In Chile

The reason that I am in Chile is to participate in a meeting that I thought was going to be designed around some fundamental questions that I am really looking at. What I have found out, now that I am here, is that the meeting contains very little of what I want to study. There are many, many talks on things that I just don't care about. Typically, these types of meetings have lots of discussion also, but here it has been very truncated discussions in which nothing is really resolved.

So, I would have to say that this meeting is a very large disappointment. Another disappointment is the fact that we are meeting from 9 AM until 7 PM. We then go out for dinner and don't get back until about 11:30 - 12:00. There is absolutely no free time or time to breathe here. Yesterday was nice since we had an excursion to a valley a bit from here to go wine tasting. I know that most of you would be ecstatic to go wine tasting in Chile. It was a lot of fun (sans the wine), but it would have been much more fun if we had gone into the mountains and gone hiking or something like that. Oh well.

What is he point? I flew for 14 hours to get here and will fly over 14 hours to get home. Everyone thought I should go to experience Chile. And here I am in Chile, but trapped in meetings all the time. I can't really experience Chile.

Here is a question - should the meetings get better and better the further you have to travel, or should they get worse and worse, since you are traveling to someplace exotic? I feel like they should get better and better, since you have to devote so much of your time in getting there and back. I don't think that many people feel this way, though.

So, tonight I have to go to the banquet (which starts at 9 PM - when will it end? Who knows.) I chair a session at 9 AM tomorrow. The conference ends at 6:30 tomorrow night, and we head back to the airport to jump on a plane at about 10:20 PM. Fly for about 10 hours, sit in an Atlanta for 4 hours, then 2.5 hours back home. I really, really hope that the sessions are good tomorrow....

Perhaps I am becoming Eeyore.

Wow, is that depressing. Ok, here are some good things about this trip - I got to talk to a number of people who I haven't talked to in a long time. I think that I am much better friends with these people now. This evening I went out and read my book for 45 minutes on the beach, while tons and tons of people played in the water and worked on their tans. I think that I understand Spanish a tiny bit more than I did one week ago. I ate a mushroom pastry thing without knowing what it was going to be. I finished it and didn't die. I moved / removed over 2000 e-mail messages from my in-boxes. I learned that Vina del Mar has a climate very very similar to LA. It is a desert here, which is pretty. I learned that in Chile, dogs just roam around freely. There are tons of stray dogs.

Ok, I have to go.

Homeschooling - Part II (On Airplane)

Here I am on an airplane. It is 1:22 AM, and I should be sleeping. But I can't. Where am I going? To Chile! Am I excited to go? No. I, once again, am on a trip that I don't want to be on. While I imagine that Chile is going to be a great place, I would rather be at home with my wife and kids.

Did I ever mention that I am a man of routine? I really do fear change. I hate the fact that I am not going to know where to get breakfast, or even what I can eat for breakfast. I, just like my daughter, am a very picky eater. I have a very hard time adjusting to new food and such. So, travel for me is not very pleasant. Especially to exotic places in which the culture is very different than ours. Like Chile. Or Alaska.

Ok, so I can't be at home.

Back to homeschooling.

Actually, before we get back to homeschooling, let's discuss happiness. This is an issue that I struggle with all of the time. What makes you happy? What makes you content? We have already established that it is not travel for me. I would have to say, as all of you know, that I am not the most happy and content person in the world. Why is that? What made me not content? What made my insatiable drive that won't allow me to be satisfied with mediocrity? I feel like this drive is what keeps me from being happy.

I think that my wife has the same type of drive also, but it is slightly different. She wants the best of everything. She can not be happy unless everything is just right, or, more precisely, some, very specific, things are just right. And those very specific things can alter from day to day. Now, that was just poking fun, but there are some constants in this. School is one of those constants that she has to have just right. Or at least, firmly under her control. This makes her happy. Having the kids in public school, or an uncontrolled environment, where bad things can happen, makes her miserable. Which, in turn, makes me miserable. And the kids miserable.

Ok, I think I dialed the telescope up a little too much there. Lets go back to the forest. The happiness forest, if it pleases you.

What makes a person happy? Can we, as parents, predict what will make our children happy? Or, more importantly, what will make them happy adults? I find that I have a hard time just wrapping my brain around this issues, since I don't know what would even make me happy.

Does having a good job make you happy? Obviously, finding a good partner helps. How can we prepare our kids to find what they truly desire? And, if they find it, will it really be what they want?

Crab-Mama has read many books about this that say that we, as a society, tend to put our children into situations in which they are not adequately prepared to handle. Kids, obviously, handle it in some way. Crab-Mama believes that the way that kids handle it is to lash out at other kids and tear each other down. Which creates a self-perpetuating chain of badness. This, in her eyes, is school. She believes that children should be sheltered for as long as they can. They should be allowed to be children until they are ready to be more. Instead of other children deciding that our children should be one way or another, then attempting to inflict this view on them, she believes that we should be the ones guiding them.

And how can you really argue with this? "No, you should put your kids in school where we know that there is a lot of negative peer pressure, and that they will obviously have some very bad experiences." That argument doesn't fly very far.

The other, extremely obvious argument against this is thought is that school is what everyone does. That is what our society does. That is who we are. And not doing it is, in many respects, spitting on a lot of people. School was good enough for me. It is good enough for everyone else's kids. Why is it not good enough for our kids? Why can't we just fit in like everyone else?

Those are really the fundamental questions that I grapple with all of the time. Those are the arguments that I have used, and they appear to have no weight what-so-ever. Why? Because some people (and they, once again, know who they are) don't care what everyone else thinks (at least about this - but about dirty toilets, then is all "clean the toilets - do you want people to think that we are heathens?").

I must say that I don't buy this argument at all. I firmly believe that we are a community of people. That one of the intrinsic things that we have to learn as children and adults, is how to get along with others. That, while bad things happen to people all of the time, good things happen too. While school has a large number of drawbacks, it has a lot of very good points also. School is a lot like life in that regards.

So, now I am rambling on a bit. Fighting both sides of the argument. Sorry. I am a little groggy.

Let me summarize.

I never considered homeschooling until Crab-Mama talked about it. It never even entered my brain. Sort of like living in Texas. But that is another story. Once we talked and talked and talked and talked about it, I could clearly see that there were many advantages and a few disadvantages to homeschooling. When we homeschooled Crab-Girl for the first 9 years of her life, we did a very good job. She is an incredibly intelligent little girl, who, when she started school, was above average in all of her Michigan Assessment test scores except for writing (she likes to type). This tells me that we were doing a lot of things right. She is still above average. Crab-Boy's first year of school was a miserable failure. This year has been great. We worked with him almost every night on spelling and reading (i.e., augmenting school with homeschool...)

Do I want to homeschool? No. Why? I really don't know. The best argument that I can come up with is that I want them to be 'normal'. What ever the hell that means. I want that for my kids. The second argument is that homeschooling is a lot of work. There is a lot of effort involved. Especially when both parents have jobs (one who is working full time, one who is working part time).

Do I think that homeschool will hurt my kids at all? I don't think so. But, I don't know. I don't know whether controlling their environment will make it better or worse for them in the future. Who can know? Could you have looked at any kid in the 6th grade and tell whether they were going to be a happy adult? I have to say, our kids are pretty happy. They enjoy life. Which is more than I can say about me right this second (2:12 - still in the airplane...)

Alright, I have to try to sleep.....

Homeschooling - Part I

As I sit here before I lecture for the day, I feel like I should use this time to write some thoughts on different subjects. Let's choose one at random..... hmmmm..... how about homeschooling?

I would imagine that putting all of my thoughts on this subject down is going to take a lot longer than the 25 minutes that I have left before class starts, so this will most likely be a multi-part event. A play in N acts, if you will.

First I should clarify what 'Homeschooling' means to people who reside in the Crab-Mansion. One of the main concepts in the idea is to immerse the kids in a learning environment in which they can freely explore the likes and dislikes. Before you jump and down and scream (you know who you are), let me continue....

I am on a committee in the College of Engineering about the curriculum. We are discussing such interesting topics as whether courses should be 3 or 4 credits and should we have a learn-by-doing type of curriculum - where a masters degree means that you have done a lot of practical hands-on type of work. During the last meeting we got into a discussion on why students learn. Do we just want to shove facts down their throat and have them vomit those facts out on a test, or do we want to teach them the fundamentals of how to learn, so they can find those facts out on their own. Should we teach them how to think or facts? How do you test students if you switch to this new idea? That is one of the fundamental problems with school in general is the assessment - how do assess how well a student is doing? We typically test them on facts, which means that we have to teach them those facts. Coming up with a test to see how they think is extremely difficult. Coming up with one in an environment in which everyone else is testing for facts just confuses them. That was an interesting conversation.

Another thing that came up in this meeting, during this conversation is that homeschool kids tend to do much better in classes than other student, and they exhibit a strong desire to learn, while other students are much more ambivalent towards the whole thing (i.e., school, homework, classes, etc.) Why is this? Simply because many homeschooling children learn to learn and end up loving the experience of understanding. Children who go to typical schools are taught to regurgitate facts and not to appreciate the facts that they are learning. The question of "why?" is almost pointless. It is the fact that this happened on October 4, 1957 (anyone???) and not why did it happen or how did it happen.

I should say that I am incredibly guilty of doing this right now. How do you teach in this way to 204 students (that's how many are signed up for my class right now - only 2 seats left in the auditorium!) It is extremely difficult. I am going to try a little more this semester. How? I have no idea. I really don't.

Now, face to face, or with a small class, it is relatively easy to do. You can lead students towards answers. You can teach them to look at things in certain ways. Do not just look for the answer, but look for why that occurs. This you can do with graduate students or with small classes. Or with homeschooling (the point!!)

Ok, to address some of the points from the 32 year old woman in the back row who has been jumping up and down.

Homeschool kids are freaks. I would say that this is probably true. I would also say that I was, and still am, a freak. I don't drink really. People are sort of weirded out by me. I don't hang out with many people. Even at meetings in which there are lots of social functions, I don't participate very much. I am well known in the field, but I am not well liked socially. I could say that this is because people don't take the time to get to know me, but truthfully, I don't enjoy the same things that many other people tend to like. Sports, drinking, etc. These are the basic backbone of our society. If you don't participate in those, then you are sort of a freak. I am firmly in that catagory. Does it trouble me that my kids don't fit either. Yes. It really does. It really, really does bother me. Do I think that I can change this? Will school change this? If you look at who Crab-Girl hung out with in school, it was other kids who people would consider freaks also. Just like I did in school.

Ok, on that note, I have to motor. Gotta go shove some facts down a bunch of students throats.

The Matrix

I am watching the Matrix Reloaded.

I would have to say that the fight scenes and the chase scene with the ghost vampires are the best actions scenes ever made. Trinity on a motorcycle. That is some hot sh*t. Ok, chase scene is over, I can turn it off.

I was thinking that I really hate Tuesday Thursday classes, but not having to prep for class on Sunday night is glorious.

Today was a pretty sh*tty day. I don't really know why. It started out just fine. I actually was starting to do some filling in nail holes in the window trim (after 2 years), but was interrupted when Crab-Mama reported that the bunny had fallen over and couldn't get up. So, we had to take the bunny in to the Animal ER. About $200 later, we got some medicine that might or might not work. If bunny feels better in a week or so, then great! It worked! If not, then we have the "what happens when bunnies die" talk to Crab-Girl. That will pretty much suck.

Then to Target. Then to the bagel place. Then home.

The roads around our house pretty much suck *ss. We got about 10 inches of snow yesterday, and they still haven't plowed our roads. Which means that if you go off the tracks even a little, it is sort of hard to get back on track. If someone comes at you in the other direction, it is pretty much game over.

I haven't called my sister even though her birthday was 12 days ago. I am sorry!!!

Ok, here is the breaking news:

Crab-Mama pulled the kids out of school is going to start homeschooling again. Starting tomorrow.

I think that is enough for tonight...

Powerless

Last week we lost power for about 36 hours. That is not too much time, right? Except we don't have any way to produce heat or water without electricity. During the night it dropped down to about 20 degrees, but during the day it got up to be pretty warm. The house cooled down only about 7 or 8 degrees over the 36 hours, which is pretty good. We started at about 62 degrees, so it was getting a little nippy....

Every time we lose power, Crab-Mama and I talk about how to have power when we have none. Our neighbors have generators and propane, while we have candles and blankets. We probably pay significantly less for heating our house than they do, but, when the lights go out, they laugh last (b*stards!) So, should we get a freaking generator? We could do it in a cheap-*ss way by buying a portable generator and running extension cords all over the place.

Option 2 - we really want to go solar, but that is an astronomical amount of cash. Which we really don't have. But, the government is giving a 30% tax rebate for installing a solar system this year. So, that is like a 30% off coupon (well, rebate...) When you are taking about spending 10-20 kilo-bucks on the system, 30% is a lot (enough?)

One of the problems with any of them is trying to figure out how much power we really need to run our geothermal unit. When the radiant floor heating is working and it isn't too cold outside, it doesn't use too much power. When the blower comes on and it demands more heat, the "booster" comes on, which is a 220 V 40 Amp draw. Now, that is an *ss-load of power. So, it is clear that we can't heat with the "booster" when we have solar power. But maybe we can do the radiant.

Can we cook? Get hot water? Watch a movie? Have a reading light? And heat the house? Hmmm, all it takes is more money. Mo Money. Mo Money.

Another option is to go with a solar hot water heater. This could heat up both our hot water and our radiant, and would take all of the heating load off the electricity. We would then turn off the blower and heat with radiant only, using solar photovoltaic to run pumps and reading lights and other stuff. That would save us a huge amount of cash, but would be more complicated, since we would have to run both electricity and plumbing out to the roof and yard.

Anyone have a windmill?

Stuck in Time

I am stuck in San Francisco time. There is really no reason to exit that time-zone, since the kids are relatively stuck there also, and when they wake up, all they want to do is play the new Wii. Which means that wii can sleep (wii!!!).

One of my problems that I have with work is that I want to work on the things that I like doing. For example, I like coding on the models that I create. This is the fun part of my job. But, really, I have all sorts of other crap that I really should be doing. Like e-mailing students who ask about books and grades and crap. I just don't want to deal with it. I want to code and live in a little bubble where I can enjoy my job. I shouldn't have to deal with it on vacation, right?

Well, I am going to code for a few more minutes while ignoring the rest of the world and the 2800 e-mails in my inbox that I should really be going through and filing and crap. I typically take the week between Christmas and New Years to clean out my inbox. I just have no motivation to do that.

Oh well. Maybe tomorrow.

Book List

This is a book list that I saw on The Professor Chaos Blog. The idea is to bold the items that you have read, italicize the items that you started and leave plain the items that you have never read. Interesting stuff....

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (I read all of these out loud to my kids.)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (high school)
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (high school)
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (read the 1st one to Crab-Girl)
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (high school)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (high school)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (a few times, once to the kids)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (high school)
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (high school)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (the first one)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (something like the first 5 of them)
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (kids again - I would have to say that this is probably one of the best kids books out there)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (high school)
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (oh the shame!!!)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving (best book on the list)
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding(high school)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (I should try this again)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (high school - sad, so sad)
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (I'm still confused....)
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White (to the kids...)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas (I heard an abridged version of the story, I don't think that this counts, though)
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Here are 10 more "classics" that should be added:

101 Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
102 Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson
103 Altered Carbon - Richard Morgan
104 Neuromancer - William Gibson
105 Sundiver - David Brin
106 The Shining - Stephen King
107 The Foundation Trilogy - Isaac Asimov
108 Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert Heinlein
109 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - Philip K Dick
110 Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card

Maybe if you copy this, you could add 10 more. Send me a message if you do copy this. It has sort of inspired me to read some of these. Some of my 10 added is from a top 100 SF list.