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College applications: smoothing out the bumps.

At the start of this week I drove my two eldest sons to a large public university in a neighboring state. The younger one came so that I could drop him off at a weeklong residential STEM camp the college of engineering was hosting for soon-to-be-eighth-graders. The eldest, who will be a (homeschooled) high school senior this year, came to make a college visit.

This is the second university that he and I have visited; the first was the large public university in our home city. We live in that city today because that is where I went for graduate school. Our son is price-conscious, and likes a big place and city life, so these two universities are his two likely choices. They cost about the same (thanks to tuition reciprocity), and both have about equally rated engineering colleges and business colleges. These are his two interests. When I asked him if he didn't want to apply to a third school as a "backup," he explained that majoring in business instead of engineering was his backup plan, because this essentially means he is applying to four colleges. This makes a great deal of sense to me.

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I have worked very hard to anticipate problems that we might run into along the way, and because I am a stickler for filling out forms correctly and fitting into the right boxes, I have documented things with near obsession. I have been thinking about applications since my first was in kindergarten, at first idly and then with more and more interest.

Still, one of the consequences of charting your own path is that unexpected bumps are to be expected. And this year I have run into the problem of official letters of recommendation. Which is something I failed to anticipate. I wound up talking to the admissions counselors, by the way, and my son and I have a plan for how to deal with it, so there is a happy ending; but let me save you some trouble if your kids aren't in high school yet, by helping you foresee what I didn't.

So the deal with us is this: Engineering colleges, it turns out, want academic (official) letters of recommendation from math and science teachers specifically. But in our family, Mark and I are my own children's only math and science teachers (so far). Why would we have outsourced this? I outsourced English, physical education, and music because there are other people who can teach this far better than I. If any of my children had shown more-than-passing interest in studio art or performance art, or in a modern language, or maybe in up-to-date computer programming (I coded in Fortran 77, and Mark only writes Visual Basic), I would have sent them for outside lessons in those as well.

If there is anything that the outside observer, mildly biased against non-institutional schools, would think that I am officially qualified to teach, it is math, physics, and chemistry. I enjoy teaching those subjects, and I am confident teaching them, and therefore I do not outsource them. And if I may say so myself, I teach them well. At least, I am having fun, and the kids I have taught (mine and H's) seem to enjoy the courses and also appear to learn the material. I make my own syllabi that are closely aligned to the AP syllabi, and I use college textbooks (which are very affordable if you go just a couple of editions out of date), and I have even found an adequate home laboratory kit for general physics and chemistry, and I insist on excellent lab notebook maintenance.

The consequence, which I failed to foresee, is that there is no math or science teacher from which I can request a letter of recommendation. H's kids can get a letter from me, with the full alphabet soup after my name. My kids can get a letter from H, of course; she is their their English-degreed literature and composition tutor who's worked with them since they were learning to read. But no parent can write a credible letter of recommendation for their own offspring. And I failed to foresee that a STEM college would want an institutional STEM letter.

(Cue sound of me smacking myself in the forehead.)

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Are you thinking, "But that's crazy! Surely they have enough homeschooled students applying by now, most of whom do pretty well in college from what we hear, that they have alternate instructions on their website for applications."

They do have some general instructions, indeed. But I think the numbers show that really, only a tiny number of their applicants find themselves in the position we are in re: STEM grades. Let's do an engineering estimate:

• About three percent of K-12 students are being homeschooled in my state this year.
• That figure is the number over all the grades from K-12. Lots of homeschooling families only homeschool through sixth or eighth grade -- more, I would wager, than the number who switch from institutional school to home school in the high school years. So I am thinking that fewer than three percent of high school students are likely to be homeschooled.
• You do have to correct for the fact that homeschooled students -- likely because of the correlation with the education level of the parents -- appear to be slightly more likely to attend college than the general population of students. The data on this is variable and not great, but could be as high as a doubling of the percentage who attend college. My argument is weaker the larger this number is, so I will concede it. Let's say that maybe five to six percent of college applicants might be homeschooled. Now we have a potentially significant number, yes. (Although the few colleges I could find online that made a reference to it -- mostly elite private colleges -- stated that a only tiny number of their applicants were homeschooled.)
• But! Lots of homeschooling families use an umbrella school, "school-in-a-box," or distance learning program which generates official grades and an official transcript and which may have nonparent instructors, tutors, or graders. (Certain states, though not mine, require homeschoolers to use such a service.) Even if the school or program is not accredited, universities will probably take their grades and transcripts as evidence of the student's performance. So now we have narrowed that small percentage to even fewer students who, like mine, lack a complete institutional high school transcript.
• Finally, even those high school homeschoolers who chart their own course often use tutors, co-op classes, community colleges, and the like to teach subjects that they aren't comfortable teaching themselves. And the STEM classes are often the ones that get outsourced. So you just don't get many kids who have *no* institutional or nonparent STEM teachers who are nevertheless attempting to enter colleges of engineering.
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Anyway, this is just to say that if you want to reduce your bureaucracy later on, it's probably a good idea to help your teens rack up the sorts of experiences that naturally lead to letters of recommendation.

It isn't so much that they won't be able to put together a good application without checking all the boxes -- we really did get the impression, at least at the colleges that we visited, that they just want to be able to get a comprehensive picture of the student. It's more that it feels better to be confident that you're sending them something their system can deal with.

And so, I reached out to the admissions counselor, and she helped me come up with a plan that I can work with that will give them the information they need. I now feel not that there are no boxes to check, but that we have been issued an alternate set of check boxes.

I was telling Mark last night, the main benefit I got from talking to the admissions counselor and getting advice, tailored to our family's approach, about how to set up transcripts, grades, and recommendations, was that I will spend less time wondering "We can't just follow the directions, so.... Should we do this or should we do that?" With that advice in my pocket, my guidance counselor hat will fit a little bit more comfortably and I will waste less time trying out different approaches.

I get the impression that even though there are plenty of experienced homeschoolers around who can tell us how they navigated this final step, it's normal and expected to feel somewhat at sea. We provide an individualized education -- that is, after all, the point. And because it is so individualized, there is a limit to how much we can follow each others' examples. Sooner or later you just have to figure out how to fit into systems in a way that is tailored to your own family's unique approach. Which is true for everyone, really; it's just that for some folks the systems make that uniqueness more obvious than for others.

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The benefit of doubt: Acquittal in the death of Philando Castile.

Last year I wrote several posts about the fatal shooting of St. Paul Schools employee Philando Castile a few miles from my home. Castile was a concealed carry permit holder who was shot in the car, next to his girlfriend and with a four-year-old girl in the back seat, by a panicked police officer during a traffic stop.

(First post: Not so much about Mr. Castile as about bumper stickers and jumping to conclusions.)

(Second post: About Mr. Castile -- appropriately -- being laid to rest from the Catholic Cathedral of St. Paul at the request of his mother.)

(Third post: On the charges that were brought, in particular on the legal distinctions between manslaughter and murder.)

By now you all know -- it made the national and international news, I saw it in a French news site yesterday -- that the police officer who shot and killed Castile and endangered the woman and child in the car was acquitted by a jury of all charges.

The prosecutor's burden in the manslaughter charge was to demonstrate to the jury that the police officer caused Mr. Castile's death by "culpable negligence" whereby he created an "unreasonable risk" and "consciously" took "chances of causing great bodily harm or death". And, since the defense claimed that the officer acted in self-defense, to overcome the finding that the shooter "reasonably believed deadly force was necessary" to prevent loss of life.

I don't think very many people dispute that the police officer -- at least momentarily -- believed that he needed to defend himself. I suppose it all turns on whether the police officer's belief was "reasonable."

It is true that white concealed-carry permit holders have on occasion been unreasonably shot by alarmed police, but it isn't a common occurance. Nevertheless, I believe it's very likely that if Philando Castile had done everything the same, but had not been a black man, he'd be alive today.

I also believe it's not reasonable for that to be the fact that made the difference.

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Civil liberties cut both ways. Mr. Castile had a legal right to be armed, and while people are disputing whether he did all the things exactly right during the traffic stop -- mentioning the gun and his permit to the officer (neither were legally required of him), moving his hands after the officer requested his license -- nothing he did was unusual behavior for a permit holder in Minnesota, except for being black.

It is questionable whether our Second Amendment rights are meaningful if their lawful exercise can "reasonably" frighten a police officer enough to kill someone.

And that is before you get to the Equal Protection clause and use it to test the notion that a police officer can legally be more easily frightened by people of one color than by people of another color, and that distinction called "reasonable."

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Nevertheless, thanks to other civil liberties which are perhaps even more important, we have theoretically got "innocent until proven guilty" in this country, and the state law is written with certain words and not with others, and there is no special part of the law about manslaughter and murder and self-defense that lays out clearly what "reasonably believed deadly force was necessary" means in the context of a police officer making a traffic stop or any other circumstance where the officer has seen fit to interact with a person who has not committed any crime.

Whether Mr. Castile's killer's belief was "reasonable" is apparently something that is not so obvious that it was proved to those twelve jurors beyond a "reasonable" doubt. Some doubt remained. And if doubt remained, then their duty was to acquit.

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It still stinks to high heaven for Mr. Castile's family and friends, and it stinks for all of us too -- maybe not so much because a jury found room for doubt in the police officer's reasonableness, but more because we know that juries often do not seem to find room for doubt in other people's reasonableness, people who do not enjoy the great deference that a police uniform affords. And we know that many people in our justice system never see a jury, because of the high proportion of people who are frightened into pleading guilty to one charge in exchange for dropping a more serious charge, and whose experience has been of not getting the benefit of the doubt. And we know that Mr. Castile did not get the benefit of the doubt, and he is dead.

It is not wrong that an unsure jury acquitted. That is what unsure juries are supposed to do. They owe every defendant the benefit of the doubt.

The wrong is that Mr. Castile's killer was allowed, by the law which does not define "reasonable," to be very unsure himself --- so very far, far from being sure --- and that another human being who had not hurt anyone paid with his own life. That Mr. Castile could not have the benefit of the doubt.

And years and years and years of other people, especially but not exclusively black men, who had the same right to the benefit of the doubt, and yet could not have it. Exhaustion, dismay, and fury is justified.

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I don't know what the answer is. I think re-examining the wording of our state law about self-defense and homicide might be a start.

Perhaps we should consider laying out more clearly what "reasonably believed" means; perhaps we should enshrine it in the law that fear of blackness itself is not reasonable (because people are definitely arguing around here that it is totally reasonable for a police officer to be more frightened of One of Those People than of your average white CCW permit holder).

Perhaps the legal definitions of manslaughter, murder, and self-defense need to be examined in the specific circumstance of police interactions with non-police citizens. Maybe we should be honest and lay out what we can agree on regarding the responsibility of police officers to make rapid judgments in quickly changing situations while protecting life and safeguarding civil liberties. It is clear that juries are willing to defer greatly to police officers' narratives of their own judgment process. Perhaps this is what we want; perhaps not; perhaps we want it up to a point. Maybe we should write down where that point is. Maybe we should lay out clearly and specifically what it means for a police officer to be reasonable and unreasonable in the exercise of deadly force. Then we, and they, would know better what to expect from a jury. Maybe training would change to reflect the clearer rules, and maybe snap judgments would be better judgments.

This is what the rule of law means.

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I have nothing more to say. Look around and listen to what other citizens have to say who are closer to the pain and struggle and fear than I am, even in the middle of it. I'm not likely to be shot during a traffic stop, nor to have to decide whether to use deadly force on someone. I am a citizen, and that's as far or as important as my say goes; so for now I'll write my state legislators, and ... and something, I don't know.

I am sorry for your loss.

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Attempting the mind to flex.

Darwin writes:

As we wrap up a year of family German classes ...I find myself taking stock of my abilities in the language. What I want, even more than the ability to converse fluently (which I have little opportunity for) is the ability to read in German relatively well. Right now I'm at something of a halfway stage....

However, as I was working through a couple pages of German this way the other night, it was striking me that aside from my vocabulary issues there's still something fundamentally different about what I'm doing in comparison to how an actual German reader would deal with a text. What I'm doing right now might be better termed decoding, because in some ways I'm still turning things into a more standard English structure as I figure them out.

For instance, the use of a past continuous is very common in German, and a standard sentence order in that case is: [Phrase denoting time or place] [helping verb: a form of sein (to be) or haben (to have)] [subject] [object] [past participle].

Laying something like that out in English might go like this:

Early in the morning had we on the train to Berlin to ride.

Of course, in English we'd keep the verb together, and a natural order would be something like:

We had to ride on the train to Berlin early in the morning.

Now, these are easy enough words that I'd make it through fine on my own and wouldn't even be consulting the dictionary, but throw in a bunch of vocabulary and I find myself going back to my old schoolboy Latin habits. Latin, of course, also has the habit of saving the verb for last. We all get the explanation during the early weeks of our first Latin class that this creates a sense of anticipation as you want to find out what is being done by the subject to the object in the sentence. However, I virtually always did what a lot of beginning decoders of a foreign language do: I would identify my subject, then jump to the end of the sentence and wee what my verb was, then go back and pick up the rest of the sentence. In essence, I was transforming the sentence into English sentence order as I went along.

This is fine for getting the sense of what's written, but it strikes me that if you stick with this, you never really move into thinking in the other language the way a speaker or reader of it would. 

Turning it into the English order as you go is, I think, what you do if you aim to translate into English eventually, as you'll be thinking all along "how am I going to render this in English?" So it's not like that habit doesn't have its uses.

I like the term "flexibility of mind" for what you're seeking. I wonder if doing some translation exercises from German to English might help you along the way -- but a German->English in which you flout more workaday English word-order conventions and seek a word-order that captures some of the anticipation inherent in the German, so you can begin to get a feel of how that might work in one's native language.

So what I'm saying is:  Go ahead and put it "Early in the morning had we on the train to Berlin to ride."  At least in your head.

In short, translate into a sort of Yoda-speak, but one in which enough licit English style choices are made that the meaning is clear, if a little unusually phrased. And feeling free to switch from active to passive voice if warranted in order to preserve the anticipation.

Let me give you an example -- I'm going to draw from Latin (French is no good, its word-order conventions are not dissimilar enough from English ones to serve as an example).  I have a textbook with its answer key in front of me, and opened it to a passage entitled "Seneca Reflects on Having Lodgings over a Public Bath."  Here are the first two sentences in Latin:

Ecce undique me varius clamor circumsonat: supra ipsum balneo habito.  Propone nunc tibi omnia genera vocum quae in odium possunt aures adducere...

The textbook translates conventionally like so:

Look, on all sides a varied noise surrounds me:  I live above the bath-house itself.  Consider now to yourself all the types of voices that can draw the ears into hatred...

but if you want to preserve the sense of anticipation above all, the periodic sentence, you could write this (partly by switching to passive, partly by choosing a less-colloquial construction):

Look, on all sides I'm by a varied noise surrounded:  above the very bath-house I live.  Consider now for yourself  all the kinds of voices by which into hatred can the ears be drawn...

It's not a great translation:  when you go from active to passive you lose some of the punch, and the style seems too ethereal and academic for such an earthy topic.  But different translations serve different purposes, and this exercise is to see the flavor of the periodic sentence:  the sentence that goes around and around, and doesn't wrap up till the end (of clause or of sentence).  Notice I swapped a synonym too so I could keep the order intact:  "the very bath-house" for "ipsum balneo" rather than  "the bath-house itself."

I've always found that literal mental translations help me get into the mind of the foreign language better.  The Romans wouldn't pitch camp; they would 'put' camp, and by the way, "castra" being a plural word, think of it as "they put the campythings."  (castra ponunt). French people don't play tennis with a tennis racket, they "play at" tennis with a "racket of tennis"; and they don't "play piano," nor do they "play at piano", they "play of the piano" or maybe "play some piano."

So, I think you can do this with word-order too.  And no, it isn't quite the same as doing a literal word-for-word translation in the order the words appear in the original text.  You can keep certain syntactical chunks together or separate them as needed, and do things like put the adjective before the noun in English.  It must remain understandable.  But it's okay if it sounds a little weird or archaic; the point is to get the sense of anticipation in.

So, let me continue my weird-English translation:

Look, on all sides I'm by a varied noise surrounded:  above the very bath-house I live.  

Consider now for yourself  all the kinds of voices by which into hatred can the ears be drawn...

When somebody (lazy and with this commonplace oiling contented) I've met, I hear the slapping of the hand on the shoulders, which, depending on whether flat it strikes [there] or hollow, thus the sound changes.  

If, though, the scorekeeper too has arrived and begun counting the balls, it's finished.  

Add now the brawler and the the apprehended thief, and he who by his own voice in the bath himself he pleases.  

Add now those who into the pool, with a mighty surge-of-water's sound, jump.  

Beyond those of whom, if nothing else of them is, proper their voices are:

 Of the hair-plucker [you must] think, reedy and strident his voice so that it might be more conspicuous, rising and falling, not ever silent, except when he plucks the armpits and someone else,  on his behalf, to shout is then forced.

Yes, it's a poor translation, and sacrifices a couple of connections in order to push those verbs back.  (They're not all pushed to the end of the clause:  "begun counting the balls" is "to count begun the balls" in the original, and I didn't think moving the infinitive would matter much.)  The textbook does a better job of rendering decent English, and I could probably do a still better job making it come out sounding well-turned.     But I find that the exercise helps me get under the skin of the word-order.  

So first you do that translation, then you set it aside and you read the Latin, or German or whatever, again.

Your mileage may vary.  I don't know enough about German word-order to know if it's so crazy that you'll never be able to make a sensible English sentence this way.  But it's worth a try?

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Another thing that you might try, especially if (in English) you're a relatively fast reader:  Watch a movie in the target language, but with English subtitles. The subtitles (at least when they are hard coded) usually appear a split second before the character begins to speak.  When the subtitle appears, take the meaning in quickly, then look up and at the character's face, and attempt -- expect -- to hear that same meaning.  Expect that verb at the end, if that's a feature of the language, or whatever feature of word-order is giving you trouble. 

I suspect you could do it with a side-by-side translation of a piece of literature too, at least with the help of some index card markers to keep your place and cover up the text when necessary.  I haven't tried that, though.

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The suggestion in all of these is to train yourself -- using either English or your target language -- to attend to the meaning-chunks coming in an order that's characteristic of the target-language.  Word-order, like vocabulary, is something that comes to you through pattern-recognition, and that takes practice with the patterns.  We can, I think, render those patterns into our native language with a little tweaking, and harness the power of our brain's flexibility with the language it's wrangled since birth, until the new patterns speak to us too.