What's a Samaritan?

It was winter, many years ago.  It was snowing.  I was driving Cindy and my kids home.  Cindy was maybe 15, old enough to baby sit my kids.  We are in the parking lot behind the supermarket in Melrose.  I see a woman a few parking spots over cannot get her car started.  I think of helping her, then I think of a car full of kids who really need to get home.  I make an idle remark to Cindy that I don't think I will be a good Samaritan this afternoon.  Cindy comes back to me "What's a Samaritan?"  This from a girl whose family made it to First Congregational Church  in Melrose every Sunday.  I know Cindy had done several years of Sunday School at FCC.
   Anyhow, it is perfectly OK to read the Bible to your children now that they are home for Corona virus.  Regardless of your personal religious views, I think every child ought to know the good old bible stories, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah's Ark, a gospel, David and Goliath, Exodus and Moses, Joshua and the battle of Jericho, and more.  The oldest stories from Genesis go back 3500 years or more to Mesopotamia, the beginning of civilization.
   The King James version is the best version in English.  Long time ago I started reading to my children from a bible we had kicking around the house.  I get to the story of Joseph and his brothers.  In this low speed bible version Joseph's coat of many colors has been down graded to a robe with long sleeves.  We can all understand that a fancy coat of many colors might arouse his brother's jealousy.  Who cares about a robe with long sleeves?  I got a closet full of 'em.  Anyhow next evening, I stopped at a bookstore and purchased a King James version.

So I went grocery shopping today

The weather people are forecasting snow for tomorrow, so I thought I would go to the Littleton Coop today.  Some customers were wearing masks. Not much of a crowd for a Sunday.  We have a lot of empty shelves and a lot of little signs saying "Please only take two.  Leave some for others." Toilet paper is all gone.  I got the last roll of paper towels, an off brand, brown, which I never saw before. Butcher counter was closed, sign saying they could not get any beef delivered.  No pork sausages, just chicken sausages, pork is all gone.  They were asking $8.59 for a pound of bacon.  I will go to Shaw's next time and see if things are any better. 
   Either the supply chain is breaking down because everybody is hunkered down at home, or they have had some really heavy panic buying.   We might need to get folks back to work just to keep us all eating. 
 

Have the kids measure the value of Pi.

Have them draw as big a circle as possible.  Measure the circumference.  Measure the diameter.  Divide circumference by diameter.  Quotient ought to come out 3.14159.  Small errors are probably due to crude measurement methods.  Large errors are some kind of blunder.  Repeat the exercise on other circles just to make it clear that Pi is the same for all circles.  This will give some practice using the calculator and give a real feeling for the size of Pi and what it means.  To draw big circles you can use a pencil stuck on the end of a yardstick and pivot the yardstick off a nail.  Or tie the pencil to a string. 

Writing is the other half of English.

 Best way to teach children to write is to have them write.  Now-a-days with rubout keys that really work, Word for Windows with spell and grammar check, writing is easier than in the bad old days of pen and ink on lined paper, or typewriters.   And now-a-days I think every kid needs to touch type.  For young children learning touch typing there are programs that teach it.  Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing is the one our family used.  I don’t know if Mavis is still in business but Google will tell you, as well as find other programs, and reviews of typing programs.

  Back in the old days I had to write a lot of book reports for school.  I am not convinced that squeezing a several hundred page book down to a one or two page book report is a learning experience.  Better exercise is to write the classic five paragraph essay.  First paragraph gives an overview “tell ‘em what you are going to say”.  Three body paragraphs (main idea and two supporting ideas) explain what you are trying to say, and a final paragraph summarizes what you have said.  Subjects for essays can be how to do something (cooking, fixing something, fishing, camping, kite flying), what happened at some time in history, how something works, political ideas (best for older children).  Parent can help their children to find a good subject.  An essay ought to about a page long and should not take more than 45 minutes to write. If writing an essay is taking too long the kid needs some help. 

   And, more fun than essays is posting something on line.  As parent you might want to have your children show you their posts before they post them.  And you might want to point out trolls, rants, hate speech, flame wars, and fake news as it appears and suggest that they never reply to such.  And the need for privacy, which means never post their contact information (home address, phone number, email address).  In fact you don’t have to reveal your name, post using a pen name.  Posts ought to be short; half a page is long for a post.  Witty is good.  Mean is bad.  Limit posts to a single idea.  If you have more than one idea make more than one post.

Fox News is giving New York Governor Cuomo a lot of air time

What can I  say?  Cuomo has little to say of worth, but Fox is putting him on the air, a lot.

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.