Month: May 2006

FAQ

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2006-05-25

2:07 am

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FAQ

Katie showed this blog to Mali­ka, facil­i­ta­tor of the wom­yn’s writ­ers group, today. Mali­ka sug­gest­ed that we might want to add an FAQ, for those who aren’t famil­iar with home­school­ing. I’ve decid­ed to start by updat­ing and mov­ing over the infor­ma­tion that was on my technomom.com site, so as to keep all the home­school­ing info in one place. The FAQ stuff will all be in one cat­e­go­ry, but we’ll also add some to the About page and make more pages to com­pile it all into one place.

Writing Wednesday

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2006-05-25

12:24 am

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General, Homeschooling, Language Arts

Today was the resched­uled date for Katie’s writ­ing group, so off we went to one of our favorite book­stores.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly — due to the resched­ul­ing, I think — Katie was the only “mem­ber” who showed up. The group is just for high school “wom­yn,” and the only oth­er per­son to attend was the facil­i­ta­tor. As it turns out, oth­er peo­ple (not high school­ers) wan­dered in and out through­out the sched­uled time. I think the girl got a lot of atten­tion, which isn’t a bad thing at all. She missed see­ing her sis­ter writ­ers, though.

I hung out in the front of the store, stitch­ing. I was insane­ly ear­ly for a Stitch ‘n Bitch ses­sion sched­uled there for 7, but I got a good two hours of time in on the Fairy Tale Sam­pler, along with some good con­ver­sa­tion.

The offi­cial SnB was the first they’ve host­ed. I was a lit­tle uncer­tain about going, as the focus was clear­ly on knit­ting. I need­n’t have wor­ried, as peo­ple were doing a vari­ety of needle­work.

Katie wrapped up the lit­tle test piece she was knit­ting, but she ran out of yarn. She picked out her next piece, though, which will require a trip to Nease’s. Oh no! The hor­rors! 😉

We got to edu­cate at least four dif­fer­ent peo­ple about home­school­ing, too, which was a bonus. Meet­ing Katie is the best answer there is to the “S ques­tion,” as she’s clear­ly not lack­ing in social skills. We def­i­nite­ly left peo­ple with good impres­sions.

I think I’ll go to their next adult wom­en’s writer’s group, as well. It’s been so long since I’ve writ­ten any­thing but non-fic­tion that I feel a bit odd, but Katie is a good influ­ence.

Arguments against homeschooling — too sheltered?

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2006-05-23

3:34 pm

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General, Homeschooling

I’m not wor­ried about Katie being “too shel­tered,” although that’s one of the “dan­gers of home­school­ing” accord­ing to its oppo­nents. This study is some­thing to remem­ber the next time some­one brings up that old argu­ment.

Peo­ple who have suf­fered life’s hard knocks while grow­ing up tend to be more gullible than those who have been more shel­tered, star­tling new find­ings from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Leices­ter reveal.

A six-month study in the Uni­ver­si­ty’s School of Psy­chol­o­gy found that rather than ‘tough­en­ing up’ indi­vid­u­als, adverse expe­ri­ences in child­hood and ado­les­cence meant that these peo­ple were vul­ner­a­ble to being mis­lead.

The research analysing results from 60 par­tic­i­pants sug­gest that such peo­ple could, for exam­ple, be more open to sug­ges­tion in police inter­ro­ga­tions or to be influ­enced by the media or adver­tis­ing cam­paigns.

The study found that while some peo­ple may indeed become more ‘hard-nosed’ through adver­si­ty, the major­i­ty become less trust­ing of their own judge­ment.

From Sci­ence Dai­ly via Omni­Brain.

SciFri: Bionics & Tissue Engineering

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2006-05-23

12:42 pm

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Homeschooling, Sciences

I just lis­tened to this epid­sode of a pod­cast that I like a lot; Sci­ence Fri­day: Mak­ing Sci­ence Radioac­tive.

In this episode, sev­er­al peo­ple are inter­viewed about things relat­ing to the top­ic. Here’s some of the things that they dis­cuss:

  • A mile­stone in sci­ence: Blad­ders are grown in labs and then put into chil­dren who were born with blad­ders that did­n’t work very well.
  • If and when we’ll be able to grow oth­er body parts such as oth­er organs, or even limbs.
  • How expen­sive this might be.
  • Mechan­i­cal hands, arms, and legs.
  • Mak­ing humans so that they could actu­al­ly regrow a lost limb, like crea­tures such as starfish are able to do.

It’s very inter­est­ing. Go check it out!

Good homeschooling day

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2006-05-21

10:16 pm

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Arts, History, Social Sciences

Kata­ri­na went out with me and we drove around, tak­ing pic­tures of things.

OK, that sounds vague, but real­ly, Kata­ri­na enjoys tak­ing pic­tures of things, and these things are high­ly ran­dom yet they all have cer­tain qual­i­ties:

  1. They’re fre­quent­ly old, cracked, rust­ed, or broken/trashed
  2. They can be cast in some sort of jux­ta­po­si­tion­al light
  3. They are fre­quent­ly inter­est­ing even when very close up to them

We had a long dis­cus­sion about gen­tri­fi­ca­tion and what that is after tak­ing pic­tures of some places that were being remod­eled and gen­tri­fied in par­tic­u­lar­ly bad parts of town.

We had a lot of dis­cus­sion, as well, about economies, espe­cial­ly the econ­o­my of Sec­ond Life, and also the econ­o­my of such vir­tu­al worlds as pre­sent­ed in Cory Doc­torow’s short sto­ry, Anda’s Game, which was read as part of the Podi­o­book “New Media Voic­es.”

All in all, it rocked the house.

Episode 2

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2006-05-21

8:06 pm

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Podcast

Episode 2

This week we talked about dis­trac­tions, del­e­gat­ing, and defin­ing your­self.

I rec­om­mend­ed Full Cat­a­stro­phe Liv­ing: Using the Wis­dom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Ill­ness by Jon Kabat-Zinn as a good intro­duc­tion to mind­ful­ness, espe­cial­ly as a way to deal with chron­ic ill­ness.

I also ref­er­enced Dr. Irene Tra­cy’s study on the val­ue of dis­trac­tion to change the per­cep­tion of pain, which is sum­ma­rized in Imag­ing how atten­tion mod­u­lates pain in humans using func­tion­al MRI.

Next week, we’ll con­tin­ue the series on del­e­gat­ing, learn about cre­at­ing Well­ness Recov­ery Action Plans, and more.

This week’s music was pro­vid­ed by the Pod­safe Music Net­work. The song was “Morn­ing on Haleakala Hwy” by Kimo Watan­abe.

Your Turn

Please share your favorite dis­trac­tions and how you define your­self.

Stitching

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2006-05-21

4:33 pm

3 Comments on Stitching

Needlework

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Katie want­ed to go by Nease’s Needle­work a cou­ple of weeks ago, and you know I real­ly resist­ed fierce­ly 😉

While there, I saw a shop sam­ple of Drag­on Dreams’ Fairy Tale Sam­pler, and could not leave the shop with­out it. It’s get­ting most of my stitch­ing time now, because I just love it. Of course, the fact that it’s the first thing I’ve real­ly made espe­cial­ly for Sam makes it spe­cial, too. And what bet­ter to work on while gam­ing?