09:30 – The morning paper reports that as many as half, HALF, of our public school third grade students are not able to read at grade level and will be required to attend summer school. After that, they’ll be re-tested to determine if they are promoted to fourth grade or are held back in third grade. Is it any wonder that homeschooling is booming?
The Dell laptop works fine for generating postage labels, but the engineer in me immediately recognized that I just created a single point of failure. If that laptop dies, I’m out of business. So today I’m going to order a second, identical laptop.
Why don’t you just install virtual machine software and a copy of Windows on your linux workstation for practice. Comments earlier this month point out you can download a 90 day copy of Windows for free. That way you can make notes, and if the laptop dies, you just refer to your notes and refresh the Windows VM.
I’d like to thank those fine kids for trying to take away our title here in Nevada as number 50 in crappy K-12 edumicashun.
Meanwhile, my first grader was reading at a sixth-grade level before she turned six and a half. Which I guess is cool for “my kid is sooooo smart” bragging rights, but it’s hard to find things for her to read because the “age-appropriate” stuff is too easy but she’s emotionally and experientially only six. The “reading-level-appropriate” stuff is not interesting to her or I don’t want her reading it. I’d rather she not be exposed to books about middle-school dating drama and backstabbing between frienemies, thanks anyway.
I tried a couple times to write a children’s story at her reading level but covering topics a 6-y-o would be interested in reading, but the little brat got better at reading faster than I could write. After about the third obsolete-before-the-first-draft-was-half-done start, I just gave up on that.
If she’s reading at the level of a 12-year-old (ignoring what that means nowadays…) why not get her started on things that 12-year-old girls have historically liked to read? If it were me, I’d hand her a stack of Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, and maybe a stack of Lauren Brooke’s Heartland stories (which the TV series was based on, but doesn’t greatly resemble).
That’s largely what I’ve been doing, mixing classics and carefully-selected contemporary books. Wizard of Oz series and Little House on the Prairie series and such were already boxed in my closet. I haven’t tried the Hardy Boys because they’re about boys and she wants to read stories about girls or cute anthropomorphic animals, and she was meh about Nancy Drew. I’ll try the Heartland books; thanks for the suggestion.
(My previous comment originally had a paragraph much like the above, but I deleted it on account of I’m a clumsy idiot and didn’t feel like retyping it.)
Here’s the wikipedia link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartland_%28novel_series%29
I should warn you that if your daughter reads these, she’s probably gonna want a horse. Target audience is girls 8 to 12.
I was thinking Hardy Boys type books when I saw your response. I read (and reread, and rereread, and rerereread…) an awful lot of Hardy Boys when I was growing up.
There used to be a lot of books about people in history for kids too. Of course the stories were totally expurgated and not what you would call fact-checked – I’m sure they would have had GW chopping down the cherry tree – but not to the point of being horrible.
This site appears to be useful: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/lists/classic-books-for-kids. I see it mentions the Oz books, which are all available free for the Kindle. (So is Tom Swift and His Motor-Cycle, or, Fun and Adventures on the Road and much more). Used book stores and libraries could be good hunting grounds too.
For cute animals, the Redwall series was a favorite of my daughter. She also liked a series that starts with Dealing with Dragons. She might like Harry Potter, but the books get a lot longer and heavier in theme and tone as they go on.
What seems to be lost in all the Common Core debate is that kids aren’t ready for it. You can’t expect an average 5th grader that’s had crappy schooling for 4 years to suddenly be able to meet standards of what kids did in the 50s and 60s. You need time and intensive help to make up for lost ground.
“…the engineer in me immediately recognized that I just created a single point of failure. If that laptop dies, I’m out of business. So today I’m going to order a second, identical laptop.”
You are still in the single-point-of-failure territory, just as I am (I bought four WD 3TB hard drives to create a RAID 5 array from the same shop, so chances are they’ll all run for 10 years or all die in a month.)
Why not beg a copy of Windows 7 from Ray and install it in a partition on a desktop?
I had the whole set of Hardy Boys, but when I looked at them again as my kids were of the right age, well, they hadn’t aged well. There are modern-day series that are better for kids. For example, “Secrets of Droon”.
Being the parsimonious sort, I think I’d get one of these, which happen to be up on Woot today. More or less what you’d need for a backup. And, assuming the hard drive is as easy to get to as it is on my HP laptop, a great testbed for new Linux distros, other random piddling, etc.
http://www.woot.com/plus/laptops-lap-bottoms?ref=cnt_wp_13
Just another quick point on the side here; our kids did not grow up as reading maniacs and biblioholics like their mom and dad; so while our daughter is very gifted at foreign languages, she is not so great with her own, in terms of reading it, and writing it. Why not? Because reading was not one of her daily activities growing up like it was for me and Mrs. OFD, who, by the way, are not to be taken as any kind of examples for this stuff; we are way out there, or as Chuck sez, ‘hyper-literate.’
My point is that the battle is almost always lost by the time a child is ten or twelve if they have not been regular and enthusiastic readers of English. On their own, out of love for it, and not at the prompting, bribes and threats of adults. We, in fact, got that treatment *because* we read so much. And the schools don’t do very much to encourage it, unless it’s super-PC rubbish, most of it written well after the Glorious Sixties. Everything earlier, of course, is patriarchal, repressive, misogynistic, sexist, racist, etc., etc. and should be stamped out or burned in piles, coincidentally, like the guys in “Farenheit 451.” But nowadays the books just disappear from libraries and are pulped or rubbished somewhere else.
As a kid I grew up reading the Sherlock Holmes stories, Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, and stuff like “Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates,” and I was entranced by the nonfiction ‘true tales of terrible shipwrecks and other disasters’ in a prolific series done by Boston’s own Edward Rowe Snow, the Flying Santa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Rowe_Snow
http://www.amazon.com/Edward-Rowe-Snow/e/B001H9R6U0
Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Beware, the Jack Zipes version http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Fairy-Brothers-All-New-Edition/dp/0553382160 is unexpurgated and slightly gruesome at times, but I loved it. Anything by Jules Verne might interest her too — but maybe that’s a boy’s thing. Don’t forget Swiss Family Robinson!
Heidi and Pinocchio come to mind, too.
Multiple, duplicate laptops is my solution. I do full backups of each to an external laptop HD using Acronis (though Ron Morse really likes Macrium Reflect) and carry those spares with me, so in a pinch I just replace the HD.
Slowly, Mr. Bob is creeping back to Windows. Next it will be a desktop system. Then a Windows phone…….
“Bah” to that “slowly creeping” bidness. RBT’s real reason for getting a Windows computer is so he can play genuine Windows Minesweeper. The plethora of free versions just aren’t the same.
(Does Windows still come with Minesweeper? I basically don’t have Windows at home* so I can’t check that, and I think the Win7 I use on my day “job” has had the games removed, though I can’t say as I’ve ever actually checked.
* My daily-use laptop can dual boot Windows, and I do boot it on occasion, mainly to run one of the MS Office apps on a file that LibreOffice just can’t handle. I’m not going to reboot now just so I can see if my Win7 Pro has Minesweeper.
Thanks for the various book suggestions. Some of them are useful, some of them I’ve already showed her, and some won’t work in this case but are probably worthwhile as reference for other people. (eg, most of Mark Twain and Jules Verne. My daughter is still a six-year-old girl, and not conspicuously courageous. I can just see her getting to the lost-in-the-cave scene in Tom Sawyer and then not being able to sleep by herself for the next week.)
The Droon books are OK, for what they are, and the Magic Treehouse books likewise. She tore through them all. In fact, the Magic Treehouse books were what got her reading “real” books on her own: I’d been reading a chapter a night before bed, and that wasn’t fast enough for her. She turned the light back on and finished the book by herself.
Eric Shanower has an illustrated series — graphic novels, really — of the Oz books. They have much of the original text, so it’s not just a picture book with a few words. Highly recommended.
If you are considering two identical laptops that you want to keep in sync, take a look at this program: GoodSync http://www.goodsync.com/
I have used it for years to keep my two main laptops in sync as well as using Carbonite for Cloud backup. I just use the built-in backup features of Windows 7 and 8 for my onsite backups.
SteveF, I was going to suggest the Hobbit, or the Chronicles of Narnia, but from what you said, she may not be ready. Or how about McGuffy’s readers? At least they’d be age appropriate. Or here’s an idea? How about taking her to the library and have her reading juvenile non-fiction? Surely she’s interested in horses or princesses or dolls, and would like to read about them. Look for the really old books that don’t have the politically correct organic fertilizer.
We, in fact, got that treatment *because* we read so much.
I got a whipping in 8th grade at Johnson Junior High for reading a paperback book in class after completing the worksheet. I still resent that and it has been 40 years.
RBT’s real reason for getting a Windows computer is so he can play genuine Windows Minesweeper.
No way! Spider Solitaire rules! And with all four decks of cards. I first played it on a Sun Unix box. I have heard a rumor that it was dropped from Windows 8.
Windows 7 Ultimate comes with Borderlands, Chess Titan, Freecell, Hearts, Mahjong, Minesweeper, Solitaire and Spider Solitaire. And a few others.
The only officially sanctioned corporal punishment I got was getting my hand smacked in first grade for trying to write left handed.* But otherwise, yah. Forty years later, I still resent the hell out of being punished for not being as stupid and lazy as the average: being forced to tutor a retarded girl to help her pass the end-of-year tests, being put on shared-grade group projects with kids who couldn’t or wouldn’t do the work, being told to shut up when I pointed out that the teacher or the text was wrong**. Oh, yah. I’ve claimed for decades that any psychopathic and anti-authoritarian tendencies I may have (and it’s a hell of a lot stronger than a “tendency”) can be attributed to my public school experiences.
* Because, as we know, the left hand is the hand of the devil. You can identify who went to Catholic school because they always chime in with the “hand of the devil” when I tell that tale. The worst part: this was in a public school. My first grade teacher told us her only regret in life was that she didn’t become a nun. Charming.
** I had a fantastic memory when I was a kid and would contrast a teacher’s statement yesterday with what she said today. This was not acceptable. And I was a math prodigy, not that anyone recognized it until I was an adult, and pointed out and sometimes demonstrated counter-examples for false or incomplete statements. This also was not acceptable. My geometry teacher apparently was unfamiliar with non-Euclidean geometry and told me I was stupid because I didn’t accept the parallel lines theorem. Resentment, decades later? Nah…
Steve F-
Win 7 at least has Minesweeper, FreeCell, Solitaire, and Spider Solitaire available, if not installed. Win 8 has none of those, they expect you to play everything on line now.
Slowly, Mr. Bob is creeping back to Windows. Next it will be a desktop system. Then a Windows phone……
Or a Windows Tablet.
Does Windows still come with Minesweeper?
Yes.
Win7 I use on my day “job” has had the games removed
Games are NOT installed by default on W7 Pro which is probably what you have at work as that version is required to join a domain. You can add the games by adding Windows features provided your AD rules and permissions allow such action.
Would any of Enid Blyton’s books be suitable for your daughter, SteveF? I remember enjoying the Famous Five series as a child. If those are a bit too old for her, The Faraway Tree series would probably do.
I’d also be tempted to suggest some of Roald Dahl’s books, although some of them are genuinely horrifying and might be unsuitable if she’s easily scared.
I second the suggestion of the Redwall books. Great adventure yarns, featuring cute animals galore. The only problem you may have is that there’s a paucity of female protagonists. If she wants a female protagonist, Triss is probably the best one on which to start.
Ah yes, decades-old resentment from public and private skool humiliations and unjust punishments. I have my share, one of which I whined about here recently.
That’s true about the Win8 games not being local; even the Solitaire is connected to the net. Still ruminating about backing down to Win7 Ultimate, with which I had zero problems for two years until a lightning strike fried the mobo. I still have the hard drive around here somewhere and should probably build another machine with it at some point. Just what we need, another machine here.
Mrs. OFD about to leave again to take care of ailing 86-year-old mom tonight and then leaves tomorrow for a week in Maryland.
I’ll be working on the house stuff as much as I am able, sitting down about every fifteen minutes to take the load off my back.
While out on a grocery errand earlier I noticed that large expanses of farm fields nearby are covered by great sheets of wottuh. And it’s still across the road about two-hundred-yards from our back porch, lake and marsh linking up. Roadside ditches are streams and streams are now rivers.
While out on a grocery errand earlier I noticed that large expanses of farm fields nearby are covered by great sheets of wottuh. And it’s still across the road about two-hundred-yards from our back porch, lake and marsh linking up. Roadside ditches are streams and streams are now rivers.
So do you have a bugout plan in case the water gets higher? We got flooded in 1989 with 3 inches of water above the foundation at 6am. Swung my feet out of bed into wet carpet (came in through the brick weep holes). The driveway was a foot lower and both of our cars were flooded.
The wottuh from either the lake/bay and/or nearby marsh and streams has never, in 200 years, got to this level; our stone and cement basement is wottuh-tight and dry as a bone. Our bug-out plan would be to jump in the canoes and strike out for higher ground to our east, toward the farms and in the direction of the big city (pop. 8k). But we don’t anticipate anything like that; our big worry centers around wintuh ice storms and blizzards that knock out the power, as has happened in the fairly recent past in this area and the Champlain islands. And we are working to get to the point where we could manage an entire bitter-cold and snowy winter completely off the Grid.
Big headline in the local paper here this past week was about a woman who’d gotten caught in her pickup truck, probably a rice-burner type, attempting to cross what she thought was shallow water across the road. Not so. And the EMS guy and a statie had to get out there to her as she was trapped with rising wottuh. Local farmer hauled out there with his tractor and they got her out, but part of the trip was swimming underwater and hanging onto that rope. And that wottuh woulda been ice-cold, too. So she tied up three guys rescuing her and turns out, of course, that she is new to the area.
People are stupid about two things, well many, many things, but the two I’m thinking of in light of recent events like this one, are trying to drive through water streaming across a road (I’ve seen videos of water picking up vehicles and carrying them away), and trying to beat a train at a RR crossing, underestimating how fast that locomotive is going.
35 here right now.
Was 89 F here today. Pool got up to 81 F so we jumped in. OK, walked in. And walked right back out into the 102 F hot tub. Got back in pool after switched circulation to common for pool and tub and got a skinch warmer. Did a lap.
Suppose to be 91 F here tomorrow. Right in time as we usually hit 90 F before May.
People are stupid about water. Never, ever drive into water. Especially when you cannot see the bottom. Or if the water is moving.
Nah, none of us were ever mistreated by teachers for being square pegs in round holes. Never happened.
I try not to nurse too many grievances, ’cause there are better things to do in life. Not that it’s always easy. I long made an exception for my first (civilian) boss in the USAF. I looked him up on the Interwebz a few years ago and found out he’s dead. Good riddance to bad rubbish, and that story is closed too…
Remember living well is the best revenge…
People are stupid about water. Never, ever drive into water. Especially when you cannot see the bottom. Or if the water is moving.
When I lived in San Antonio there were, and still are, several locations that have water problems when it rains. Police try to block the roads but are not always there on time. Almost every time it rains hard some fool would attempt to drive through and would need rescue. Video or photograph of some idiot standing on the roof.
These people have lived in SA for years, know about the locations, yet still attempt to make the crossing. Too bad they don’t get killed so they would not attempt such activity again. May not do any good as some other idiot would gleefully fill the vacuum left behind.
There was one place in my subdivision that had a road that would flood. I knew the road and the height of the curb. If I could see the top of the curb I would drive through. If I could not see the curb I would turn around and use an alternate. I was in a pickup so I had plenty of clearance under the vehicle.
I will avoid my Yankee knee jerk reaction to make a joke about the obviousness of schools in “the South” being sub par. 🙂
This seems to vary widely by school system. Myself, I am genuinely impressed with how much my daughter has learned. She is just finishing kindergarten and continuously blows me away with what she knows. She is certainly learning a LOT more in Kindergarten than I did.
I did see a while back that a study questioned the effectiveness of Head Start. While it appeared to be working wonders with underprivileged children entering kindergarten it was revealed that, by third grade, kids of similar demographics who did attend Head Start were at the same academic level as kids who did not attend. That is, all the benefits of Head Start’s early intervention were wiped away by third grade. Of course, Head Start is still around, but I contend that’s because it’s really a government run daycare and free meal program disguised as an education program.
Of course, Head Start is still around, but I contend that’s because it’s really a government run daycare and free meal program disguised as an education program.
Jerry Pournelle has written about this quite a bit. It’s the teacher’s unions that are partly to blame. Head Start is not staffed with credentialed teachers, so they aren’t allowed to teach much other than the alphabet and numbers. No reading, no arithmetic.
Head Start was yet another gummint boondoggle that accomplished not much, and it hangs on like other Fed programs of its own inertia and longevity, not because of merit or performance, like much else in gummint.
Meanwhile we have declining enrollments in the publik skools yet the teachers want more money and bennies and both skools and universities are top-heavy with “administrators” and educationist types, whose mentalities are saturated with Freud and Marx.
I don’t sympathize with teachers at all. Frankly, I am tired of listening to them piss and moan about their paychecks. It’s not like teacher pay is a big secret. So, every single one of them went to college and majored in elementary or secondary education knowing full well what the pay was like. If they don’t like it, then they can quit and find something else to do for a living. There are a LOT of unsung heroes out there working for crap pay. What makes them so special? Add in the fact that they throw a fit every time someone wants to come up with a way of measuring their performance and they can all piss off.
Agreed, Chad, but I’m up against the opposite opinion up here; I’m told that ‘teachers have a hard row to hoe and they do great work, etc., etc.’ I’ve been fed up with their crap for decades now; and the pay is pretty good, if you ask me; seems to be in the forties and up, up, up. Plus the summers off, endless “in-service training” weeks where the kids are off and we had to take vay-cay and sick days to cover for them, and all the holidays. More money for more advanced educationist degrees. And when they’ve done the performance measurements and teacher testing in other places, they find that way too many of them are substandard and can barely tie their shoes. Yet there they are.
I’m sure it’s the 80/20 rule again; 20% do the work. And there are heroes and evil scum and everything, including the average, in between.
I’m dating an retired teacher with M.Ed, who has also been vice-principal, principal and administrator for the ministry of education. She now works with the faculty of education at UBCO (University of British Columbia Okanagan) and now certifies new teachers as part of her job. In all, she’s put in 35 years in education, and she thinks teachers are over-paid. What does that tell you! 🙂
She’s definitely part of the 20%, probably closer to the top 5%. If more teachers had been like her, I would probably be working as a teacher, and never have needed to homeschool. BTW, she’s very supportive of homeschooling.
Excellent! That’s what we needed all these years. Instead we got mostly time-serving hacks and drones who had no great difficulty doing as little as possible while brainwashing our kids with super-PC claptrap. So now we have high skool grads who come to college with 8th-grade-level skillz but they’re death on race, class and gender discrimination and can work an iPad and sext each other all day with endless selfies.
Best wishes for the dating and continuance of same, sir.
She definitely takes her job very seriously. Of the eight teachers she is dealing with this year, only six will pass her muster.
Thank you, Davy! It’s taken me a long time to get back in the game. I thought I never would.
I didn’t marry until I was 35 and when that one ended I was 42. Remarried at 45. Tempus fugit and a lotta funny shit happens. The game ain’t over till it’s over, young man. Carry on.