Dumb Lazy, Rotten Kids....Googling

Ha!

The poor kid must be....Chinese.

If not, I'll bet he is short and has straight black hair nonetheless.

Recall that I did "make" my kids do those Kumon math books.

See - From Counting to Algebra - A Simply Recipe.

But John went through them quickly (1.5 years?) - at least through Grade 6. And Chrissy started out with them, but I had her do some different stuff too.

What I discovered, when I found the above search results, was that Kumon has apparently expanded beyond Grade 6. Hence the irate dumb kid.

And there's more Kumon whining - here - albeit from people that don't know squat about math.

Here's what I discovered my OWN TWO kids secretly Googling on their mother's iPad yesterday afternoon:

From Counting To Algebra - A Simple Recipe

Now more than ever people keep asking me for advice on teaching/helping their kids get going with math.

Recently someone remarked to my advice that *I just don't see how you do it*...

So I did my best to summarize it quickly:

john was just over 3.5 when he started *tracing numbers* - the first kumon math book. we just did workbook pages every day until he exhausted them. got through grade 6 math and into algebra in 1.5 years.

the path is very easy, just do the books one after another. you'll have to sit down with them and put in the time because they can't really press forward each step on their own. but obviously it's an investment that pays off. need discipline too. if you take a week off the kids lose momentum and may decide to put up a fight when you start up again. i've learned to never take days off - and to NEVER give in to their protests. even if you just do 10-15 minutes on a busy day it keeps you moving forward.

you can see the books here:

http://www.kumonbooks.com/catalog/catalog_workbooks-numbers.aspx

80 pages a piece.

after that you have these:

http://www.kumonbooks.com/catalog/catalog_workbooks_gradeschool_math.aspx

i think they are 73 pages each.

i deferred the *word problem* books until much later.

i skipped the grade 1 books.

16*73 + 14*80 = 2,288 pages

$hit....that's the first time i added them up.

that's 1,525 per year, 127 per month, or just over 4 per day for a 1.5 year time period.

i'm going to have to write this up as a post for my blog. thanks for stimulating me!

Note the Kumon books can be found at your local Big Box bookseller or on Amazon for about $7 a piece.

Oh, and make sure you math-interested people check out Math Rider. I have my daughter on it for around 40 minutes a day and she (and I!) are cruising with it. It's more than a little brutal teaching kids the math facts and this program will really help.

BTW, if you make your child do 4 pages a day of math, every day, they'll come to expect it as normal and won't put up a fight. PLUS daily work begets daily progress....and that begets pride and self-confidence.

Don't just think about it, DO IT.

Still Chugging With Workbooks

My son just finished - Kumon Reading - Grade 6.

While many homeschoolers parents who educate their own deprecate stale workbooks, and I sympathize with them, we've used them from day 1 and continue to do so.  Personally I like the fact that I have *standby work* for deploying at any time - in the car, at the library, for right when they wake up, for when I need to do something, for the doctor's office, etc.

This one was pretty good. As one might expect, it's simply short reading passages and follow-up questions. There's a whole lot of good, challenging vocab in there as well.

Luckily, my son doesn't complain about doing these, ever. I try to make him do 2 pages a day,  sometimes 4. A 74 page book, these Reading books are good for a month or so. In fact when he got near the end yesterday, he asserted that I had promised him a *prize* when he finished it. I probably did but couldn't remember. Egged on by material greed, he took the book outside and finished off the last 10 pages on the deck all on his own. It's amazing what kids/people will do when sufficiently and basely self-motivated!

The Prince is also chugging along with his algebra. Check out his latest blog post - Imaginary Numbers.

And to see the mountain of workbooks he did before he was even 5 - click here.

Princess Homeschooling Update

There she is, my daughter adding 4 a week before she even turns 4!

That's from Kumon's Addition workbook - recommended for ages 5, 6, and 7.

For those of you (and you know who you are!) who routinely accuse me of neglecting to give my daughter *equal time*...

Let the record show that she's still at least 2 months ahead of where her brother was at this age - at least in terms of math.

My son, like most boys, is lazy. Girls are a whole lot more manageable at this age anyway. In fact there's some insane statistic that says 90% of *special ed* youngsters at government schools are boys - so I've heard.

From numbers like that an educated person might be tempted to extrapolate that there are genetic and developmental differences between the sexes - even through Harvard!

Due To My Rank Negligence...

Recall I do in fact have two children - the 5.25 year old Prince and the 3.68 year old Princess.

Most of my homeschooling posts have focused on my son because, well, he's the guinea pig and she's still a little young.

Many of these days where I was sitting at the kitchen table for a couple hours teaching my son arithmetic, my poor daughter was left to herself. Innumerable times she was yelled at to *Go away* or *Stop bothering us*.

My wife has oft accused me of systematically neglecting the little one and she was absolutely correct. So I've always had it in the back of my mind that the Princess was being educationally short-changed. Additionally, I had no idea how she'd take to my martinet-like approach to the same subject matter. Let's just say that she can be extremely willful (gene from both grandmothers). I had no idea whether or not my perceived success with my son would prove an outlier or not.

But today she finished the above Kumon book - My Book of Numbers 1-120 - and just for kicks, I dug out my son's workbook for comparison.

Guess what. It turns out the Princess is a full 3.5 months ahead of her brother's pace!

See - Homeschooling Update.

So I guess I'm going to have to work harder at *neglecting* her...

Kids, Flick Em

In the past 1.33 years of homeschooling Prince C-Nut, I can't tell you how many hours I've sat next to him at the kitchen table with his Kumon workbooks; and I can't tell you how many times he's sneezed all over my arm, face, or other parts of my person! It was frustrating enough when the four year-old couldn't remember to carry, borrow, of what 13x29 was - and it was usually at these very low points that he would fire nasal poop on me.

He soon enough conquered the basics of arithmetic, but remembering to cover his mouth BEFORE a 100 mph sneeze....that remained problematic for quite some time.

Exasperated, I decided that whenever he forgot to cover his mouth, I'd FLICK him but good on the head, with my middle finger. I'd slap him around like Biff did with George McFly!

Guess what, it worked fabulously!

But you have to be on top of it. Even if he was across the room, or outside by his lonesome, every time I witnessed an uncovered cough or sneeze I'd go barreling over there to deliver his reminder. I've got him so on his toes now that when he does cover his mouth, just for kicks, I lunge in his direction - and he puts his arm over his head and yells back, "I COVERED. I COVERED. I COVERED"

That's not cruel because he needs the *blocking* practice for karate anyway.

So it's on to the next lesson.

I am so sick and tired of telling my kids to say *please*...

...That I've decided to henceforth flick them whenever they forget.

I admit I am a bit of a Nazi with *please* and *thank you*. I make ALL KIDS, of strangers, of friends, et al, use proper manners when asking me for something. I don't well care if their parents are right there, if their parents have a religious aversion to manners, or what. The fact is, I'm not getting anything for anyone, or doing anything for anyone without being asked politely. Recently at my son's birthday party, some 5 year old snot told me, "Get me a juice box."

Can you imagine? How hard would that kid have gotten smacked 50 or 100 years ago? What right-minded parent would raise children like that?

Mr. Manners did go overboard once, at a restaurant in Boston this summer.

My wife asked the waitress for another Kettle One and tonic and forgot the magic word.

"HOW DO YOU ASK?", I scolded her at a dinner table seating 25 acquaintances.

In hindsight, I most probably shouldn't have corrected Mrs. C-Nut in that manner.

From now on, she'll get flicked in the head like everyone else!

For more on *flicking* - click here.

And for you young'uns and future readers, George McFly is from an epic 80s flick - Back To The Future.

And for West Coast Tom, I'll link to Huey Lewis singing the theme.

I admit, I just watched that video clip three times. The Eighties were by no means a crazy decade but I submit that most who didn't live through them will have a very hard time comprehending the cheesy entertainment and fashion which prevailed.

And it was so much easier to live under the ominous threats of nuclear armageddon and acid rain that it is today to suffer through *climate change*, fully nationalized healthcare, and the collapse of our currency.

Grade 4 Math - Done!

We're still chugging here on the homeschooling front. Tonight Prince C-Nut finished the last of the Grade 4 Kumon Math books: Multiplication, Geometry, Decimals & Fractions, and Division.

Here's where the final book took us:



Click image to enlarge.

In Homeschooling Update - Grade 3 Division, I forecasted that we should be through Grade 6 math before Prince C-Nut was legally eligible for kindergarten (Sept 2010)...

But at this pace, we'll be done sixth grade mathematics by January. Perhaps it's time to slow down and branch out a bit, no?

I don't know how we are going to prevent this kid, or his sister, from giving me one heck of a *teaching ego*!

BTW, he keeps asking me *who is cap-is-nut?*. The nosy little dude keeps peering at my open browsers.

I haven't answered him, at all, on this one. As a rule I do not like to discuss my blog with live people. But I won't be able to hide it much longer from my literate and tech-savvy son.

Soon he won't just be a blog post subject; before you know it he'll be schooling Taylor on the folly of drug legalization and he'll be ribbing West Coast Tom over his love-life in the comment section!

Math Monkey - An Edu-Franchise

A couple of months ago, I was thinking about those Kumon learning center franchises and how it might be a sound business idea for myself.

I thought I could open such a center, all on my own, but one that focused completely on math. It's almost axiomatic that starting an enterprise in competition with a government monopoly will get you rich - think Mail Boxes, Etc.

But then, while perusing through Entrepreneur magazine, I discovered that someone had already raised this idea to fruition. I saw an ad for Math Monkey.



Apparently, Math Monkey teaches a little Vedic Math - a subject I just learned about. See - Vedic Math?.

There doesn't seem to be too many Math Monkey franchises out there at the moment. But something like this could do very well in the future if something big happens - like we get a President and Congress smart enough to de-Federalize education!

Remember, there are millions of brats out there that need to be taught *something*; education would be an ENORMOUS BUSINESS full of profit potential if the jerks got out of the way.

Marginalizing Kumon

Well, I'll at least Marginalize the professionalism of their new Geometry books.

Look how poorly those questions are phrased. I had to read the questions three times before my brain could process them. So how the heck is a 4th grader going to comprehend them?

Kumon may be an Asian brand. But if they are going to sell books over here perhaps they ought to have at least one person fluent in English edit their content - and add in the missing articles and prepositional phrases.

For example:

"3/5 OF A meter"!

Otherwise the books are great. See also - What'll We Do Next Year?

A Lost Day

On Sunday, PrincessC-Nut fell from the monkey bars. It was obviously on my wife's watch as I never have incidents like this!

Her wrist swelled up and didn't improve over the past two days.

So I spent all day today driving her around to doctors with the end result being a pink cast atop two buckle fractures in her wrist. She'll be wearing it for 3.5 weeks. It's her darn right arm to boot. Though thank God swimming season is over!

Do y'all think I was wrong to force her to do her Kumon books with the left hand this evening?

I remember that my naturally left-handed grandmother experienced something similar back in the day. Though, that was pure coercion by her teachers who tried to get everyone to write with the right. (Just think how many of today's educational practices will be deemed barbaric by future generations!)

Anyway, today was a complete loss from my standpoint. I'm exhausted and got nothing done outside of turning heads in the waiting rooms.

While other kids sat there watching television, staring at the walls, and playing video games....I had my 4.75 year old son doing his 4th Grade math in front of them all. People kept looking at us like we were aliens!

BTW, the doctor said they had five kids this week alone with the same exact injury from the same exact apparatus.

So much for wood chips!

What'll We Do Next Year?

My wife laments that we never really did a *scrapbook* for our babies.

I told her that much of their progress has been preserved on this blog!

Since we just finished Kumon's Grade 3 Math series, I figured that it was time to take a snapshot of this past 12-13 months accumulated *work*:



I also stacked them here for easier reading.



As always, any pic can be enlarged by clicking on it.

There are 25 books there - even the Prince, only 4.75 years old, can tell you that at 80 pages apiece....that he labored through about 2,000 worksheets between last summer and this one!

For the record, he did finish yet another book today. AND, my otherwise perfect wife whined that the books she did with him were omitted - chiefly a few Gifted and Talents books (by Flash Kids Editors).

I'm going to take a week or so off before resuming the Grade 4 math workbooks. I'm really trying to get my son as passionate about spelling and composition as he is about arithmetic. All day long he's asking me questions, "Dad, what's 90 times 50?...What's 2 million times 2 million?"

[I think he fired that last question after reading an article about Obama's new *public option*!]

I've started quizzing him on how to spell words we come across and but so far he's putting up a little resistance. After all, math was made relevant from *counting money*. THAT piqued his interest at first. If you remember, I kept giving him my change so long as he could count it accurately. So right now I am amidst figuring out how to make spelling properly (and expanding his vocabulary) an efficient and passionate undertaking.

Just as I was typing this it dawned on me that we could play Scrabble, or, one of my childhood favorites, Big Boggle!

THIS is why I blog. It forces me to think when otherwise I'd be vegetating in front of the color TV!

I'll get those games from my mother....as I'm sure she never through them out.

Marginalizing The Metric System

Recently I mentioned to a relative, who's a government school teacher, that PrinceC-Nut was starting to study geometry - that he was amidst Kumon's Grade 3 - Geometry & Measurement workbook.

I said he's been learning to measure, weigh, and whatnot. To that this relative of mine scoffed, "I hope he's learning the metric system!"

He was; after all, these books are meant to dovetail standard government edu-curricula.

But wait a minute....I got to thinking.

How important has the metric system been in the 35 year course of my life? And then I counted ON ONE HAND how many times I had to call upon this useless knowledge in my dome.

When was the last time any of you buttheads out there ever used the term *decimeter*???

I didn't think so.

Some guy wrote a brilliant, trenchant criticism of all things metric. Here is his concluding paragraph:

Any praise for the metric system hits a raw nerve with me. The metric system is a symbol to me of the division of the ruling class and the people doing all the work. The ruling class (no pun intended) makes all these rules that are completely impractical, and everyone else has to sort of make do, find their way around it. The metric system also symbolizes to me this blind faith we have in science, that science is some kind of ultimate truth, instead of a tool we use to make life easier for ourselves. And because of this blind faith we have, "science" ends up making life harder, less practical for ourselves.

Now click here and read the entire essay. The gist of it is that in the real world, Europeans don't even really use the metric system; they've transformed it back into more of a fraction-based system, a la the original English system! For example, Euros order *pints* of beer and Euro carpenters order wood in standard units of 120 centimeters - instead of in meters. Read the article to see why.

Even as a youth I KNEW, I JUST KNEW that this so-called metric system they were forcing me to learn was complete BS.

Fear not, while even though I spitefully make my son wait 30 minutes between lunch and returning to the pool....I have let him breeze, half-heartedly, through the metric lessons in his book.

Prince C-Nut Meets X

My 4.69 year old son asks me math questions all the time. For example, "Dad, what's 90 plus 73?" or "What's 700 minus 2000?".

I answer as fast as I can; and he can't stump me, yet, unless he ventures into the *jillions*.

Yesterday I was half asleep on the floor, my prime resting place, when he badgered me, "Dad, 19 plus what number equals 70?".

Now he's fluent in addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, negative numbers, and we just started fractions....so I guess it was time to start manipulating equations. I introduced him to X - the unknown variable; how to solve for it; and how to check his answer.



Click the pics to enlarge.



I believe the ancient Greeks were fanatical about keeping mathematics a purely theoretical arena. They thought little of applying it, practically, to the outside world. Their stance was that math was simply a way to hone one's thinking.

On that last point I couldn't agree more. BUT, I believe a teacher just has to keep subjects relevant or the kids can lose interest - as I tragically did with english, science, history, and the arts growing up. So now I'm going to have to drum up some real world word problems for Prince C-Nut....

Note that while my son may be doing algebra today, it was only one year ago that we started our *work*. Last August was when he began writing the alphabet with Kumon books. How many years does it take for factory schools to get to solving equations? Six? Seven? Or Eight?

It really pisses me off when people say he's a prodigy. Yeah, that's a slight against his parents - but more so because it's a lousy justification for one's own parental negligence.

Kids are awake for 14 hours per day. The idea that they can't spend a mere hour or two sitting down with pencil and paper doesn't fly.

My son pushes back all the time. I simply withhold dessert, the park, swimming, his Knex legos, etc.

I drill into his head that *everyone has WORK to do....everyday*. I can't tell you how many times I've reiterated to him, "Nana's at WORK....Mom's WORKING....I have WORK to do". I even refer to his younger sister doing her *puzzle WORK*. This way it can't possibly ever seem weird for him to be doing some work, every single day.

And on those rare days where my son doesn't do anything cerebral.....his behavior is uncharacteristically off-the-wall. But that's a subject for another post.

Homeschooling Update - Grade 3 Division

If you want to see what my 4.6 year old is doing, at 9pm, IN JULY, then click the graphic to enlarge.

About a month ago, in Looking Ahead, I threw up the following pic of Kumon's math series:



The problem I had was, that when I got to the Grade 3 books last week, I noticed that they were not only mostly review (half the pages!), I saw that the learning curve seriously flattened out. Going from adding and subtracting 2-digit numbers to 4-digit numbers hardly merits so much attention and repetition. So I've decided for the moment to skip Grade 3 - Addition & Subtraction.

AND, the next book, Grade 3 - Multiplication was also found to be a waste of time. Again, it was all review. At the very end of it, they were just getting to writing out a multiplication table....but only up to *9*. That we've already been doing - and up to *14* no less for a few months. See - Who Needs Textbooks.

So I started Grade 3 - Division last week. As you can see, we are blazing through it. With 38 pages left, and doing 5-6 per day....

Prince C-Nut himself can tell you that we'll be on to the Grade 4 series in 6-7 days!

Looking Ahead

Excuse the pic. My scanner is busted and these things never photograph well.

That's the backcover of a Kumon math book. Click graphic to enlarge. Right now my 4.5 year old son is on Grade 2 Subtraction which covers vertical subtraction and borrowing. Remember that?

Anyways, my ambitious plan is to do all of those books - up through Grade 6 Fractions - with Prince C-Nut within the next twelve months.

So he'll be approximately a full six years ahead of government school curricula before he's legally eligible for kindergarten!

It may sound like a lofty goal but remember that I was two years advanced in math with no parental boost whatsoever, AND that the schools have watered down their expectations even more in the past 30 years.

On another front, in a previous post I discussed the progress of Princess C-Nut and lamented that she may be getting neglected in the early on because she is a *second child*.

But today I started her on Uppercase Letters and noticed that my son hadn't done that book until he was about 9-10 months older.

And lastly, I'm happy to announce that yet another holdout friend of mine finally broke down.

Yesterday I received an email from him asking about how to get his kids started with the Kumon books.

So months of badgering, and blogging on the subject, by me finally paid off. Heck, just last week he was telling me that it was impossible for his wife, a former *educator* no less (!), to homeschool FOUR CHILDREN.

Yeah, he'll be the first to remind me that he's still not homeschooling - AND, he may very well not go down that road.

But, if he starts a home Kumon program with any application at all....he, or anyone else, will be hardpressed to send his kids into the infantilized factory school *system*.

Today's adults (including moi) are impervious to reason; they are mentally lazy AND stubborn. Therefore it's hard to convince anyone via intellectual argument of just about anything. Instead, hard evidence must be waved in their faces.

That may be my son's precocity to start with; then the clincher will be that of their own kids'.

John Taylor Gatto insists that "genius....is as common as dirt."

And Malcolm Gladwell's research essentially corroborates:

The striking thing about Ericsson's study is that he and his colleagues couldn't find any "naturals," musicians who floated effortlessly to the top while practicing a fraction of the time their peers did. Nor could they find any "grinds," people who worked harder than everybody else, yet just didn't have what it takes to break the top ranks. Their research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That's it. And what's more, the people at the very top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.

Visit my prior post - Outliers - A Must Read.

That book lit a fire under my hiney; it could very well have the same effect on y'all - on your work, your golf game, or on your parenting.

When To Yell At Your Kids

My father was here the past two days to see his grandkids and to *help*.

Yesterday, at the kitchen table he was astounded to see my 4.5 year old son read whatever it was (not a children's book) that Prince C-Nut had in front of him. I mean he was ASTOUNDED.

Now, let me tell you about this morning. I put the Prince in front of one of his workbooks and told him to do 4 pages whilst I shaved and showered. But when I was done, my son was still sitting there, literally mining his nasal passage, only halfway down the first page. I scolded him, strongly advised him to speed up, lest I add to his workload, and then set about vacuuming and mopping the kitchen floor.

Still he dawdled. Forty-five minutes into this *session* he wasn't even done 2 of the 4 pages of Kumon's Writing Sentences that I assigned.

The problems we are at the cusp of, are that of *self-motivation* and *concentration*. If I sit next to him, correct his posture, force him to utilize tissues, and keep him focused, he presently has the ability to do those particular four pages seamlessly in 15 minutes or so.

BUT, not only do I not want to be holding his hand constantly, it's a key part of the learning process - the ability to study independently and efficiently. I yearn for the days that I can just email him rough sketches of what he should be working on, and that he goes ahead and competently completes his tasks. After all, pretty soon I'll have just-about-3-year-old Princess C-Nut to educate as well!

So I was getting annoyed at the Prince's performance - and hollered at him more that a couple of times. To put it in perspective, not long ago we were doing 20 pages of different books each day. Admittedly, we've gotten lazy recently and therein lies the problem. If there's a distraction (e.g. *his sister* or *grandpa*) or if we take a few days off from what we refer to as *his work*, our momentum always disappears - and takes a couple of days to come back.

Halfway through my floor cleaning, I seen that my son has still made little progress - outside of probably *the other nostril*. So my hollering goes up a notch....and I tell him that we'll skip that pizza party tonight if he doesn't DO HIS BLEEPIN' WORK.

As the tears bubble from my son's eyes, my father becomes aghast; telling me to lay off; reminding me that "he's only four".

Normally, I don't take lightly the arrogance of anyone who comes into MY HOUSE and tells me how to talk to or raise MY CHILDREN....

But it just so happens that I've got 30+ years of solid experience ignoring my parents - so I effortlessly brushed it off.

Eventually, the work was completed, that pizza party attended, and everyone will live to see another day.

But I got to thinking more philosophically about all the things my father saw fit to YELL AT ME about in my childhood.

I mean, if as a kid I gave my sister a deserved punch (on the arm) my father went ballistic on me. If When I farted at the dinner table there was always hell to be paid. And if memory serves me, he and my mother weren't too cool about the three times I was suspended from school, the fires my brother and I set, or about the time I got caught shoplifting. Why didn't I yell back, "I'M ONLY 13!!!"

So what exactly makes an offense worthy of parental yelling?

It's got to be nothing more than the priorities of mom and dad.

And my priorities are well-thought-out. Expecting, and demanding my son to perform within the limits of his abilities is not child abuse.

No, having low expectations for him would be.

Remember, my father was ASTOUNDED at his grandson's reading ability. From where did he think that competency came? From watching cartoons all day? From pre-school?

His wife, my mother, is far worse. She's never once expressed anything but disapproval for how I am raising her grandchildren. I asked her how she thinks the Prince became so articulate, so literate, and so numerate.

Her response, "He's just a really bright kid."

In other words, not because of any time, research, and work put in by me and my wife.

There's a reason God had to codify this one into law:



Because otherwise....

Homeschooling Update - May 3, 2009

So PrinceC-Nut is just about 4.5 years old now and his outside-the-school education is rapidly getting more interesting.

We're on the final book, Sentences, of the Kumon *pre-school* series. It's pretty amazing that he's already learning about what nouns, adjectives, and verbs are.

I've been pushing his email a bit. We write a few lines on paper to a relative, then he has to log into his Gmail account and type the message in and send it off. This way he gets responses from his aunts and grandmothers (grandpa is not *online* - even though he's 62 years older than his grandson!) - which he can read himself. I figure since this is how modern day adults correspond, then why not get him started on a skill he'll utilize for the rest of his life, right?

Also, more generally speaking, I consider composition a core component of education. Ideally, I think students should everyday do some reading, some computation, they should be composing, and even doing some oral presentation. To that I'd add that the well-rounded student ought to regularly be *creating* and, of course, *working*. These endeavors remain goals within themselves - almost regardless of the particular context or subject.

Next up for my son on the math side will be division (How do we split up 12 cookies in our family?) and my favorite - geometry. Although I haven't figured out how to proceed formally as of yet. Apparently Kumon is going to release in July a new series on geometry but I don't want to sit around and wait. By then we'll probably be studying continuous functions.

But as I said at the outset of this post, the learning curve is getting pretty steep and our educational options are broadening. My son can sit and read by himself now. And this opens up many, many avenues. Heck, he grabbed the macaroni and cheese box the other day and hollered out the instructions.....telling me I needed *6 cups of water*, etc.



One thing that he's really into, on the toy side, is what he calls *Polish Legos*. They aren't actually Polish; they are called Knex. I jokingly called them Polish Legos when he got his first box only because the young lady, a friend of ours, who gave them to the Prince is 105% Polish.

Anyways, these are far beyond conventional Legos. They are tiny and there are numerous types of interlocking pieces. My son can now follow the instructions and build these very complicated spaceships, motorcycles, and whatnot. It excites me that he's now mature enough to hunker down, concentrate, figure out, and deal with the frustration that comes with intricate projects (and when one's sister comes by and spitefully destroys his works in progress!).

I've also given my son free rein with my digital camera - only partially because I bought a new one. In fact the above pic is his work. Of course he absolutely loves it, which 4 year old wouldn't? But he's learned, mostly by himself, how to center targeted images in the viewfinder, that he must keep steady, how to shoot video footage, and we're even working on how to upload to the computer. Meanwhile his agemates are watching Elmo....

When I pull out of the driveway, I ask my kids which roads to take. In other words, I say, "we're going to the library...how am I going to get there?" We recite street names as we drive by them. And I usually quiz them on which of their friends live where. Ideally, I would like my son to hold the GPS device in his hands so he could get a firmer grasp of maps and geography....but then his little sister would be demanding equal time.

I also make he and PrincessC-Nut try to remember where we park the car; and I ask them to find it before we start walking back to it. I'm just forever thinking about adding new responsibilities to my brood. And why wouldn't I?

The sooner they grow up and become productive individuals, the lighter my load, and the sooner I can relax.

Homeschool Evangelism - Shaming Others For The Welfare Of Their Children

This weekend my wife was at the store with our 4.25 year old.

He espied a girl from his *pre-school*:

Prince C-Nut - Hi Sally,.....HOW WAS FLORIDA? Did you go to Orlando or Naples?

Now this girl's dad was blown away by my son's conversational/geographical aptitude. Of course he had to *answer* for his daughter. Most of my son's age-mates can barely say hello or state their name - they definitely can't discern or expound on the difference between Disney World and 'old coot'-ville Naples.

And the other day at the library some kid had a shirt on that read "Cooler Than Ice". I grabbed the Prince and made him read it - which he did competently on the spot. The father of the other boy exclaimed, "HE'S READING?!?!?!"

Well, we practice reading every thing we see: cereal boxes, road signs, DVD cases, food labels, etc.

And here's the last example, just from the past week. Some other *mom* brought her kids over for a *playdate*. One of the girls was a bit older than the rest of the brats. Thus she was *bored*. So my wife grabbed her and said, "Hey let's read a book. Let's read Madeline..."

But the young lady, despite being 6 and despite attending a $22,000 per year kindergarten couldn't read. In fact she couldn't read ANY of the words. My Captious 4 year old was blurting out the story over her shoulder right in front of her, hopefully embarrassed, *mom*.

A lot of prospective homeschoolers fret that they won't be able to teach their kids ALL of the subjects; that they're kids might very well miss out on *something*.

Here's the rejoinder:

If you start them young; do a little work everyday like Kumon books; you'll end up like me. Your kids will be so far advanced, at such a young age, that such a fear will become laughably remote.

Well fears of inadequacy will become remote for you, but not for the other parents who come into contact with your children.

Then they'll be deflectively blaming *the school*!



Last year, after my son displayed some advanced erudition at a friend's house, the mother there got scared. She got scared that her husband would find out how *behind* their Montessori-educated child was in comparison. Serious, she said, "Oh boy, I hope [husband's name] doesn't find out....he'll be furious."

Good for that *dad* anyway. At least he has some expectations for the $34-per-hour education he's paying for.

Convincing someone to homeschool is not anything that can be easily accomplished with words and persuasion. That's why I encourage people to read John Taylor Gatto, to start the Kumon books, etc. - this way, the parents will soon realize how infantilized the school systems are by comparison. They will see as plain as day how low institutional expectations are compared to their children's capabilities.

One other point I want to make about my son's precocity is that except for 5 hours per week, he's with me, a competent, complete-sentence-wielding adult all day. The other kids who are *daycared* are stuck with a bunch of juvenile, mute mush-heads all week long.

I'm telling you. All these preschoolers who've been age-segregated, they can't even speak - which is a curious deficiency for those presumed to be developing *social skills*.