CHEC Conference

WOW! This was three days of learning by firehose. I attended the Christian Home Educators of Colorado Convention last weekend and it was quite an experience. The only other home school conventions (if you can call them that) I've attended in the past have been held in high school gyms and have about 20 vendors displaying their curriculum. For three days straight this convention had no less than 5 (usually 10) different speakers presenting a myriad of topics at the same time, throughout the entire day and over 100 vendors displaying their products. It was a bit overwhelming, but incredibly informative. The only problem is that I wanted to hear three different talks that were occurring simultaneously. However, that was solved by the purchase of CD's with every presentation recorded.

Silly me thinking I would attend this huge thing and not buy anything, except the presentations. It's not that we REALLY NEED more curriculum. CC pretty much has us set up for the year. But, there is just some great stuff out there. I guess when you look at all the purchases I really only got two curriculum items (then Andy added a third for himself, Greek) and the rest is fun stuff or home schooling support. I actually purchased a Nutrition 101 curriculum. I know most of the info in there, but I found it to be a great presentation of the information I know for children. It explains and illustrates what different nutrients and toxins do to our bodies so my children can make their own informed choices about what to eat rather than me always saying 'no'. Each lesson is always followed by a recipe as well so they get some hands on experience making a healthy snack. This part fits right in with our cooking on Fridays. The other curriculum is a poetry memorization program by Andrew Pudewa of Institute for Excellence in Writing. It looks like a great addition to our CC plan and will greatly benefit the boys throughout their lives. I also got some of the Drive Thru History DVDs. A friend in Eugene introduced us to these and we loved them. They have a new American History one which will be a nice follow-up to our year of U.S. History with CC. I also got the Greece and Rome ones since Gladiators are always a huge hit and I find the life of Paul fascinating. Another item I got are more of the books by Chuck Black in the Kingdom Series. The boys love these and they have come out with two more in the series and then three other books that are about knights going on different missions and putting to work the character qualities they have each developed. Chuck was there so he signed a book for each of the boys. Lastly, I joined CHEC and HSLDA. Colorado home schooling laws are much different than Oregon and we have to keep track of all our hours spent in 'school'. This makes me a little nervous since I've never kept track of anything we do :). CHEC will help make sure we are complying with all the CO laws and hold all our family records for us so I'm confident this is a wise decision. HSLDA is the Home School Legal Defense Association which we have contemplated joining/supporting since we became official home schoolers. However, I have always felt it cost too much when I could buy more curriculum with that money instead. I no longer care about the cost and would urge any home schooling family reading this to join asap. They are the ones that jumped in and got the whole California HS fiasco turned around. Now they are fighting for something much bigger than that, but I'll go into it further down in this entry. On to the speakers I heard...

I was partial to the talks given by Andrew Pudewa so I attended several of his. He is an engaging speaker and spoke on a variety of topics with writing being his specialty. The first talk of his that I attended was titled, "Rebuilding your Education Paradigm: Teaching for Freedomship." It was informative, but a bit depressing. First, he gave an over view of education in our country (that's the depressing part). Most of this was drawn from the book, "An Underground History of American Education" by John Taylor Gatto (I've read "Dumbing Us Down" also by him, but have now added this to my reading list as well). The author is a two-time NY state teacher of the year. After winning the second time he quit teaching and told everyone in his speech at the award ceremony that the only way he was able to achieve this title is that he bent every rule in the book and even broke the law in order to educate his students. In this book he addresses our educational system and traces the roots of it. He says there is nothing wrong with our educational system because it's working just as it was designed to work. We've adopted a non-thinking educational concept and those of us that decide to learn to think do so in spite of our education, not because of it. Our system came from the Prussians who adapted their system from the Spartans. The Spartans knew that if they got the children young enough they could make a powerful army and that's just what they did and succeeded. The Prussians saw this model and decided it would work to also make a predictable and controllable work force. They educated 90% of the people in this way. Another 9% were educated differently so they would be able to lead the 90% and then the last 1% were the elite who controlled it all. When the industrial revolution came about in the US this is exactly the model our country followed because they wanted people educated enough to work in the factories, but who could still be controllable and predictable. Throughout the last 100 years anyone with any real power in the US (some presidents excepted) would not put their children into our country's school system. My guess is that they educate them through tutors mainly because they do not want them to be part of that 90% who are 'factory' workers and not problem solvers. Anytime you put a text book in front of a child you are giving them answers and telling them how to think before they ever have the opportunity to ask questions. Pudewa refers to text books as "predigested pablum for immature minds." They don't allow a person to think. They are given the text book and told to learn it because it is full of the answers. Then they take a test and need to give the answers they learned in the text book. How do these people learn to think? How do you think? If you can't ask questions you can't think. As Pudewa says, immitate your mom. When she wants information she knows how to ask questions. To think you need to become a master question asker to yourself. Have a constant conversation going to help you get stuff out of your brain, but remember you can never get anything out of it that wasn't in there in the first place. "The quality of your life will depend on the quality of questions you ask." School only allows you to give answers, not ask questions. In fact, if you give the right answers you pass, if you give the wrong answers you fail, but if you ask questions you will most likely be kicked out. So, after Pudewa destroyed our paradigm of what we were raised to think education is he started talking about what education should be. Most of us approach HS with the attitude that we need to cover all the bases which I can now see as impractical and will leave us all knowing nothing about everything which is pretty much what we graduate from school knowing. The desire comes from the experience we know, but also stems from what he refers to as idolatry. We bow down to the gods of the SAT and ACT and to the gods of comparison when looking at other children. Pudewa talks of only three subjects needing to be covered, Character (honesty, caring, nice, etc - the most important), Knowledge (customized for individual missions in life) and Skills (language, math, artistic). He also says to explore a child's talents and encourage those, but not to worry so much about a child's weak points. When a business is hiring they don't look for someone who is weak in the areas they need and decide they want to improve those areas in that person. No, they look for someone who is strong in the tasks they want accomplished. We all have strengths and weaknesses that will be with us for life we just need to know how to handle them. He also mentioned that from the time one of their children was 15 until she was 16 and a half years old they did zero academics with her. She had major character issues and that is all they worked on. When they were done with that time period she went on to finish high school on time, entered college and got straight A's. I found this a great presentation with which to begin. The history of our school system from which I graduated was depressing, but left me with much confidence that our decision to home school is the right decision. This is always a good thought to hold onto when trying to get through one of those many tough days.

The next speaker I heard was Kevin Swanson talking on the "Core Curriculum." Kevin is the founder of CHEC and a pastor here in Colorado. This was also a talk emphasizing character (God knows this is an area we are struggling in right now). We can educate in one of two ways, with either a view that the world just exists, God is not relevant and there is no absolute for ethics or with a Christian worldview and a healthy fear of God. He goes on to talk about man's empire and how it is power driven and the fact that all of man's empires fall. The only empire that will not fall is God's so we should be giving our children a history of God's empire as well as the history of this world and man's empires. The greatest men were great because they had passion and we should have passion in raising our children to know God is real, to love God and His Word.

For the third lecture I went back to Andrew Pudewa and heard him speak on "Humor in teaching writing and speaking." Another reason I attended many of his seminars is because I'm tutoring our CC writing and grammar class this year and need all the help I can get. First, I learned a new word, gelotology, the study of humor. He talked about the importance of using humor throughout our lives because laughing is just plain good for us. It also increases attentiveness. If the students think something will be funny every 10 minutes or so they will pay more attention so they won't miss the funny part. When teaching it is very simple to insert humor, even if you are not generally a funny person. Humor can be learned. He suggests bringing a good joke (pertaining to grammar in this case) to start the class. It helps get kids there on time since they don't want to miss it. Also, use a joke to explain a grammar concept (diagram it). Humor is learnable and these are the 10 things that make something funny:
1) misunderstandings
2) impossible absurdities (crazy image)
3) stating the obvious unexpectedly
4) physical humor that is unpredictable
5) hyperbole and exageration
6) understatement
7) play on words (double meaning, puns, reapplication)
8) irony
9) common sense or painful truth
10) character traits, self-deregation

A book he suggests to help in grammar class is Anguished English by Lederer.


The fourth seminar I attended was the one on Nutrition where I decided to buy the nutrition curriculum. There wasn't a whole lot of new information presented, but I got to look at the curriculum and obviously liked it enough to purchase it. I'm still waiting for it to arrive in the mail (it was at the printers during the convention) so we haven't started using it yet.

I then listened to a bonus lunch seminar by Andrew Pudewa, yet again. This was the first time he had given this lecture and was doing so because he is passionate about it. All the other lectures he gave at the conference are also available in mp3 format on his website (www.excellenceinwriting.com). I would highly recommend listening to all of these. They are $3 a piece to download and well worth every cent. Anyway, this lecture concerned the Parental Rights Amendment and UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). First he addressed the CRC which is quite a scary document. Among other things is allows a child to seek governmental review of every parental decision with which the child disagreed (these government workers would be easily accessible in the schools), spankings would be illegal and children would acquire a legally enforceable right to leisure, etc. The ratification of this treaty would cause it to supersede the laws of all 50 states when it comes to children and parents. The only kind of law that can override the treaty is the Constitution of the United States. At this time parents have no constitutionally protected rights whatsoever (Justice Scalia pointed this out in 2000). Therefore, HSLDA has drafted a 28th amendment and is working on getting it to Congress. This is not an easy task and they need the support of many. There have been 27 amendments in the history of our constitution with the first 10 being done immediately. The 28th is called the Parental Rights Amendment and states:
Section 1:
The liberty of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children is a fundamental right.
Section 2:
Niether the United States nor any State shall infringe upon this right without demonstrating that its governmental interest as applied to the person is of the highest order and not otherwise served.
Section 3:
No treaty may be adopted nor shall any source of international law be employed to supercede, modify, interpret, or apply to the rights guaranteed by this article.

In short, it's saying that fit parents should be allowed to direct the upbringing of their children. This is a fight we are passionate about and if you feel the same I would urge you to get involved. We are sitting down this week to write our senators (we get to do this again because we already did it once in Oregon) and urge them to vote NO on the CRC. Then, we will write our Representatives and ask them to co-sponsor the Parental Rights Amendment. There is also a petition to sign regarding this amendment. They are hoping to have 4.5 million signatures when the bill goes to the House of Reps. You can go to www.parentalrights.org for more information. This was not a very uplifting talk, but it was good to be able to walk out of there with a plan of action to do our part.

On to the next speaker, Little Bear Wheeler. His topic was "Teaching Your Children to Stand Alone." He had a very interesting perspective on this that I did not expect. He focused on the controlling spirit of the parents (especially those from dysfunctional homes) rather than what to actually teach our children. Us parents from dysfunctional homes learn to isolate ourselves and distrust others, thus becoming more controlling and then home schooling feeds this need to control. How can our children stand alone when we control all? Controlling parents who decide to send their children off to school at 5 years old at least relinquish some of this control, but those of us that HS need to learn how to release our children from our control. Our motives for doing things should be based on biblical truth. We need to let our children experience pain so they can become the men and women God wants them to be. Let them venture forth and try and fail. We can still be positive and encouraging through their trials, but most importantly, we need to humble ourselves before our children.

My next Pudewa seminar was on "Teaching and Evaluating Writing." Another great lecture by him, but hard to write about here. It was more hands on with us doing examples and making a flowchart that I do not know how to post here. The lecture is well worth listening to and you can find that on his website as well.

The last lecture I heard I actually got to go with Andy since he was there on Saturday. Again, it was Pudewa and the title was "Teaching Boys Who Would Rather be Out Building Forts." Excellent, whether you're a parent of boys or girls. Much of his info came from the book "Why Gender Matters" by Dr. Sax. Dr. Sax advocated single sex classrooms and through his studies and education there are now about 700 public school classrooms that are segregated by sex. The students in these classrooms have test scores that doubled the expected increase due to their change in environment. Dr. Sax's main argument for this are the basic physiological differences in boys and girls that each are born with and cannot be changed. Their vision is different. Boys have more optic nerve connections to their rods which enables them to see direction and speed more clearly and girls have more connections to their cones which enables them to see color and texture more clearly. Hence, boys tend to draw single color verbs and girls will draw mulitple color nouns. Nouns look a whole lot better than verbs when drawn so boys don't get much praise for their drawings. Girls have better hearing and their whole brain is active when listening. Boys don't hear as well and only half their brain shows activity when listening. Boys learn better when the temperature is 68-69 degrees and girls learn better when the temp is 74-75 degrees. This is because learning is stressful and boys need to be cooler to lower their stress whereas girls need to be slightly warmer to lower their stress. I thought one of the most fascinating differences found in these studies had to do with pain. When boys feel pain their brain clarifies, but when girls feel pain their brain tends to fuzz over (probably why we end up having more than one child most of the time). This is why boys will often bite or hit themselves when working on a tough problem. These differences alone can explain a lot about the number of boys diagnosed with ADD/ADHD. The sheer torture of putting a boy in a standard classroom with chairs would bring out many actions that would lead a teacher to think they have ADD. In the single sex classrooms the boys have the option of using chairs and almost 100% of the time the chairs sit unused stacked against the wall. Pudewa went on to explain the art and science of motivation and how relevancy makes learning easy and irrelevancy makes it hard. But, there are four types of relevancy: 1) intrinsic-interested just because you are, 2)inspired - someone you know gets you interested, 3)contrived - need to learn something that's necessary so make it into a game, 4) enforced - avoid this whenever possible. Children like to do what they are good at so you should teach at this level 60-80% of the time. They want to do what they think they can do so teach here 20-40% of the time. They hate to do and refuse to do what they think they cannot do so don't even try to teach here. Two secret weapons to use at all times while teaching: say 10 positive things before criticizing and smile. Another great lecture that I would recommend listening to off his website.

So, those are the seminars I heard and I can't wait to listen to the rest when I get the recordings. One overriding consensus from the speakers that caught me a bit off guard, but was mentioned or at least alluded to by all is the demise of our country. For two decades now our country has been the longest standing civilization in the history of the world (we beat out Rome at 200 years) however, every civilization falls at some point. It's not a question of "if" it will, but when it will. One of the speakers even said that he's told his children he does not think they will die in the country in which they were born because that country will not exist. Our country's administration is very corrupt and is greatly contributing to this demise. Are they any more corrupt than other administrations in our country's history? Probably not, but due to the nature of technology and our world today that corruption is much more far reaching than ever before. Couple this with a society that is sinful by nature and has been educated to not think for themselves, but wait to be fed the next sound bite of the moment, and it's not pretty. These are interesting times and I'm thankful that I can trust God is in control of it all and His plan is much larger than any one person's agenda.

Besides listening to some great speakers and browsing the many vendor booths I also worked at the CC booth for four hours. The number of campuses in Colorado has doubled since last year so there are many people looking into this. It was fun answering questions and trying to educate people on what the classical model of education is. The more I learn about classical education and children the more I'm convinced it is the perfect way to educate 98% of children (I'm sure there is an exception somewhere, but I can't think of one, but thought I should leave room for it). However, it's not perfect for most adults because we don't get it and are stuck in our educational mold from when we were children. So, when parents asked me how do they know if it's right for their child it was a difficult question to answer without sounding offensive and I certainly didn't answer it as bluntly as above, but tried to help them work through it.

The time at the conference was also a time for us to take advantage of living close to relatives for the first time since we had children. The boys got to hang out with Papa all day on Thursday and Friday and then spent the night there on Friday night and stayed all day Saturday as well. They had a great time going to the driving range, the movies, the shooting range, taking bike rides and going out to eat. They can't wait for an opportunity to do it again.

That's it for a record post. I've spent several days trying to get this put in here. If you're still with me at this point I hope you gleaned some new information. I know I sure did over these three days.