The American Legion Post 155 has been running its oratorical contests in Citrus County Area high schools since 1950.
Information packets with rules and entry forms for The American Legion Oratorical Contest have been given to the Guidance Counselors of Crystal River, Lecanto and Seven Rivers Christian High Schools, which are in the American Legion Post 155 area.
All high school students (no matter what grade) – public, private, or even home- schooled children – are eligible to enter.
The state is looking at regulating home ed:
Alaska has the most lax home-schooling law in the country.
No one even knows how many Alaska children stay home instead of attending a public or private school — they aren’t tracked or monitored.
Home-school advocates say the lack of reporting and regulation is the way it should be because it leaves parents free to make choices for the child. But others say it leaves an uncounted number of children at the mercy of parents who don’t have what it takes to give kids what they need to avoid being left behind in life.
The tension between the two camps — traditional bricks-and-mortar educators and fiercely independent home-schooling parents — has existed for years with each bad-mouthing the other for real or perceived inadequacies.
Should Alaska join the ranks of other states by tightening its home-schooling laws?
State Education Commissioner Larry LeDoux wants to at least ask the question.
The newspaper article is very one-sided. Lots of quotes from educrats; none from home educators.
Can anyone explain this? It makes no sense to me.
Help your country – be a real American
This is a test. Now is the time for all good men and women to come to the aid of their country. Plus, be an American. If you want the benefits of Americans, become an American instead of being an American at your convenience.I am an American for the freedom, opportunities, supposed freedom of speech, free to do everything I can, get everything I can from America without paying my blood, sweat and tears.
I am an American because I joined the military to get my education (GED), go to college, get a degree and live rent-free. However; if there’s a war, I have my rights, not a contract.
Warren Honor Jr., U.S. Army (retired)
Hope Mills
My favorite day of the year.
I don’t stand for the singing of that song, either. I hope the kids win.
James Carville: “If crazy were a pre-existing condition, the GOP wouldn’t be able to get insurance.”
World Nut Daily again lives up to its nickname and quotes a clueless doctor opposed to health insurance reform.
How would you describe the current system in America? Costly and imperfect, but dynamic and innovative. Consider this: I vividly remember how many seniors in my childhood church in the 1960s were on walkers or functionally blind. Visit the same church today and the demographics are essentially the same, but gone are most of the walkers and smoked glasses due to joint replacement and cataract surgery.
Yeah, health care in the early ’60s for the elderly was woeful. It’s MUCH better now, of course. I wonder what changed.
DWI in a school bus loaded w/ kids.
Let’s give it up for the new & improved Hubble!
Except when they’re not.
Especially ones who seem to go out of their way to be obtuse.
College for $99/month? Sign me my kids up.
COD has an excellent suggestion to counter the g-school wingnuts.
Our kids are going to watch, too (assuming they’re out of bed by then).
Most disturbing is that the White House has collaborated with the Department of Education to distribute a study guide to accompany the speech. The guide is chalk full of writing assignments for students, including an instruction for students to write a letter to themselves about what they can do to help President Obama.
Chalk full? LMAO!
Rae Ellen Virgilio of Baltimore doesn’t have a clue what homeschooling is or isn’t.
Home schooling has never meant “unschooling.”
An ignorant teacher spouting off without the proper background in the subject matter? Whodathunkit?
Threatening to homeschool for a day because Obama is giving a 10 minute speech about working hard in school?
I think the answer to the question posed above is obvious.
September, when every paper in the country feels compelled to run a “homeschooling is really on the grow” piece.
Including my hometown paper.
The school bus just rumbled past our house. 6:38 a.m.
Boy, we have certainly downgraded the meaning of the word “professional.”
Public underestimates teacher assistants
I could not let the Aug. 16 Forum response by Charles Hill (“Teachers, detention, sports all in equation”) go unanswered without setting him straight, even if he was “just kidding.”
I cannot allow him to continue to perpetuate the myth that teacher assistants merely pass out drawing paper and crayons. We are professionals. We all have at least a two-year college degree and many have a four-year degree. We work with small groups in the classroom for both math and literacy. Teacher assistants run computer labs and are even Web masters for school Web sites. We are trained to screen hearing and vision problems for referral to the school nurse. We take loving care of special-needs children.
Oh, by the way, we also transport your children safely from home to school and back by driving the school bus. I could go on and on, Mr. Hill, but please come see for yourself and volunteer in our schools. With all the budget cuts, we will certainly need someone to pass out drawing paper and crayons.
Erika Brand, vice president, Cumberland County Schools Association of Teacher Assistants
Fayetteville
Never ever again buy Bright Effects CFLs as the MTBF is probably around 3 months.
What a tale!
A friend at work asked about buying a graphing calculator for his daughter. The calculators run around $80 – $100, but I thought she could probably just use Excel, as it’s only for homework. I wrote this simple spreadsheet and thought that someone here might be able to use it, too.
Caveats:
1) You’ll need either Excel ($$$) or Open Office (free). Google Docs doesn’t create the graph.
2) You’ll have to create whatever function you need in cell D2 and copy it down to D1002.
3) Be careful when using trig functions. The default for Excel is radians. If you don’t specify degrees, you might get some strange-looking graphs. The way to do this is not very intuitive. In fact, it’s always looked backwards to me. For example, to graph sin(x) from -180 to 180 degrees, enter the two values for the starting and ending x and enter the formula =SIN(RADIANS(C2)) in D2 and then copy down.
Have fun, and if you get stuck drop me a line.
Conclusion: Highly overrated
I received a bottle of Blair’s Ultra Death sauce for an anniversary present (What? You didn’t know that 23 is the Hot Sauce anniversary?). I’ve been a bit afraid to try it. The second listed ingredient is the Ghost Chili, hottest known pepper, and the woman who sold us the bottle swore that it was deadly hot.
So, I finally worked up the nerve and put a big ol’ splat of a drop in a bowl of enchilada soup. Meh. It was warm, no doubt. But I was really expecting a lot worse (i.e., better). I then stuck my finger down in the bottle and tasted a bit undiluted. It gets you in the back of the throat, but the burn really wasn’t there. Either my taste buds have been completely acclimated, eating as we do Indian food most nights, or Blair’s just ain’t that hot (both literally and figuratively).
Don’t believe the hype. If you have a bottle of the significantly less expensive Da Bomb, there’s no need to invest in Blair’s Ultra Death.
The schoolies are heading back to prison and the HEKs are still enjoying the summer.
World Nut Daily goes from universal health care to schools to a totalitarian gov’t. All in about 500 words.
Yep, they earn their nickname every single day.
Don’t enroll and save even more money by homeschooling independently.
In MS for a family wedding after a week of R&R in Daytona Beach, FL. Back on Monday.
I’ve been rubbernecking at the total disaster that is ONN way too much lately. Because I knew instantly how they will frame this good news that the APA will officially get off the scared talked straight bandwagon.
Another useful poll from the wackos. I’m surprised only 38% think the Republicans are too liberal.
One of the schools on Anthony’s short list made Princeton Review’s “Best Colleges” list. But I really have to question some of the criteria they use to rate the schools:
Colleges were rated on academics, admissions selectivity, financial aid, quality of life, fire safety and a green rating.
10,000 posts will give you such a crick in the neck!
Tucked into another article on HEKs and g-school sports was this tidbit:
Many home schoolers say they aren’t willing to trade their freedom for sports. Home school students in Georgia must submit monthly attendance reports to the local public school superintendent…
Do GA homeschoolers really have to submit monthly reports? Why? Talk about a waste of time and money!
I’m guessing that John Eberhart rides the bench:
Home school, no play
I am writing this in response to your July 15 article (Neighbors section) about home schoolers being allowed to play high school or junior high sports.It would be so unfair to allow a student taking just one course to play. How can you monitor academic eligibility? Suppose they take “cooking” or “wood shop,” an easy “A,” while other full-time students struggle to balance six to seven courses.
Also, if I were a coach, I would never allow a part-time home schooler playing time and sit one of my players who is a full-time student. I don’t care how well they practice or how good they are, if they are part-time and home-schooled, they never see one second of playing time. Suppose all athletes withdraw full-time and become part-time? What a mess!
If you decide to be home-schooled, then you voluntarily give up extra-curricular activities.
If you want to play, go full time to school. The OHSAA I feel will stop part-time students from playing full-time sports.
JOHN EBERHART
Toledo
If the State allows HEKs to play g-school sports, coaches would have to be idiots to sit them solely because of their homeschooled status. Coaches are fired for losing, after all.
Make sure you read all the way to the bottom of this LOTD to get the punchline:
Fading freedoms jeopardize survival
To take from a long-ago advertising campaign, “Where’s the stimulus beef?” When we were told by the Obama administration that 3 million to 4 million jobs would be saved or created by these stimulus plans, a free pass was issued without so much as a debate in Congress! Most congressmen didn’t even read the bill they were signing.
Summer is half over and the economic/employment numbers are less than encouraging. Department stores are already running Christmas specials hoping they can meet their financial forecasts. The private sector is losing more and more jobs while, in contrast, only the federal government has gained in employment prominence.
Our Founding Fathers created this republic; but a republic can only survive if its populace wishes to maintain its economic freedoms. We’ve put unions and government in control of automakers. Our banking system is nearly solely owned by the Fed and we print money as if plucking it from a money tree in the backyard.
Don’t do yourself the disservice of trying to convince me that “We the People” own these institutions. To date, I’ve yet received my dividend check or interest payments on monies loaned to these “government/taxpayer”- owned businesses. You’re witnessing government takeover at its finest.
Wake up and smell what your government is shoveling down your throats, people. Without getting educated and understanding the course our country is on, there’ll be no end in sight. Our Founding Fathers’ legacy is quickly turning into a dilapidated mess. FairTax!
John N. Horton
Fayetteville
Not that the rest of it was persuasive in the least, but adding the “FairTax!” [sic] tag was just icing on the idiocy.
I find this ONN poll just a bit slanted.
And here are my photos from the trip. Chris did an excellent job documenting it, so I’ll just refer you there for the write up. I’d only add that my camera appears to have been somewhat damaged by the trip in the Tardit. It seems to have gotten stuck a couple years in the future.
From my favorite fundy/wing-nut site:
“Most individuals, particularly [poor] families with children…, are poor because in good times or bad, the parents don’t work very much — they work on average only about 16 hours a week — and also because 34 percent of all American children are born out of wedlock without a father in the home,” he notes. “Those are the two principle causes of poverty in the U.S. today. And if we had a normal work rate among these families, and if we didn’t have this very high rate of out-of-wedlock childbearing, virtually all the child poverty in the U.S. would disappear.”
And if frogs had wings they wouldn’t bump their asses on the ground. The “Christians” at ONN are worried that Obama is going to provide more money for the poor. Oh noes! It seems to me that I recall Jesus saying something about feeding the poor. Why do the “Christians” at ONN hate Jesus?
Haven’t done one of these in a while. The blithe “of course” at the end is a bit jarring. I disagree, of course. 🙂 Socialism, communism, capitalism are economic systems. Neither evil nor virtuous. And to just assume, without presenting a single bit of evidence, that any system but laissez-faire capitalism is “evil” is just facile. But this is what passes for discourse around here.
Where you get help defines socialism
“Maybe we should all take care of each other . does that make me a socialist?” The political cartoon in the July 7 Observer depicts an anti-socialist, anti-health plan person. When he hits hard times, he begins to change his mind about President Obama’s health plan and about socialism in general. I think the cartoonist agrees.
But all of us taking care of each other is not socialism. Having the government do it for us is socialism. And, of course, socialism is evil.
Kenneth N. Haynes
Vass
The Tax Foundation just sent out this breathless announcement:
Democrats’ Health Care Plan Pushes Top Tax Rates Over 50% in 39 States
Couples Earning More than $1 Million Hit with 5.4% Surtax
Washington, DC- A third updated Tax Foundation report shows that 39 states would see top tax rates exceed 50% under a health care funding plan announced today by House Democrats.
The latest proposal – one of several floated on Capitol Hill in the past few days and the third analyzed by the Tax Foundation since Friday – would impose a surtax of 1 percent on married couples with adjusted gross incomes (AGI) between $350,000and $500,000 (singles between $280,000 and $400,000); 1.5 percent on couples with incomes between $500,000 and $1 million (singles earning between $400,000 and $800,000); and 5.4 percent on couples earning more than $1 million (singles beyond $800,000).
Are we really supposed to feel pity for folks who earn $1M+/year?
The floor, that is.
All of the transition pieces are in. The quarter round molding was cut and glued (yes, glued) to the baseboard this a.m. The new area rug (which covers most of the floor I just laid!) went down a little bit ago.
And I’m beat.
SecularHomeschool.com is just getting started. I like the domain name.
It seems the GOP has won their War on Science:
According to a recent Pew survey, 55% of scientists are Democrats and only 6% are Republicans.
The same survey reports that a majority of scientists self-identify as liberal and only 9% as conservative.
A reader is looking for recommendations for a good secular high-school level biology curriculum. Any suggestions?
Do Muslims and Christians worship the same god?
The latest ONN poll. I was somewhat surprised by their results.