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“Hey look!”

“A caterpillar!”

“Let’s scoop it up with your Croc!”

“The Croc’s not working!”

Then I transported it to safety underneath a tree, away from the sidewalk. I didn’t get a good picture of the caterpillar itself, but I think it is known as the caterpillar of the polyphemus moth.

And yes, I do believe each statement was spoken with an exclamation point.

Here are three recent photos of life around here:

Lego Bed

In our house, the phrase “make your bed” usually means “move the Legos off the bed” rather than “straighten the sheets and pillows”. In fact, that has become part of the bedtime ritual – change into pajamas, brush teeth, put away Legos, read a story, and say prayers. Beta probably likes to have his Legos on his bed because his is the top bunk, so no one bothers anything up there.

Driver’s Ed

Beta’s cousins have one of them fancy battery-powered toy trucks. And Beta loves to drive that whenever he’s over there. Now Gamma is old enough to ride in it. They shared a ride last weekend, and I just really like this photo.

Blokus Art

My wife and I like playing games. I want the kids to like games too, so I try to play whatever board games we have that might be appropriate. Blokus is fun, and the kids get the concept, but they don’t have the sense of challenge in playing the game yet. Alpha and Beta will play (against each other or against me), but as soon as it is done, they eagerly take apart the board and proceed to make patterns or pictures with the pieces. Alpha liked this masterpiece; I liked that he made sure all 4 colors were symmetric.

We had a birthday party the other weekend. It was a surprise party, so we were to arrive at a certain time. Leaving the house at a certain time is never easy with young kids, but we actually did it this time.

But we almost didn’t make it to the party.

We were last in a line of cars on the road. About a mile and a half from our house, three things happened at once:

• I saw a car, one that was several cars in front of us, swerve violently off the road, crossing through the oncoming lane to do so;
• I heard my wife yelling something (I forget what at this point, probably “look out!“); and
• I saw a tree falling across the road.

“Get your phone!” I said to my wife. She called 911, but it went to a “please hold” message so she hung up. We noticed other people on their phones as well, so we figured someone would get through.
(more…)

Alpha has taken our teaching to heart.

For those who don’t know the story, go read the original Pblk Education first.

Okay, now that you’re back, take a look at his recent paper (click on the picture for a larger version):

Every single word has the wrong number of boxes for letters. I’ll give them the one box for “sh” since that’s one sound and that’s the lesson for the day and they made that box slightly larger. But they’re still short by one letter every time.

Alpha adds boxes where boxes should be. If they don’t give him enough spaces to spell a word correctly, then he makes the spaces himself. The curriculum might not know how to spell, but he knows that he knows how to spell and he tries to do things the right way (okay, “shrit” isn’t exactly right, but we’ll tell him that and he’ll learn that it’s “shirt”).

There are a bunch of ways I could go with this topic, but I’ll choose this one: it’s good to know that my child is listening to his parents over the school. I hope it stays that way. And it’s good training for the future – “I don’t care if the government says it’s legal; it’s still wrong.” He has already learned that people in power can be wrong.

Except for his parents, of course.

My goal is that he learns something more than spelling – that there is right and wrong and that is ultimately determined by God. He needs to do what is right regardless of the culture.

There are gray areas too, and he should understand that not everything is either 100% right or 100% wrong. But we’ll work on that concept later. Spelling, grammar, and math work better without gray areas.

I was just minding my own business on the web, checking my credit card statement, when along popped a survey plea. Normally I just decline offers to participate in surveys, but tonight I felt generous.

Okay, maybe not generous. There is a glaring omission to the website that I wish they would fix, so I volunteered for the survey in the hopes that there would be a question about said glaring omission.

And I was not disappointed.

But there were lots of other questions too. I answered them to the best of my abilities. Those of you who know me know that one of my better abilities is the ability to take things literally. It comes in handy in the engineering profession, but it tends to annoy ordinary civilians.

I did not want to skew their survey results, but I am obligated, nay compelled, to answer the question as written. It’s a two part question, so be sure to read 19.2 and then 19.2.1 and then go back and read 19.2 before reading my answer to 19.2.1 (you can ignore 20).

(click on the image for the full-size version, which is only slightly larger)

As usual, the credit card company name has been obscured in order to protect the innocent.

The question asked if I would recommend viewing my statement online to other people. But I don’t want other people to see my statement, so of course I wouldn’t recommend it.

I think they meant to ask “How likely are you to recommend [credit card company]’s online statement feature to a friend or colleague?” or “How likely are you to recommend the online viewing of statements at [credit card company] to a friend or colleague?”

In case you are wondering: yes, I did leave that text there and submit the form. What you see is how I actually answered the survey. I don’t know if the survey people will appreciate it, but I had fun typing it.

One night during the Easter break, I spent about 2 hours on the Cheezburger Network, just flipping through the various sites and discovering interesting things and reading captioned photos.

And reading captioned photos.

And reading captioned photos.

They kind of blend together after a while, but I couldn’t stop clicking on the “Next” button.

After a couple of hours, I snapped out of it. Where had the time gone? What had I done with my life tonight? What else could I have accomplished with those two hours? I could have cleaned off the tops of my dresser and nightstand. I could have finally attached the trim around the closet in the bathroom. I could have done a number of useful things.

The Cheezburger Network is not useful.

I want a refund.

Srsly, can I get those two hours back?

I suppose it was no worse than a bad movie, so I’ll just consider it that. Yeah, like a choose-your-own-adventure movie because I was clicking on links to determine the plot content.

No, wait…that makes it worse. I am complaining about a bad movie that I directed. At least it was free.

Oh well, I suppose that’s what the internet is for.

Alpha attends the local public school. He was able to read before starting kindergarten, but not all of his classmates are at that level so the teacher teaches to the lowest common denominator. That means the public school is causing my child to regress. His spelling is getting worse by going to school. (that’s his going to school, not his spelling that attends . . . oh never mind).

The teacher has a lesson, and it seems that all students are to follow the lesson. The problem is that the lesson is about letter sounds and spelling words as they sound, not how they are spelled.

Here is an example. Alpha brought his schoolwork home, as he does just about every day. We saw this:

My wife noticed how he spelled the words and just asked him “Alpha, how do you spell ‘mouse’?”

And he replied “M-O-U-S-E“.

“Why did you spell it ‘M-O-W-S?”
“That’s how everyone else spelled it.”

Then she asked “And how do you spell ‘monkey’?”
“M-O-N-K-E-Y”
“And why did you spell it M-U-K-E?”
“That’s how the teacher told us to spell it.”

My wife and I were taken by surprise at this. The teacher had warned us at the beginning of the school year that we were not to correct our child’s spelling, so that she (the teacher) could see the child’s progress throughout the year. In theory, the teacher would see that the child was spelling poorly as he was just learning letter-sound concepts and then, at the end of the year, the child’s spelling would be better as he has learned word concepts.

“In theory” is the critical part of that paragraph.

What happens when a child already knows how to spell the required words? How does the teacher measure progress then?

Now, lest you think we made too much fuss over one piece of paper, let me describe to you some more of the story.

We had discussed our concern with ourselves, and we explained to Alpha that he should still do the right thing even though his classmates were not. “Some of them haven’t learned how to spell words yet, so the teacher is trying to help them. If you do know how to spell a word, you should write it correctly.” And we all were satisfied with this plan.

Then Alpha brought home his next paper.

He spelled “orange” as “ornje”.

“Alpha, why did you spell orange like this? It looks like you had it right with the G there.”
“The teacher made me change it.”

That’s right, he spelled orange with the proper letter and the teacher had him erase it and put the wrong letter in there (click on the picture for a larger view). He already knows that G can have a hard or soft sound. And he knows that orange is spelled with a G, not a J.

To be fair . . . he had a substitute teacher that day. But why would the sub do that? Either she had strict orders from the teacher or she went through the same spelling curriculum training as the teacher. Either way, she had to have been told by someone that kindergartners cannot know how to spell and she must enforce illiteracy. And either way, we are not impressed with what we’re getting for our tax dollars.

Just for fun, to torment the kids who can spell, they made almost enough boxes for the letters. They left off one or two boxes for each word.

It’s like musical chairs for spelling. There are 4 letters but only 3 spots. Which letters can find their places first? Which letter will be left standing? Oh, too bad. Letter N is out.

If only they made the spelling sheets with an area for writing the word instead of letter boxes. Then the children could spell the words the way they wanted, including the right way.

I don’t know why they did that for one letter sheet but not the others. Most of the letter sheets had the wrong number of boxes for correctly spelling the words.

Unfortunately, Harrison Bergeron is applicable once again. You would think a teacher would encourage excellence and high standards and good stuff.

If it’s kindergarten and we’re already having conflicts about what the school is teaching versus what we the parents think is right, I am not optimistic about junior high or high school. And the conflict is over the rather innocuous subject of spelling.

On the bright side of things – at least that’s the only problem we’ve had with the school. We’ll just be sure to keep our children supplied with real books that use real English words. That way, they will learn literacy at home and can be prepared for life.