bearing blog

Engineering ethics, from both directions.

I recently discovered a blog that's new to me but has been around since 2006:  Engineering Ethics Blog, written by "Kaydee," whose profile states that he teaches engineering courses at Texas State and that he has worked in industry and as a consulting engineer.  

Engineering ethics is a great interest of mine, coming at it from two directions -- the conventional one, and a different one as well.    

The first and common understanding of "engineering ethics" would be the professional ethical standards of practicing and teaching engineers.  Engineering organizations have their own published codes of ethics (for example, here is the code of ethics of AIChE, in which I briefly held membership before switching my job description to "never worked a day in her life"*).   Engineering colleges routinely offer courses in engineering ethics to their students, although the courses are not always required.  Here is an online, uncredited course in engineering ethics offered through MIT OpenCourseWare.  (I have not reviewed this course and this link is not a recommendation.)

In that sense, "engineering ethics" encompasses questions of serving public safety, of truth-telling in public statements, of refusing to take part in bribery or corruption, of accurate self-representation, and of working within one's own sphere of competence.  

There is another sense in which I, personally, like to think of "engineering ethics."  That is the special perspective and specialized knowledge that engineering training brings to the consideration of ethical questions in general.

Such questions confront all human beings above the age of reason.  They include questions that societies face in balancing diverse interests through public policy; questions of evaluating costs and benefits, risks and rewards in the workplace and in our personal lives; and how specific ethical questions ("case studies," if you will) refine and sharpen the broad principles of moral philosophy.

What do I mean by the "special perspective and specialized knowledge" of engineers?  Emphatically not that the engineer, or any other kind of scientist, has a specially privileged moral sense.  Scientists and engineers are no more likely to make good interior ethical judgments than anyone else.  We are just as likely to be selfish, corruptible, or arrogant.  If all our policymakers were scientists and engineers, we might have more technically informed policy, but we would not necessarily have policy that better served the public good.  There is precious little about "what one ought to do" in an engineering education -- and what there is, appears in the engineering ethics courses.

Part of what I mean by the relevant perspective and specialized knowledge is our expertise in technical matters that may inform ethical decisions.  

• We may not be specially able to tell the public whether we ought to mandate such-and-such an adaptive technology to better accommodate the disabled in public buildings.  But we can tell the public how much the machines will cost, how soon they could be installed, which places they would be more difficult to implement, and how frequently they would require maintenance.  
• We may not be specially able to tell the public whether we ought to ban a particular type of gadget that has fallen out of favor because of some impact its production or disposal has on the environment.  But we can provide a list of feasible substitute gadgets, count up how much the substitutes would cost, estimate how soon new technologies might come to market, consider whether there are alternative means of dealing with the old gadget's problems, and try to predict whether the substitute gadgets will bring worse costs and risks than the old ones.   

My husband, the other engineer on this blog, says about his responsibilities giving technical advice at work:  "I never tell them that such-and-such an idea is impossible, or that it is a bad idea.  That is not my job.  I always tell them how much their idea would cost, and let them make the conclusions."

But another aspect that the engineer brings to ethical problems is our trained approach to problems in general.  It's sometimes maddening for the people who have to work with us and live with us, but we can be accused of treating every problem, from public policy to household budgetary dilemmas to difficult childrearing decisions to friends' marital woes as an engineering problem.  

What are the constraints?  Make a list.  What are the available resources?  Tally them up.  Which pieces of information do we lack?  Take a measurement, go get advice, or make an appropriate assumption along with the necessary caveats.  What are the conceivable courses of action?  Plot them out.  Where are the critical decision points?  Identify them and identify the possible decisions.  

How much could each path cost?  What are the possible benefits?  Who benefits at each stage?  What are the risks -- and what is the probability of each projected undesirable outcome?  Can we live with those possibilities?

It's not that we don't take into consideration people's feelings about their problems.  It's just that the potential effect of feelings  have to be factored into the cost-and-benefit structure.  If you're going to have an irrational reaction to one potential outcome of this decision, then I have to factor your irrationality into the potential negative costs.

We tend to drive nontechnical types a little crazy when we import our approach into nontechnical problems.  But I think it's a good way to approach problems of all kinds, and is one reason why I'm grateful for my engineering education, which has shaped the way I look at all kinds of things, even though (as noted) I haven't worked a day in my life.  At least not recently.

Anyway, here is a sample of posts from Engineering Ethics Blog.

On the unintended consequences of the ethanol-in-gasoline mandate ERISA:

At the time, ERISA was passed, ethanol was the only biofuel that had any reasonable chance of making it into the nation’s gas tanks in a reasonable time frame....

The not-so-advertised reasons for the law have to do with the strength of the agricultural lobby.  The E10 mandate was a tremendous windfall for everybody who grows corn.  While some ethanol from corn was being used voluntarily as a fuel additive before 2007, the mandate caused this use to skyrocket.  By 2011, according to the Mosbacher Institute report by economist James Griffin, 37% of the entire U. S. corn crop went toward ethanol production.  And corn prices soared from $2.50 per bushel up to as high as $7.50.

If the only people hurt were U. S. food consumers (not everybody drives a car, but everybody eats), it would be bad enough.  But the U. S. grows and sells more corn than any other nation, and much of it is exported to poorer countries, where it is a staple in many diets.  While the rise in corn prices was not solely responsible for the worldwide inflation in food costs that led to food riots in many nations in recent years, the timing is suspicious, and there is no question that the ERISA law led to hardships for many poor people around the world who were now even less able to afford to eat....

Unintended consequences show up all the time in considering engineering ethics, and the ERISA mandate has plenty.  The parties who appear to have benefited are:  growers of corn and producers of corn-based ethanol (a lot), the U. S. driving public (a little), and the U. S. overall, from the viewpoint of slightly improved energy security.  The losers include refiners (who have had to fool with the mandate and change their processes), anybody who buys corn (U. S. food consumers, U. S. livestock growers, and millions of foreign food consumers, many of whom are poor), and the U. S. public in the sense that they have had to pay the 45-cent-a-gallon subsidy through the U. S. treasury.  Quite a mixed bag, to say the least.

On the Air France 447 crash of June 1, 2009:

While we will never know why co-pilot Bonin (the one with least experience) did what he did, the fact remains that at 2:10, he pulled the stick back and basically kept it there until it was too late to correct his mistake....

In older aircraft, the two pilot sticks are mechanically coupled together, so only one message goes from the cockpit to the ailerons. If two pilots disagree on what to do with such a stick, they find themselves literally fighting a tug-of-war in the cockpit, and most reasonable people would react by at least talking about what to do next. 

But even in the autopilot-off mode, the Airbus sticks could be moved independently, and the plane responds to the average of the two sticks’ motion. To my ears, this sounds like a software engineer’s solution to a human-factors problem. In the event, even though the senior pilot eventually did the right thing with his stick, the computer averaged it with Bonin’s all-way-back stick, and the stall continued. 

... I hope the software and hardware engineers working on the next Airbus rethink their strategy of independent sticks and averaging. While human-machine communication is important, this accident emphasizes the fact that interpersonal communication in a crisis is vital. That single additional channel of communication through a mechanical link between sticks might have been enough to avoid this accident. 

 

On the show Mythbusters:

Hyneman and Savage are really doing what used to be called “natural philosophy,” back when philosophy really meant the love of knowledge, and not some arcane specialty that you have to get a Ph. D. in to understand, which is mostly what it means today. Before about 1800, most science was done simply because people were curious and wanted to know whether a thing was true or not. There were no huge funding agencies, no boards of proposal review or journal referees—just a few curious guys (it was nearly all guys then) who got together in coffee shops and wrote each other letters about their experiments. And because there was almost no organized industry producing scientific instruments, they had to build almost all their equipment and experiments themselves.

Hyneman ran a special-effects shop before getting involved with MythBusters, and so the very hands-on demands of that type of work (especially before digital technology took over movies to the degree it has) gave him a set of skills that fits very well into the kind of things required by the MythBusters shows. So his lack of formal scientific training isn’t really a disadvantage—instead, he goes about things the way the average guy with time on his hands might look into them. 

Somewhat to my regret, I noted that the Wikipedia biographies of both stars list them as sympathetic with the skeptic or atheist turn of mind. While such a philosophy may be an advantage in their particular line of work, it is by no means a necessity....

The MythBusters people deserve credit for popularizing both science and how to do dangerous things safely. Their latest mishap, although attention-getting, could have been a lot worse, and I’m sure they will be more careful in the future while investigating questions from the past, such as whether a cannonball could really breach a stone wall. And I’m glad they are continuing a long-established tradition of science for science’s sake—even if they are interrupted by messages from their sponsors.

 

_______

*This joke is the property of MrsDarwin.

Perceived deficits in the homeschool.

There are some good conversations going on in the comments on the recent post about the "one-room" schooling techniques and in the post about deficits in the homeschool.

I want to talk a little bit about perceived deficits in the homeschool.

What are you comparing your homeschool to, anyway?

If you think you are comparing it to an institutional school, do you have a realistic idea of what goes on in your average institutional school?  Sure, many high school students have access to excellent teachers and a great peer group, but even in the good schools there are often mediocre teachers and bad classes.  I went to a pretty good high school, and I encountered some really excellent teachers there -- my French teacher was absolutely top-of-the-line, my English literature teacher was memorable and engaging, my chemistry teacher could have taught Bill Nye how not to bore people.  I learned a lot in those classes.  But I also had some really bad teachers -- substandard ones, or mean ones, or incompetent ones, or lazy ones, or possibly-mentally-ill ones -- whose classes were a waste of time or worse.  A lot of it is hit-or-miss.  Few schools of any kind excel at everything.

Is the problem that you cannot give enough one-on-one time to each student?  How much one-on-one time do you think students get in an institutional school?  It is not the equivalent of a full-time tutor every day of the week.  

Certainly there are efficiencies in an institutional school that a large-family homeschool cannot match.  When one teacher teaches all the English classes and the curriculum is always the same, he just does not have to spend as much time on preparing and planning as we parents do when we are designing our curriculum and schedule to fit a family which forms a new configuration basically every year.   When there is a fully stocked chemistry lab available all the time, laboratory prep time is minimized.  It's easy to put together group learning experiences, like discussing literature or putting on plays or holding debates or setting up games, when there are many other students at the same level.  

But there are different kinds of institutional schools with different strengths -- set up purposely! -- and that's often something we celebrate.  Magnet schools!  There's a performing-arts K-8 public school up the street from me, and within close walking distance is a small public high school specially organized for students who speak Spanish in their homes.  There are language immersion schools and schools designed as interventions for students at risk of dropping out.  There are vocational schools which specialize in turning out students who are already prepared to enter the skilled-labor workforce at age eighteen.  And yes, there are college-preparatory schools.   They all serve different purposes, promise a different educational experience, and turn out young people who are prepared for life in different ways.  Even within those broad categories there are wide variations in style.

And this is a good thing.   People don't typically complain that their child graduated from a college-prep program without also learning in school how to rebuild an engine (though maybe they ought to).  It's not the college placement rate, but the job placement rate and job performance, that we're interested in when we measure whether a vocational-technical high school program is adequately preparing its students.  

The homeschool, too, has its own essence, its own reason for being, its own niche in the educational ecosystem.

 The essence of homeschooling is not academic excellence (although homeschools can provide that).  The essence of homeschooling is not preparation for a job (although homeschools can provide that).  The essence of homeschooling is not "special" education for students with particular challenges that make institutional schools a poor fit or a toxic environment (although homeschools can provide that).  The essence of homeschooling is not that it can set its own schedule rather than being tied to external ones (although homeschools can provide that).  The essence of homeschooling is not its freedom from externally imposed ideological structures (although homeschools can provide that).

The essence of homeschooling is simply that it happens within the family.

That schooling happens as an outgrowth of family life and family work.  

That the young person is surrounded by people with whom he has meaningful and permanent relationships:  parents, siblings, perhaps grandparents and cousins, friends who are connected to him through a web of relationships between families rather than a single point.  

That the "curriculum" and schoolday is designed neither exactly to suit him as an individual with the perfect environment for his own personal success, nor to shove him along in a faceless crowd that on average receives an education adequate enough to keep trouble away... but for the best interests of the family as a whole, the innate natural grouping of the human organism, the grouping in which we can truly be known as human persons and in which we can learn the art of balancing needs and wants of the self and others.

That is the essence of homeschooling.  That is its specialty.  That is where it shines.

+ + +

H. said to me yesterday, "My standard answer, when someone asks me, 'So, how is the homeschooling going for you?' is "Great.  I love having my kids with me all day.'  It's true, and it's the reason I do it."  Even though H. is confident that she is providing a really excellent education to her three children, she said, it isn't the academic excellence that she chooses to emphasize.  Because that isn't the primary reason she does it.

I laughed and said, "I could never get away with saying that I love having my kids with me all day.   Especially if it had been one of those days.  You know I have no poker face."  But I went on:  "My standard answer doesn't have anything to do with academics either.  I mean, if they press me I say so, and sometimes I tell them  that I enjoy the work of planning the curriculum and things, which is true.  

"But most of the time I tell people, 'What I really love about homeschooling is that my children spend all day surrounded by their siblings, and that they have wonderful relationships with each other.'  Which is also true.

"Sometimes I get the response, 'Oh, my kids drive each other crazy if they have to spend ten minutes in the same room.'  But it isn't hard for people to understand that if their kids spent lots of time together, they would probably understand each other better.  Most people get that."

+ + +

Why do homeschoolers judge themselves so poorly, so often?  I really think it's because we are constantly  judging ourselves based on external standards, sometimes imaginary ones, and often ones in which the homeschooling paradigm doesn't make sense.  

We shouldn't judge ourselves against the standards of the urban vo-tech high school, or against the wonderful parish school, or the impressive classical charter school out in the suburbs, or the neighborhood public school.  

We definitely shouldn't judge our homeschools against the imaginary standard of an imaginary school that somehow provides the best of all those worlds:  immersion in a foreign language, and valuable real-world hands-on job skills, and a broad liberal-arts education, and time to go deep into the subjects that are most loved, and an opportunity to learn to play a musical instrument, and connections with other young people who live in the same neighborhood, and education centered within the family's own system of values and philosophies, and preparation for the best colleges, all at once.  

Nor should we judge our homeschools against the imaginary standard made up of all the best things we read on the blogs of other homeschools, and none of their drawbacks, because who wants to write at length about those?  (Face it, homeschoolbloggers, we like to brag about our good ideas, not our bad ones, unless we can do it while sounding really Witty and Gritty and Real.)  So, please, let's not fret because we are not able to keep nature notebooks from age four through eighteen, and have all of our children in Suzuki lessons, and have a working wood shop, and collect and use all the official Montessori-method practical-life learning materials, and read the entire Ambleside book lists to the children, and co-school twice a week with another family, and have a field trip three times a month to a local museum/theater/zoo, and operate a working family business wherein the children will learn the Real Meaning of Money, and send them all to the National Spelling Bee...  because nobody else is doing all that either.  We can pick one or two things and do them really well and create massively cool experiences out of them.  We can't do it with everything.

We are families.  Families!  As different as families can be.  

We need to set our own standards for ourselves, and meet those.

That's all.

Deficits in the homeschool.

Lacking time this morning, I just want to pull an exchange out of the comments from the Moving the furniture post, and try to continue the discussion here more visibly.  It reminded me of a conversation I had on FB with another one of my commenters/friends.

Tabitha:

I am homeschooling an 8th, 6th, 4th, 1st, and preschooler. Next year I'll add in the now 3yo as a preschooler. I'll still have a barely 1yo at that time, too.
I consider this a one room schoolhouse, for sure.

We're trying to make decisions for next year for high school for my oldest. The thought that keeps running through my head is that "There is a reason one room schoolhouses ended in 8th grade." I want to be able to make it work, and many families do. I'm just not sure I'm capable of adding high school into this mix.

Any of your amazing readers have any thoughts?

I wrote:

Well, my plan for high school has been to try to get my kids as independent as possible before they get there! I figured that we would be spending a pretty big chunk of eighth grade working together -- the eighth-grader and I and my husband that is -- to decide what needs to be in the curriculum, which textbooks and other materials to use, and how we're going to put together his portfolio or whatever it takes for applying to whatever postsecondary institution he winds up being headed for.

 
I haven't ruled out enrolling any of the kids in a traditional or nontraditional high school, if that is what it takes, to be honest. We are fortunate to live in an area where there are many schooling options, even à la carte coursework at a small independent Catholic academy centered around our parish.

But we are also enjoying the benefits of co-schooling with other families, which has really opened up a depth of learning that I didn't think was possible to organize on my own, because we (the parents) have been able to specialize in areas of personal interest to us. But we're still maintaining the cozy familiarity of being among people who care about our kids and really know them.

 
I guess what I'm getting at, with all that, is that the high school student ought to be taking on a lot of the responsibility for his own learning. He's got to. He needs to have the kind of self-discipline that most people don't have to show until they are a freshman in college, when Mama isn't around to make him do his homework anymore.

I may be around, but I'm busy with younger kids, you know?

Tabitha again:

 ...My oldest 2 are already very independent.

I thought my high school plan was going to work. 8th grade has shown me all the deficits, though, and I don't know if I can overcome them. She needs some one on one time and it's hard to make that consistently happen.

I'm starting to see school through 8th grade as more general and high school as more specialized. I don't feel like I can do both justice. I've long envied your co-schooling set up. You are very blessed!

Me again:

"I'm starting to see school through 8th grade as more general and high school as more specialized."

My theory: yes and no. You have to be somewhat specialized by that time, because there simply isn't time in the day to do everything, and so your student is going to choose to study some things and not others (or be constrained to do so in order to meet requirements she may meet later).

But you can still be aiming for a strong liberal arts education, which is by definition well rounded and broad, with deeper "dips" here and there into areas of special interest to give a sort of taste of specialization. There is time for specialization in college or on the job.

The proper place of high school is to develop the child's mind into the adult one, and to fine-tune the skills of self-teaching, the "lost tools of learning" that Dorothy Sayers wrote about in her famous essay. The subjects are just the material on which the mind cuts its teeth.

Every school (home or institutional) has inherent deficits, and you could look at the ones in your own home school as teaching tools for learning how to learn -- because identifying and remedying deficits in the resources available to you is a basic tool for self-teaching. I would say, bring the 8th graders into the discussion of what seems to be missing from their environment, and work together on the challenge of restoring it.

 

There are a couple of different threads here worth picking up.  I wouldn't mind writing a co-schooling post discussing how it is that I (with my engineering degree) have so far "specialized" in teaching Latin and History to children, while my partner in co-schooling (with her English degree) has, maybe more predictably, "specialized" in literature and grammar, but also primary-school art appreciation, music theory, and handcrafts.  It all reminds me of the post that Amy Welborn wrote yesterday, "Gifts and Talents:  Overrated?"  To define my mission as "that for which I have been prepared" would be... rather limiting.   

But what do you think, readers, about the idea of embracing the "gaps" in the available educational resources as an opportunity to learn how to learn?  Bringing the young person into the design of his own homeschool, understanding that no school can specialize in everything, every school of every kind has inherent limitations, and the home school is no different?  

(Let's just take landscape as a starting point.  My homeschool is in the middle of the city, within easy reach of a huge library system, museums, theaters, historical sites, and parks... but I have a tiny postage stamp of a backyard, a neighborhood where people don't really send their kids outside to play, and not as much time as I would like to leave the city.  A rural child would get a lot more opportunities for gardening and in situ nature study, but maybe not so much museum and zoo time, or practice riding the city bus or walking to the library, or even my 11-year-old's beloved opportunity to study alone in a neighborhood coffee shop.)

Anyway, my thought is that as you are approaching eighth grade and the start of high school, it is time to have a frank discussion:  What does the young person want to learn?  What external requirements must be met?   What can the homeschool provide?  What are its strengths and weaknesses?  How can the strengths be channeled best, and the weaknesses compensated for?  What resources does the homeschool have which remain untapped?  Where can the parent and the young person work together to bring them to fruition?  

I know it's a bit cliché to recast a deficit as an opportunity -- but in the case of the homeschool it strikes me as really true.  We are preparing these young people for life as a human being in the world.  The world is full of barriers, and human beings are full of deficits.  Learning to come up against them, and either work our way around them or live, constrained, with acceptance and humility, is a good thing.

Moving the furniture.

Some time ago I attended a talk at our local Catholic homeschooling co-op, a lecture entitled "The One-Room Schoolhouse."  My friend The Road Scholar has put together an entertaining and informative presentation about how the teachers in American one-room schoolhouses in the late 1800s and early 1900s taught their subjects, managed their time, and maintained discipline in classrooms with dozens of children and young people who might be aged 3 through 20.  She  drew from her own family history and from primary sources like teachers' record books and employment contracts, and included lots of photographs as well as a sample daily schedule and a formidable sample eighth-grade graduation examination. (If you're currently looking for a speaker, I believe she's available for presentations to homeschooling conferences...)

It turned out to be very inspiring, not in the spiritually uplifting sense, but in the kick-in-the-pants sense.  As in, If a twenty-year-old high-school graduate could provide quality instruction to twenty kids from kindergarten through eighth grade in the same room, then I can sit my five-year-old daughter and my eight-year-old son next to each other and teach them, too.

There had been so much sniping and bothering each other, and also of each one disappearing from the schoolroom the instant I turn my back to attend to the other, that I had allowed my school day to become like this:

MORNING:  Teach the eight-year-old, ignore the five-year-old

NOON:  Hashslinging, decompressing

AFTERNOON:  Teach the five-year-old, repeatedly shout at the eight-year-old to get back here and finish your independent work

(Meanwhile, my eleven-year-old chugged through his to-do list without any input from me.  That kid spoils me.  But I should point out that he probably deserved more attention from me than he's been getting.)

I sat down and thought about the differences between my schoolroom and the stereotypical One Room Schoolhouse.  

(This is my schoolroom looking its absolute best:)

There are a lot of them.  I don't have a big chalkboard, because I use lap-sized dry erase boards or printouts.  I have a thermostat instead of a woodstove.  I can send people around the corner to watch videos if that seems like a good idea.

But probably the biggest difference is that my schoolroom has no place for me.

In the one-room schoolhouse, the children sit and work facing the teacher, and the teacher works standing at the board or seated at a desk facing the students.  She can see all of  them at once, and this is true even if she is working one-on-one with a student at the front.

My schoolroom has no "front of the room."  There is a countertop on which I prepare my lessons, but no place at the front for me to stand or sit.  Typically when I work with a child one-on-one, I pull up a chair next to him at his desk.  This works great for the child to whom I am attending, but then my back is to the others.  Distraction ensues.

It isn't that I want to create "school-at-home."  I don't.  But right now I need to borrow a technique for helping two squirrely children stay on task while I work with them in turns.  

Fortunately, the desks move (and are the same height and a carefully chosen aspect ratio):

It's not great, but it is the best I could do in a pinch.

See the desk with the dry erase board and marker on it?   I can stand or sit there.  Now my five-year-old can sit directly across from me, and my eight-year-old can sit at the desk on the right.   The eleven-year-old still has access to his desk on the left, although he has proven himself focused enough to be allowed to work anywhere in the house that suits him.

I've been making my five- and eight-year-old plow through their work at their own desks, and insisting that they get permission before getting up to use the bathroom or get a glass of water.  (Trust me, they have plenty of opportunity; it is just that there has been a disturbing trend of conversations like this:

ME:  Hey, 8-year-old, would you mind---

8YO: I have to go to the bathroom!!!!

[running feet]

[faraway slam]

[silence for the next 20 minutes])

And I have a big basket of already-sharpened pencils on the counter behind me, so that excuse is gone.

With the two of them right in front of me, it is much easier to work with them in turns.  When my daughter finishes a task, I can see it, and I can turn around and grab another assignment or at least a book for her to read.  When my son casually leans back to try and peek around the corner to see what his toddler brother is doing, I can catch him out.  For the most part, I can keep them on task, at least better than before.

There is a lot of moping, and a lot of "Can't you make her be quiet?!?" but I am determined to allow them to learn how to work in the same room with each other, respecting each other's space and cultivating patience for the inevitable distractions.   Fortunately the bottoms of the desks are built like enclosed boxes, so they literally cannot kick each other under the table.  

It's not that long.  Only about an hour in the morning and less than two hours in the afternoon.  With plenty of bathroom and glass-of-water breaks -- between subjects.

Speaking of subjects, I've aligned their subjects together now -- which is to say that the 8yo works on his catechism during the same block of time that the 5yo listens to or reads Bible stories, that the 8yo has math lesson while the 5yo does math worksheets and vice versa, the 8yo writes in his journal while the 5yo prints in her copybook, and they both do independent reading at the same time.  

This works shockingly more efficiently than my previous model, which was to teach one while the other (theoretically) worked quietly and independently.  The problem is that neither one of them seems to be developmentally ready to sit and work independently without help -- not help with the math problems or sounding out words, but help staying on task.  Does it sound unrealistic to have a five- and eight-year-old sitting in chairs being directly taught for a two-hour stretch?  Trust me, it is more unrealistic to expect this five- and eight-year-old to decide where and how to sit and what order to do their work in, and yet complete their daily tasks.

Still many bugs to be worked out, but I've got something that's going pretty well for these middle two right now.

(And in case you are wondering what I am doing with the toddler, the answer is that I am coping as best I can.  He has a little table around the corner.  Today it has Play-Doh on it.  Tomorrow it may be something else.  I'm not above a video or two if it comes to that.  Sometimes I am lucky and he goes down for a nap just in time for afternoon school.)

 

What grammar curriculum we use.

A reader just sent me a question:

What grammar book/series do you use? As you've noted on your blog about your dissatisfaction with pre-packaged science curriculum, grammar is my (and my husband's) "thing", so we're probably hoping for something that doesn't exist out there (grammar is so much my husband's "thing" that when he started teaching Latin at the local Catholic seminary, he wrote his own textbook because he wasn't satisfied with any out there).

But I long-distance respect what you do, and I just thought I'd ask. We register at Kolbe Academy, entirely for the paper-trail it affords us, and then proceed to apply their "principle of subsidiarity" to substitute just about every single thing in their curriculum--either for same-series-but-higher-level, or for completely-different-book. I'm not averse to supplementing, cobbling together, etc. 

My answer:

Oh goody, here is a question I can answer.

The big disclaimer here is that H., my English-major partner in co-schooling, has always managed the grammar. She teaches it from the (free! online!) K.I.S.S. Grammar books by Dr. Ed Vavra.

(Warning: the website looks like it was designed in 1995.)

You can download workbooks from the website and then print them. We printed them double-sided and took them to a copy shop to be spiralbound, and then worked with them as if they were conventional workbooks (which makes them not exactly free, I guess, by the time you pay for binding). The grade levels are not exact and have to do more with the reading level of the texts used for analysis

I personally find it hard to navigate the website. It is probably easiest to choose which workbook to use if you just download the workbooks as .doc files from the links on this page and then open them in Word and page through them.

I don't think H. even bothered to print out the answer key pages for the books, because she didn't need them, but they are there if you want them.

Check them out and let me know what you think. I really think the K.I.S.S. Grammar is a hidden gem.  We have been particularly pleased with how well it dovetails with teaching Latin.  I recognize that a traditional, analytical grammar curriculum doesn't please everyone, but if you're doing Latin or a similarly heavily inflected language, it really saves teaching time overall, I think.

 

UPDATE:  Here is a little extra information from H. who does the actual teaching, answering a mutual friend who was asking about using it for her 10-year-old son.

 ...It should work well to learn along with the kids. The first few levels of KISS are a level of grammar that any person literate in English will be familiar with, so the learning part will be to learn the marking procedures and vocabulary if that is rusty. Once you get the hang of the marking, it should be smooth sailing. Either review the provided answer key before he does the sheet or complete the exercise yourself and use that as the answer key. ( I cheat and don't often use the answer key because of unnecessary grammar nerdiness). 

In the first level, he'll only be explaining the basic 'skeleton' of the sentence: subject, verb, and the broad class called complements which includes direct and indirect objects, predicate adjectives and predicate nouns. KISS adds to the level of analysis fairly slowly. The kids get to watch themselves being able to explain more and more of the words in the exercise as they move through the program. [Our kids, age 12 and 11] have been working through it for three years. When they began they explained only two words in each sentence. Now they have gotten to the point that they can explain all the words in most sentences, even ones written by people like Jules Verne and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.

KISS doesn't spend a lot of time on explaining analysis-- it spends most of its time on making them perform the analysis, which is why I love it. 

The material covered with the program is found in the links at the bottom of the "workbooks" page that are called the Master Collection of Exercises. The material is divided into six levels, which are subdivided into concepts.

• Level One covers basic grammar, like subject/verb, prepositional phrases, adjectives and adverbs, pronouns, complements to the verb, compounding, and punctuation.
• Level Two helps the kids through problems they may have encountered when applying the concepts in Level One. It introduces concepts like understood subjects, embedded prepositional phrases, phrasal verbs, and infinitives.
• Level Three is primarily concerned with main and subordinate clauses in all their variations, and the function of subordinating conjunctions. 
• Level Four covers gerunds and infinitives (in all their grammatical functions as single words, and also when they function as ellipsed or reduced clauses in the conditional or subjunctive)
• Level Five practices everything they have previously learned and teaches the noun absolute as an extension of appositives.
• Level Six allows for integrating their grammar practice into their wider reading, writing,and literature studies.

The grade 2 workbook covers levels 1 and 2. The grade 3 workbook also covers levels 1 and 2 plus a few constructions from other levels. The grade 6 workbook covers levels 1-4.

The main difference between the grade levels is the type of text they are given to analyze. A typical grade 2 text is taken from Beatrix Potter, Thornton Burgess, etc. A typical grade 6 text may be from Howard Pyle, Longfellow, Frances Hodgson Burnett, or Robert Louis Stevenson.

The main thing to remember is that if you start with the grade 3 workbook, you *won't* repeat level 1 or level 2 when you move on to the grade 4, 5,or 6 workbook. You will skip the pages of that workbook that introduce level 1 and 2 concepts. You'll start at the level 3 exercises unless you think he needs review of the last concepts studied. They should never quit marking the things they've already learned about as they learn new things, so practice of older concepts is built-in.

...There's no particular reason to start [a 10-year-old] in [the 4th grade level] if his comprehension and vocabulary are advanced. I bet you could start with the 6th grade book. Here is the first question of the first exercise from four different grades:

Grade 2:

 1. The three little rabbits lived in the woods.

Grade 3:

1. Grethel shared her bread with Hansel.

Grade 4:

1. A King and Queen were perfectly happy.

Grade 6:

1. Her appetite grew amazingly.

So, not much difference there.

However, by the eleventh lesson in the sixth grade book the selections are more like this one:

Perseus wondered at that strange cloud, for there was no other cloud all round the sky; and he trembled as it touched the cliff below. And as it touched, it broke, and parted, and within it appeared Pallas Athene, as he had seen her at Samos in his dream, and beside her a young man more light-limbed than the stag, whose eyes were like sparks of fire. By his side was a scimitar of diamond, all of one clear precious stone, and on his feet were golden sandals, from the heels of which grew living wings.

The vast majority of the texts are taken from classics, and I can't think of objectionable material off hand in the sixth grade lessons outside of fairy tale violence like "Bluebeard", etc. I'm using a mix of 6th, 8th, and 9th grade lessons with the 11, 12, and 14 yr olds I'm teaching. Last year they all used the 3rd grade workbook, and they've had no trouble jumping from that to the higher grades material.

So there you go.

Letter from a liberal homeschooler.

Last week, the left half of the homeschooling-o-sphere exploded with discussion of this piece by Dana Goldstein entitled, "Liberals, Don't Homeschool Your Kids:  Why Teaching Children At Home Violates Progressive Values."  

I know, my conservative homeschooling readers might be going "W00t! Bring it on!" but as you can imagine, it contains a lot of stupid.  Homeschooling is a symptom of being rich and white and privileged, we have a duty to keep our children in public schools because we believe in public education, lefty homeschoolers preach sound social values but... you can imagine how well this was received ... don't practice them.

There is an absolutely fantastic piece in response to this today, called "An Open Letter to Dana Goldstein," by Stephanie Baselice.

What is a Liberal Homeschooler? Am I, for you, merely the assumed opposite of a Fundamentalist Christian Libertarian Dominionist Homeschooler? Do you imagine we are a group essentially just like the women at your office, or the last cocktail party you attended, except we are nursing toddlers in the park with our older children readingMark Twain and Philip Pullman nearby? What exactly leads you to presume that your idea of “liberal values” is one that the entirety of non fundamentalist attachment parenting unschoolers would share? Just because we are not raising revolutionaries for God’s Christian Army does not mean we agree with you about the meaning, let alone the value, of public education.

In my personal experience, you are right about some things. Home school families are indeed diversifying as a group. I live in an area where the home school community spans the spectrum from those who want to ensure that their God-fearing children are not sullied by exposure to science to those Dragon Mamas who want to make certain their offspring get into Stanford. Yet there are a wide range of perspectives somewhere between those poles, or somewhere else altogether. Many are families whose children for one reason or another did not thrive in the school system. Many have children with mild to moderate ADD, ADHD, Aspergers or OCD.

There are indeed those parents who prefer to spend family time together, perhaps running a family farm or traveling instead of attending school. There are Homeschoolers of Color who feel their children will be ill served in a public school system which tracks them towards low achievement (many of the Moms I know who meet that criteria are former public school teachers). Plenty of homeschool families I know personally live at or near the poverty line, making lifestyle choices from the bedrock of their values. Choices which involve significant financial sacrifice. 

This is my favorite line:

...You do not own the cause of progress. And the liberal tradition of fighting for public schools is a particular expression of values, not a value in itself.

... because failure to distinguish between values, and a particular expression of values, is a really common error.  For people both on the right and the left.

Another great insight:

When I worked in finance, pre-child days, I had been a registered assistant for an investment adviser. I was seriously underpaid. The number one question we got from couples under 50 was “Our family is so stressed and exhausted…is there some possible way one of us can stay home? ”. My job was to take in all their financial data, and put it together so we could analyze their situation and present financial options. Unless Mrs. Client was an attorney or a physician, or had a job she deeply loved and did not want to leave, I saw the math prove over and over again that these families would be better off financially if Mom stayed home.

Mothers, even highly educated ones, seemed often to bring in just enough money to put these families in a higher tax bracket. Usually two income households lock themselves structurally into this problem by buying more house than they really need—an expense that has recently become all to clear to families struggling with layoffs in the economic crisis. Granted, the families I was working with were usually well to do. But the same problems apply broadly to our whole society. Our lifestyle choices and our incomes are interdependent, not unidirectional. The values perpetuated by consumer culture lead us to view accomplishment in terms of income. It has long been possible to purchase status. If one lets go of that wheel, and is willing to live with less, according to different values, other economic possibilities can and do open up....

This is not to say that fathers cannot do the job of care giving, or that Mothers cannot provide adequately for families. There are all sorts of  ways to structure families. I know many families where the parents both work part time to support homeschooling, or where Dads stay home with kids while Mom works. Some of the non traditional families are gay. Yes, extended breastfeeding does indeed create a prevalence of very traditional looking stay-at-home Moms in the AP and homeschool communities. But this is more a response to the way the consumer society and nuclear family is structured than anything else. Most Moms I know would ideally work part time and spend lots of time at home with their little ones. In a tribal situation, there is extended family and lots of help with the work of raising a family. My homeschooling group has come to be almost a tribe to me. We help each other. All the time. Because that is how we wish to live. Relationships have replaced the need for revenue in many areas of my life.

Read the whole thing.  As I've said time and time again, one of the greatest things about homeschooling is the way it brings into agreement people from across the political spectrum.  Liberal and conservative homeschoolers often have more in common than they have separating them.

Project-filled day.

The 6th-8th graders made modern, construction-paper takes on ancient Athenian theatrical masks:

This stock character is "sick and tired."

 

And no elementary-school medieval village of paper-bag cottages is complete without its Kidzilla:

Teens/tweens and sleep.

This isn't new material for me, but something to think about anyway:

 As adolescents grow, their sleep cycles change (Carskadon, 1999).  During adolescence teens tend to stay up later and sleep later. Some of these changes are explained behaviorally...But some of the changes are due to intrinsic, biological changes. Even more seriously, researchers, doctors, and teachers are realizing that circadian rhythms and school schedules are out of synch (Carskadon, 1999). The result is excessive sleepiness, inferior academic performance, and even accidents.

Pioneering research has begun to focus on circadian rhythms and circadian rhythm disorders ...Measurable by biological events, like melatonin, circadian rhythms control the timing of rapid eye movement sleep (REM). Research is beginning to show that circadian rhythms are developmental and change with growth from childhood, to adolescence and adulthood.

One of the most fundamental benefits of homeschooling is that it leaves families freer to choose their own schedules.  That includes sleep schedules.  Most days of the week, I could, if I chose, arrange things so that the children and I could sleep very late or take naps in the middle of the day -- at least in theory.  We have no buses to catch, after all.  

Kids generally don't get enough sleep when they have to keep to a school schedule that starts early in the morning and leaves no room for a nap:

Early survey research at Stanford University, showed that as pubescent girls matured they preferred evening to morning schedules... In other words, as the girls' bodies changed so did their sleep cycles. This is more than staying up late to have fun. Changing sleep cycles are biologically based. Furthermore, parent surveys and teen sleep diaries indicate that during the school year, teens average about 2 hours/per night less sleep than in the summer. The effect is cumulative. So losing 2 hours sleep each night adds up to a total of 10 hours lost sleep by the end of the week.

As adolescents' bodies change, they stay up later but still show afternoon dips in alertness. Previously believed to be a sleep pattern of younger children, who once took naps in school, this "siesta" effect is pronounced even into later adolescence. Changing circadian rhythms of adolescent bodies and early school schedules are out of sync. 

Looking back at my own late adolescence, especially my first experiences with setting my own schedule in college (my freshman year, of course, but before that I attended a summer credit-earning residential program for high school students)  -- I vividly remember how quickly I (and many of the others my age) re-adopted the afternoon nap that hadn't been possible since kindergarten.  Often, after returning from classes, I'd pass out on my bunk and not get up till the dining hall was about to open.

Looking specifically at my preadolescent son -- he is 11 -- I could let him sleep as long as he wished almost every morning, and let him set his own schedule for schoolwork most of the time.  He's proven himself responsible and capable of plowing through his daily to-do list with little supervision, and it is obvious that he has developed the ability both to self-teach and to know when it's time to ask for help learning something.

Typically, though, I haven't given him total sleep/work freedom.  There are a few pressures that work against the "everybody can sleep as much as they need to" model, at least in our family.  The challenge is in finding the balance.

(1) The rest of us may not have to be out the door early in the morning, but Dad does.  If a teen sleeps in late, he misses time with his father (or whichever parent is the breadwinner) that he could otherwise be having.  Of course, he could get more by staying up late -- but many families prioritize early bedtimes because it gives Mom and Dad a block of time without interruptions.  

(2) I like there to be a time in my day when I'm "done" with school.  I get a feeling of satisfaction when everybody has cleared out of the schoolroom early enough that I can straighten it up and leave it  in the late afternoon.  

I realize that a mother's schedule is not meant to conform to outside-world expectations.  But deep down I like the illusion of having something less like a vocation to which I give myself fully in my my every moment, and more like a JOB, because JOBS eventually have a quitting time, after which I can crack open a beer and put my feet up and chat with my husband about his day.

(3) A fairly predictable school schedule is the tool that helps me give time and attention to each child over the course of the day.   This is a big deal.  I have to have enough time in the morning, and enough time in the afternoon, especially to work one-on-one with my five-year-old and my eight-year-old.  (Thank God my five-year-old learned to read precociously early, because that is one less time-intensive activity I need to work on with her.)  We have a rule around here:  "You may not interrupt me if I am teaching someone younger than you."  If my oldest were completely free to set his own schedule, it would be trickier for him to work with mine.  

Still, the daily schedule may not be optimized; perhaps I should re-evaluate it with tween-sleep as a high priority.

(4) I try to do a couple of school subjects, as well as lunch, together as a family.  This means calling my older kid away from his own work -- or his bed -- and bringing him "in touch" with the rest of the children.  

(5) We aren't totally isolated from the outside world and its schedules.  There's Sunday morning Mass, for one thing -- and if we sleep in and go to late Mass, there's just so much less of the day left to play.  Two days a week we co-school with another family, and that means getting up early (at least when it's our turn to drive and car-pool) so we can start early enough to get the work done and get home to Dad.  When doctor's appointments and such need to happen, first thing in the morning seems best because it interrupts our day the least.  

(6) There is pressure to teach conformity with the outside world.  Someday he's going to have a job, and it might make him get up in the morning and keep a traditional workday schedule, right?  

In theory, I reject the "but he'll have to learn it eventually, so we have to work on it now" philosophy.  Most lessons can wait for developmental readiness most of the time, and there is much more natural motivation to learn when the natural need arises.  Still, all homeschoolers (I think) have to make decisions like this all the time.  Even though as homeschoolers, our children don't have to jump through the same hoops as all those "normal" people, when they are adults they will be expected to act like "normal" people some of the time, and we want to prepare them to be able to  conform by choice when it's in their best interest.  

Sooner or later most people will need the skill to arrange sleep schedules in order to meet somebody else's demands.  The question is, do they need practice with this more than they need... well... sleep?

It's yet another are where we must decide how best to strike the balance among the natural needs of each individual living in the family, all with one eye to the sometimes unreasonable but often unavoidable demands of the outside world.  This is never a simple question, and parents encounter it and answer it -- not always easily, and not always willingly -- again... and again... and again.

Real work.

Given a plastic toy "workbench" by a distant relative for one's second birthday, complete with plastic hammer and plastic saw and plastic wrench and an array of sound effects that ring out when one pounds the plastic pegs or cranks the plastic bolt or saws the plastic wood in the plastic slot --

-- obviously, it is much more interesting and worthwhile to locate the real recessed screws that hold it together, and then toddle off to find Mommy's real Phillips-head screwdriver so you can take the thing apart.

Wouldn't you?

Hey girl.

A year or two ago I found out through FB that several women who had been high school classmates, and whom I hadn't seen or spoken to since graduation, were homeschooling their kids.  We had a few brief exchanges, and it was fun to discover that we had that in common, especially in the cases where we hadn't had much in common at all when we were in high school.

That's a little preamble to pointing out this Tumblr site that Anne H, who went to high school with me, put together.  Have fun reading Homeschool Ryan Gosling.