I thought that by drawing out homeschoolers into a conversation, and bringing in people interested in science education, we would have a conversation in eSpace that would otherwise never have happened in Meatspace¹. And, it is absolutely true that this happened. There are people who come from that Christian homeschooling world that I still communicate with, and the communication is not as uneasy as one might guess. People who don’t know much about homeschooling learned a lot more than they thought they needed to know.

That bloggy experiment was also a dismal failure for two reasons. One is that I was very new to blogging and was utterly unaware of how to handle hostility, disputes, conflict, and what sometimes emerged as outright hatred. That was my fault. The other is that there is a community of homeschoolers that calls themselves the ‘Evolved Homeschoolers” because they teach evolution, and are generally not particularly religious (many are atheists) and they desperately want to distinguish themselves from the Christian Homeschoolers. One would think that these science-oriented individuals who happen to be homeshcoolers would be allies with someone like me, who wants to advance science education. But these folks are not allies to anyone. They homeschool because they hate schools and anyone who is in any way supportive of traditional schooling is seen as an enemy. They have a cultish siege mentality and charismatic leaders who are very angry people and whom no one within the movement questions. If it wasn’t for the fact that they live dispersed across the nation, I’d worry a great deal about a Waco Texas like end to them all.

(Two examples of homeschooling blog posts are: The Homeschooler Mind Set and The odd logic of home school jingoism. If you read through the comments you’ll notice some missing commenters, such as one known as “Doc.” Those comments were deleted because of violation of Scienceblogs.com or because threatening language was used.)

So that didn’t go well. But my foray into gun ownership went better, perhaps because I have more ambivalent feelings about firearms. Personally, I would have preferred it if guns were never invented. Personally, I would have no problems with strict ownership and possession laws that would make it very unlikely that anyone, upstanding citizen or criminal, would have a gun on them or near them at any moment in time. But, I’ve also come to accept the fact that in the United States, gun ownership is a big part of our culture. Assuming that most people are going to have the legal right to own any number of a large number of deadly weapons, there are things that can be done to stem what sometimes seems like insanity. Every day someone in the United States is shot by accident, an avoidable accident. (During hunting season this number goes up.) A certain number of killings or woundings occur because a gun owner insists on leaving a loaded firearm without a safety out on a nightstand or in a glove box so as to shoot the bad guy imagined to be poised to strike (note: this is not always a good idea). Perhaps the gun goes off when a pillow knocks it off the stand, perhaps the half asleep and possibly intoxicated gun owner shoots a 12 year old child who is out in the hall heading for the bathroom. My position on gun ownership is this: The community of gun owners, by and large, has not demonstrated that it can be trusted to posses such a dangerous thing without sensible, enforced, regulation. And there isn’t enough of that (the regulation, that is).

So here’s what I do. I write a simple blog post that lists a bunch of nasty stuff that has recently happened with guns. Perhaps a list of recent accidents, or perhaps a description of a recent school shooting. I don’t say much about; I just post the facts, more or less. I use tags (hidden clues used by search engines) like “gun control” and “gun ownership” and “firearms.”

There are people who patrol the Internet looking for anti-gun conversations, or who have an interest in guns so somehow gun related blog posts come across their radar screen. They show up (in small numbers, but they always so show up) and sometimes they are mad. They yell at me for calling for the banning of all guns. They spew NRA rhetoric about how guns don’t kill people, people kill people, etc. etc.

At that point I may note in a simple comment that I’ve not said anything about guns. Maybe a commenter or two chimes in. In a short time the gun-ownership supporting commenter figures out that he or she has (probably) miscalculated the situation. A conversation ensues. Sometimes the conversation is reasonable. A discovery is made: Most people really are not at one end of the spectrum or the other, at those distant poles, in the debate over gun ownership. There are areas of agreement. There are things people didn’t know that they now know. Gun control advocates learn that being pro-gun does not mean right wing, or anti-safety. Pro gun people learn to be more sensitive about teenage suicide and that a piece of string and a loaded firearm really are not the same kind of tool in the hands of a depressed 14 year old. Gun control advocates learn that the number of people who actually die when they shoot each other or themselves by accident is a tiny fraction of the total overall number of fatal gun incidents, and gun advocates learn that many “anti-gun” people mainly want gun owners to lock the things up when they are not using them. Gun control advocates learn that when a conceal-carry law is passed, the Wild Wild West does not ensue. Pro-gun people learn that when a conceal-carry law is passed, the number of gun-toting heroes that jump in and stop crimes does not change either.

We do not reach perfect agreement, but we make measurable and meaningful progress. And that is what we are … well, that is what we are shooting for.

(Most of my current blogging on guns is a The X Blog. Examples of “just the facts” posts that lead to interesting discussions include: Fun with Guns, Interesting gun-related facts, and Seven Year Old Jaymee Stewart Had Died.

¹“Meatspace” is a term for “real life” as opposed to the virtual society of social networking and the internet.

The The Manga Guide to Relativity might come in especially handy these days, what with faster than light neutrinos, Republican candidates and other science-defying entities zooming around. And, it is one of those Japanese anime things, which makes it cool. This is a story set in Tagai Academy summer’s school session, where the “plucky” Miss Uraga teaches the kids relativity.

When you have finished reading this book you will be able to calculate the effects of time dilation, explain the Twin Paradox, understand Einsteinium famous E=mc² and get a job at CERN.

Hideo Nitta, is in the Department of Physics at Tokyo Gakugei University, and an expert in physics and physics education. Masafumi Yamamoto is an applied physicist from Hokkaido University, and I’m pretty sure Keita Takatsu is the artist. This is a little like Pokemon except only things that are possible happen in the book.

Christian-based materials dominate a growing home-school education market that encompasses more than 1.5 million students in the U.S. And for most home-school parents, a Bible-based version of the Earth’s creation is exactly what they want. Federal statistics from 2007 show 83 percent of home-schooling parents want to give their children “religious or moral instruction.”

source

Hat tip: Ana

How good was the science? How good was the learning? Were children being indoctrinated in a religious view rather than trained in thinking scientifically? Were children being trained in a cynical view of science, so they might grow with sufficient disdain for rational and critical thinking that they might make compliant followers of fundamentalist doctrine, and vote with the anti-science Right Wing on matters of science policy no matter how stupid such a vote might be?

Well, let’s look at some of the presentations and see.

How are apes the same and different from humans? Hypothesis: there are more differences than similarities between apes and humans. Interestingly, this student discovered that humans and gorillas were more different than similar, but only by about 20% by count, while humans and orangs were more different than similar, with there being about twice as many differences than similarities. That is pretty much what evolutionary theory would predict. Evolution is true, according to this poster. Unfortunately, I do not think this is what the student concluded.

The effects of birds colliding into planes. This was one of my favorite presentations because of the identification of the cycle of life, as depicted in this picture:

Lilydale Fossil Hunt. This was about a fossil hunting expedition to Lilydale, in Saint Paul. A permit is required to collect fossils there, but it is a public fossil-rich limestone deposit. The student concluded that the deposit was proof of Noah’s flood. He found some cool fossils, mostly extinct shellfish. None of those large dinosaurs that were refused admittance to the ark were found. Oh well.

How does music affect plants? Conclusion: Rock and roll causes plants to grow poorly, classical music causes plants to be lush. I would have liked to see different results than that, but you can’t always get what you want. I just hope God buys me a Mercedes Benz.

Dinosaurs went extinct because they were too big to get on Noah’s Ark.

God made the ear. Say no more.

No, there was not very much science. Or at least, any science that seeped into these creepy presentations was entirely by accident and had the organizers of the event recognized it, they would have bowdlerized it. Yes, the projects ran rough shod over rational and critical thinking. Yes, it was indoctrination. Yes, these children are being used as tools in the culture wars by the organizers and judges of this event, by the children’s own parents, and by all involved. Yes, this is abuse.

The Twin Cities Creationist Home School Science Fair demonstrates one of the main negative outcomes of home schooling,¹ and is evidence that we as a society should restrict or regulate home schooling to a reasonable degree. The mothers of these children have the same exact “mommy instinct” as the parents of other home schoolers … meaning, none … and have damaged these children socially and intellectually. Home schooling not only produces freakishly asocial miscreants but it also produces what we saw in this fair² … a flagrant disregard for reality.

It was sad to see this. I wonder why the Minnesota Department of Education allows this sort of thing to happen. I wonder what college these children will be going to.

There are those who often point out that home schooled children are smarter, on average, or better educated, on average, than public school children. I assume that this “science” fair, being a public display of sorts, did not involve culling out the best and showing only the lowest quality outcomes. Seeing what I saw yesterday does not jive at all with the numerous assertions made by pro-homeschooling groups and pro-homeschooling activists that homeschooling is better. But if homeschooling is in part about learning to comfortably ignore the truth, why should we expect the rhetoric to match the reality?

The following notes, and a few words in the text (which are in italics) were added to clarify a few points.

¹A phrase like “one of the main negative outcomes” means that there are a number of outcomes, possibly positives, possibly negatives. Among the negatives, there may be many outcomes. But one of them is … (then the rest of the paragraph happens here).

²A phrase like “X produces Y” in no way states that there are not other outcomes. A tomato produces tomato seeds. It also produces tomato flesh. If you work on this, you can come up with some other examples too.

Rather, we go to the funny little mall to enjoy each other’s company, those of us who wish we got together more often than we do, to browse through the Creation Science Fair displays, and to size up the local creationist scene.

For me, I will also be stopping at Radio Shack because I need a switch box to make my Roku work more seamlessly with my TV.

In my experience, there are the following kinds of displays at the science fair:

1) True creation science, like a poster on how Noah built the Ark, with a suitable biblical quote attached.

2) Regular science that is not too well done, presumably because the supervision on these Christian Home Schooler projects probably isn’t very good … such as a poster a few years back demonstrating that hot water freezes before cold water … with a suitable biblical quote attached.

3) Half way decent actual science projects. With a suitable biblical quote attached.

We have a facebook page for the event, coming up this SATURDAY.

We’ll be gathering around 10:30 or 11 in or near the Barnes and Noble, and later on, about 1:00, lunch most likely at Chicago Pizza. (But I note that Har Mar has a veritable cornucopia of dining options in case Pizza does not suit your tastes.)

As has been said many times by many people: Just observe, converse politely, do not lay ideology on the children.

A federal appellate court has ruled against a Christian school in Murrieta which had sued the University of California over its refusal to accept high school courses that rely on the Bible as the unerring source of truth.

Details here.

Next step: Homeschoolers!

(Hat tip: August Berkshire)

Here’s some info from the web site:

Have you been to the Home School Science Fairs? They are great! Some of the best and brightest kids in Minnesota were there. You could have learned how stable the Ark was in strong winds, how to, and how not to make yogurt, how weight effects the speed of a sled, and how to get energy from chicken droppings. Over 60 projects were up for display with many passersby stopping to check them out. It was a wonderful opportunity to place a Christian viewpoint of science before the public.

…

We heard about one lady who saw the Science Fair displays at the Mall. She began to read some of the verses on the displays and was convicted to start attending church and get right with God. There are probably other stories like this we have not heard but it shows the power of God’s Word through our program.

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.

What does this quote mean to you? If you don’t know its context, you may be in for a surprise.

You see this quote all the time on K-12 educational material as a header, footer, slogan, logo, inspirational message, and so on. It obviously means something good about teachers. Maybe something good about education. The quote is by Henry Adams and comes from his book “The Education of Henry Adams” which sounds an awful lot like a title for a porn movie. Since this is a book, first circulated in 1907, about education it must be the case that this quote refers to the positive power of educators back then, and presumably, now. Right? Certainly that is the meaning that is usually attributed to it.

A Google search of

“A teacher affects eternity”

… yields 272 thousand hits, many of which are examples of the term’s use as an inspirational maxim in one or another dialog about education. So clearly people are in tune with the positive message of Henry Adam’s sentence.

A Google search of

“A teacher affects eternity” -adams

… (thus leaving off a direct reference to Henry with the minus sign in front of ‘adams’) yields about 59 thousand hits and I’ll wager almost every one represents the use of the quote as a positive maxim in the dialog about education. One teacher uses the phrase as the title for a web site on teaching. Via Google I find the phrase tweeted on Twitter, and checking directly with Twitter, we find forty recent instances over the last 10 days (older tweets are not available). In fact, it does not matter when you check Twitter. If you search for this phrase, there will be about forty instances over the most recent ten hours or so. Four times an hour someone tweets “A teacher affects eternity” and sometimes gives the rest of the quote, sometimes mentions it’s Henry Adams’. But they always seem to mean it to be a nice thing to say about teachers and about how important they are.

You can buy note cards or posters with the phrase, and since I live in a teacher’s house, I can attest that people tend to embroider the phrase or a version of it on pillows and print it in shadow boxes and on little signs held by teddy bears. Which they give to the teacher as a way of saying that they like teachers.

The Education of Henry Adams (the book not the porn film) is a complex work that I will not try to characterize, but at least in part I take it as a literary act of cynicism. Adams speaks of himself in third person and by the time we get to the quote in question he is discussing Henry’s first nine months as an Assistant Professor in History at Harvard.

For the next nine months the Assistant Professor had no time to waste on comforts or amusements. He exhausted all his strength in trying to keep one day ahead of his duties. Often the stint ran on, till night and sleep ran short. He could not stop to think whether he were doing the work rightly. He could not get it done to please him, rightly or wrongly, for he never could satisfy himself what to do.

Henry thinks of himself as inadequate, not up to the job, apparently.

But part of the problem was with Harvard itself, and its inattention to quality education.

The fault he had found with Harvard College as an undergraduate must have been more or less just, for the college was making a great effort to meet these self-criticisms, and had elected President Eliot in 1869 to carry out its reforms. Professor Gurney was one of the leading reformers, and had tried his hand on his own department of History. The two full Professors of History — Torrey and Gurney, charming men both — could not cover the ground. Between Gurney’s classical courses and Torrey’s modern ones, lay a gap of a thousand years, which Adams was expected to fill. The students had already elected courses numbered 1, 2, and 3, without knowing what was to be taught or who was to teach. If their new professor had asked what idea was in their minds, they must have replied that nothing at all was in their minds, since their professor had nothing in his, and down to the moment he took his chair and looked his scholars in the face, he had given, as far as he could remember, an hour, more or less, to the Middle Ages.

In other words, the History Department at Harvard was a mess, a chain of rusty links of which Henry himself was the weakest. Henry Adams does not think the teachers at Harvard were doing what needed to be done, the system of education was not doing what was required, and the students were probably being damaged more than assisted by participating in this system. And this worried him.

Not that his ignorance troubled him! He knew enough to be ignorant. His course had led him through oceans of ignorance; he had tumbled from one ocean into another till he had learned to swim; but even to him education was a serious thing. A parent gives life, but as parent, gives no more. A murderer takes life, but his deed stops there.

In other words, all those important people in your life: Your mom, a person who kills you, and so on, have only limited effects on you as a person. But, according to Henry Adams,

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.

OMG. That sounds like bad news. The system of education sucks, the professors suck, the students are getting the shaft, and this will affect the students for their whole lives, and through them society in general, and the course of history itself. Bad teaching, Henry Adams is telling us, ruinz everything for everybody!

But this is not what people think is happening, is it?

A teacher is expected to teach truth, and may perhaps flatter himself that he does so, if he stops with the alphabet or the multiplication table, as a mother teaches truth by making her child eat with a spoon; but morals are quite another truth and philosophy is more complex still. A teacher must either treat history as a catalogue, a record, a romance, or as an evolution; and whether he affirms or denies evolution, he falls into all the burning faggots of the pit. He makes of his scholars either priests or atheists, plutocrats or socialists, judges or anarchists, almost in spite of himself. In essence incoherent and immoral, history had either to be taught as such — or falsified.

From here Adams goes on to an interesting discussion that misunderstands (modern) evolution, and very rightly laments the thorn that the Middle Ages is in the side of western civilization. And in that discussion he reiterates that while all this is interesting stuff, it is not what is taught to the students. Because the teachers, really, don’t have a clue as to how to interpret the material they are responsible to cover or how to convey it to their pupils.

Here is Henry Adam’s famous quote translated into modern parlance:

Be careful. The system of education is inadequate, and a half baked attempt to educate is dangerous. A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell how badly fucked up everything will be when he is done with it.

I had always seen the quote as what most people seem to see to as: The nice phrase you embroider on the pillow and give to your favorite teacher. My friend Josh Borowicz, who happens to be an historian and a Henry Adams scholar, pointed this interesting irony out to me, several months ago. I vowed at that time to blog about it. And now I have.

You can read the full text of The Education of Henry Adams here.

Here’s why. The first paragraph of this essay contained five sentences, some run-on. The second paragraph of this essay was made up of only one sentence. It is my understanding that in many American High schools, this concise, accurate, and very clear one sentence paragraph would not be allowed in any student wiring (in English class or Science class) because it breaks a rule. The rules is that a paragraph has five or more sentences. WTF?.

If find this rule to be profoundly disturbing. While this rule is not only about science education, it does symbolize much of what is wrong about our system of education in general. This rule solves a problem (students not thinking enough about what they are writing) and in the process ruins the teaching of good communication. Similar arbitrary and capricious rule making plagues each area of our educational system. Bleh.

Recently, my daughter wrote an excellent short essay for her English Literature class. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end, with a very logical progression and making excellent points about two novels being compared as part of the assignment. But the first and third paragraph were three sentences long. In order to comply with the rules, she had to move the last sentence of the third paragraph with the first paragraph, split one of the sentences in the first paragraph in two, and tack what was left of the third paragraph on to the middle paragraph. Ouch.

Every iota of effort expended by our students on appeasing teachers and school authorities by following arbitrary rules made up to fix minor problems but in turn causing serious deficits in how we teach thinking, writing, and reasoning, is a wasted iota of effort and should be discouraged, not required, of those students. I. Really. Mean. This.

Well, I’ve said enough and it is time to break for lunch. Having soup today. Mmm. Mmmm. Good.

I am a parent of a child in the Roseville, MN School District. I am very concerned about news reports I’ve been hearing from elsewhere in Minnesota indicating that there are parents upset about The President of the United States addressing the students in some classrooms next week.

I am primarily concerned with the responses by the school districts to the parents. The responses I’ve heard have been rather appeasing to these parents. I do not think this is appropriate.

The parents in question are insane.

They are suggesting, perhaps not to school districts directly but in all their other rhetoric, that President Obama is Adolph Hitler incarnate and intends to convert the political system of the United States to a communistic or socialistic one. They claim that this speech to the students is the first step in their indoctrination into a kind of “Obama Youth” that will do the President’s bidding at some future time. Many of them also claim that our health insurance system is not in need of reform, that President Obama was born in Kenya, and that Apollo 11 did not actually land on the moon. It is also clear from much of their rhetoric that they are reacting to the fact that our newly elected president is African American. In fact, I consider much of this defaming rhetoric to be very thinly disguised racism.

I know some of this sounds rather funny, but it is not, and I am not making any of this up.

When you receive calls from these parents, please make sure to tell them that what they are asking is potentially unpatriotic as well as anti-education. You might suggest to them that if they have a problem with this … a short speech by the Duly elected President of the United States … then they would not like much else of what goes on in Social Studies, Language Arts and Science classes. You might even suggest that they should take their children out of the school system entirely if this is a large problem. After all, the public school system is … sort of socialized.

I implore, and in fact as a tax paying citizen, insist that you enforce state law in this case. If these parents keep their children out of school because they (the parents) are insane and do not want their children to hear a speech from our president, that should NOT under any circumstances be considered as an excused absence. The child should be seen as truant and the parents as culpable.

Well, OK, maybe that is going to far, though technically it is correct. But at the very least, please do not provide some mealy-mouthed response that makes them feel good. In fact, you should provide a reply that makes them feel a little bad or at least, makes them consider seeking help for their insanity. At the very least, please firmly tell them you have registered their concerns but do not intend to change your plans.

I for one insist that you not balk in any way at showing this speech. Make good use of it. It is well intended and will be well executed.

Remember, no matter how many insane people call you to tell you to not allow The President of the United States into Roseville classrooms, there are many, many more people out there who support our President as well as your efforts in education.

Thank you very much,

Greg Laden
Patriotic American Citizen and Sane Parent