When A Curriculum Doesn't Work

Marsha over at the Heart of the Matter Online is blogging about how it's okay to be a quitter. Homeschooling parents take heed.

I Am A Newspaper Guy Without My Newspaper

My newspaper died today.

The Rocky Mountain News started daily publication in 1860, a full year before the "War Between the States." If you look at the front page of the very first issue, it says Cherry Creek, K. T. That K.T. stands for Kansas Territory because Colorado wasn't a state until 16 years later in 1876. After 149 years of the daily Rocky Mountain News, Denver will wake up tomorrow to find that she's gone, terminated by a guy in a suit, as Littwin says. Instead of soldiering on and keeping jobs in the deepening economic turmoil, Scripps shafted the paper.

Nearly as long as there has been a Denver, there has been a Rocky Mountain News. My grandmother was a typesetter for them long ago. She worked many years as a single mom to my mother. Years later, she received a gift from them commemorating the 125th anniversary of the paper and she was so tickled that they remembered her. They remembered her because the Rocky had heart. Unlike that broadsheet abomination, the Rocky was a family.

More importantly, my grandmother gained some satisfaction that she was a part of something that was making a difference in the lives of people. When you got the paper, you had news of all sorts that mattered. It came in length of details that was ruled more by the cost of ink than by the time it took someone to regurgitate the facts to a camera. Am I a newspaper guy? You better believe it. The newspapers gave enough information to form an opinion about something. The nightly news shows jump from story to story, never giving you the opportunity to look deeper.

But the nightly news didn't kill the Rocky. Was it the Internet instead? No, the net has been popular for 15 years or nearly that. The Rocky adapted, and put out a superior product online. People still bought the paper, though, because it's tough to bring your computer with you to the park, the cafe, or the bathroom. No, the Internet may have wounded circulation, but it didn't kill it. What killed my Rocky is the tightening purse strings in Denver and beyond. People, it seems, like to eat, and if the choice comes down to paper or food, people find the food more useful. The Rocky, which survived the Great Depression of the 1930s, will not survive the depression we now find ourselves in.

So if there's any consolation in the final edition of a great newspaper, it's that her passing is neither unnoticed nor unmourned. Reading the Rocky as a kid helped me understand the world around me in a way that no other medium could do. It trained my mind to ask good questions and to expect good answers. It showed me what good journalism, what good writing will do for people. My first letters to the editor were published in the Rocky. It will always be my newspaper, and today was its final day.

What Fatherhood Is Worth

A friend of mine sent me the following quote. It's a priest responding to a complaining father out of the book Power to the People by Laura Ingraham.

"The time you spend with your children may prevent you from having the promotion you've always wanted, may force you to sacrifice friendships and hobbies that you wanted to pursue, and may even place a strain on your marriage. But this is what you must do. You are their father and the relationship you have with these children will affect them for the rest of their lives."

We all do it. We forget the size of the shadow we cast, and who it falls on. As fathers, our actions affect so much more than just ourselves. It ripples down to our children and our grandchildren. It's not just a single act for good or ill. It's a series, a pattern we imbue on our children. We can't just show up at graduation and say, "I'm here. Good job, son." It's being there, day after long and weary day, for each of our children. Fatherhood is less quality time and more quantity time with quality thrown it from time to time. Friendships, hobbies, and career goals die a quiet death as fathers decide that they will make time for their children. It is a noble calling to be a father, and it is worth everything you put in.

"I had big dreams when I was a child. But without my dad, those dreams might not have come true. He brought stability to my life. He made my world a safe place in which to think and to learn. And though not every boy may aspire to become a football coach, every father can aspire to become the dad of his child's dreams. But to make that a reality, fathers must choose daily to work toward that goal."

— Super Bowl Champion Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin

What more needs to be said?

Little 5 Year-old Calls 911, Saves Dad's Life

This little bit of homeschooling paid the boy's dad back in spades. This is just another part of the curricula for us.



Good job, Tyler.

Weather Sensitivity - Why It Doesn't Always Make Sense

I just came back from a doctor's office visit. Between he and I, we could corroborate every instance where weather, specifically frontal systems, made my chronic symptoms worse. Why is that? He had 4 or 5 other patients who encountered the same exacerbation of symptoms at the same intervals. That's why.

A lot of us can remember someone like "old aunt Thelma" who had that ability to predict the weather based on how they felt. The group that once delivered backyard weather predictions has grown and changed to a segment of the population that has weather-sensitive chronic symptoms. They literally feel under the weather and they usually feel it when the weather changes.

While there have been a lot of studies seeking to tie conditions to weather patterns, few have had scientifically valid conclusions, meaning that while there were definite trends present, not all of the scientific criteria were met. While I have no in-depth analysis of the studies, I would suspect that the key criterion missing is a sufficiently large sample of the population. It could also be a lack of adequate controls, as most studies with large enough populations are unable to limit all of the outside factors that would affect the data. You just can't pay 5,000 people to spend the next 6 weeks in a laboratory unless it involves TV cameras and "unscripted" scripts. Finally, I can't imagine a study that has yet considered the impact of microclimates on the data.

So there's a lot of challenges to any weather sensitivity study for science. What about a person's own empirical data? Anyone with chronic symptoms can keep track of the weather and how they felt. The problem comes when they sit down and try to attach their symptoms to one or two things, such as changes in temperature or precipitation or wind. Even the more nuts-and-bolts readings like air pressure and relative humidity aren't always going to yield a specific trend when analyzing the changes, although some smaller studies have previously linked a drop in air pressure and rising humidity to things like arthritic pain. My own work in this area has confirmed this, although other weather factors like local precipitation and other, non-weather factors such as rest, diet and stress play as much of a role in my symptoms as changes in pressure and humidity.

The bottom line seems to be that there is a relationship, but the relationship varies from person to person. Weather will always change, and folks will usually be able to tell when it will, for the most part. Hopefully, technology will improve to where complex monitoring of the subject is possible, putting the subject on ice. It's possible that someday, such suffering will be a thing of the past and people will feel right as rain, whatever the weather.

Tiger Balm, Tolkien and Taking A Little Off The Top

I know. I know I haven't published anything in close to 10 days (10!) but I've been writing--oh, I've been writing! In my mind, more than anything, actually, because I can't sit at the keys. Something about this weather lately has been kicking me back and forth from the bed to the bathroom to the den, right past the keys, and straight underneath warm blankets that smell of Tiger Balm, Ben Gay and Green Tea, much like I do, I'm afraid.

I have been reading Tolkien again, and like a chameleon, I take on the voice of the author in my thoughts and my writing. Terrible thing, really. Talking in half sentences like this. Dangling participles over capricious phrases, writing like this can be a chore.

Why am I reading Tolkien? Well, I made the kids a promise. Sarah (12) and Bubba (9) are approaching the age where their peers are asking them "You haven't seen The Lord of the Rings?" Like they're asking them if they still suck their thumbs. So, I turned to them one evening and told them, "If you can read through the books, you're ready to watch the movies." Ha! I thought, This will be fun. Bubba will bog down in the Council of Elrond. Everyone does. He'll get discouraged and pick it up again when he's ready.

He's on page 210 of the Two Towers, far outpacing his sister! Aigh!

As a result, we just watched the first hour of the Special, Extended, Super-Colossal, And-You-Thought-The-Books-Were-Long Edition DVD of the Fellowship of the Ring. They are eating it up! And this even after I showed them the long segments on Tolkien and how they adapted the book to the movie, which are really helpful for people who read the books. It seems they're the ones that get steamed about Tom Bombadil only showing up on milk cartons--"Have you seen me?"--on Hobbit first-breakfast tables.

Anyway, I've been writing. I have an open letter to my son that I plan to put up soon, if I can get around to editing it. It's all about relationships, but I won't tip my hand too much. I also have something about skiing, but I don't want to drag anyone through that's not willing, so I'll give fair warning in the title. Nothing like getting snow in you keyboard from an errant skier.

So I'll close with a quick observation in a field I am mostly inexperienced at analyzing, politics. Never has our fair Republic been in greater danger of falling to the wolves. The center of political power in America, Congress has already purchased--ipso facto--the banks of our nation with their bailout. They are now calling their erstwhile managers to account for the money. Does anyone else think this a little... well, what's the word... incredible? Here we have an entity so incapable of fiscal responsibility, it took them years to discover that the House checking accounts were a little overdrawn. There's only one thing worse than Congress ousting the Golden Circle of Bank Presidents and their cadre, and that is Congress letting them stay in power. So where's the danger? If things get worse under a liberal President and a liberal Congress, the state of our societal morals tells me that we will have a French Revolution, not an American one, looking us straight in the eyes.

Small-time Observation: The thing about history is that you have so many years to think about other people's mistakes and the thing about the present is that you have so little time to fix your own.

He Knows Your Heart

Last night, I was up late again. I didn't know why I couldn't get to the sleepy point where I knew I was ready for bed. I'd had a medical appointment yesterday and the news wasn't entirely positive. Add to it the news that our house payment will be going up next month. I watched the hours tick away. Two o'clock ticked by, three o'clock, then four... Finally, at five, I asked out of frustration, "What is it?!"

"Steve," I felt the Holy Spirit say, "you're not trusting me!"

"Oh."

"Go and lie down. Leave the rest to me."

I did, and I fell asleep as God brought scriptures and promises to my mind.

Aaron gets it. We may fool others. We may fool ourselves, but we don't fool God. God knows our hearts much better than we do.