First Order of Business
ISP. We are in the process of switching. Earthlink has either already shut down our DSL or it’s just down. I’m on dial-up and just letting you know, FRIENZ AND RELATIVEZ, that ANY OF OUR OLD MINDSPRING EMAIL ACCOUNTS ARE DEFUNCT. Between the devil and the deep blue sea, we have switched to ATT. Yes, despite it being no respecter of privacy. When we heard that Earthlink was laying off 900 employees and closing 4 offices (AND THEIR STOCK LEAPED, INVESTORS HAPPY BEYOND WORDS AT THE NEWS OF IT, MORE MONEY MORE MONEY MORE MONEY) then, if we were already made crazy by their abysmal service, what lay down the road? Plus, Earthlink was usually so slow now that often enough we weren’t able any longer to view videos online at H.o.p.’s educational sites, and we need full access to those educational websites. Plus, though we live in the heart of the city, our television reception is nearly zero, we can only get Channel 17 and Channel 36 and a fuzzy rendition of the PBS channels (often without sound). That’s it. We decided some Discovery channel etc. would be nice to have for H.o.p. instead of ordering all the shows through Netflix. I’m ALREADY ruing the decision to get TV, it costs way too much money, but there you go. Marty said, “What do you think?” And after a month (we’ve been contemplating this for a month or longer) I said, “Sure, OK. We’ll have Discovery Channel.” The money should go elsewhere, like into essentials. Lots of essentials it should go into. But I had a moment of weakness. Marty couldn’t quite believe it. “Sure, sure,” I said. And he said, “Sure, OK.” And now I’m in a panic. Anyway, over the next couple of days we’ll be getting realigned with ATT (they’re dropping by in the AM) and I’m going to have to change our mindspring email addresses on websites and elsewhere and send out notifications. It’s going to be a chore. We were with Mindspring/Earthlink for 10 years. This is going to be a biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiig chore.
Our Earthlink DSL was painfully slow but dial-up is insane. Our connection is so slow it will take 10 minutes for this to post. A last check of mail has been slowly loading in for the past 20 minutes.
Second Order of Business
Am 12 days into working on the Standing Meditation, still getting that right. I had been wondering why in the world I wasn’t feeling any tension in my thighs, considering one stands with knees bent, and I believed I was doing it just right, and then around the 9th day my knees started saying, “Something’s’ wrong here.” So I positioned myself in front of a wall and found that indeed I squatting with my knees beyond my toes, too much stress on the knees, and found more the right positioning for the legs. Two days later and that’s feeling better.
So 12 days now into the Standing Meditation, and 20 days into Qigong and I am rather uninspired. Today I was so uninspired that I stood in front of a bookcase and read book titles and examined a couple book covers. “Shouldn’t be doing this,” I told myself and eventually kind of settled into things. I suppose I’m acquiring more standing meditation stamina, at least, but I don’t feel physically improved. I’m impatient with the tedium and the thinking, “When will I stop finding this tedious because I really would like to hit a point where I find it pleasant.”
Yesterday I added the Walking Meditation, which I was really looking forward to. But I’m concentrating so much on keeping the right posture (as with the Standing Meditation still), and moving absolutely level with the knees bent, “emptying” one leg while transferring weight, that after a couple of minutes I again start thinking, “I will, at some point, derive some benefit from this, won’t I?” and feel increasingly dulled.
Which is kind of odd because the first two weeks I was feeling very positive about it all, feeling that I was certainly going to derive benefit from it, and after about two hours of the Qigong I would feel a lift that remained with me much of the rest of the day. But that lift stopped 5 days ago or so.
Having decided the needed thing to do is to learn the elementals, I just stand there doing the meditations. Bored. Angsting away. And, oh, I walk with the Walking Meditation and my right knee goes kind of “Ouch” because I stressed it by squatting too low too fast and too far over my toes with the Standing Meditation for the first week.
I will at some point derive some benefit from this, won’t I?
I keep telling myself that I will and to not even ask that question for four months.
Third Order of Business
Finally got H.o.p.’s standardized test results back. They are exactly what I was expecting, almost.
He’s great with concepts. He’s in the mastered range (75th to 99th percentile) for reading comprehension (85 to 95th percentile on the various scores), vocabulary, language expression (75th to 95th percentile on the various scores) and word analysis, but is the pits in spelling and language mechanics. No surprises there as we’re coping with dyslexia and there are certain things for which he’s just not ready. What I’ve been primarily concerned about with him is nurturing an appreciation for the written word and story.
And he is in the so-called mastered range for all math concepts (all in the 88th to 90th percentile range). He is in the partially mastered range in math computation, which does surprise me. I thought the results for math computation would be more the pits.
He was taking the test at the end of “third grade”, and most of the grade equivalents were somewhere in the 5th grade level. I was very surprised it was at 6th grade level with math concepts. Got mid 7th grade with Language Expression. I’ve got to find something that will interest him in continuing to work at least with math concepts. People always say, “Do LIVING MATH!” I’ve tried. He hates it all.
He scored real high in thinking skills. That surprised me because I can tell him, “Please put up your socks that you left next to the front door” and he looks at me like I’m speaking an incomprehensible alien tongue and wanders toward the television, scanning the ground. “I don’t see them,” he groans.
Here’s what surprised me. He got a 12th grade equivalence for science. Now, I’m not surprised in that it’s a subject he loves, the only subject he loves (in fact) outside all the art and film we do. Anyway, he was 99th in the National Percentile for science. This is actually what weakened me absolutely on the television and made me decide, well, yeah, it’d be nice to have Discovery Channel access for H.o.p. because he loves almost all videos to do with science.
It’s my anticipation that in the next couple of years he’ll make a huge leap in reading and that it will be up there near the science. My expectation with the spelling is that when he gets some mastery over writing on the computer then that will improve a great deal. I didn’t start teaching myself keyboarding until I was 10/11. He’s interested but doesn’t like to practice it. As for math, I’ve got no idea. The other day I joined yet another online homeschooling group for math hoping somewhere in there I might eventually find the holy grail for mathematics. I pulled back out Penrose the Mathematical Cat because he at least loves the stories.
There. I did it for THE STATE. We did the standardized testing for the state. I still hated doing it. And H.o.p. was in agony until the last day when he decided he liked some of it. I fulfilled my obligation.
Did I learn anything? Well, I hate to admit I did learn something on the science end (really, I hate to admit it). I’ve been over at Amazon the past few days looking for other science books he might enjoy this year because every curriculum we’ve purchased for science has been uninspiring. I came across a series of books on quantum physics done in story form for grade school to high school age. I’ll be ordering those as he was expressing interest in some of that this summer anyway. He heard about Schrodinger’s Cat and that got him started. What he understands of it, I don’t know, he will look vague but then later he’ll tell me about a storyboard he’s making and some of the things we’ve talked about will have become properties of a character. I told him about getting the books and he’s quite excited about it.
I’m also surprised how closely the results and my anticipations (based on those scores and my knowledge of how H.o.p. does things) align with Lawrence M. Rudner’s study, Scholastic Achievement and Demographic Characteristics of Home School Students in 1998
The grade equivalent score comparisons for home school students and the nation are shown in Figure 2. In grades one through four, the median ITBS/TAP composite scaled scores for home school students are a full grade above that of their public/private school peers. The gap starts to widen in grade five. By the time home school students reach grade 8, their median scores are almost 4 grade equivalents above their public/private school peers.
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