • Year: 2006, 2017
  • Edition: 2nd Edition, 2017
  • Started: 09/07/2023

Last book read

• The Historical Jesus: Ancient Evidence of the Life of Christ
  • Author: Gary Habermas
  • Year: 1996
  • Edition: 8th printing, 2006
  • Started: 09/01/2023
  • Finished: 09/06/2023

Books in waiting

• The Barbell Perscription: Strength Training for Life After 40
  • Author: Jonathon M. Sullivan and Andy Baker
  • Year: 2016

I have worked pretty hard on my book idea since I decided to pull the trigger and start writing. There is enough prose on paper now where others can get a sense for my writing voice. One of the greatest benefits of my Ph.D. program was the I really do not know if I have the writing skills or that writing voice is suited at all for the kind of book I am proposing to write. I have spent the last forty-five years writing in engineeringese and acquiring bad writing habits even doing that. That understanding was impressed on me when I wrote my dissertation.

The first time I submitted a draft of a technical journal article for review by my doctoral committee, I was pretty offended by the vigor of their corrections. I was wise enough to swallow my pride enough to make all the recommended changes. By about the third round of reviews I was beginning to understand that it was me that had the writing problem and they were absolutely correct in all their corrections. On the other hand, I have been writing in this blog for quite a while. This blog, while not exactly the voice I hope will be in the book, is somewhat closer to the feel I envision. My writing needs to improve in a lot of ways, but I am not without hope that I can produce something that is interesting for a certain set of people to read.

I created a working title and an outline for the book both of which will change as I work. Then I wrote a Preface, Introduction, and a couple of partial chapters in a LaTeX document that allows me to edit easily and committed it to a source control repository (best practices for writing software). I sent the current output to all of my siblings, my Ph.D. adviser, and my cousin, Trisha. I expect there to be others I will have review the book. Trisha is a thoroughly professional, very up-to-date reader of the current pedagogical literature, and experienced elementary school teacher who was a huge help in reviewing my dissertation. All of these people have different worldviews than my own–some more than others. My hope is that they can give me a sense were I really should undertake this enterprise. I told them to be brutally honest and do not consider my feelings. I really only have enough time and energy, God willing, for two more Ph.D. level projects in my life, so I do not want to waste my time on something for which there is little chance for success.

After reflecting for not very long on my August 30, 2023 blog post, I have decided to opt for an attempt at authoring a book. I actually found a LaTeX template, made some modifications, made a rough outline, and started writing. One thing that became immediately evident is my lack of formal writing skills. I learned a lot going through the correction process when I prepared technical articles and my dissertation during my Ph.D., but that is a very different kind of writing from what I hope to produce.

The idea for the book is to tell our homeschool story. Whether anyone would be interested in reading the story was the first question that came to mind, but it also dawned on me that writing down what would be interesting to me and worth doing whether anyone else was interested or not. The story could serve as family history if nothing else. There are also some things I do not want the book to be. The worst outcome possible would be to turn it into a self-indulgent hagiography or a homeschool apologetic. The idea would be to tell the story, identifying where we thought we failed and succeeded, describing the questions we asked ourselves that would be common to anyone making decisions about their children’s educations, but also what we chose to do based on our own unique circumstances.

I have completed first drafts of the preface, introduction (chapter one), and the educational setting in our household before any kind of school was on our radar (chapter two). From what I have written so far, I think it is going to take me a year or so to just get a first rough draft complete and, even then, I will have to work at it pretty hard. Part of the reason I am writing about this now is to embarrass myself if I do not keep going and finish the thing. To that end, I plan to post about the book’s progress as I write it. Maybe in the next post, I will put up the (very early) first draft of the Table of Contents. If this does not work out, maybe I will return to the idea of getting a law degree.

Month 0 WEIGHT: 235.1 lbs. BMI: 36.6

Last night, for the first time in Chapman family history, we entertained no trick-or-treaters on Halloween. Maybe yesterday’s diatribe drove them away, but I think it is more likely the apartment where we live does not allow it. So with impending big changes in the works, I sat around and read a book that was recommended by Marvin Olasky in 2015 called The Book of Strange New Things. It is definitely an odd book written in English by a non-English speaker and you can tell that from the use of the language in the book as well as the markedly Western European worldview it manifests. I am still trying to decide whether or not I like it. There are some very, very good things about the book, particularly its treatment of things Christian, but it is a little bit of a slow read in places and does not ring true (or maybe real is a better word) in others. Still I am glad to have the time to read it because I think those opportunities are going to decrease dramatically due to said “impending big changes in the works.”

I have been giving quite a bit of thought to this book thing and have decided I will start to take this off line until I have a plan a little bit better formulated. I think I do have something to say about homeschool.  There are some pretty broad categories of homeschool styles.  We fit into a pretty specific category when it comes to educational style and goals and another with respect to worldview training.  We know a lot of homeschoolers, but only one other family we met in Texas fits into a similar model to our own. They have experienced the same kind of success as us.  I talk about “kind of success” as opposed to “level of success” because we think people who follow different models achieve very high levels of success, often much higher than our own, but with different goals in mind.

I plan to write about the model we followed.  The funny deal, looking back, is that we had a fairly well established plan for what we wanted to accomplish within a few weeks or months after we reestablished ownership of our children’s education.  It would be interesting to understand whether other successful homeschoolers established the model they would follow early or if there was significant evolution of the model over time.  I plan to report back now and again as things progress, but to write about other projects and ideas until I start to actually have something a little more concrete on this subject.

Betty Blonde #124 – 01/06/2009

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Luke and Gene both made good comments about my ambition to write a book about our family’s educational experience.  Both Luke’s thought that not so many people would want to read the thing and Gene’s thought that such an effort is a fine thing to do for future generations of his own family seem exactly right to me.  I have to admit I was a little offended about the idea that not too many people would want to read my book, but on reflection I think it is true.  We, like other homeschoolers, took our own unique path in educating our children.  I suppose there are parts of they way we did it that will resonate with almost all homeschoolers, parts that only a few will like, and a lot that most will think ridiculous.  Even we think some of the stuff we did was ridiculous.

I think, though, that this will be a good exercise for me, for my family, and maybe for a handful of others who have similar values and educational goals.  My take-away from Luke’s and Gene’s comments are that I need to avoid doing this for any kind of selfish motive.  I mentioned in a follow-up comment to the previous post that I would write the book with the idea that I would print a dozen or so copies to give to the kids and for posterity, then give the book away as an e-book on this web site.  I think that is just about right.  I might charge a small fee for the e-book to either give away to an appropriate charity or create a small scholarship fund for homeschoolers, but it kind of depends on whether I think the book is even good enough to warrant that.

Maybe Gene and I can read each others efforts as we work our way through this.

Betty Blonde #123 – 01/05/2009

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As you might have noticed, I have been struggling for awhile trying to find a project that is separate from my day job, but that is interesting and somehow might make a contribution to something bigger than myself.  I have my GaugeCam project which meets all that criteria, but is really just more of the same kind of thing as my day job.  For a long time now, my son Christian has been encouraging me to write a book about our experience in trying to educate our kids. I never thought I had much to say about how other people should educate their children because we barely knew what to do with our own.  At the same time, we absolutely loved the whole process, had a modicum of success.

I have thought seriously about the idea of writing a book quite a bit over the last several weeks.  I have decided to put together an outline of what I might write, then determine whether I think someone might want to read that. If I think it might be interesting to other people, I will take the next step.  I always thought I would write something about our homeschool, but I do not think that will be the main focus of this effort.  Our educational path was more about getting our kids educated at as high a level as possible in accordance with our worldview.  It was less about which particular homeschool or traditional school methodology we used. So I believe this book would be a narrative more than a how-to.

Of course there will be big chunks about why we chose what we chose in terms of learning materials and methodology.  Sonlight, The Well Trained Mind, Mark Kistler’s Draw Squad, Singapore Math, and a lot of the materials we chose would rightly have to be a part of the narrative because of their great value in helping us to figure all of this stuff out and make the whole educational task tractable.  Still, this book would be a narrative about the particular path taken by a particular family.  We did what we did based on what our kids needed, the best knowledge we had at the time, time constraints due to work, how much money was available, etc., etc.

We felt like our educational path was successful for us.  We have no illusions that our children’s abilities and/or intelligence were greater than those of their peers. The were pretty good at some stuff, but very average at other stuff.  Still we experienced some success in our educational path to the point that Christian was able to skip high school to earn a BS degree in Applied Math at age 18 while Kelly skipped three years of high school to earn a BS degree in Statistics at age 20.  Both of them got funded PhD’s offers at tier one Universities which they accepted and will start this fall.

I have kept a record of our efforts on this blog for over ten years now.  The idea is to turn the blog into a narrative and fill in the many, many cracks where there is missing information to determine whether I might have a story that is interesting enough that someone might want to read it and maybe even use some of our ideas.

Betty Blonde #122 – 01/02/2009

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