Postscript

Plot twist. Four years ago when we signed off after writing 51 articles about homeschooling, after spending ten years homeschooling, after graduating two kids from Ohm Academy, both of whom are now out on their own – one is an urban planner and works for the government, and the other is in medical school studying out of state, suddenly, after all that flack we took, everyone is homeschooling!

I get it. You didn’t plan on homeschooling. Actually, neither did I, but yours was predicated by a pandemic. You’re scrambling. I’m watching people move through every Stage of Grief described by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance, and even some that are cycling back through the different stages, too. I see you ugly-cry.

Return that empathy. Imagine how it is for me and others that chose the homeschooling path. Nearly every news story, every poll, every debate, every social media post is framing this pursuit as a negative experience that one must endure. If you’re reading this right now, know that I am not singling you out; a whole lot of parents are complaining about homeschooling right now. You do know that some people chose to do this, right?

Calm down. I have to ask this gentle question: is this the first time you tried to teach your kid something? Really?? I’m guessing no. And if they didn’t/don’t learn it, then what? Does the sky come crashing down? All of these kids are going to be in the same boat. Just like all of these nurses I’m teaching online will be graduating without ever touching a patient in a clinical setting. And they will get jobs. And the world will go on. And your kid is resilient.

Love them. Your kid is watching everything you do. You are their hero, and they will respond to challenges the way they see you respond to them. The best thing you can do for them is to give them a positive outlook on learning. My best advice is to abandon all of the mindless worksheets and online drivel, and just follow with what they want to learn. However, if you feel you cannot do that, I would ask yourself why you feel you can’t. What is the imaginary norm that you are striving for?

Take note. For most of you, what you are doing is not really homeschooling – this is online school with parents as behavioral managers. You still have a teacher, a district, a curriculum, and a support system outside the home. Most homeschoolers, including Thomas Edison, Benjamin Franklin, Sandra Day O’Connor, Florence Nightingale, and George Washington (there are many more) did not have that level of support.

You can do this.

Signing Off

On Wednesday night after work, Mike and I went to see a free Roy Orbsion documentary with a talk afterwards by the writer/director/producer of the film who works for the BBC music journalism department. Then on Thursday night we went to another Arizona Republic sponsored storytelling night, Estamos Aqui/We Are Here. It was so fabulous, and I was so bummed that the kids couldn’t come with us, but they both had classes. As we were walking out, Mike asked me how I hear about all of these cool events, and I gave him my typical answer that I’m on every mailing list in town. I realized then that I am essentially homeschooling Mike now.

So, here’s my point – homeschooling is such a messed up term. If I never had to utter that word again it would be too soon. Yet here I am again writing about it! Today I’m trying to condense our lifestyle for the last 10 years into a one-page “high school transcript” GODDAMIT. I’ve been digging in my heels trying to avoid this bullshit document even though I’ve saved every piece of everything my kids have ever done. In a few weeks Patrick will be graduating with his Associate’s degree from community college, and he will transfer in to ASU as a junior, not having to complete anymore lower division G.E. and already powering out much of what he needs for his major, Urban Planning. Rebecca, despite having taken 50 million music and French classes, will finish her Associate’s and AGEC  in one more year, so I’m going to go ahead and graduate her too, and give her the Ohm Academy diploma as well, as I spent good money at OfficeMax buying the high-quality paper with gold seals. Ohm = OurHomeschoolMystery or the measure of electrical resistance, which we clearly have much of (naming our school was one of the fun days we had here.)

My standard answers are still the same. Yes, anyone can homeschool. No, we did not homeschool for religious reasons (although we’re also not anti-religion either and some of our best friends are both devoutly religious and atheists.) No, we are not unschoolers (although if you truly look at our day-to-day it might look that way.) No, I have nothing against schools, schoolkids, or teachers. Yes, my kids have friends and social lives (we have met some of the most amazing people since starting this journey.) Yes, my kids partook in most, if not all, of the major milestones that school kids do – proms (three of them), plays (countless), band, sports, clubs, etc. (see our blog in its entirety.) Yes, I worked as a registered nurse the entire 10 years that we homeschooled. Yes, my husband also works full-time. Yes, he is one of the homeschool teachers, too. No, we are not crazy (relative term.)

Since I started homeschooling my kids, I have now moved on to doing nurse case management, which largely consists of matching patients with services they need for wellness. I liken this role very much to what I did when I pulled my kids out of school and what I went on to do throughout their homeschooling, which is continually ask the question, “What does my kid need for educational success and how can I get that?” I have been relentless in advocating for my kids, and at this point, my proudest moment is that I see evidence that they can now advocate for themselves. This is how I know that it’s time for me to wrap things up, write the transcript, seal the diploma, and say goodbye to homeschooling in its formal sense, and let it be the lifestyle choice and state of mind that I already know it really is.

Holy Sh!t, Our School Is Closing

Rarely these days do I feel compelled to write anything in the ole "Our Homeschool Mystery" blog so here is a short update on life... I drove Rebecca, who is now 15, home from her English 101 class this morning, while Patrick, who is now 17, has a slightly longer college geography class on Thursdays where he is predicting weather and doing research on the "urban heat island" phenomenon. They are excited to be going to a dance with their homeschool friends tomorrow night, as they get together on most Fridays with homeschooled teens. They are still involved with the homeschool theatre group. They still volunteer three hours per week at the natural history museum. Patrick still does homeschool fencing classes, and he now also has a paying job at the library 19 hours per week. Rebecca still plays horn in the youth symphony. The only big difference schooling-wise is that I have now farmed out the rest of their homeschool education to the local community college so they can be taught by people above my level and receive college credit, as well. They are both taking a full load of classes there and enjoying themselves, and I have gone back to work full-time; although, it is self-scheduling so I am mostly able to set my work schedule around their homeschool needs.

As Rebecca and I came closer to our neighborhood this morning, we drove by her old school from many years ago. You may remember my very first "Our Homeschool Mystery" blogpost where I gave a little description of our short time at the school in "Secrets of the Old Schoolhouse" (linkable post.) Over the years, we have driven by the school, often to fun field trips and other activities during school hours, and felt pity for the kids stuck in this lifeless building. I am not trying to be mean, but I started with a barren slate of dirt in my backyard and the kids' great-grandmother's furniture, and over the last 17 years, the kids and I have planted gardens and trees, acquired books and musical instruments, and our house now looks like any other homeschooler's does with projects and curriculum overflowing everywhere you look. Meanwhile, 17 years later, our neighborhood school still looks like this:

On Tuesday night, the school district voted to close this school at the end of this school year. In our local election last fall, the district was unable to get a budget override passed that would have helped with the $2.7 million budget shortfall so our elementary school will be closed, and the 584 school-less students will be bussed to the three remaining elementary schools in the district, ranging from 3 to 11 miles away. Besides the additional wear-and-tear on our environment from bussing, the kids will be on the road more with less time for extra-curriculars, and on top of that, the school district also elected to go to a 4-day school week, making for longer school days during the remaining four days of instruction. But wait, there's more!!! The district also approved an increase in class size to absorb all of these extra kids. So your child's kindergarten class may now have up to 31 students in there, and your teenager may be in a class with up to 40 students!!!!!! Because we all know that larger class size IMPROVES the quality of education! (Yes, that's sarcasm!)

I've gone through a range of emotions upon hearing this news. Some guilt for having pulled my kids out instead of staying to fix the problems. Some dread about worrying about my decreasing property value now that I won't have a nearby school. Some sadness because my school has a great SPEER program and all those special-ed preschoolers and elementary-schoolers will no longer have a home with a dedicated group of teachers and nurses. But mostly, my emotion is one of complete and utter DISGUST in my fellow humans. If one more person tells me that they don't vote because they feel they "can't change anything," I swear that I'm going to punch them in the face. The election last fall that decided the school's fate, the budget override, actually had an increase in the number of eligible voters that voted. Want to know that percentage?? 43% !! Less than half of all eligible voters bothered to come out (or mail-in) their ballot that would decide the fate of an entire elementary school. You non-voters are pathetic and are victims of this crappy education system that somehow managed to graduate you without teaching you the basics of civic education and responsibility to your community. And for those of you whining in comments sections of articles about this decision, saying that the school board should have "balanced the budget," you need to go back to school and retake math because you aren't getting it -- there's not enough money going to schools! Get it? NOT ENOUGH MONEY FOR EDUCATION. You get what you pay for in life, and if you don't want to invest in our future generation, then don't expect them to solve these problems for you.

Let's Talk About Risk

Don't you hate it when you meet someone who is anti-homeschooling? It's so tiring. You can provide mountains of evidence that your child is well-adjusted:

• Socialized. Check - child is frequently photographed hanging on large group of friends, constantly texting and going to parties.
• Intelligent. Check - child is 16 and has finished all lower division general ed at community college with a 3.8 GPA.
• Community-oriented. Check - child has held down two volunteer jobs for the last 3 years.
• Polite. Check - child greets people with handshake, makes eye contact, and can hold down a conversation.
• Egalitarian. Check - child has witnessed both mom and dad working during their childhood.
• Diverse. Check - child has participated in scouts, theatre, soccer, teeball, basketball, fencing, chess team, hiking club, dance classes, art classes, foreign language classes, band, symphony, museum guild, etc., etc...

But still . . . "I just don't believe in homeschooling." 

Ugh. 

Do you want college acceptance rates for homeschoolers? Nah. How about standardized test scores for homeschoolers? Nah. How about convicted felon rates among homeschoolers? Nah.

This is exactly what it's like when you meet someone who is anti-vaccination. 

Do you want CDC, NIH, or AMA recommendations? Nah. Do you want peer-reviewed PubMed articles on vaccination safety and effectiveness? Nah. Do you want the advice of a trusted friend who is also a registered nurse? Nah.

The difference here is that when my kids were little, I would come home from homeschool park days and study microbiology textbooks and take exams. Hard exams. All while I was homeschooling with you. On my shelf right now, I am looking at "Microbiology," "Pathophysiology," "Pharmacology," "Essentials of Pediatric Nursing," "Critical Care Nursing," and the "NCLEX-RN Study Guide" which I practically memorized to take my State Board Exam so I could get a license to practice my "voodoo witchcraft" that advocates vaccinations for the health of your child and states that I am a Registered Nurse with Multi-State Privileges. 

And I homeschooled right along side you all of the way. I breastfed with you. I shared granola with you. But I can no longer stay silent about this anti-vaccination madness. 

You have been getting away with not vaccinating because other people have been vaccinating. They have been vaccinating for YEARS now; it is not new. You have forgotten what a sick kid looks like. You need to take a PALS (Pediatric Advance Life Support) class with me and watch videos of toddlers in respiratory distress from Hib. You need to see kids in the Third World with deformed limbs from polio. You need to WAKE UP. Eradicating disease requires a collective. You have to be willing to say, "I will accept this vaccination, even if I don't understand the science behind it, because I want what's best for the greatest number of people." I'm telling you: I understand the science, and it's safe. I'm risking my license, my career, and my friendship with you to tell you that vaccines are safe.

So let's talk about risk. This morning (after getting mad at ignorance on the internet) I was thinking about all of the risks that we take as humans. There are so many things. Being alive is even a risk. For some reason, I was thinking about a time when I was sixteen and on a flight with my dad who has now passed away, and I miss him. We were flying from our home in Germany to Bucharest, and I was positively terrorized. There are some mountains, the Transylvanian Alps, I believe, that are actually part of the Carpathians, and you descend down over them on your way into Bucharest. Those mountains made for the bumpiest flight I have ever been on. It was absolutely horrible, and I still cite that flight as one of the worst I have ever taken. After landing, I was completely determined that I was not going home on a plane. We were visiting friends at the embassy there, and my poor parents had to endure their weird teenage daughter looking up train schedules and talking about plane crashes the whole week that we were there. Since they weren't budging on the train idea, I started planning my life there in Romania; I would meet a nice Romanian boy, get married, have a family, and hopefully my friends would come visit me there since I wasn't ever leaving. 

After many ultimatums, my parents were able to get me on my death flight home. My dad, who was an aerospace engineer, sat next to me and explained EVERY little thing going on with the plane. Every little noise. Every little part, right down to the hydraulics. I was particularly afraid of the hydraulics -- God knows what they did, but they seemed to be implicated in more than one plane crash. I didn't understand anything he was telling me. To this day, I don't really understand all of the science involved in our modern-day jets, but I accept and respect the people that dedicate their lives to studying aerospace safety, and I realize that I don't have that expertise. Sure, I can read all about plane crashes on the internet, but when I actually crunch the numbers I can see that flying is safe. 

Risk is all around us. It is a risk to fly. It is a risk to drive. It is a risk to turn your back on the predominant educational system in our country and do it yourself. And it is a risk to get a vaccine that you think is injecting "toxins" into your body when it is actually a simple way to expose antigens of a pathogen to produce antibodies that keep you well. Please, if you are a homeschooler that vaccinates, can you please stand up and be counted? I fear that there are so few of us in our community that we need to be more vocal. And to all of my "friends" that think they know more about vaccines than I do: maybe we're not really friends if you don't respect that I am BOTH a homeschooling parent and a nurse that has studied this subject extensively and cares deeply about your health.

End of Our One Year Blog Project

Wow! We started this blog back in January 2010 as a way to enlighten folks about our homeschooling. It's fun to go back and read what we have all written, back to back, chronologically. I think we've done the best possible job we can at giving a window into our atypical world. I hope we've answered your burning homeschooling questions! When we first started out, we didn't have a way to see if anyone was reading the blog; however, since then, Blogger has added a "Stats" tab, and we now know that our little homeschooling blog has received over 5000 page views from 10 different countries. We've done very little to advertise, but I think more and more people are searching out information about homeschooling. I hope we have given a realistic and positive light on the subject. I have never looked at our homeschooling as anything other than, "Okay, we'll give this a try and see how it goes," and here we are nearly 5 years later still homeschooling. I don't know what the future holds: Patrick says he would like to give high school a try, and Rebecca thinks she wants to just go straight to community college as soon as they'll let her in. I will support whatever decision they make. I'll try to keep Our Homeschool Mystery updated from time to time, but the posts won't appear as frequently, as we move on to other interests. After being asked over and over again about the how and where of our hikes, I am in the process of launching a new blog, Our Hiking Mystery. Stay tuned for all our hiking secrets revealed! Thanks for reading and Happy New Year!

"Changing Education Paradigms"

 Just thinking about some of our homeschool plans for this week which include building gingerbread houses and baking cookies! We aren't getting much "school" (in the traditional sense) done during the holidays, but we are tapping into our creative sides. So this morning I am considering the value of creativity in all aspects of life, and how I can continue to nurture that in my children. I was reminded of a great video by Sir Ken Robinson where he states that creativity is, "Original ideas that have value," and "Divergent thinking isn't a synonym but is an essential capacity for creativity." Here is the video with help from RSA Animate and YouTube. I'm also including him in our blog's "Links We Like" section. His website has the rest of the hour-long talk on the subject.

Disspelling the Doubts of Homeschooling

This month, I decided to google search for some topics for a post. One of the most popular topics I found was about how bad homeschooling is. So, I thought I'd dispel some of these doubts about homeschooling.

1) The first anti-homeschool result I found was from http://www.ehow.com/list_6603210_reasons-against-home-schooling.html. It said, "It is difficult to understand how a parent or parents can provide their children with the same level of academic opportunity as an entire staff of trained professionals. They must depend upon a self-planned curriculum or those they have found elsewhere. Each curriculum varies widely in efficacy and can lead to different levels of learning. A school setting offers specialists in each field, including music, art and speech. As bright and dedicated as a home educator might be, he/she simply cannot fill all of those roles." You don't need a curriculum to teach. We actually only have two curriculum we use, one of which we use rarely. The rest is just things like writing blog posts, or taking music lessons. No one person is filling in all the roles. Many people are filling in all the roles.

2) Another search result took me to a site called http://teacherrevised.org/2009/05/30/the-case-against-homeschooling/ Number seven on the list said, "God hates homeschooling. From my side, to take your faithful children out of schools is to miss an opportunity to spread the grace, power and beauty of the Lord." Theoretically Jesus was homeschooled. At the time Rome didn't have free schools, and you can't say a guy who was born in a hay trough was rich. So who schooled him? Exactly, his parents.

3) The next site I found was a site called http://www.educateexpert.com/argumentsagainsthomeschooling.html. My favorite argument from this site is the third argument. It says, "You need to think about when it comes to the arguments against home schooling is the distraction factor. If a child is schooled at home, the result can be that the child does not take their studies seriously, especially when a parent is their teacher. This behavior could thus result in poor grades." True they could be distracted, but that doesn't mean they'll get bad grades. Even as I write this post, Rebecca's computer is playing the annoying, almost jazzy music that comes with her Kitty Care video game. I think that's distraction enough. Yet I still write this blog post, and the last thing I'm thinking about is watching her play her game. It is still possible to work at home without distraction, you just need to know how to avoid being distracted. Don't adults get distracted at their jobs, too, and have to learn how to deal with it?

4) The next anti-homeschooling thing I found was the third or fourth comment on http://www.pjnet.com.my/ftopict-3660-.html. It said, "I personally dislike homeschooling because it deprives the children from interacting with other kids their age. This does limit their social skills." I think people against homeschooling take the term to literally. They think that we only school at home. However, I honestly think we school more away from home than we do at home. With the many field trips and events between our two homeschool groups we really only homeschool at home on Thursdays, some Fridays, and Saturdays. That's four out of seven days that we are interacting with other homeschoolers. So, socialization isn't a problem.

If this blog post didn't dispel some of the doubts about homeschooling I don't know what will.

Massacre Grounds

Thanksgiving Tuesday is coming to a close here at our house, and we'll be working on turkey leftovers for the rest of the week. We celebrated early due to the homeschooling parents' crazy work schedules, but the good news is that both Mom and Dad will be off for Christmas this year for the first time in three years. Woohoo!

While the turkey was in the oven, we took a short hike to the Massacre Grounds along the northwestern slope of the Superstition Mountains off of First Water Trailhead. The Tonto Forest Rangers have closed the dirt access road to the Massacre Grounds, but the trail can still be reached by parking in the Crosscut Trailhead parking area, and heading southeast along the dirt trail following the many rock cairns. Here are a few shots of the ones I photographed along the way. We all thought this was a cool way to keep track of a pretty unused trail. We never saw a soul the whole afternoon. The entire trail with the new trail access is about 5 miles round trip with approximately a 1000 foot elevation gain with great views. We could see Four Peaks and even the Phoenix skyline distantly to the far west.

The Massacre Grounds take its name from the alleged massacre of the Peralta mining family by the Apaches around 1848 because the Apaches held this part of the Superstitions as a sacred place of the "Thunder God," and the Peralta family continued to mine there and transport the gold back to their home in Sonora, Mexico. There are many different versions of the story, but it is thought that after the massacre, the Apaches dumped all of the Peralta gold in this area, and subsequent miners have attempted to locate it here. As with all of our Tuesday trips, we try to make it as educational as possible, and we frequently remind the kids, "Hey, you could be in school right now," but they really liked this trip to the Massacre Grounds on Turkey Day because of the relation to the massacre of  "Alfred the Turkey" (I don't know why they started naming the turkeys -- we buy them wrapped in the grocery store just like most people do.) Anyway, Happy Turkey Massacre Day, for those of you that have not yet celebrated! Hope you, too, can enjoy a nice Thanksgiving hike!

Being Weird

"But homeschooled kids are just weird!" 

(sigh)

No, we've never heard that before! 

(aahhh... the smell of sarcasm)

As we're sort of starting to wrap up our year-long project-blog of providing just a little window into "our homeschool mystery," I'm considering topics that I haven't yet hit on. I know our tag cloud is fairly long, but I wanted the kids to see some of what they have accomplished in one year, and I also wanted readers interested in certain topics to be able to find them. The tags increase in size as we return to those subjects, and I see that "socialization" is nice and big! If you click on the socialization tag, you will see all the times we have referenced the socialization process when writing about our homeschool journey. I enjoy reading them all back to back since I like stories about times with our friends.

So I find that even if I'm able to convince the doubters that homeschooled kids are, in fact, plenty socialized, I still get the, "but they're weird" response. So I officially give up! That's right, for those of you that know me, miracle of miracles, I'm not going to argue this one! I do believe that homeschoolers eat, sleep, and breathe just like everyone else in this world, but I will accept the "weird" title. If being weird means that we make our own paths and don't follow the crowd, then I'll take it! There's no coincidence that I'm timing this blog post with Halloween, a holiday that I've always enjoyed. To me, there's something so fun about dressing up and being silly and weird for a night. It's the only night of the year that we "get to try on something new" for a change, and it's accepted by most of society. I think it would be nice if we could embrace that philosophy the rest of the year.

I have three favorite blog articles on the subject of homeschoolers "being weird." The first is "The Weird Homeschool Girl Goes to School" by Tammy Takahashi where she points out the irony that if schooled kids are so accepting of people who are different, then how come they don't help the weird kid at school?
Here's a link: http://www.justenoughblog.com/?p=1468

I also like her article, "School Pot Calling Homeschool Kettle Black -- Acceptance is not taught in school" which has one of my favorite quotes, "School is not better simply because you went to school." As someone who also went to school, can I please be spared of one more person telling me, "Look, I went to school, and I turned out fine." Yes, I get it -- it's possible. I'm only trying to present that homeschooling is also a viable option for turning out "fine."
Here's a link: http://www.justenoughblog.com/?p=1735

The last article is from the blog, Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers, and the post, "Why Are Homeschoolers So Weird and Unsocialized?" attempts to define what it means to be "weird," followed by one of  my favorite poems by Robert Frost. I also encourage you to read the comments after the post so you can get an idea of the kinds of things people say to homeschoolers all the time. Do parents of schooled kids endure this much hostility towards their decision to send their kids to school?
Here is the link: http://www.weirdunsocializedhomeschoolers.com/2008/08/why-are-homeschoolers-so-weird-and.html 

Return of the Tadpoles

Along time ago, about three or more months, I went kayaking with my family at Watson Lake. While we were there, Patrick and I caught six tadpoles. While we were catching tadpoles, I spotted a tadpole that had actually started growing legs. It was even bigger than the frog that we saw earlier. Patrick nearly caught it, but the tadpole escaped too quickly. We put the others in an old water bottle we found in the car so we could take them home. When we arrived at home base, we left them in their water bottle on the porch. We had decided not to move the tadpoles into something bigger until Patrick and I got home from Eagleridge the next day. Now you are to hear the more recent story of the "tadpoles."

The day after we went to Eagleridge, we spent our day studying tadpoles. We learned what they like to eat, how long it takes for them to turn into frogs, and other helpful things about tadpoles. We also tried to figure out what type of frog would come out of our tadpoles, but we couldn't find our type of tadpole. That's when we found out they were not tadpoles at all. Our dad had suggested they were this from the beginning, but we didn't believe him. After a little research we found the truth. These animals live in large groups. We saw some real tadpoles swimming around with them which was why we thought they were all tadpoles, but they weren't. We had caught a group of minnows!

Just this week we went to Flagstaff to see some fall color. We wanted to go to Hart Prairie, but it was closed so we just drove around in the mud pretending we had four-wheel drive. :) We had decided to bring the minnows with us so we could drop them off in one of Flagstaff's lakes. We wanted to put them in something similar to their environment. When we were done driving through the aspens, we started driving to Lake Mary. We turned of onto this dirt road thinking it led to Lake Mary. We drove on this street that wasn't even on the map for an hour to only get about two miles. During our nice drive, we thought we had passed Lake Mary and were on our way to Mormon Lake. Then we thought we had passed Mormon Lake when we got out of the dirt. We saw this horse while we were going one way off the forked road, but he kept telling us to go the other direction. In the end he was right.

We ended up at Lake Mary where we deposited our minnows. We weren't even sure if they were alive, but we didn't fret over it. We arrived home late on a school (Eagleridge) night. That was okay though because we learned a lot from this trip. This is one of the ways a homeschooler learns. By experiencing! I also learned never to catch my pets again.

The Mystery of the MIM

Yesterday we went to the new Musical Instrument Museum (MIM for short) with our homeschool group. Before we went into the museum, while we were standing in the courtyard, we learned from the tour guide that the entire building was made from sandstone shipped from India. She also told us that it took six years to collect all the instruments that are in the museum. I found it very interesting how they used different classes of instruments to organize our presentation, how each part of the world has all different types of instruments, and how they acquired the biggest stringed instrument in the world for this museum.

For the first part of the tour, there was a small demonstration on the different categories of musical instruments. These categories are: Aerophones, Membranophones, Electrophones, Idiophones, Corpophones, and Chordophones. The museum classifies these instruments in these categories to better understand how they are played. The best Example of these classes is the Theremin. It Makes sound by sending an electronic signal to an ampliffier when it's magnetic fields are disturbed. So, the Theremin is an electrophone.

Another thing that made the museum interesting was all the different types of instruments they had. It seemed like there were at least two instruments from every country in the world. That's more than 390 instruments from around the world. Other wise know as enough instruments to give a musician a headache trying to remember them all. Along with these instruments they also had some historic ones on display including one of the light up drums from the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the Peace Piano, Eric Clapton's guitar "Brownie", and a couple of amplifiers that Dick Dale blew up. Who knew a broken amp could be considered historic.

My favorite instrument in the museum is the Octobass. It is a 12 foot tall three stringed Double bass that is so deep that it can barely be heard by human ears. Only three were ever made, and there is only one person in the western hemisphere who can play one. After we got home, Omar Domkus (the parent who set up the tour and he is also a bass player) sent us a YouTube video of someone playing the same Octobass. It sounded like a dying whale.

Another thing I noticed about the tour was the fact that the tour guide seemed to think we didn't know much about instruments. During our second run through the museum, (the tour guide seemed to be rushing us through the exhibits) the tour guide met up with my dad and I while we were looking at the electric guitars. She told us about how on the web-site they had a whole curriculum on how electric guitars and amps work. My dad then explained how we had just finished building one (picture of the guitar we built is below), and he told her that I work the sound board at our church. The look on her face was priceless.

This concludes the mystery of the MIM: Idiophones don't mean the maker was an idiot, broken amps can be historic, and the tour was most likely made for public school groups.

Happy Emergency Nurses Day!

We like to celebrate holidays here at Our Homeschool Mystery so today we are celebrating Emergency Nurses Day! Cheers to all the great Emergency Nurses out there! I feel so lucky to be one of them! Every working day is a new and different adventure with people from all walks of life... patients with delayed care, intoxicants, language, cultural, and educational barriers... we see everybody!

We see patients BEFORE a diagnosis is made, and we are the ones that deal with patients and families in their time of anxiety from the "not knowing."

We shift gears on cue... never knowing what is going to walk through the doors next!

We have FUN! We play charades in triage when the patient does not know what meds he takes... "Little blue pill... sounds like... starts with... 2 syllables... rhymes with..."

We're crafty... ever see our "stinky feet" combat creations?

We also love patient makeovers... "We had to cut all your clothes off of you, but we're sending you home in these donated clothes... the hot pink biker shorts are a new look for you, sir."

We're resourceful... "Oh looky, I found the one last vein for an IV that you DIDN'T already use for your heroin!"

We're the cheerleaders... "You're a natural with those crutches -- it's like you've had a broken leg your whole life!"

I have to think that many of these emergency nursing skills are a lot like being a homeschooling mom... adaptable, strong, fun, crafty, resourceful, and encouraging. But most of all, we just CARE about our patients, much like we CARE about our kids, and that's why we do it, and it all seems easy for that reason.  :)

September News Now!!!

This September must have been the most exciting yet tiring September in my life (I think.) We started going to a new homeschool group, the youngest member of the Murphy family (our best friends) slept over for the first time, I started a new instrument, and, well, I'll just let you hear the story yourself.

We'll start with VHE (Valley Home Educators.) This is the new homeschool group we have joined. When we went to the kick-off meeting, I met a bunch of people my age. A few of them I already knew. At the kick-off we had a potluck lunch. After a few hours of chatting, all the kids around the ages 10 and up (as long as they were kids) went outside for the TNT meeting. TNT stands for teens-n-tweens. Every year in November, they have a yard sale to help a charity. This year will be there fourth annual, or that's what I remember. The next week we went to the Sea Life Aquarium with the rest of the group. We saw many different fish and sea creatures. During the tour of the of the aquarium, we answered questions that were painted on the wall. Then we scratched out the answers on the cards they gave us to turn in and get a sticker. Some facts I learned from the trip were that lion fish are one of the most dangerous fish, that manta rays are most closely related to sharks, and much more. At the end of the tour, Brenna and I played in the tubes with Ailish. Then I went to Brenna's house for a sleep-over. On the second day of the sleepover (the day I was going home) Brenna was going over to one of her friend's house to help her do something. While she was gone I babysat Ailish. It was fun.

A few weeks later, Brenna, Ailish, and Devin came over to spend the night for five days. It was exciting since it was Ailish's first time sleeping anywhere, but home. During our un-sleepover, (Ailish chose not to sleep at night, every night, but the first one) we took Ailish and Brenna to my French horn lesson. I should probably put more detail into this picture. Back in the second, or maybe the first week in August, I went back to my two-day-a-week enrichment program, Eagleridge. As you know, (or should know) I play flute in our Monday band. Actually I used to play flute in band. This year we added a lot of flutes. We took up 1/3 of the band all put together. Mr. Hink, our band teacher, mentioned one of us playing French Horn. I told it to my mom and she said I probably should try it because she remembered when she was a girl, she played flute and she knew this girl who played French Horn and had always wanted to switch, but her mom said no. So I switched and I'm glad I did. It has been six weeks and both my band teacher and my French horn teacher said I'm doing great for a kid that started six weeks ago. I really enjoy it.

Just this Wednesday I went to Open House and Mr. Hink told my parents about how good I was. At Open House I performed a song with  my fellow classmates, about 1/4 of them. We also did a hand clapping routine like the one from the Kleenex clapping commercial with 6th grade Wed., 6th grade Fri., and 5th grade Fri. It was great. I did the clapping almost perfectly. It has been busy, busy around here, but September was fun.

Eagleridge Update

I thought I should give you an update on what has happened at our homeschool enrichment program, Eagleridge. On Wednesday, we officially started our third week back to Eagleridge and on Monday, we will officially end it.

We will start with my first class, music. In music we talked about body language. Over the past weeks we had been talking about communication. The first week we talked about slit drums, and the second week we talked about talking drums. One of the things we did was take a white sheet and put a light behind it so we could use body language to say something. It was fun, but the thing I was supposed to show was quick and tiny and to do it, I had to shuffle across the floor really fast on my knees, and I got a bad rug burn.

In my second class, P.E., my P.E. teacher worked us to death (not literally.) For our introduction, we played "Home Base." For our fitness, we did "Race Track Fitness." That's where we died. We had to run around the gym, and then come back to our cone to do push-ups or sit-ups or something like that. I went around the gym about 16 times and it's a big gym. Then we had to jump rope for the rest of the class. At the end, we got to play cage ball though.

In science we looked at samples of human skeleton muscle, cardiac muscle, smooth muscle, and blood on microscopes. Just before music extras, one of my friends asked me if I would take her to the bathroom. At our new campus, we have to take a buddy to the bathroom and the bathrooms are only unlocked between classes and at recess. We missed 10 minutes of class because something like 15 kids were in there. We missed getting singing solos, but since we wanted solos, too, the teacher made them duets.

After a lunch of mini corn dogs, applesauce, and chocolate milk, and recess, my class and I went to art class. In art we started working on our calligraphy poems. We got the poems from last week's composition work of diamontes. This week in composition we're working on cinquains. Here are a few I wrote:

Autumn

Colorful- Leaves

chills, crunching, rustling

Beautifully colorful around me

Fall

Eating

Delicious- Food

munching, chewing, crunching

Defeating my agonizing hunger

Devouring

Music

Graceful- Notes

playing, listening, affecting

Telling me a story

Songs

In computers we reviewed the tools in Word. Then I went home. Now my work is officially done.

Poetry Is Music

We have had a pretty busy summer this year, and we haven't had very much time for blogging. We started the summer with a camping trip on the beach with my best friend and his sister. Rebecca and I also went on a camping trip with our grandparents and cousins.We've also done a whole bunch of other activities this summer. One of these activities was a concert at which Natalie Merchant was promoting her new album Leave Your Sleep. I really liked this concert because all of the songs were poems set to music, and we have been doing poetry in my homeschool composition class and at home. It is very interesting how this form of songs works, and because it is very interesting how she used certain instruments for certain parts of the songs.

The songs on this album were of a collection of poems either by children, for children, or of children and turned into music. Some of the poetry that she used was The Dancing Bear by Albert Bigelow Paine, Bleezer's Ice-Cream by Jack Prelutsky, and The Sleepy Giant by Charles E. Carryl. All of the songs came with a short biography about the poets. There were some bad reviews about the concert that we read before we went. People were complaining that the concert was more like a poetry lecture as opposed to a concert. However, I found these people she talked about very interesting. One of the most interesting was Albert Bigelow Paine, who was a close friend of Mark Twain, and he eventually wrote his biography.

I really like how Natalie Merchant turned these poems into music because poetry is meant to sound like music. Music is essentially made up of rhythm and sound, and poetry is exactly the same. Just last week, we were doing limericks in my homeschool composition class, and Mrs. Pittman was talking to us about how rhythm is part of poetry by the way things are accented. The week before that, we were doing haikus which all have the same rhythm made up of the same number of syllables per line: 5 syllables, 7 syllables, and then 5 syllables again. Shakespeare's poetry and stories are good examples of using rhythm in poetry because they were all written in iambic pentameter. Iambic Pentameter is a form of rhythm which alternates using 5 stressed and unstressed syllables per line. These forms of poetry are only three examples of the many ways that rhythm turns poetry into music.

It was also very interesting which instruments she used for the album. At the concert there was a clarinet, a bass clarinet, a saxophone, a violin, a cello, a double bass, a tuba, two guitars, drums, and a keyboard. Some of these instruments she only used in certain parts of the songs. For example, in the song, The Peppery Man, whenever she said "The Peppery Man," one of the guitarists would echo it in an unnaturally low voice while the double bass player played three or four notes on the tuba making it sound hilarious. I know this sounds confusing, but all of the people on the stage were able to play multiple instruments and some sang back up. It was also really funny what was said by Natalie in between songs. During the beginning of the second song, the speakers started making a weird static sound which they called, "The dragonfly in the Dodge Theater air-conditioning system." 

I am also impressed by this album because it took her only six and a half years to turn all 26 poems into songs. I hope this post explains what we have been doing this summer, and that poetry is music. I can't wait until Natalie Merchant's next concert here.

Highlights of My Summer

Over the summer recently, I've been busy. Between studying comets, to watching the tide pools, to going back to our homeschool enrichment program, we haven't had much time for blogging.  So now, I'm going to give you the complete overview of everything that has happened since my last post, er, sort of.

We're going to start by going in chronological order which means first you'll learn about our trip to the beach.  Back in July, I went on a seven-day camping trip with my family, my friend Brenna, and her brother Devin. On the second day, we went to go play at the beach. We had learned  most of what we knew about riptides from our first camp out at the beach last year. Actually, I had been to the beach before, but I only learned about riptides last year. I had learned that riptides are waves that go at an angle to pull you out to sea and the only way to escape it was to swim sideways. We learned on this camp out though that you can tell where riptides will happen by how dark and choppy the water is. On another day we went to go see the tide pools. Devin found a crab and caught it. We also saw a crab eating. It was funny because the crab was shoveling food into it's mouth. We also saw some sea anemone, mussels, and many other creatures. On the last day, one of my mom's old friends came over to our campsite for dinner. She video taped a video of us pretending to be caught in a tsunami. We do a different video every year of one of the dangers of the ocean to scare Devin and Brenna's parents. It's quite enjoyable.

On the 11th of August, I started going back to my homeschool enrichment program, Eagleridge. We have moved the school to a new campus, so it's going to take some getting used to. On the next day, August 12th, was the Perseid meteor shower. At nine pm at night we went into the front yard with our folding chairs to watch the shower. Earlier that day we had played a game of "five questions." "Five questions" is a game my mom came up with to help us learn. To play, she comes up with a subject and writes down five questions about it. Our part is to answer the questions. The subject this time was the Perseid meteor shower and our five questions were:

• When is the Perseid meteor shower?

• Will we be able to see the shower from here in Arizona?

• What causes a meteor shower?

• How often can we see the shower?

• Why is it called Perseid?

We printed off some papers, read, and surfed the web to come up with these answers to the questions:

• The Perseid meteor shower is on the night of August 12th.

• Arizona is the best place to see the shower because we'll be hitting it head on.

• A meteor shower is caused when Earth enters a cloud of debris left behind every time a comet nears the sun. The Perseid Shower is caused by the comet Swift-Tuttle.

• The Perseid Shower occurs every mid-August.

• The shower is called Perseid because the meteors seem to radiate out of the constellation, Perseus.

The few meteors we saw were fascinating. We didn't see many though because we couldn't see the constellation, Perseus. We couldn't see the Perseus constellation because there are too many street lights in our neighborhood. In fact, one time a person crashed into a street light by our house and part of the pole came crashing into our house, but that's a whole different story.

Gifted Education

I want to scream so therefore I will blog. The phone rang this morning at 8:02AM while we were sleeping in after a late night of sitting in lawn chairs in our front yard watching the Perseid meteor shower. The viewing coming after a week of immersing ourselves in meteors, comets, and all things astronomy. I didn't recognize the phone number so I wandered out to listen to the answering machine located in the kitchen. It was the school district wanting to know if Rebecca would be joining them this year in their "ELP." ELP stands for "Extended Learning Program," and from their own website, the program, "is designed to challenge intellectually and academically gifted students." One of my first questions is why these programs are always being disguised in covert acronyms: MGM - "Mentally Gifted Minors" (that's from WAY back in my elementary school days), GATE - "Gifted and Talented Education," and TAG - "Talented and Gifted Education." I'm sure there are more. I do believe it is the first step in the weed-out process by making the acronym so confusing that the ordinary parent cannot figure out what it is.

I mean no offense to the nice teacher calling to inquire about Rebecca, but the message itself made me laugh when she said, "We're practically on the other side of the world from you," in relation to where the school is located: distance to the school = 22 miles, distance to my work = 38 miles, distance to Mike's work = 29 miles, distance to the pediatrician = 27 miles, etc. Seeing a pattern? If 22 miles away is, "the other side of the world," then I would like to know how this program plans to broaden my child's scope of the world? So I looked again at the handout they sent home with Rebecca on the first day back to her homeschool enrichment program. The program meets once per week, all day, and some sample sessions are: "Snap It" - take pictures using iPhoto complemented with creative writing (CHECK: Does making her own vacation DVD this summer using iDVD count? How about writing and publishing her own posts for this blog?) "Fold It Up" - learn about Japanese art and origami. (CHECK: I think she earned a girl scout badge for origami because I remember the two of us one day making oodles of origami creatures to take to a meeting. How about our recent trip to the Phoenix Art Museum and checking out the Asian Art display? Her haiku notebooks she keeps?) "Flying High" - the principles of flight and designing a structure that will survive launch into orbit. (CHECK: Challenger Space Camp? The rocket she built and launched with her dad, the cub scout leader?) I'm sure these activities would be great if she wasn't ALREADY doing them! If she needed a break from the boring classroom where she was already way ahead of the rest of the class, then I would sign her up. However, here's where I want to make another case for homeschooling: I designed the curriculum with my child's individual needs already in mind!

New day and I'm still trying to figure out if I'm challenging my "gifted" child. I've decided to analyze what we're doing for signs of "gifted." Here is a true sample window into my world this morning:

• Around 8:30AM wandered out to find Rebecca on the couch reading Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell. She's excited about reading this book because she wants to partake in a book club with her friends, and this is the book they're reading. "Did you eat breakfast?" I say. "Yes, I had Nutella on toast, watermelon, and milk," she says.
• I make tea, and check to see if I'm up on Facebook Scrabble (a.k.a. "Mommy's teacher lounge.")
• Patrick wanders out and pours himself a bowl of Raisin Bran and a glass of orange juice. He sits at the table and starts reading his 933-page Philip Pullman novel that he selected for himself at Half Price Books earlier in the week. I laugh at parents struggling to find "A.R." (Accelerated Reader) books from the school's list when this process is so easy, and I want to brag for a minute: they both had near-perfect reading comprehension scores on their standardized tests without ever taking a single "A.R. comprehension test."
• Everybody's done with breakfast, and we decide it's time to start math. We spend nearly an hour on the following problem from Life of Fred: Beginning Algebra by Stanley F. Schmidt, Ph.D.: "Snow stopped breathing (he is an army sergeant that has kidnapped Fred, our main character through the math book, who is a five-year-old college math professor), and the nurse indicated to the doctor that there may be something wrong. The doctor concurred and ordered that Snow be given some medicine. What he said to the nurse was, '30 cc of 25% cough medicine,' figuring that if Snow would cough, he'd have to start breathing again. The nurse ran to the cabinet and found two bottles. One of them was too weak. It only contained 20% of the cough medicine by volume. The other bottle was too strong. It was 35% of the cough medicine by volume. The nurse had to mix the two together to get 30 cc of 25% medicine. (A "cc" is a cubic centimeter. That's about the volume of a small sugar cube.) How much of each were used?" This math question led us to pull out a bottle of Robitussin, a bottle of Axe (we didn't have another cough medicine), and a medicine syringe, as we did a physical demonstration of what was being asked. They made legends, devised an equation, added the values, discussed the hypothetical possibility of whether or not this medicine would solve Snow's medical issue, and they argued like all good 10 and 12-year-old siblings do. In the end, they solved the problem.
• After math, they went to work on writing blog posts for Our Homeschool Mystery since we have a loose goal of one blog post per month, and they haven't done one for August yet. While they write, I write too, as I am doing right now. I can't think of a better way to motivate them to write, then for them to watch me do it, as well.

As part of my research for this topic, I have been looking into what a true "gifted curriculum" entails to see if my morning fits the bill. I've written before about the feelings of self-doubt that homeschooling parents face from time to time. I think when anyone does something slightly different from the norm, there are always those times when you ask yourself, "Am I doing the right thing?" There's a lot less to think about when you're in the middle of the herd of sheep, following along, instead of going solo on a new path. So I went to the National Association of Gifted Children website, and clicked on "publications" which led me to their quarterly magazine: Parenting for High Potential. I'm sure this is a fine publication, but I can't get past the title. My question is: high potential for what? High potential to learn? A gifted child with a learning disability doesn't have any higher potential to learn than a non-gifted child. High potential for success? How do we measure success? High potential for happiness? Does having a "gifted education" make you any happier in life? Does being "gifted" make you any happier in life? One of the most prolific books I have ever read was Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. I'm not going to go too in-depth into this book other than to say: read it! He has many specific case examples of how getting along with others, empathy, and self-discipline have more to do with our futures than IQ.

I asked Rebecca if she wanted to go to the gifted school because ultimately we have a democratic household. Her response: "I would miss my friends." I said: "But maybe you could make new friends?" Her response: "The kids in that class are all nerdy boys, one annoying girl, and one sassy girl." Well, that sounds fun! After her first day back to her two-day-per-week enrichment program, the first thing she wanted to tell me when I picked her up was how she led the class around to all their rotating classrooms because she had "memorized the map" and knew where everything was (they are at a new campus.) This was the most fun part of her day. She enjoys being the leader. She likes it when her peers ask for her help with things. Why would I want to put her in a class where she is no longer the leader? When she gets in the "real world," will she not be with all walks of life -- followers and leaders? So . . . for all those people that criticize homeschooling for segregating children, I say to you: school segregates children! Homeschooling allows kids to learn at the pace and level appropriate for each child, and they can then make friends the way the rest of us do: through common interests, clubs, groups, church, sports, and shared social time together.
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Back to School

I am a spectator at this sport. I merely watch seemingly normal people lose their minds for one week every year as children return to school. Today was the first day back to my kids' homeschool enrichment program (a.k.a. "school two days per week") so we did pull out a backpack, throw some pencils and paper in it, grab a water bottle, and attend "Meet the Teacher" yesterday, but that pretty much covered it. They do have to change classes all day and find their classrooms, buy lunch in the cafeteria, and follow rules, but that's about it. They left the house dressed like they looked yesterday. They felt the same way about life as they did yesterday. Life is as it was yesterday -- before . . . (insert dramatic music here) . . . "BACK TO SCHOOL!"

My husband and I made the mistake of going to Walmart last night to look for a pool cover for our above-ground pool (a.k.a. "the ongoing chemistry set.") You would think that finding pool supplies in August in Arizona would be easy, but first you have to make your way through the entry maze of school supplies that occupy the first five aisles of the store and also a bin conveniently located at each register. I ended up deciding that I would take this opportunity to look for my special four-color ball-point pen since nurses must sign orders in red and chart in black, and who wants to carry two pens? I never did find my special pens, but after a while, I gave up looking because of the zombies standing in each aisle blankly staring at school supplies lists. Seriously? You don't already have these items at home, or you haven't picked them up already? They appeared in the stores two months ago!

When I got home, I decided to research what is being requested of kids these days on these school supplies lists. It's been four years since my kids attended regular school, and the last time I remember buying school supplies, we showed up to back-to-school night with two bags full of tissues and Ziplock baggies because that's what the teacher wanted, and I wanted to get in good with her early on. She was holding the key to my child's future so if she needed tissues, I would provide. As it turns out, tissues and baggies are still on most of the school supplies lists for school districts whose lists I found on the internet. I like to think that the key to a good education starts with a high quality sandwich bag. The rest of the items on these lists were common sense. I had to look up what a Duo-Tang was -- that teacher has got to be a forward-thinker as that term for folder is now passé. I saw several lists which specifically asked for "an old white sock." Do you know what this is for? It's for wiping the dry-erase board because only "an old white sock" will do. I can see myself specifically buying white socks just for that purpose.

On the topic of other clothing needs, I learn from Seventeen magazine that the hot back-to-school fashion trend for 2010 is leggings, boots, and oversize shirts which makes perfect sense when the forecast high today is 107°. I really don't understand why kids need new clothing to go back to school. What did they wear yesterday? Were they walking around in their underwear? The Bureau of Labor Statistics tells me that 77.5% of kids ages 6-17 years have a working mother. This leads me to believe that the majority of these children were in some sort of supervised childcare over the summer while their parents were working. Did they attend naked? Can they not wear the daycare clothes to school? I looked up the dress code for one of my local schools, and I was so impressed by this PDF, that I feel the need to put a link here: http://www.mpsaz.org/brinton/faqs/files/dress_code_1-22-2010.pdf. Really, they've thought of everything complete with photo graphics! This is an elementary school! I particularly like the part prohibiting the body piercings and tattoos, and I don't think they mean the Cracker Jack variety. Okay, so maybe the back-to-school clothes craze is for uniforms. Well, the National Center for Education Statistics tells me that for 2007-08 (their most recent statistic), only 18% of public schools require uniforms, and the percentage raises only slightly when you factor in all schools, public and private. So I don't think the average $600 per American family going towards back to school items is being spent on uniforms. The Back-to-School shopping craze was invented by retailers, and it remains the second biggest money-making time of the year for them, second only to Christmas. Here's where one must realize that education in America is already married to big business. Case in point, Monday's first day back-to-school lunch menu in my district included pizza and "Elf Grahams." Hmmm . . . I wonder who the "Elf" is??? Keebler? Do you know of any other cracker elf? We couldn't just say "crackers" on the menu?

Thankfully, we have Oprah to sort this out for us with a slide-show on how to "Beat the Back-to-School Blues" http://www.theonion.com/articles/back-to-school,16852/#1 Whoops! That's The Onion, but doesn't it look like the same slide-show!? Here's Oprah's: http://www.oprah.com/relationships/How-to-Ease-Back-into-the-School-Year/7#slide! Back-to-School is the most important thing going on in the world right now. That's my story, and I'm stickin' to it! We're not over-exaggerating or anything here . . .

Did America Create Fireworks, Too?

America is known for many things. We won the Revolutionary War, we defeated the Japanese in World War II, we conquered the Great Plains, plus more. We are also know for our ingenuity. I have to say, we have created quite a lot of stuff. From the atomic bomb to new battle strategies, we are a creative bunch.

In 1873, an Illinois farmer named Joseph Glidden created barbed wire on his kitchen table. Now sure I can make an owie fence, too, but the fact that an American made it is what really matters and besides, that's something I probably wouldn't think of making. Within ten years, a billion acres of the mid-west are parceled up by half a billion miles of barbed wire. That was a pretty ingenious idea. I can see where it was more helpful then to keep cows out of your yard, but it's still used today. They still use barbed wire to keep the cows in their pasture, but now it is also used on other places too, to keep the robbers away.

In 1879, Thomas Edison invents the electric light bulb. It would soon get a thousand patents. It's almost funny to think about how the light bulb has helped us. It is really helpful. Before the light bulb we had to go try and kill whales to get whale oil. He also created the first commercial power grid. In two years, he sets up 5,000 power plants. Five more years and he creates a further 127,000. The power plants are the ones giving the power to the light bulb so we have it to thank for the light bulb's light. It wouldn't be a light bulb without the light. Then it would just be a useless bulb.

In the 1940s, a single computer was the same size as a Greyhound bus with the same power as a modern PC. It needed as much power as a small town. Many people didn't believe the computer would go very far. Trust me, I don't think I can fit a school bus in my bedroom. In 1976, in a garage in northern California, two computer hobbyist, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, create the first practical, personal, computer (PC). In the 1980's there are just 300,000 PCs, but in the 1990s there are 67,000,000. I thought the 300,000 was a big number, well, compared to the people in the US that number is tiny.

America has created a lot of things. As I'm typing I am thinking of more. We would probably top on the list of "country that has invented the most stuff." I wouldn't be amazed if America had invented fireworks, too. Happy Fourth of July!

The People Who Really Won America

We recently finished our History Channel documentary America: the Story of Us, and since I wanted to do a Fourth of July post, I decided to tie them in with each other. I think that the biggest part of our culture is our rebellious spirit and our willing to fight for what we believe in. This can be demonstrated through the actions of the Pilgrims, the colonists, and the slaves.

The Pilgrims went a long way to insure this country came into existence. They went 3,000 miles to be exact. The Pilgrims pretty much sold everything they had to go to a place where there was nothing there. They did it all for religious freedom. Thousands of people died of diseases, starvation, and animals they did not know about. However, they found ways to survive with the help of the Indians, and kept on going with life without even thinking of trying to go back to England.

The colonists were probably the biggest rebels in history. They started with small riots like the Boston Tea Party and the Boston Massacre and then started the Revolutionary War to establish their country. The colonists fought the British for seven years and 25,700 people died, but they never gave in or said, "Fine you can have this place." They fought it out and were able to have that freedom the Pilgrims always dreamed about.

The slaves were also very rebellious. Harriet Tubman even went back and helped other slaves after she escaped through the Underground Railroad. The Civil War was then fought until the Confederate states submitted and the Thirteenth Amendment was signed. Even after the Civil War, racism still continued, and people rioted often against racism until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed to prevent it. Because of the rebels like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., racism is now much less. We even have the first black president because of these people's struggles.

Along with these rebellious successes, many other rebellions helped America like the Vietnam War protests, and other slightly more violent protests in which many people lost their lives defending their beliefs like the Kent State Riots. Either way, rebels are definitely a major part of the American culture, and I am proud to be one of them.