Homeschooling progress. Outings with children. Zoriana's cough. The theme that is thrust on us.
2021 09 21
Eddie and I are making progress on all fronts. We read every day – the current book is James and the Giant Peach. As he reads, I am occupied with analyzing the process. He has at least passive recognition of most of the vocabulary. I am glad for the opportunity to reinforce his recognition of words such as ascend, hovering and peered. These are not words that he hears anybody speak on a daily basis. He will have to work harder to learn to read English than a kid in America.
The biggest problem appears to be mechanical, simply translating the characters on the page into the sounds of language that he can understand. I know from my own study of languages that you just have to keep pounding. I have witnessed him improve in his recognition of the IGHT words such as flight, might, sight, blight and so on. Likewise the OUGH words. There are other families such as words with French roots that still carry extraneous letters, such as beauty, portmanteau and so on.
We are able to read three or four chapters a day. When I taught English at Eddie's former school we managed perhaps one chapter a week, and the kids were quite content to let me do the bulk of the reading.
Staying on track is a constant battle. There is always somebody tugging at my sleeve to add something else such as history or science to the curriculum, let Eddie go on this excursion, participate in this or that sport, or whatever. I have become rather curmudgeonly in rejecting such appeals. If we are going to make progress, we have to be focused. My focus right now is English, math and typing. Oksana's focus is Ukrainian. These keep him busy most of the day. The time will come for focus on history, science and other topics.
There are several messages wrapped in what we are telling him.
1. Make good use of your time. If he finds himself sitting on his butt doing nothing, he is likely to get a suggestion that he do something.
2. Don't spread your energy and attention too far. Concentrate on a few objectives, and achieve them.
3. Think for yourself. Develop metacognition – the ability to look over your own shoulder and assess whether you are learning efficiently.
4. Learn to teach yourself. The teacher is there to help you teach yourself, not as a perennial crutch.
The good thing about working one-on-one is that we can go off on tangents. This morning's tangent was isotopes. Having learned that uranium 235 and carbon-14 are isotopes, Eddie imagined a scheme to generate energy combining the two. We talked about the difference between nuclear fission and fusion, the decay chain of uranium, why cesium 137 and strontium 90 are the major pollutants at Chernobyl, and about half-lives. We learned that while there are no stable isotopes of thorium, one isotope has a half-life of 14 billion years. We talked about how the scarcity of carbon-14 (measured in parts per trillion) and its half-life of just over 5000 years means that carbon-14 dating doesn't work for objects more than 40,000 years or so old.
A boy's brain is like a sponge. He will remember many different elements of the conversation, but it will take several times through before he gets everything in proper order and relationship. It gives me great pleasure to finally have, in my fourth child, one who relishes these discussions. Zoriana hates to be left out of anything. She likes to be included on the fringes of these discussions.
Teaching Eddie to read has made me more attuned to Zoriana's needs. She has recently asked me to read a Russian classic fairytale, Мойдодыр, moidoduir. It's about a little boy who was so dirty that everything he owned – blanket, sheets, clothes, schoolbooks, sandwiches – ran away from him in disgust. Then the Мойдодыр shows up to take charge and scrubs the little urchin from head to toe, after which all of his possessions come back to express their love. Zoriana supposedly doesn't read at all, and if she did I would suppose it would be Ukrainian instead of (the very similar) Russian. However, whether from recognizing the characters or having heard the story before from somebody else –I don't know who – she is able to fill in words as I come to them and correct my pronunciation periodically.
I make another observation. Kids here read more than in America, and the canon is sufficiently limited that most kids recognize the same set of kids' stories, like Доктор Айболит (doctor ithurts) and the stories of Анна Барто. They are well-written, time-tested, and carry moral lessons from a bygone era. They have not been scrubbed up to be politically correct. Бармалей (Barmeley), set in Africa, portrays Africans as they were seen in Soviet times.
Oksana got recommendations for textbooks from a homeschooling group here. The Ukrainian texts that she got are wonderful. The grammar has a very straightforward presentation on parts of speech, case declensions and the like. It appears it will give an appropriate structure to her lessons for Eddie. I read the first couple of chapters of the fifth grade arithmetic book myself. It does not insult the children's intelligence. Here are three of the questions in these first couple of chapters:
1. Peter's birthday is on the 15th of the month. It is as many days from the first of the month as it is from the end of the month. In what month was Peter born?
2. What is the sum of all of the unique three digit numbers that can be formed from the digits 0, 2, and 5, without repeating any digits in the number.
3. If you look at the numbers of all the pages in Peter's textbook, there are a total of 119 digits. How many pages are there in the textbook?
American textbooks would probably not offer such challenging questions.
On the other hand, the English language history that they recommended has all of the woke antiwhite rhetoric that pervades American schools. I include their pages on Christopher Columbus at the end of this.
A week ago the kids and I made another outing into the large botanical garden. This time we finally got to the steep hills that appear to have been constructed to augment the natural defense provided by the high bluffs along the Dnieper. At any rate, the trails are steep enough to offer a wonderful climbing challenge to kids.
Zoriana came home with a cough. Truth be told, she had left with a cough. She has had a cough for the past couple of months. It doesn't slow her down. It doesn't seem to be contagious – I share a bed with her and I haven't caught it. Dad's diagnosis is to leave it alone and let her immune system deal with it. However, people don't want to hear even a medical professional say "there's nothing we can do, leave it alone," so something has been done. She has been home from school for a week and a half taking antibiotics and God knows what. She remains as rambunctious as ever, and the cough is still there. This morning she begged to go back to kindergarten. Tomorrow she gets her wish.
Oksana's father was with us for a week and a half with a standard basket of old people's complaints. His kidneys hurt, his back hurts, his legs don't work right, his brain is foggy, and perhaps some other stuff. He went to two different specialists who came up with two different lists of medications. Although when I see specialists I invariably come back with a list of five medicines to buy, these two were content to prescribe only four apiece. The second one contradicting the first one to some degree.
My opinion, offered from the vantage of a guy five years his senior, is that when you get old stuff goes wrong. You pretty much have to live with it. Once again, that advice is not going to be well accepted. Oksana and I agreed to buy the whole skein of medicines as established by the second doctor and send him home with our best wishes. No good saying wudda shudda cudda with regard to smoking, drinking exercise. Let it be what it will be.
Eddie got a new cell phone recently. He is bombarded with egregious messages telling him to get vaccinated against the coronavirus. Such exhortations are everywhere – posters entering the Metro, on the on board video systems, and showing up between posts in Facebook. It is worse than the drumbeat a couple of years ago, sponsored by the American government, for getting tested for HIV and for gay pride marches. No connection drawn, of course, between the two although statistics assure me that if I am not interested in the second I will have no need for the first.
Perhaps the most frightening aspect of this coronavirus/vaccine episode is the suppression of free speech, and the consequent difficulty of figuring out what is going on. The official stories contradict each other and change so frequently that they absolutely must consist in large part of claims that are not true. On the other hand, you cannot believe everything that you hear with regard to the virus being "just another flu" and the vaccines being designed to decimate humanity. The situation requires critical thinking, something that our universities have been loath to teach for a couple of generations now. My rule of thumb would be to be skeptical of everything you read or hear with regard to Covid. You should systematically ask certain questions:
1. Do people making the claim have a definite agenda? Do they have conflicts of interest
2. What is the reputation of those making the claim. What are their networks. What are their accomplishments and awards?
3. How well did the claims fit with your own personal experience?
4. Are the claims logically consistent, over time and among each other?
Let me give the example of a claim against the vaccines that I believe is untrue. Read about it by searching on "Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine Contains Poisonous Graphene Oxide, 'Confirms' Spanish Professor" and "former Pfizer employee graphene oxide".
Here are the clues that it is probably bogus. The "Spanish researchers" are from Chile, not Spain. Their university affiliations are unclear. They claim that the vaccines are 99% graphene oxide. That seems absurd – GO is a well-known poison, and that would not leave much room for any other ingredients. They claim that the ingredients are magnetotoxic. A search on that word finds that nobody else in the Internet world uses it. It was made up for this article. I regret that I forwarded a link to a video of this Pfizer researcher before doing further checking. If somebody had called me on it, I would have been embarrassed and it would've damaged my credibility.
Having set out criteria for judging whether an article is legitimate, let me say that Mike Whitney's recent article on the Unz Review checks out very well. The authorities that he cites are well-established scientists, including a couple of Nobel prize winners such as Luc Montaigner. Others I find credible are Alex Berenson of Substack and Bret Weinstein of Darkhorse. One of the most endearing things about the latter two is that they have very quickly admitted when they knew they made mistakes and described in detail how they were misled.
For Ukrainian readers only, I am attaching a translation of one of Whitney's recent articles. You Ukrainians are being forced, dragooned, browbeaten into getting the vaccine. Whitney makes a powerful point that this is against the spirit of the UN charter of human rights and the Nürnberg trials on human subjects. Whether or not the vaccines were dangerous, the way they are going about forcing them on you is immoral. However, Whitney goes on to make the claim that they are forcing them on you precisely because they are dangerous. As most of the discussion takes place in English, you may not have seen it. If you have not read this side of the argument, here would be a good place to start.
That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the women are good looking, the men are strong, and the children have an above average appetite for common sense.