This week’s Carnival of Homeschooling is themed “All Things Austen.” Check it out here; you’ll learn more about homeschooling and you’ll probably want to watch “Pride and Prejudice” again too. 🙂
While our son’s disabilities make it unlikely that he’ll be able to live on his own when he becomes an adult, he’s fortunate that he’s quite functional, unlike other young people who have more severe disabilities than he has.
I really feel for the families of those with severe disabilities, and I understand why many cannot homeschool their children. But sometimes I wonder what’s going through the heads of those who plan public school curriculum for these kids. Some of these educrats have many years of teacher training classes behind them, yet they seem to think something like this is a revelation:
Without knowing it, Mr. Adams’s efforts had touched on recent research in educating severely disabled children that focuses on using emotion and human connection to reach them. As higher functioning areas of their brains are underdeveloped, emotion moves them at a deeper level, lighting up the same part of their brain, the limbic system, as meaningful music, and possibly creating a bridge to greater intellectual cognition.
“We are so focused on teaching them skills, we don’t focus on the emotional part of the child,” said Rosanne K. Silberman, who coordinates graduate teacher preparation programs in severe disabilities and blindness at Hunter College.
Wow. You get results when you reach these young people on an emotional level. Who’d have thought? (sarcasm off)
PS Mr. Adams was the longtime teacher of the disabled young man in the article; after many years of working with the young man and developing a close friendship with him, he was reassigned to other students and now the young man has regressed. How sad. Way to go, educrats.
Over at the Homeschool Lounge, we’ve been having a discussion about eBooks and whether they’re popular with homeschooling parents and kids. I’m learning from other parents that many of them love eBooks, and that there are an increasing number of devices you can use to read them. It remains to be seen which eReaders will survive and which will wither on the vine.
The competition among eReaders is certainly heating up. Just today, BN.com dropped the price on its Nook (now $149-199) and Amazon responded by immediately cutting the price of its Kindle from $259 to $189. Now that the price wars have begun, more people will use eReaders, I’m sure.
I do wonder, though, if it’s good for us to be reading so many things on computers. This writer believes that we are losing the ability to “deep read.” He says we’re so used to being distracted by other things on the screen (hyperlinks, ads, etc.) when we read that we no longer become immersed in one piece of writing. Instead, we flit from topic to topic.
I’ve noticed this myself. Just yesterday I was reading an interesting biography of Katharine Hepburn. She had a 25-year-long affair with actor Spencer Tracy, who apparently cheated on Hepburn just as he cheated on his wife with Hepburn. Had I been reading an eBook or online article, there probably would have been a hyperlink to more information about the many women in Spencer Tracy’s life, and I probably would have clicked on it and gone off on yet another Internet bunny trail. But since I was reading an actual hardback book, I just thought, “I might look that up online sometime,” and continued reading the book. Score one for deep reading.
Right now, reading on the Kindle is not so different from reading a hardback book. I had the opportunity to play with a Kindle recently, and I can see why people like it. It’s very much like a print book in shape and usage. But while it’s similar in size, it holds many books, and you can easily buy more on impulse.
But according to Amazon, before long eBooks on the Kindle will have hyperlinks. Some believe there will also be ads. Then it will become just another way to read online, and the war on “deep reading” will continue.
Like many bloggers, I often get email from people wanting me to feature one of their posts. Often these are from spam blogs, so I delete them. But once in a while the post is actually a good one.
Take this one, for example. “100 Ways to Teach Your Kids to Love Reading.”* While I certainly don’t think you need to do all or even most of the things on this list (who could?), there are enough good ideas there to get you started. Most kids will take off on their own once they become good readers, although that’s less likely if you don’t limit their tv/computer/technical device time (hint, hint.) 🙂
*Link removed 5-17-13
The best educational site I’ve seen in a long time,
“Ron Paul’s Home School High School Curriculum,”
An article about teaching woodworking to your children,
And the link to a free eBook.
These are just a few of the things you’ll find in this month’s issue of “The Imperfect Homeschooler” newsletter. Subscribers got theirs earlier this week. Want yours to arrive in your email box each month? Sign up here.