English for Home Schooling

Learning English is half reading and the other half is writing.  Reading is terribly important.  Reading swiftly and well is one of the secrets to getting thru high school and college.  Any book cool enough to get a child to read it on their own time is a good book.  Doesn’t have to be the kind of book that school teachers approve of.  Just reading improves the child’s ability to read; even it is just a comic book. If the child has seen the movie, reading the book is not all that important, movies are vivid and the child will pick up and retain much of them.  If the child wants to read the book, even after seeing the movie, more power to her/him. Don’t discourage a reading of love.  The books my children were assigned from school were mostly terrible.  Dystopias that made 1984 look like summer camp.  Novels where the protagonist never did anything other than play the victim for 200 pages.  Riding the Bus with my Sister, where after 150 pages she marries the bus driver.  Or age inappropriate like Of Mice and Men in middle school.  For that matter my schools were not much better.  I never did appreciate Jane Austin or Thomas Hardy of which we had a lot.  In case you are short of ideas about good books to suggest, here is a short list of books that I enjoyed reading back in grade school and junior high school.  I didn’t bother to list the better known modern books like Harry Potter on the theory that everyone knows about them. 

The Thirteen Clocks James Thurber

Tom Sawyer Mark Twain

Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain

Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court Mark Twain

Mr. Lincoln’s Army Bruce Catton plus all of Bruce Catton’s other books

Aku-Aku Thor Heyerdahl  

A Tale of Two Cities Charles Dickens also A Christmas Carol

Treasure Island Robert Louis Stevenson

Stuart Little E.B. White

The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame

The Borrowers Mary Norton

The Martian Chronicles Ray Bradbury

Lest Darkness Fall L. Sprague De Camp

Lord Kalvan of Other When H. Beam Piper

The Last Planet Andre Norton

Mission of Gravity Hal Clement

The Battles that Changed History Fletcher Pratt

Run Silent, Run Deep Edward L. Beach

All Creatures Great and Small James Herriot

The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe C.S. Lewis

Three Hearts and Three Lions Poul Anderson

Have Spacesuit Will Travel Robert A. Heinlein plus all the other Heinlein books

The Long Ships Franz Gunnar Bengtson

Dune Frank Herbert

Robin Hood Howard Pyle

We cannot keep the country shut down forever

The Corona virus is going to be with us for years, perhaps forever. We cannot keep everyone hunkered down at home for years.  We have to farm the land, plant the crops, bring in the harvest. Process the food, turning oats into Quaker Oats and corn into Kellogg's Corn Flakes.  Distributing it to the markets.  Providing furnace oil and motor gasoline and diesel fuel and jet fuel.  Clothing, shelter, rail transportation, medicine, electric power, fresh water, and a zillion other life essential things.  We can shut down for a few weeks and live off inventory, but very shortly inventory will run out and we have to get back to work and grow and make stuff.
   And time doesn't make much difference.  Corona virus is pretty infectious, if we go out, we are liable to catch it.  It will be the same a year from now.  Only a vaccine will  solve the problem and everyone says a vaccine is at least a year away.   I am thinking that we have to accept our losses (deaths) from Corona virus and get on with running the country, and we might as well do it in a week. 

Corona virus strikes the town dump

Oh sorry "transfer station", dump is pejorative.  I went down to the Franconia "transfer station" with two weeks worth of trash.  And, the "transfer station" only has one guy on duty and he tells me they are only taking garbage, no recycling (cans, bottles, magazines, paper).  So I got rid of my last full pay-as -you-throw bag, bought a new roll of bags ($17 for 10) and went home with a trunk still full of cans and bottles. 
  And this evening, to add to my joy, it is snowing.  Forecast is for maybe six inches.  So I shall lit the fire. 

Senate Democrats kill "Phase 3" Corona virus relief bill today

The Republicans are lacking five senators who are self quarantined with Corona virus, including Rand Paul.  This weakened their hand,  The Democrats were demanding that the multi trillion bill be made yet more expensive by including all sorts of greenie demands, and union demands.  So our gallant US Senate hung the bill out to dry on a "procedural" vote.  They didn't have the stones to make it a vote on the bill itself.  Let's hear it for senate democrats.  They have the needs of us constituents close to their hearts.  Yeah. Right.

Show your kids how to use a hand calculator

Let's assume a simple four function calculator.  Show 'em how to add, subtract, multiply and divide.  For really young children see if they understand what these functions mean in the real world.  Add they probably know.  As in I have two baskets of apples.  How many apples do I have total. Subtract is not too hard, I have a dozen apples.  We eat 5 apples, how many are left?
   Multiply is a little more abstract.  Try this.  Each man eats three Meals Ready to Eat (MREs) a day.  We are going out on a seven day patrol. There are 29 men in the squad.  How many MREs do I draw out from supply?
   For divide consider a 40 foot long railroad car, a gondola say.  How many shipping containers 8 foot square can I load into the gondola?  Then try them on 7 foot shipping containers, which gets into remainders.  Then try them on miles per gallon. 
   Then show 'em how to add up a long column of numbers.  You clear the accumulator and punch in the numbers one by one.  Hit + after each number.  Hit = to add them all up.
   Then show them how to take a percent.  For extra credit show 'em how to convert a fraction into a decimal.
   Get thru all that and you have done something good. 

Heard another good one on TV. "Liquidity Facility"

"Liquidity Facility".  Part of the "Phase 3"  bailout bill going thru Congress.  What a nice name for a bailout bucket. 

Beat the Press was in fine form this morning

Of course all they talked about was the Corona virus epi/pan demic.  Chuck Todd opened with 10 minutes of just plain bashing of President Trump.  Helpful that is.  Then he gave Bill DeBlasio, the nutcase NYC mayor, a lot of air time.  DeBlasio wailed and cried that the government wasn't doing enough to help NYC.  He never got into specifics, except that he wants the US Army to send all its medical people to New York to help out. 
   And them we get to interviewing Pat Toomey, Republican senator from Pennsylvania.  "We have an important PROCEDURAL vote coming up this afternoon and then we will know..."  Good old US senate, the plague is sweeping the land and they cannot bring themselves to vote on a real issue, like passing the "phase 3" economic repair bill.  Procedural votes are just time wasters.