Jay Currie

Kate – who despite having a rather authoritarian view of the police is very sound indeed on other stuff – has a post about the BC Ministry of Education’s “Social Responsibility: A Framework” classroom guidelines.

As we homeschool these guidelines are entirely irrelevant to our boys’ education. But they are yet another great reason to homeschool.

If [...]

When I was nine I looked up the word “fuck” in my Winston’s School Dictionary and, to my not very great surprise, it was not there. I wandered off to the school library and, in the Shorter OED, there it was in all its glory.

Nine has changed and my nine year old son searched it [...]

Some of the 50 Dangerous Things author Gever Tulley says we should let our children do:

Dam up a creek

Burn things with a magnifying glass

Throw a spear

Drive a nail

Drop from high places

Whittle

Make a rope swing

Play with fire

Melt glass

Sleep in the wild

Fly your homemade kite in a gale

Cook something in the dishwasher

national post

A couple of days ago [...]

Regular readers will know that we home school. A mixture of “unschooling” and now a tutor for six hours a week to give Susan a break and make sure Sam and Max have a clue about, to revise Paul Simon, “all the crap you learn in grade school”...in fact our tutor is brilliant and the [...]

“I thought, ‘Oh, God. Not that same old joke … And then in the sweetest voice she said, ‘I’m in Stockholm and I want to tell you about the Nobel Prize.’ ” yahoo news

I have to say, given that I hear this conversation between my homeschooled elder son Sam and his mildly scientifically challenged mum [...]

So, “Last year, Victoria police and Langford RCMP boarded buses and searched passengers for alcohol, triggering an investigation by the RCMP Public Complaints Commission. The commission determined that the searches went beyond what is permitted by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.”

So this year BC Transit, “Police will be searching buses if they are [...]

The Cat in the Hat was written basically because Dr. Seuss thought the famous Dick and Jane primers were insanely boring. Because kids weren’t interested in the material, they weren’t exactly compelled to use it repeatedly in their efforts to learn to read. So, The Cat in the Hat was born, and I must agree: [...]

Consider this from the draft of the course’s proposed achievement indicators>

Demonstrate an understanding of the need to undertake informed action while at the same time not necessarily waiting until having “all the information.”

Oddly (though hardly surprisingly), this particular phrase was amended to an almost opposite meaning (“demonstrate an understanding of the [...]

Fearing that a failure of Lehman Bros. could topple other financial firms, senior officials of the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department were talking with the struggling company and potential buyers Thursday to try to smooth the way for a sale of the venerable investment bank, people familiar with the situation said.

The 158-year-old Wall Street institution [...]

As predicted, no sooner has it been determined that Ontario’s Catholic school boards are disproportionately outperforming the province’s public school boards, than the call goes out to “correct [the] injustice” of a separate Roman Catholic school system. edward michael george

I tell you, those Papists are clever…too clever. They teach that reading, ‘riting and ‘rthmetic like [...]

WASP children – at least those whose parents were raised after the 1960s – ignored their parents from a very young age, and were consequently loutish and ill-breed. My bunch were terrified neurotics who, even to this day, drop out of high school in record numbers. The middle way is respect. That [...]

A goodly number of pixels have been spilt on the allegedly political removal of two children from their white supremacist mother after the elder was sent to school with a swasika drawn on her arm. Dawg went to the wall in his comments:

“Teaching kids to hate is harmful per se. It seems to me, based [...]

Dr. Dawg is making fun of the IDers. Intellectually this is rather like little boys pulling the wings off flies: cruel, but inconsequential. Only the fundamentalist “no chancers” want to try and run the ID argument and when they do the billions of years and trillions of chemical interactions per year get in their way. [...]

On the eve of his retirement announcement over beer Monday night, Gen. Hillier nicely framed his military legacy in a single sentence: “We’re one of the big boys now.”

With air, ground and naval equipment upgrades on order or delivered to bolster an extended Afghanistan mission fortified with 1,000 fresh American troops, Gen. Hillier has put [...]

Yitzhak Danon, a student, told Israel’s Channel 2 television that an Arab man wearing torn jeans fired for several minutes at students in the library, using an AK-47 assault rifle. globe and mail

I suspect the murderous bastard was following your boy Dr. Mohamed Elmasry of the Canadian Islamic Congress’s logic about any Israeli citizen over [...]

“human rights activist Vicky McPhee said an Africentric school “is a right,” and the only type of school to which she wants to send her 6-year-old child. She called for these schools in each of the city’s 22 wards.” toronto star

In other words, Ms. McPhee wants segregated schools for all of Toronto; and it is [...]

An elementary school in Ottawa was flooded with hateful and threatening e-mails and phone calls after media reports that it had removed the word “Christmas” from a song to be performed at its Christmas concert.

The choir at Elmdale Public School did not sing its controversial version of the song Silver Bells at its closed-door concert [...]

Dalrymple: The idea that one’s pleasure or desire of the moment is the only thing that counts leads to antisocial behaviour. Let me give a small and seemingly trivial example of this.

About half of British homes no longer have a dining table. People do not eat meals together – they graze, finding what they want [...]

As we think it would be a good thing for Sam, our six year old whom we home school, to learn a second language we have a delightful French student coming in to tutor/chat for an hour or two each week to get Sam’s feet wet.

They were just in my office as he had stumped [...]