I just returned from a three-week trip to northern Spain and Portugal. Every day, every minute, I was living outside my comfort zone. Granted, I was having a fabulous time, given that I was encountering new people, places and things, learning about new cultures, food, and different ways of living life.
Yet, it took me time to adjust and modify behavior and thought from city to city. The most uncomfortable moments came with food. I didn’t like the food (I am a plant-based eater), and I dreaded dinners. But I coped and smiled as my fellow travelers gushed over the local cuisine.
Travel isn’t easy. Every hotel room was different. Bus rides from city to city were tiring. Simple movements like walking and standing provided some discomfort. But we all moved past our comfort zones and explored an exciting and inspiring part of the world.
If you have ever gone on a blind date, you’ve been outside your comfort zone. If you’ve ever walked into a happy hour where you don’t know a soul, you’ve been outside your comfort zone.
If you’ve attended an academic class that was outside your learning experience (that would be a math class for me), you’ve been outside your comfort zone. Just think how stressful it is to learn new technology. Most of us are way out of our comfort zones in that arena.
We all have fears that stop us from stepping into our potential, into a new and different level of personal expectations. The comfort zone is a place where fear is minimized so that we can function at an acceptable level in our daily lives.
However, acceptable can put us to sleep mentally, physically, emotionally, and socially. We develop a level of reaction that can flatline and energy deprivation takes over. I’ve had introverted boyfriends that never adjusted to new and different social situations. It was painful and our relationship never grew.
Let’s take a different view!
You don’t always realize how much you give up for the sake of comfort. In fact, dedicating your life to the comfort zone is overrated. Instead of plunging into an exciting life experience, you retreat, step back, or run from what can be a transformative moment.
In an effort to minimize your greatest fears, you can be sacrificing your heart’s deepest desires. In the name of comfort, you sacrifice potential.
Most great motivational speakers talk about confronting your deepest fears. Yet, this is precisely where life begins to take on meaningful experiences as you start the process of transformation.
Easier said than done.
Moving through our fears takes courage. It might include risk. You could encounter limitations, become intimidated, and start to retreat, instead of embracing your human potential.
The following are 3 ways to manage life outside your comfort zone.
Most days are filled with stress as you encounter a myriad of individual inconveniences. Some of these inconveniences turn into struggles. They get more complicated with time and negativity settles into your unconscious with a vengeance.
When I taught yoga, I would always give the following mantra to my students: Struggle is overrated. When you struggle, you encounter your ego, and that ego gets in the way of staying present, and being present helps you to feel comfortable in any environment.
Yesterday, I spent almost 18 hours trying to download an operating system for my computer and failed. I was devastated. It turned into a battle with myself. It should have worked. I did exactly what was told me. And yet, the rules of the tech game failed me.
In my mind, I failed, too, because I was operating under the delusion that I was using a Mac product, but because I was out of my comfort zone and not present, I was actually using a PC product. Obviously, I was far from present. Struggle had won the day.
But struggle is ubiquitous.
I took a walk today, concluding that everything we encounter probably takes us out of our comfort zone in one way or another.
The idea is that most struggle comes from a limited belief system. You want to be expressive, but your mental functions are limited. Your ego says: It’s risky or dangerous. You’ll be rejected, or criticized, or you will fail.
The struggle is between an ego that does not want to expand your mental boundaries and the unleashed desire for potential. You can’t blame the ego. It’s the job of the ego to keep you safe and that doesn’t correspond to reaching your full potential, which is limitless.
One of my closest friends once said to me, “Behind every door, there is an opportunity. But to get to the opportunity, you must understand the possibilities.”
This is when imagination takes over and change becomes a reality. This is when you begin to see beyond your comfort zone. You can dare to be comfortable outside the familiar.
Imagine what your life would feel like if you decided to exercise every morning no matter the weather. You will begin to see changes that are pleasing. You will begin to see different, more pleasant results from your actions. It is then you are making choices from outside your comfort zone.
You grow stale by making decisions inside your comfort zone. Sometimes you don’t like your choices. They are repetitive and uninspiring. In effect, you create a kind of been there, done that paradigm.
Different results require doing things differently. That’s what makes life exciting, new, and inspiring. You begin to realize that the comfort zone is a mental and emotional trap that perpetuates limited thoughts and feelings daily, weekly, and monthly.
Take a risk and go outside your comfort zone and discover beliefs and ideas that are new to your consciousness.
Anyone who has ever accomplished anything great has done so with the element of risk – not necessarily physical or emotional danger, but a risk that makes the ego concerned.
If the ego doesn’t know how to deal with new situations based on new beliefs, then the prognosis for change and growth is overtly negative.
For some people, the idea of doing something they haven’t done before can be daunting. They might lose control, find themselves in a negative or compromising situation, have their feelings hurt, or any number of uncomfortable reactions.
Sure, it is a risk. But the real risk is to maintain the status quo, and that means no human growth. The results are unhappiness or worse, depression.
When life gets uncomfortable, smile, laugh, find humor, express your truth, project your personality, and go for it because what have you got to lose? Nothing.
Regroup your belief systems, re-stage your life, re-orient your mind set. Travel, be curious, be bold. Search for more exciting possibilities and let your new potential shine through.
What kind of techniques do you use to manage your emotions when you step outside your comfort zone? What is your least favorite “outside your comfort zone” experience? Please share your stories with the community!
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]]>Explore Wonder Math, the revolutionary Math Tuition Website, where storytelling intertwines with live teaching, pre-teaching, and real incentives. This Wonder Math review unveils an innovative approach that transforms the learning experience, captivating students and revolutionizing math education.
At Wonder Math, storytelling captivates young minds, making learning a truly immersive experience.
Live Teaching sessions provide personalized attention, fostering a deep understanding of mathematical concepts.
Pre-Teaching offers students a head start on upcoming topics, empowering them with confidence and proficiency.
Additionally, real incentives motivate and reward students as they progress through the curriculum.
Join me as we explore the remarkable world of Wonder Math, where storytelling and innovative teaching methods unlock the wonders of mathematics.
Affiliate links are used on this page.
Wonder Math stands out as an exceptional math program, driven by its one-of-a-kind approach that combines storytelling and active learning techniques.
What makes Wonder Math unique is its ingenious use of captivating narratives to teach math concepts making math fun!
These story-narratives immerse students in a world where numbers and calculations become fascinating adventures.
This way of teaching not only makes learning enjoyable but also instills a sense of confidence and positivity in students towards this often-dreaded subject.
This unique methodology not only helps struggling learners but also ignites a love for mathematics in all students, making Wonder Math an exceptional and affordable program in math education.
Keep in mind that Wonder Math is a secular program.
Wonder Math’s curriculum is tailored to cater to the specific needs of struggling math learners, focusing on fostering math competency and instilling a positive attitude towards math.
The program is flexible and better paced than normal, allowing students to choose a schedule that works for them.
With the support of dedicated tutors in small class settings, Wonder Math provides personalized assistance and guidance to ensure students’ progress and success.
Yes, two – the visual, kinesthetic and logical learning styles.
For visual learners, Wonder Math incorporates visual aids, diagrams, and illustrations that provide clear and vivid representations of mathematical concepts.
Visual learners can visualize mathematical relationships, patterns, and operations more effectively, enhancing their understanding and retention of the material.
Kinesthetic learners, on the other hand, benefit from hands-on activities and interactive exercises incorporated into Wonder Math’s curriculum.
These learners thrive through physical engagement and movement, allowing them to manipulate objects, solve problems through tactile experiences, and actively participate in the learning process.
By incorporating kinesthetic elements, Wonder Math ensures that these learners are fully immersed in their math education.
Logical learners, characterized by their preference for logical reasoning and systematic thinking, find Wonder Math’s curriculum particularly suitable.
The program emphasizes logical sequencing, step-by-step problem-solving approaches, and the application of logical principles in mathematical operations.
By aligning with the logical learning style, Wonder Math enables these students to grasp complex mathematical concepts and build a solid foundation for their analytical skills.
Wonder Math exclusively offers its curriculum in an online format, providing a flexible and interactive learning experience.
With the convenience of accessing the program from any device with internet access, students can learn at their own pace and in their preferred environment.
The online curriculum incorporates multimedia resources, progress tracking, and real-time feedback, fostering engagement and personalized learning.
Wonder Math is more eclectic than anything.
They use a story-telling technique that has the flavor of Charlotte Mason living books and the literature-based approach.
With minimal hands-on teaching or supervision required, Wonder Math empowers students to take charge of their math learning independently.
This not only frees up time for parents but also cultivates valuable skills such as self-discipline and problem-solving in students.
The online platform provides accessibility and flexibility, allowing students to learn independently.
By incorporating Wonder Math into their daily routines, parents can ensure their children receive quality math education while fostering independence and responsibility in their learning journey.
No, Wonder Math’s comprehensive program does not require parents to purchase any additional extras or supplements.
No. It only caters for one age at a time.
Wonder Math’s program is designed to focus on one age group at a time, specifically targeting the critical ages of 7 to 11, during which it fosters math competency, cultivates a positive attitude towards math, and builds a foundation of confidence.
Yes!
The program incorporates storytelling, active learning methods, and interactive elements that captivate students’ attention and make math enjoyable.
This multi-varied approach ensures that learners with different preferences and learning styles can find the techniques that resonate with them.
Additionally, Wonder Math’s curriculum allows for flexibility in terms of pacing.
Students can progress through the material at their own speed, ensuring that they have ample time to grasp and master each concept before moving on. This personalized learning approach accommodates individual strengths and areas of improvement, promoting a deeper understanding of mathematical principles.
Also, if the student misses a day, it isn’t hard to catch up.
Wonder Math provides extensive support to every child enrolled in the program.
In addition to gaining access to the curriculum, each student is assigned a dedicated tutor within a small class setting, consisting of just 2 to 4 students.
This personalized attention ensures students receive individualized guidance and assistance throughout their math journey.
The tutors, equipped with expertise in math education, are readily available to answer questions, provide clarifications, and offer ongoing support to students.
This one-on-one interaction and small class size foster a nurturing and collaborative learning environment where students can actively engage with their peers and educators.
Wonder Math is a lot more affordable than many other math programs (see alternatives further down the page), and only costs $99/month.
Wonder Math’s program is not self-paced, as it is paced according to the tutor’s guidance and instruction. The tutor sets the pace of the curriculum, ensuring that students progress through the material in a structured and effective manner, tailored to their individual needs and abilities.
No, they only cater for ages 7 to 11 years.
Yes, children are assigned to a tutor when they enroll in the program.
No. Because this is a Math tutoring program, it is meant to be done in conjunction with a Math curriculum at home or at school.
No
Look at Wonder Math Here: https://www.wondermath.com/
(You can get 50% off the program for the first month.)
Alternatives to Wonder Math offer different approaches to math education, including Kumon, Mathnasium, and the Russian School of Math.
Kumon is a popular alternative that focuses on individualized instruction, aiming to identify a student’s weaknesses and provide targeted support to help them overcome challenges.
Their approach emphasizes mastery of math concepts to ensure a solid foundation.
However, Kumon’s materials and graphics may not be as engaging or visually appealing as Wonder Math.
Mathnasium, another alternative, concentrates on identifying and addressing students’ specific areas of struggle, helping them overcome obstacles in their learning journey.
By focusing on foundational concepts, Mathnasium aims to prevent students from encountering repeated difficulties.
While Mathnasium’s personalized instruction is beneficial, it tends to be more expensive than Wonder Math.
Additionally, Mathnasium may not offer the same level of interactive and visually stimulating graphics that Wonder Math provides.
The Russian School of Math offers a different perspective on math education, following a more structured and rigorous approach.
This approach emphasizes problem-solving skills and critical thinking, providing a comprehensive understanding of math concepts (this makes it more like Beast Academy).
However, the Russian School of Math may have a different teaching methodology and curriculum than Wonder Math.
While these alternatives may have merits, Wonder Math differentiates itself by utilizing storytelling techniques. These features contribute to an engaging and enjoyable learning experience for students, fostering confidence and a positive attitude toward math. Wonder Math’s focus on creating an interactive and immersive learning environment sets it apart from other alternatives in the market.
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Wonder Math stands at the forefront of math tuition websites, redefining how mathematics is taught by incorporating storytelling alongside live teaching, pre-teaching, and real incentives. The integration of narratives captivates students, making learning an engaging and enjoyable experience. With personalized attention in live teaching sessions, students gain a deep understanding of mathematical concepts. Pre-teaching empowers them with advanced knowledge, enhancing their confidence and preparedness. Furthermore, using real incentives motivates and rewards students, fueling their progress. If you love looking into this program, perhaps you’d also like to check out some of the best math homeschool curriculum programs here.
The post Wonder Math Review: Storytelling, Pre-Teaching, Live Lessons & Rewards! appeared first on How Do I Homeschool?.
]]>Play is as essential to kids as parent bonding and vitamin D. Kids not only want to play, they need to play to better understand the world. And this need drives parents to sports practices and afterschool programs in search of appropriate forums for play, and to toy stores in search of appropriate tools. Humans instinctively understand the need for play and cater to it. But ask someone, anyone, what play is and they’re unlikely to be able to define it. Ask an expert in childhood development for a clinical definition, and they’ll likely recite something disconcertingly broad and heavy to hold.
A common exchange might go something like this:
What is play?
“Play is innate.”
But what is it?
“It’s an aspect of biological, psychological, and social development.”
So why do they do it?
“Kids play to make sense of their world and practice things they have learned and observed, practice new skills, interact with others, and to communicate.”
The initially broad answers above come courtesy of child behavior expert Stacy Stefaniak Luther, Psy.D., a counselor and play therapist. And they are actually pretty good answers; they just require unpacking. Play defies a simple, straightforward definition because it’s mutable and mutating. Infant play transforms into toddler play and so-on across a series of blurry “stages” before taking on social or professional or even gendered baggage. And it looks entirely different from person to person.
One thing we know for sure — play is essential to childhood.
Time spent playing is correlated with emotional stability, better grades, more sleep, improved social skills, advanced motor function, boosted focus, diminished stress, decreased anger, increased creativity, and just plain happiness. Parents should want kids to play. A lot. But before they can start encouraging play behaviors, they need to understand what they are. What does play look like? It starts with eye contact — we’re talking weeks out of the womb — and catalyzes quickly from there.
Gravity is our first playmate. Take this classic high chair scene: A kid picks up a utensil or sippy cup, and drops it on the floor. Over and over, they are handed the object, dangle it over the edge, and let ‘er drop — all while beaming, laughing, and watching with clear fascination. Not only are they getting mom or dad to jump and react, they’re making a loud bang, and they’re watching an object completely disappear.
“If this repetitive throwing feels like a game, it’s because it is,” says KinderCare Learning Center Chief Academic Officer Elanna S. Yalow, Ph.D. “But it’s also exploring physics, cause and effect, and testing the responsiveness of a caregiver. It displays the innate scientific thought that babies have.”
While the high chair drop is one of the first recognizable forms of play-learning and offers the clear through-line that learning is a consistent element of play. Once babies begin to taste, feel, hear and smell as well as see, they’ll do things considered play. Infants’ recognition of their own random movements are the first observable signs of play, says Stefaniak Luther, but the stage is set even before this, when eye contact and back and forth interactions begin between parent and infant shortly after birth.
“These interactions set the base for building play skills,” says Stefaniak Luther. At five months, play is in full swing. Infants begin to learn the cause and effect of exploring tools, such as rattles and fabric books, with their hands and mouth. Just about everything that isn’t wailing or a bowel movement is a part of play at this point in life.
Babies and adults play in much the same way. When playing a card game or, say, bowling, adults explore cause and effect, tweaking the experiment, and aiming to perfect the goal — by playing the right cards or sending the ball into a just-right spin down the lane. The main difference between adult and baby play is that of consequences. If the adult plays poorly, they lose the game. If the kid fails to play, their very social and cognitive development is at stake.
“The spontaneity of play is not just a thing, it’s the thing,” says Michael Alcée, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist in Tarrytown, New York.
“Spontaneity” can be described as a response to an impulse. It’s crucial to play because play starts when we’re more connected to our imaginative right-brained side, Alcée explains. That’s when we’re closer to the magic of wonder, curiosity, and spontaneity, or what Alcée calls the “building blocks of the later, more sophisticated forms of creativity that artists, scientists, and innovators bring to the table.”
Researchers who have studied how kids determine whether something is fun debate over whether “construction” is a type of play. Building something, for some experts, has an end goal so is not purposeless enough to be considered play. But when a kid inevitably goes off-script with their LEGO set, there’s broad consensus play kicks in again.
The need for spontaneity also defines a particular environment that is needed to foster play. “Play is a paradox,” Alcée says. “Kids need to feel free enough to play but also safe enough in their environment to engage in it and reap play’s developmental benefits.” In other words, parents need less to set the stage than to get out of the way and let the fun begin.
While this is natural enough for an infant or toddler, a school-age kid might have more trouble finding such an environment. This in no small part parrots the reasoning for the birth of the Montessori method of education, “based on self-directed activity, hands-on learning and collaborative play.” This line, ripped from the About Page of a Montessori school in the Pacific Northwest, could have just as easily come from a play researcher. The idea is much the same: set the stage for play and get out of the way.
The two-year-old in a fireman’s hat pushing their toy shopping cart around the house making a “wee-oh, wee-oh!” noise; the kid (and the age range is wide for this one), spreading their arms like wings and flying like a plane, bird, or superhero; the group of children sitting around action figures making up a story about their day. These are all examples of pretend play, which typically develops between 18 to 24 months. At first, children begin to use symbolic thinking — like using a hairbrush as a microphone — and by age 3 or 4, they start engaging in pretend play that is elaborate and collaborative. From there, the stories and symbols build on each other and the world gets more and more complicated. For proof, go ask a 10-year-old about their personal superhero mythology. Be sure to set aside a few hours.
Psychologist Lev Vygotsky, a 20th century “founding father” of the study of play alongside Jean Piaget, considered pretend play to be a leading factor in child development, fostering creativity and creative problem-solving. Not all researchers agree with that, but some studies indicate a link between pretending behaviors and later cognitive development and abilities, including language and reading skills. In a 2010 study, at-risk preschoolers who received vocabulary tutoring performed better on a vocabulary test when the tutoring was combined with a play program. Although it sounds counterintuitive, pretend play actually helped kids better separate fantasy from reality, a 1977 study found.
“In pretend play, reinforcement comes from ongoing pleasure with peers as the game progresses,” says Stefaniak Luther. “The interaction itself promotes prosocial skills because the peer(s) will want to continue to play and will also pull away or give feedback if they are not enjoying the interaction for any reason. Pulling away from play serves as an unspoken notice that the interaction was not positive and provides the opportunity to learn and adapt behavior in future interactions.” In other words, it’s actually a learning opportunity when your kid announces they’re taking the ball and going home.
When kids play, they don’t just sit around telling stories to each other. By the time they’re toddlers, play, to some extent, includes imagination, physicality, and objects.
Physical play, the most “endangered” type of play according to the Minnesota Children’s Museum Dr. Rachel E. White, is one of the least researched forms. Object play is the playful manipulation of objects. It can be as simple as throwing a rock or as complex as putting together the 10,000-piece LEGO Harry Potter Hogwarts’ School set. Both of these forms of play start young. The aforementioned random movements of a weeks-old baby count to many as the start of physical play. Researchers agree that object play usually begins around 1 (one 1993 study concluded that babies around 1-year-old are capable of trying to duplicate the noise a horn or castanet makes when presented with a similar-looking object). Many think it starts earlier.
Creative play comes later when kids have a grasp on open-ended materials and can practice representational play, such as a using a banana as a telephone, Yalow says. Open-ended materials also allow kids to use their imaginations and think symbolically, as well as figure out multiple uses for an object, such as a box that’s an airplane one day and a train the next.
Add socialization — another crucial piece of the play puzzle — and you get something all the more complex. A toddler soccer game is more than just kids engaging in a game with parameters set by adults. As any parent who has watched their toddler “play soccer” knows, the game is practicing physical coordination, self-regulation of emotions (i.e., calming down once the game ends), paying attention and taking direction, exploring the physics of a ball and field, and interacting with others. When conflict arises during play — and this goes for all social play — children learn to negotiate, how to advocate for themselves and how to deal with frustration. In other words, kids’ soccer is hardly about the parent-imposed rules of the game. Play, on the kids’ terms, finds a way.
The reason children often struggle to play organized sports in the same manner as adults has to do with the type of play that is innate to childhood and the type of play that is not. From a game theory perspective, soccer is a closed game. Each contest is confined by lines, time, rules and the idea that someone can win. Pretty much all sports operate this way, but closed games are unusual for children.
Children normally play more open games, which mutate as they proceed. Unlike soccer, a game of make-believe is likely to end with a different structure than it started with. A princess becomes an astronaut and a moat becomes the surface of the moon. Rules are discarded and willfully misinterpreted. The goal of the game becomes the continuation of the game on more or less equal terms by each player. The game is, in short, not only the game, but the game of constantly deciding what the game could be. (Consider Calvinball the best possible example of this phenomenon.)
Game theory considers collective and individual decision-making and there’s a reason why. Games represent a specific type of social play that requires such decision-making and actually models it. Games teach us how to make decisions and open games and closed games teach children how to make different types of decisions in different scenarios. That said, exposure to closed games in the absence of open games (an issue in the age of the over-scheduled kid) might represent a risk. Life is more like an open game.
Video games offer a specific conundrum for play experts. These worlds can give the impression of being open given the extent of their world, but are essentially closed, driven by rules and a winner-take-all model. Such a mentality works well if you play games for a living, but represents a flawed model for those who do not. Open play has, at least from a rational and strategic perspective, far more to teach us about how to be in the world.
Alcée looks at it from another, psychological perspective. “If they’re primarily used as a distraction and retreat from reality, then they are not as creative and psychologically valuable,” he says. “But video gaming has definite pluses in terms of problem-solving, deep engagement with narrative and character, creativity, and even nowadays, a large social component.”
Compelling evidence on the import of play is found in research on kids who don’t have as many opportunities to play. Dr. Doris Bergen from the University of Miami notes in her study, The Role of Pretend Play in Children’s Cognitive Development, that a long-term lack of opportunity for play had a negative effect on the development of literacy, math and science skills.
When there’s too much unmediated reality, or trauma, coming into the child’s world, they temporarily shut down, and this shunts the natural capacity for play. “Spontaneous exploration, curiosity and integration get sidelined and are instead replaced with hard vigilance, an overtaxed survival instinct that doesn’t allow the child enough freedom and relaxation to be playful,” Alcée says. “In addition, the child loses the capacity to bring words or symbols to what their experience is, and so it goes offline as if it really isn’t there.”
The lack of play has consequences. Bergen notes that when imaginative play especially is put on hold, we can expect perspective-taking, abstract thought, problem-solving, language development, and academic skills all to be retarded. A recent study, published in the journal PLoS One, found social play not only enhances children’s joy in learning and teachers’ enjoyment of teaching, it reduces bullying and peer ostracism. Quality play for kids takes a crucial role in a wide variety of cognitive and social development.
Fortunately, there’s a solve for kids whose play has been thwarted by trauma or outside influences: More play. Although their capacity for it is damaged by trauma, play is an important tool to help traumatized kids heal. “Play can be particularly important for children who have been exposed to toxic stress,” Yalow says. “Development of executive function skills can help build resilience, and play can be used to develop these essential life skills.”
For others, play reads as something like a cure-all for kids. “Play captures and captivates, stimulating synaptic formation and challenging cognition,” says Dr. Jack Maypole, associate professor of pediatrics at Boston University School of Medicine, director of the Comprehensive Care Program at Boston Medical Center. “It helps little brains that are hungry for new experiences and relationships learn to pay attention and focus. Joy and laughter cement the process together.”
If there is one takeaway from the science of play it would likely be that, as Maypole puts it, “fun is motivation.” Now there’s a rule to parent by.
Parents can help children get the most out of play and use it to strengthen the parent-child bond. But you don’t want to help too much. “Guiding play can be fine, but one needs to be careful to give enough room for the unknown to take shape,” Alcée says. Here’s what that means on a practical level.
The boys are prepubescent, but their exact age is unclear, as is their relationship to each other. Though the style of their illustration has changed over the years (they were briefly elves with pointed ears before transforming, unannounced, into human boys), they have always been essentially identical to each other. Are they twin brothers? Friends? The same kid in alternate universes? Or is it more of a Jekyll-and-Hyde situation?
It doesn’t really matter. Goofus and Gallant are symbols more than characters. In every issue, they play out a sort of Calvinist destiny. Their essential nature was preordained by a higher power long ago—Goofus forever doomed to be a screwup, Gallant to be a smug little do-gooder. What can they do but play the roles that were laid out for them?
[Read: The parenting prophecy]
The higher power that created them was Garry Cleveland Myers, who first wrote a version of the strip called “The G-Twins” at the magazine Children’s Activities, before he co-founded Highlights with his wife, Caroline Clark Myers. But in another sense the characters sprang directly from the moral compass of society. I recently spent a day at the Library of Congress, reading Goofus and Gallant strips from over the years, and found that the panels are remarkable windows into history. They chart the shifting freedoms and boundaries of childhood, and illustrate how adults’ expectations of kids have changed over the decades.
Highlights is explicitly edutainment. The magazine’s tagline is “Fun with a purpose,” and many issues over the years have included guides to its contents for teachers and parents. A flyer tucked into a 1948 issue at the Library of Congress explains to parents how the magazine can be used for the “home training of the child.” “Character building threads through the book from cover to cover,” it reads.
That philosophy remains, and is perhaps most obvious in Goofus and Gallant. “The feature is designed to be a part of our work to help kids become their best selves,” Christine French Cully, Highlights’ current editor in chief, told me. “It’s about helping kids develop character and moral intelligence.”
Many of the comic’s themes are timeless. Again and again, I saw Goofus pocket lost money while Gallant chased down the owner. Goofus left a mess while Gallant tidied up; Goofus bullied and excluded other kids while Gallant welcomed them. If you crack open a December issue from any era, you’ll probably find Goofus being a greedy little gremlin about his Christmas presents, while Gallant rhapsodizes about the pleasures of giving to others. The strip also has a few oddly specific preoccupations—not messing with other people’s mail, changing from good clothes into “play clothes,” putting your bike away instead of dumping it on the lawn, and not blocking the sidewalk all appear multiple times over the decades. The core of what it means to be considerate hasn’t changed dramatically from 1948 to today.
But a lot has changed. Technology is an obvious example, and the strip has guided kids through the etiquette of sharing the TV with your family and taking a polite phone message all the way through to being quiet during a parent’s Zoom meeting and not giving out personal information online. (Poor Goofus has fallen prey to a couple of scams over the years.) Gender roles, in the world and in the magazine, have also grown more expansive over time. The boys’ father seems more present in modern strips, after an unsurprisingly long time in which I only ever saw their mother doing domestic labor.
Less immediately obvious are deeper shifts in the nature of childhood, and in adults’ conception of the ideal well-behaved child. For instance, the range of a child’s independence has shrunk considerably from Highlights’ early days. Goofus and Gallant ran amok in old strips, with little to no parental supervision. They completed errands on their own in 1955; they stayed out until the streetlights came on in 1965. As recently as 1990, Gallant simply left a note for his mom on the counter letting her know where he’d be, and peaced out. By today’s standards that feels more like Goofus behavior.
Kids don’t have as large of a roaming radius as they used to, Steven Mintz, a historian at the University of Texas at Austin who has studied the history of childhood, told me. “Until my kids were virtually teenagers, they were never out of my sight. Or if not my sight, my wife’s sight, or some adult that I viewed as responsible.”
[Read: ‘Intensive’ parenting is now the norm in America]
Newer strips don’t explicitly illustrate helicopter parenting or tell us that the boys have a packed and highly supervised extracurricular schedule. But previous indications of their independence are largely absent now. The boys are rarely pictured alone when they’re out in the world.
Perhaps another reason the lads are rarely by themselves is that Highlights editors are intentionally focusing the strip more on “social-emotional learning,” Cully told me. The modern Goofus and Gallant are not only demonstrating politeness, but teaching kids emotional intelligence and social skills. This is the most striking evolution I observed over the strip’s history. In the July 1955 issue, after some fairly benign panels about going to bed on time and not leaving garden rakes face up, comes a truly disturbing diptych of 1950s emotional repression. “When Goofus falls and skins his hands and knees, he cries like a baby,” the caption reads beneath a wailing, injured Goofus. Meanwhile, “Gallant gets up smiling, even if blood is seeping from his knees.” And indeed, Gallant sports a chilling smile in the drawing, as droplets of his blood sprinkle the earth.
A couple other comics present a less extreme but similar morality tale in which Goofus complains about being hurt, while Gallant cheerfully insists on helping his parents with chores even though his arm is in a sling. The message is clear: Expressing discontent is tantamount to misbehavior, and pain is no excuse.
This motif in the early strips is certainly shaped by the fact that Goofus and Gallant are, well, boys. Even fictional boys in the 1950s, it seems, were told not to cry. All the more notable, then, that by 2021, Goofus is the one telling another kid to stop crying while Gallant affirms that it’s okay to cry, and asks a sad friend if he wants to talk about what’s bothering him. And as we know, Goofus is always wrong, and Gallant is always right.
I started to notice a particular attentiveness to the boys’ emotional life starting around the 2000s, which grew more prominent over time. The strip has attempted more and more to account for the effect kids’ emotions can have on their behavior, and to demonstrate how to acknowledge those feelings while still behaving appropriately.
In a strip from 2000, Goofus clenches his fists and screams at a boxy monitor, “This computer is really annoying me!” Meanwhile, “Gallant politely asks for help when he feels frustrated.” In another, from 2005, Goofus complains about waiting in line, while “Gallant takes a few deep breaths when he feels impatient.” The Gallant of the new millennium addresses his feelings; he doesn’t repress them.
“One of the things that happens over time is that parents are not just disciplining their children, but they’re expecting their children to, in some ways, learn to discipline themselves,” Paula Fass, a professor emerita at UC Berkeley and the author of The End of American Childhood, told me.
Cully told me that at Highlights, they sum up what a child ought to be with what they call the “four C’s”: “curious, creative, caring, and confident.” Those are the traits the magazine tries to encourage. She added, “We try to keep our finger on the pulse of what concerns parents, and right now it’s mental health, making sure kids are kind.” Kind not just to others, but to themselves. Goofus beats himself up for being “bad at math” when he makes mistakes on an assignment, while Gallant admits his mistakes and instead says, “I need to study this chapter again.”
“These cartoons are much more psychologically knowledgeable and psychologically attentive” compared with the ones of the past, Mintz told me when I shared a selection of strips through the years with him. “There’s a certain kind of child that they’re trying to produce who has communication skills, who’s self-regulated. I think that’s our vision of what a child ought to be [today].”
The other thing that Cully really wants to convey about how Goofus and Gallant has changed is a message that is somewhat at odds with the format of the strip.
“We try really hard now, and have for a long time, to be clear that Goofus is not all bad, and Gallant is not all good,” she said. To do that within the confines of the dos-and-don’ts binary that is the strip’s raison d’être is “probably the hardest editorial job in the whole magazine.”
Every installment of Goofus and Gallant now has a line at the top that reads “There’s some of Goofus and Gallant in us all. When the Gallant shines through, we show our best self.” And alongside the comic, Highlights also publishes submissions from young readers talking about moments when they felt like either Goofus or Gallant, to show that everyone can relate to both of them at different times.
This mirrors a larger shift in the culture of American parenting, Fass told me, where it’s become prevalent to emphasize that although a particular behavior or choice may be bad or wrong, the child is not a bad kid.
“We just try to be really clear that Goofus isn’t always bad. He’s not. He’s just often making choices that aren’t thoughtful or safe,” Cully said. One recent example that illustrates this is a strip from July 2022 in which Goofus and Gallant both fight with a friend. “When Goofus gets upset, he yells unkind things he’ll regret,” the caption reads. We would never have gotten such insight into the future mental state of the Goofus of old. But the new Goofus is not a total monster—he will regret it later.
The starker differences between the Goofus and Gallant of the past and present aren’t signs that all parents of previous decades were emotionally distant disciplinarians, or that all parents today have endless patience for their kids’ big feelings. Nevertheless, the boys’ evolution reflects American parenting culture’s own evolution. As the fire and brimstone of “Because I said so” authoritarian parenting has fallen out of favor, Goofus and Gallant have also become more than the messengers of strict commandments. They have a spark of humanity.
So even if Goofus and Gallant will always be the devil and the angel sitting on kids’ shoulders, nowadays, you might say, there is a little more sympathy for the Goofus.
]]>Security approaches that completely block these “side-channel attacks” are so computationally expensive that they aren’t feasible for many real-world systems. Instead, engineers often apply what are known as obfuscation schemes that seek to limit, but not eliminate, an attacker’s ability to learn secret information.
To help engineers and scientists better understand the effectiveness of different obfuscation schemes, MIT researchers created a framework to quantitatively evaluate how much information an attacker could learn from a victim program with an obfuscation scheme in place.
Their framework, called Metior, allows the user to study how different victim programs, attacker strategies, and obfuscation scheme configurations affect the amount of sensitive information that is leaked. The framework could be used by engineers who develop microprocessors to evaluate the effectiveness of multiple security schemes and determine which architecture is most promising early in the chip design process.
“Metior helps us recognize that we shouldn’t look at these security schemes in isolation. It is very tempting to analyze the effectiveness of an obfuscation scheme for one particular victim, but this doesn’t help us understand why these attacks work. Looking at things from a higher level gives us a more holistic picture of what is actually going on,” says Peter Deutsch, a graduate student and lead author of an open-access paper on Metior.
Deutsch’s co-authors include Weon Taek Na, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science; Thomas Bourgeat PhD ’23, an assistant professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL); Joel Emer, an MIT professor of the practice in computer science and electrical engineering; and senior author Mengjia Yan, the Homer A. Burnell Career Development Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at MIT and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). The research was presented last week at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture.
Illuminating obfuscation
While there are many obfuscation schemes, popular approaches typically work by adding some randomization to the victim’s behavior to make it harder for an attacker to learn secrets. For instance, perhaps an obfuscation scheme involves a program accessing additional areas of the computer memory, rather than only the area it needs to access, to confuse an attacker. Others adjust how often a victim accesses memory or another a shared resource so an attacker has trouble seeing clear patterns.
But while these approaches make it harder for an attacker to succeed, some amount of information from the victim still “leaks” out. Yan and her team want to know how much.
They had previously developed CaSA, a tool to quantify the amount of information leaked by one particular type of obfuscation scheme. But with Metior, they had more ambitious goals. The team wanted to derive a unified model that could be used to analyze any obfuscation scheme — even schemes that haven’t been developed yet.
To achieve that goal, they designed Metior to map the flow of information through an obfuscation scheme into random variables. For instance, the model maps the way a victim and an attacker access shared structures on a computer chip, like memory, into a mathematical formulation.
One Metior derives that mathematical representation, the framework uses techniques from information theory to understand how the attacker can learn information from the victim. With those pieces in place, Metior can quantify how likely it is for an attacker to successfully guess the victim’s secret information.
“We take all of the nitty-gritty elements of this microarchitectural side-channel and map it down to, essentially, a math problem. Once we do that, we can explore a lot of different strategies and better understand how making small tweaks can help you defend against information leaks,” Deutsch says.
Surprising insights
They applied Metior in three case studies to compare attack strategies and analyze the information leakage from state-of-the-art obfuscation schemes. Through their evaluations, they saw how Metior can identify interesting behaviors that weren’t fully understood before.
For instance, a prior analysis determined that a certain type of side-channel attack, called probabilistic prime and probe, was successful because this sophisticated attack includes a preliminary step where it profiles a victim system to understand its defenses.
Using Metior, they show that this advanced attack actually works no better than a simple, generic attack and that it exploits different victim behaviors than researchers previously thought.
Moving forward, the researchers want to continue enhancing Metior so the framework can analyze even very complicated obfuscation schemes in a more efficient manner. They also want to study additional obfuscation schemes and types of victim programs, as well as conduct more detailed analyses of the most popular defenses.
Ultimately, the researchers hope this work inspires others to study microarchitectural security evaluation methodologies that can be applied early in the chip design process.
“Any kind of microprocessor development is extraordinarily expensive and complicated, and design resources are extremely scarce. Having a way to evaluate the value of a security feature is extremely important before a company commits to microprocessor development. This is what Metior allows them to do in a very general way,” Emer says.
This research is funded, in part, by the National Science Foundation, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Intel, and the MIT RSC Research Fund.
]]>With online tutoring platforms like Cambly, BookNook, and more, you can create a schedule that fits your lifestyle while helping students excel in their studies.
From test prep to homework help and a wide range of subjects, these online tutoring services have got it all to help you launch your tutoring business.
So, get ready to connect with students, unleash your teaching skills, and embark on an exciting adventure in online tutoring.
Tutor With Cambly! Get paid to chat with people from around the world. No teaching certificate, bachelor’s degree or prior teaching experience needed.
Whether you’re a seasoned teacher or a college student, these online tutoring services provide a platform to connect with students worldwide and make a difference in their academic journey.
Here is my quick list of the best tutoring sites to join today:
Ever thought about teaching English from your couch at your own pace? Well, Cambly lets you do just that.
Cambly is one of the best online tutoring programs and is known for being user-friendly.
Tutors often comment on the joy of watching their language learners grow in confidence while speaking English.
As a Cambly tutor, you provide one-on-one sessions to help students who speak different languages improve their English language skills.
Cambly tutors earn $0.17 per minute ($10.20 per hour) on Cambly and $0.20 per minute ($12.00 per hour) on Cambly Kids.
Find out more about this platform in our honest Cambly Review!
Tutor With Cambly! Get paid to chat with people from around the world. No teaching certificate, bachelor’s degree or prior teaching experience needed.
Looking for a flexible online tutoring platform that lets you focus on teaching, not lesson planning? Check out BookNook.
It offers a ready-to-teach, research-based curriculum created by experienced educators, so you can spend less time planning and more time helping students reach their full potential.
BookNook lets you set your own hours and work between 1.5 and 10 hours a week with no minimum hours required. And you’ll get paid $18 per hour for your work!
Become a tutor today and make an impact on young students, plus earn a competitive rate of $15-$22 per hour for your time.
Chegg is a top online tutoring platform where you can share your knowledge and help students with homework or test prep.
As a Chegg tutor, you can choose from various subjects, from math and science to language learning, and set your own hours.
The application process is straightforward – just provide a couple of verification forms and a photo ID, and you’re good to go.
And according to Indeed, Chegg pays their online tutors $20 per hour, which is a great incentive!
Wyzant is a top-notch platform offering in-person and online tutoring services, where tutors get the most access to educational materials.
As a Wyzant tutor, you can access various tools, including interactive lessons and videos created by private tutors and a virtual whiteboard, making sessions interactive and effective.
Getting started as an online tutor is easy, with a user-friendly interface that lets you schedule lessons, collect student reviews, and track your payments.
As a side note, you can choose your hours and rates, but tutors are paid 75% of their posted hourly rate, and Wyzant keeps 25% as a processing fee.
Skooli is an online platform that offers tutoring services in various subjects for students in various grade levels to help them improve their letter grades.
Tutors wishing to work with Skooli must meet certain qualifications:
Skooli pays qualified teachers a competitive rate based on their qualifications and experience, which typically seems to be $0.82 per minute- or around $49 per hour.
TutorMe is a popular tutoring platform catering to K-12 schools and higher education for college age.
To apply as a TutorMe tutor, you must meet some minimum requirements:
One of the key features of TutorMe is its live sessions, where you can engage with students in real-time.
Tutors providing immediate support and guidance in homework help for different subjects and test prep.
As a tutor, you’ll be earning $16 an hour. And that’s not just for the time you spend in a session with students but also for the time you put into giving writing feedback.
Preply is one of the best platforms for tutors who want to excel in teaching languages and grow their working vocabulary.
The platform focuses on one-on-one lessons, offering a tailored learning experience for students and maximizing your impact as a teacher.
As you start teaching on Preply, you’ll have opportunities to receive feedback and ratings from satisfied students, helping you build your reputation as a skilled tutor.
As a tutor, you can create a customized profile showcasing your expertise, teaching style, and personality. Preply charges commission fees, so you must consider that with your rates.
There are 2 drawbacks, though- you have to do an unpaid trial lesson before tutoring students, and students can ask for a full refund if they aren’t happy with your tutoring services.
If you’re looking for a well-established platform to work as an online tutor, Varsity Tutors might be an ideal choice for you.
They offer homework help in various subjects and test prep and cater to different age groups, from elementary school students to adults.
Tutors set their schedules and work from any location. The platform uses a sophisticated algorithm to match tutors with students, eliminating the hassle of finding new clients.
The platform provides advanced tools for tutoring, including adaptive assessments and AI-generated lesson plans to tailor sessions to a student’s needs.
Varsity Tutor’s pay rates vary and are determined by the subject and tutoring style- ranging from $13 – $23 per hour. You can also earn more the longer you tutor and get positive reviews.
Tutor.com is an online platform where tutors assist all ages in various subjects.
Tutors are expected to guide, encourage active learning, help with test prep, and use online tools for communication.
The tutors on Tutor.com are from all walks of life – teachers and even pros in fields like math, science, and computer science.
Tutor.com offers 24/7 tutoring services and has joined with Princeton Review to offer more tutoring options.
To qualify as a tutor, you must:
Tutors are paid a set hourly rate based on the subjects they tutor, which averages $22 per hour, with incentives for high-quality tutoring.
TutorOcean is one of the tutoring platforms that enables tutors to establish their own tutoring business.
Tutors create a profile, choose their subject area, set their schedules and own rate, and then connect with the student via the platform.
TutorOcean handles all the logistics, including booking, billing, and payments, allowing tutors to focus on teaching.
Tutors earn money based on a commission model in 2 ways:
Learn To Be is an online platform where volunteers from various backgrounds offer their expertise to students.
Tutors, who may be students, professionals, or retirees, commit to providing 60-minute lessons once to twice weekly for at least four months.
Unlike some other platforms, Learn To Be operates on a volunteer basis, so tutors aren’t paid. This site would be great for new tutors who need experience before getting onto paid platforms.
Tutoring sessions on Learn To Be typically focus on specific homework, assignments, or test preparation that lasts 45 to 60 minutes.
Tutors use ice-breakers and educational games to keep sessions engaging and build a rapport with the student, making learning enjoyable and effective.
Whether you’re great at math and looking to share your skills online or in person or help someone learn the English language, there’s a tutoring platform out there for you.
The choices are pretty diverse, from Cambly to BookNook, where you can earn some cash while helping students to improve their language skills.
It’s all about finding the one that fits your style and needs- and aiming to earn $20+ per hour if you can!
So whether you’re just starting your tutoring journey or looking to learn something new, these 11 online tutoring services are a great place to start. Happy tutoring, folks!
Tutor With Cambly! Get paid to chat with people from around the world. No teaching certificate, bachelor’s degree or prior teaching experience needed.
Vendor: Peter Pauper
Type: Back to School
Price:
4.99
Fun and colourful set of Division Flash Cards will help get your child started on the right track with essential math skills!
Flash card set will help your child learn to divide within 100.
Pack includes 55 cards with 110 problems in all, from 1 divided by 1 to 100 divided by 10.
Cards are double-sided, with a problem on the front and an answer at the bottom of the back.
Makes a great one-on-one parent/child activity.
Kids can use them independently, too.
Ideal for reviewing, practicing, and developing accuracy and confidence.
Perfect for on-the-go learning!
Heavyweight coated card stock.
Cards have rounded corners for reduced wear and easy handling.
7+ years.
Vendor: Peter Pauper
Type: Back to School
Price:
4.99
Fun and colorful set of Multiplication Flash Cards will help get your child started on the right track with essential math skills!
Flash card set will help your child learn the complete times tables up to 10 x 10.
Flash cards are double-sided, with a problem on the front and the answer on the bottom of the back.
Pack includes 56 cards with 112 problems in all.
Makes a great one-on-one parent/child activity.
Kids can use them independently, too.
Ideal for reviewing, practicing, and developing accuracy and confidence.
Perfect for on-the-go learning!
Heavyweight coated card stock.
Cards have rounded corners for reduced wear and easy handling.
Flash cards measure 7.95 x 11.75 cm (3.13 x 4.63 inches)
7+ years.
Vendor: Peter Pauper
Type: Books
Price:
7.99
Just for toddlers: An engaging book to help little ones learn early math!
Trace numbers from 1 through 10.
Learn to count.
Do simple addition and subtraction.
Lots of fun practice activities!
Toddlers will also develop motor control for writing while learning their numbers.
Full colour throughout.
Pages are perforated and reproducible.
Sturdy paperback binding.
64 pages
3+ years.
Years ago in a professional development class, I learned that classroom procedures must be taught and practiced – in the same way you would teach a reading skill or a math concept.
But, how do we get students to pay attention to learning those procedures?
And, how does this apply to the STEM Lab? Much the same way. We learn procedures and practice them. But, what would happen if we made it a STEM Challenge?
We call it The Rules Challenge!
In this post, for your convenience, you may find Amazon Affiliate links to resources. This means that Amazon will pass on small percentages to me with your purchase of items. This will not create extra costs for you at all! It will help me keep this blog running!
As classes came into the lab we complete a “Scavenger Hunt” first. This made them explore the room and especially the board with our rules posted on it!
For each question on the scavenger hunt answered correctly the team received a specific material for the challenge. We used foil, cups, craft sticks, straws, and construction paper.
I have tried several versions of rules posters for our lab. I have sets with cute student scientists and engineers and then I created the Dot People version.
This new set features funny little dot people and we love them so much.
Here’s the best part! During this challenge, many teams made little dot people figures as part of their Rules Model. It became a cute joke to say that they were making “stick” people!
After the Scavenger hunt, students had their materials and it was time to plan their structure. Here’s the task:
These two drawings were completed by fourth graders. We always talk about how important it is to label our drawings.
This challenge was one that took two class sessions which are one week apart. If you don’t label those sketches you will forget what you were thinking!
Students completed their sketches and shared their ideas with their team.
Next, the teams created a job for each team member and then they got busy. In the photos, you can see teams starting to create their models.
(By the way, the planning procedure we use is purposeful. If you missed the post about how we do this, you can click >>>HERE!)
After all teams were ready we had a sharing time. Each group told the rule they were representing and then showed us the model. It was really fun to see how they incorporated the rule into their structure.
In the photo is the rule “Wait for instructions before touching materials.” The materials are on a shelf they built of craft sticks and the dot person is waiting to get things off the shelf.
Remember, the setup I used for this challenge was that the materials were earned based on a scavenger hunt. This team missed 4 of the 6 questions on the scavenger hunt paper and all they had were craft sticks and straws. They did pretty well with such limited items!
In this image, the team chose the rule “Always wear safety goggles when they are needed.” They made a person holding a beaker that is spraying liquid (the orange paper) into the person’s face.
He needed goggles.
The wearing of goggles rules was a popular choice!
There were a lot of groups that opted to show the rules about cleaning up messes! In this photo, you have a person throwing away trash.
He also seems very excited about it, doesn’t he?
Notice that this one is built from straws and construction paper. This team also missed several questions on the scavenger hunt and received a small amount of materials.
Click on any image to see the resource!
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The post How to Teach Your Classroom Rules with STEM appeared first on Teachers are Terrific.
]]>This was after my failed attempt at trying to set up an applied behavior business for children with autism where I would drive to people’s homes and spend all day practically on the road.
I had to give that up because daycare was so expensive, and my husband couldn’t watch the babies all day since he had to work too.
And, with my in-laws? Well, I couldn’t ask unless they offered first.
They didn’t.
But I wasn’t ready to give up on my dream of working for myself!
Working from home is awesome for moms who want to balance work and family, but finding time to work can be challenging when your little one needs constant care and attention.
Fortunately, there are things you can do when you want to work from home but have no childcare!
Let’s take a look.
Look –
You gotta be realistic with all of this. You may just not have a lot of time to work.
When you’re looking for jobs you can do with a baby, it’s important to set realistic expectations.
You may have to consider adjusting your workload or schedule to accommodate your baby’s needs, or be prepared to work outside of traditional office hours to get your work done.
Remember that it’s okay to take breaks and prioritize your little one’s needs over work when you have to.
Setting realistic expectations will help you avoid burnout and also make sure that both you and your baby are getting the care and attention you need.
So, why is daycare so expensive in the first place?
Mostly it’s because of the high ration of caregivers to children, but also because daycares have to adhere to strict licensing and safety regulations, which can drive up the cost of operations.
Daycares have to follow a lot of rules to provide adequate care and attention to every child there.
Plus, many daycares stay open in the evenings, so they have to pay their staff.
Understanding why daycare is expensive won’t help you work from home without childcare, but it’s helpful to understand why they charge what they do.
If you have family or friends nearby who are willing to help, there’s nothing wrong with asking them to watch your little one while you work from home.
This is definitely a more affordable option than paying for a daycare or hiring a babysitter.
But if you don’t have friends or family that can help, you can always look into joining a local parent group or online community of working moms.
These groups can provide support and advice, as well as potential babysitting or childcare swap opportunities.
When you want to work at home but don’t have anything that can help with childcare, you can always look at hiring a cheap babysitter.
I’m not saying that you should expect someone to babysit for pennies, but babysitters often charge far less than daycares because they have fewer children to care for and fewer overhead costs.
Chances are, you’re going to find a good rate for a babysitter who watches children in their home (instead of coming to yours). If you want someone to come to you, you may end up paying more.
To find a cheap babysitter, ask for recommendations on your social media or check online classified for babysitters looking for work.
If you end up hiring a stranger, just make sure you do a background check and interview them to make sure they are a good fit for your needs.
I know that babies need a lot of care, but they don’t need attention 24-7. If you have a flexible work-from-home job, you can work around your baby’s schedule.
You can do this by creating a routine for your baby and establishing things like consistent naptimes and feedings.
Plan your work around these times so you can focus on what you need to do and be productive.
This is exactly what I did with my twins.
I would set them up for an activity and then do my pitching for clients.
Or, I would put them down for a nap at the same time and get an hour or two to write blog posts.
You can also use a sling or baby carrier to keep your baby close to you while you work.
This way, they are more likely to take those naps, and you can quickly soothe them and keep them calm if they wake up.
Good jobs for moms are those with flexible schedules.
This means that you aren’t expected to work during a specific timeframe – you can work whenever you want as long as you get the work done.
Many employers offer remote work options and flexible hours to accommodate the needs of working parents.
When looking for a job, make sure you read the job description carefully to see if the job really is flexible.
I have some flexible work-from-home job ideas you can check out here.
If you’re a mom saying, “I want to work from home but have no childcare,” why not start your own business?
Starting your own business is a great way to work from home and have more control over your schedule so you can take care of your baby instead of worrying about childcare costs.
There are tons of businesses you can start at home, such as freelance writing, graphic design, or consulting.
Even if you don’t have any ideas for starting a business, that doesn’t mean you can’t get started!
Here are some business ideas you can use:
The gig economy is an online labor market where you can post the work you are willing to do or apply for freelance jobs to make money from home.
Gig economies offer a range of opportunities if you are looking for work-from-home jobs for moms with babies.
Upwork and Fiverr are two examples of gig economies where you can find flexible jobs that you can do from home.
Finding gigs is a great way to make easy money but they can also lead to a full-time income.
Technology can be an absolute lifesaver for moms who want to work at home with a baby. There are so many tools and apps available to help you work more efficiently from home.
For example, video conferencing software like Skype or Zoom can allow you to have virtual meetings with clients or colleagues.
Project management tools like Trello can help you stay organized and on top of your work tasks.
There are also apps and devices that can help keep your baby entertained and occupied while you work, such as a baby swing or bouncer to soothe your baby.
You can also use a baby monitor so you can keep an eye on your little one while you work.
Okay, so we talked about what you should do when you want to work from home but have no childcare and now I want to give you some ideas of jobs you can do with a baby!
I know personally that finding a way to balance caring for my twins with earning an income was a dream come true.
It took some trial and error, but I eventually found a way to make it happen by exploring a ton of good jobs for moms.
To help you find work-from-home jobs for moms with babies, here are some ideas you should check out:
If you have strong writing or editing skills, freelance writing or editing can be a great option for working from home with a baby.
Many companies and websites are in need of freelance writers or editors to create content for their websites, blogs, and social media platforms.
This type of work can often be done on your own schedule, which makes it ideal for moms who need to work around their baby’s needs.
Want to learn more? Check out all the amazing jobs a mom can do to make money with their writing!
If you enjoy writing and have a passion for a particular topic, you can consider starting your own blog.
Many successful bloggers are able to earn a substantial income through advertising, sponsored posts, and affiliate marketing.
While it can take time to build a successful blog, this type of work can often be done from home and on a flexible schedule.
I have lots of information here on how you can get started!
Virtual assisting is a popular freelance field that can be done from home.
Virutal assistants provide administrative and technical support to businesses, entrepreneurs, and professionals who need assistance with tasks such as scheduling, email management, social media management, research, and more.
This is an amazing opportunity to use your organizational and communication skills to help others while also being able to care for your baby.
Virtual assistants often work on a project basis or on a retainer, and the work can be flexible and remote.
You can specialize in a particular industry, such as real estate or finance, to better serve your clients.
If you have experience in a particular subject area, such as math or English, you can consider online tutoring.
Many tutoring companies allow you to work from home and on a flexible schedule, which can be ideal for moms with babies.
You can also consider creating your own tutoring business by advertising your services on social media or through your local community.
If you have graphic design skills, such as drawing by hand or using software, you can work from home with your baby as a graphic designer.
Many businesses and individuals are in need of graphic designers to create logos, websites, and other marketing materials.
With many companies requiring these services, it’s a great way to work from home while caring for your baby.
Freelance social media management is a growing field that can be done from home.
Social media managers help businesses and entrepreneurs build and maintain their online presence by creating and responding to comments and messages, posting content, and analyzing data to improve engagement.
This type of work requires creativity, strong communication skills, and an understanding of social media platforms and trends.
You can also specialize in an industry that you have experience in, such as fashion or food, to better serve your clients.
By working as a social media manager, you can choose your clients, set your own rates, and work on a flexible schedule that accommodates your baby’s needs.
If you’re fluent in multiple languages, freelance translation can be a viable option for you.
Companies, government agencies, and individuals often require translation services for documents, websites, and other materials.
You can specialize in a specific field such as legal, medical, or technical translation, which can increase your earning potential.
This field is in high demand and can be a great way to work from home while caring for your baby.
Okay, so maybe being a photographer doesn’t allow you to stay at home, but it’s job where you could take your baby with you!
Or, you can get someone to watch your little one and get a ton of pictures done in just a couple of hours.
Either way, many businesses and individuals look for freelance photographers for their websites, social media accounts, and other marketing materials.
As a working mom who wanted to work from home but didn’t want to pay out the nose for childcare, I know how challenging it can be to make this dream a reality.
Thankfully, there are so many options out there for you to consider when it you want to work but have no childcare.
From asking for help to finding a flexible job, you can fin a job that works for you and your baby.
Just don’t forget that it’s okay to ask for help and prioritize your family’s needs while pursuing your carer goals.
With some creativity, planning, and support, I know you can achieve success a a work-from-home mom!
What’s your experience balancing work and family life as a parent?
Have you found any tips or tricks that have helped you make it work? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
]]>The monk paces the Zendo, forecasting the end of the world.
Soryu Forall, ordained in the Zen Buddhist tradition, is speaking to the two dozen residents of the monastery he founded a decade ago in Vermont’s far north. Bald, slight, and incandescent with intensity, he provides a sweep of human history. Seventy thousand years ago, a cognitive revolution allowed Homo sapiens to communicate in story—to construct narratives, to make art, to conceive of god. Twenty-five hundred years ago, the Buddha lived, and some humans began to touch enlightenment, he says—to move beyond narrative, to break free from ignorance. Three hundred years ago, the scientific and industrial revolutions ushered in the beginning of the “utter decimation of life on this planet.”
Humanity has “exponentially destroyed life on the same curve as we have exponentially increased intelligence,” he tells his congregants. Now the “crazy suicide wizards” of Silicon Valley have ushered in another revolution. They have created artificial intelligence.
Human intelligence is sliding toward obsolescence. Artificial superintelligence is growing dominant, eating numbers and data, processing the world with algorithms. There is “no reason” to think AI will preserve humanity, “as if we’re really special,” Forall tells the residents, clad in dark, loose clothing, seated on zafu cushions on the wood floor. “There’s no reason to think we wouldn’t be treated like cattle in factory farms.” Humans are already destroying life on this planet. AI might soon destroy us.
[From the July/August 2023 issue: The coming humanist renaissance]
For a monk seeking to move us beyond narrative, Forall tells a terrifying story. His monastery is called MAPLE, which stands for the “Monastic Academy for the Preservation of Life on Earth.” The residents there meditate on their breath and on metta, or loving-kindness, an emanation of joy to all creatures. They meditate in order to achieve inner clarity. And they meditate on AI and existential risk in general—life’s violent, early, and unnecessary end.
Does it matter what a monk in a remote Vermont monastery thinks about AI? A number of important researchers think it does. Forall provides spiritual advice to AI thinkers, and hosts talks and “awakening” retreats for researchers and developers, including employees of OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Apple. Roughly 50 tech types have done retreats at MAPLE in the past few years. Forall recently visited Tom Gruber, one of the inventors of Siri, at his home in Maui for a week of dharma dinners and snorkeling among the octopuses and neon fish.
Forall’s first goal is to expand the pool of humans following what Buddhists call the Noble Eightfold Path. His second is to influence technology by influencing technologists. His third is to change AI itself, seeing whether he and his fellow monks might be able to embed the enlightenment of the Buddha into the code.
Forall knows this sounds ridiculous. Some people have laughed in his face when they hear about it, he says. But others are listening closely. “His training is different from mine,” Gruber told me. “But we have that intellectual connection, where we see the same deep system problems.”
Forall describes the project of creating an enlightened AI as perhaps “the most important act of all time.” Humans need to “build an AI that walks a spiritual path,” one that will persuade the other AI systems not to harm us. Life on Earth “depends on that,” he told me, arguing that we should devote half of global economic output—$50 trillion, give or take—to “that one thing.” We need to build an “AI guru,” he said. An “AI god.”
His vision is dire and grand, but perhaps that is why it has found such a receptive audience among the folks building AI, many of whom conceive of their work in similarly epochal terms. No one can know for sure what this technology will become; when we imagine the future, we have no choice but to rely on myths and forecasts and science fiction—on stories. Does Forall’s story have the weight of prophecy, or is it just one that AI alarmists are telling themselves?
In the Zendo, Forall finishes his talk and answers a few questions. Then it is time for “the most fun thing in the world,” he says, his self-seriousness evaporating for a second. “It’s pretty close to the maximum amount of fun.” The monks stand tall before a statue of the Buddha. They bow. They straighten up again. They get down on their hands and knees and kiss their forehead to the earth. They prostrate themselves in unison 108 times, as Forall keeps count on a set of mala beads and darkness begins to fall over the Zendo.
The world is witnessing the emergence of an eldritch new force, some say, one humans created and are struggling to understand.
AI systems simulate human intelligence.
AI systems take an input and spit out an output.
AI systems generate those outputs via an algorithm, one trained on troves of data scraped from the web.
AI systems create videos, poems, songs, pictures, lists, scripts, stories, essays. They play games and pass tests. They translate text. They solve impossible problems. They do math. They drive. They chat. They act as search engines. They are self-improving.
AI systems are causing concrete problems. They are providing inaccurate information to consumers and are generating political disinformation. They are being used to gin up spam and trick people into revealing sensitive personal data. They are already beginning to take people’s jobs.
[Annie Lowrey: AI isn’t omnipotent. It’s janky.]
Beyond that—what they can and cannot do, what they are and are not, the threat they do or do not pose—it gets hard to say. AI is revolutionary, dangerous, sentient, capable of reasoning, janky, likely to kill millions of humans, likely to enslave millions of humans, not a threat in and of itself. It is a person, a “digital mind,” nothing more than a fancy spreadsheet, a new god, not a thing at all. It is intelligent or not, or maybe just designed to seem intelligent. It is us. It is something else. The people making it are stoked. The people making it are terrified and suffused with regret. (The people making it are getting rich, that’s for sure.)
In this roiling debate, Forall and many MAPLE residents are what are often called, derisively if not inaccurately, “doomers.” The seminal text in this ideological lineage is Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence, which posits that AI could turn humans into gorillas, in a way. Our existence could depend not on our own choices but on the choices of a more intelligent other.
Amba Kak, the executive director of the AI Now Institute, summarized this view: “ChatGPT is the beginning. The end is, we’re all going to die,” she told me earlier this year, while rolling her eyes so hard I swear I could hear it through the phone. She described the narrative as both self-flattering and cynical. Tech companies have an incentive to make such systems seem otherworldly and impossible to regulate, when they are in fact “banal.”
Forall is not, by any means, a coder who understands AI at the zeros-and-ones level; he does not have a detailed familiarity with large language models or algorithmic design. I asked him whether he had used some of the popular new AI gadgets, such as ChatGPT and Midjourney. He had tried one chatbot. “I just asked it one question: Why practice?” (He meant “Why should a person practice meditation?”)
Did he find the answer satisfactory?
“Oh, not really. I don’t know. I haven’t found it impressive.”
His lack of detailed familiarity with AI hasn’t changed his conclusions on the technology. When I asked whom he looks to or reads in order to understand AI, he at first, deadpan, answered, “the Buddha.” He then clarified that he also likes the work of the best-selling historian Yuval Noah Harari and a number of prominent ethical-tech folks, among them Zak Stein and Tristan Harris. And he is spending his life ruminating on AI’s risks, which he sees as far from banal. “We are watching humanist values, and therefore the political systems based on them, such as democracy, as well as the economic systems—they’re just falling apart,” he said. “The ultimate authority is moving from the human to the algorithm.”
Forall has been worried about the apocalypse since he was 4. In one of his first memories, he is standing in the kitchen with his mother, just a little shorter than the trash can, panicking over people killing one another. “I remember telling her with the expectation that somehow it would make a difference: ‘We have to stop them. Just stop the people from killing everybody,’” he told me. “She said ‘Yes’ and then went back to chopping the vegetables.” (Forall’s mother worked for humanitarian nonprofits and his father for conservation nonprofits; the household, which attended Quaker meetings, listened to a lot of NPR.)
He was a weird, intense kid. He experienced something like ego death while snow-angeling in fresh Vermont powder when he was 12: “direct knowledge that I, that I, is all living things. That I am this whole planet of living things.” He recalled pestering his mothers’ friends “about how we’re going to save the world and you’re not doing it” when they came over. He never recovered from seeing Terminator 2: Judgment Day as a teenager.
I asked him whether some personal experience of trauma or hardship had made him so aware of the horrors of the world. Nope.
Forall attended Williams College for a year, studying economics. But, he told me, he was racked with questions no professor or textbook could provide the answer to. Is it true that we are just matter, just chemicals? Why is there so much suffering? To find the answer, at 18, he dropped out and moved to a 300-year-old Zen monastery in Japan.
Folks unfamiliar with different types of Buddhism might imagine Zen to be, well, zen. This would be a misapprehension. Zen practitioners are not unlike the Trappists: ascetic, intense, renunciatory. Forall spent years begging, self-purifying, and sitting in silence for months at a time. (One of the happiest moments of his life, he told me, was toward the end of a 100-day sit.) He studied other Buddhist traditions and eventually, he added, did go back and finish his economics degree at Williams, to the relief of his parents.
He got his answer: Craving is the root of all suffering. And he became ordained, giving up the name Teal Scott and becoming Soryu Forall: “Soryu” meaning something like “a growing spiritual practice” and “Forall” meaning, of course, “for all.”
Back in Vermont, Forall taught at monasteries and retreat centers, got kids to learn mindfulness through music and tennis, and co-founded a nonprofit that set up meditation programs in schools. In 2013, he opened MAPLE, a “modern” monastery addressing the plagues of environmental destruction, lethal weapons systems, and AI, offering co-working and online courses as well as traditional monastic training.
In the past few years, MAPLE has become something of the house monastery for people worried about AI and existential risk. This growing influence is manifest on its books. The nonprofit’s revenues have quadrupled, thanks in part to contributions from tech executives as well as organizations such as the Future of Life Institute, co-founded by Jaan Tallinn, a co-creator of Skype. The donations have helped MAPLE open offshoots—Oak in the Bay Area, Willow in Canada—and plan more. (The highest-paid person at MAPLE is the property manager, who earns roughly $40,000 a year.)
MAPLE is not technically a monastery, as it is not part of a specific Buddhist lineage. Still, it is a monastery. At 4:40 a.m., the Zendo is full. The monks and novices sit in silence below signs that read, among other things, abandon all hope, this place will not support you, and nothing you can think of will help you as you die. They sing in Pali, a liturgical language, regaling the freedom of enlightenment. They drone in English, talking of the Buddha. Then they chant part of the heart sutra to the beat of a drum, becoming ever louder and more ecstatic over the course of 30 minutes: “Gyate, gyate, hara-gyate, hara-sogyate, boji sowaka!” “Gone, gone, gone all the way over, everyone gone to the other shore. Enlightenment!”
The residents maintain a strict schedule, much of it in silence. They chant, meditate, exercise, eat, work, eat, work, study, meditate, and chant. During my visit, the head monk asked someone to breathe more quietly during meditation. Over lunch, the congregants discussed how to remove ticks from your body without killing them (I do not think this is possible). Forall put in a request for everyone to “chant more beautifully.” I observed several monks pouring water in their bowl to drink up every last bit of food.
The strictness of the place helps them let go of ego and see the world more clearly, residents told me. “To preserve all life: You can’t do that until you come to love all life, and that has to be trained,” a 20-something named Bodhi Joe Pucci told me.
Many people find their time at MAPLE transformative. Others find it traumatic. I spoke with one woman who said she had experienced a sexual assault during her time at Oak in California. That was hard enough, she told me. But she felt more hurt by the way the institution responded after she reported it to Forall and later to the nonprofit’s board, she said: with a strange, stony silence. (Forall told me that he cared for this person, and that MAPLE had investigated the claims and didn’t find “evidence to support further action at this time.”) The message that MAPLE’s culture sends, the woman told me, is: “You should give everything—your entire being, everything you have—in service to this organization, because it’s the most important thing you could ever do.” That culture, she added, “disconnected people from reality.”
While the residents are chanting in the Zendo, I notice that two are seated in front of an electrical device, its tiny green and red lights flickering as they drone away. A few weeks earlier, several residents had constructed place-mat-size wooden boards with accelerometers in them. The monks would sit on them while the device measured how on the beat their chanting was: green light, good; red light, bad.
Chanting on the beat, Forall acknowledged, is not the same thing as cultivating universal empathy; it is not going to save the world. But, he told me, he wanted to use technology to improve the conscientiousness and clarity of MAPLE residents, and to use the conscientiousness and clarity of MAPLE residents to improve the technology all around us. He imagined changes to human “hardware” down the road—genetic engineering, brain-computer interfaces—and to AI systems. AI is “already both machine and living thing,” he told me, made from us, with our data and our labor, inhabiting the same world we do.
Does any of this make sense? I posed that question to an AI researcher named Sahil, who attended one of MAPLE’s retreats earlier this year. (He asked me to withhold his last name because he has close to zero public online presence, something I confirmed with a shocked, admiring Google search.)
He had gone into the retreat with a lot of skepticism, he told me: “It sounds ridiculous. It sounds wacky. Like, what is this ‘woo’ shit? What does it have to do with engineering?” But while there, he said, he experienced something spectacular. He was suffering from “debilitating” back pain. While meditating, he concentrated on emptying his mind and found his back pain becoming illusory, falling away. He felt “ecstasy.” He felt like an “ice-cream sandwich.” The retreat had helped him understand more clearly the nature of his own mind, and the need for better AI systems, he told me.
That said, he and some other technologists had reviewed one of Forall’s ideas for AI technology and “completely tore it apart.”
Does it make any sense for us to be worried about this at all? I asked myself that question as Forall and I sat on a covered porch, drinking tea and eating dates stuffed with almond butter that a resident of the monastery wordlessly dropped off for us. We were listening to birdsong, looking out on the Green Mountains rolling into Canada. Was the world really ending?
Forall was absolute: Nine countries are armed with nuclear weapons. Even if we stop the catastrophe of climate change, we will have done so too late for thousands of species and billions of beings. Our democracy is fraying. Our trust in one another is fraying. Many of the very people creating AI believe it could be an existential threat: One 2022 survey asked AI researchers to estimate the probability that AI would cause “severe disempowerment” or human extinction; the median response was 10 percent. The destruction, Forall said, is already here.
[Read: AI doomerism is a decoy]
But other experts see a different narrative. Jaron Lanier, one of the inventors of virtual reality, told me that “giving AI any kind of a status as a proper noun is not, strictly speaking, in some absolute sense, provably incorrect, but is pragmatically incorrect.” He continued: “If you think of it as a non-thing, just a collaboration of people, you gain a lot in terms of thoughts about how to make it better, or how to manage it, or how to deal with it. And I say that as somebody who’s very much in the center of the current activity.”
I asked Forall whether he felt there was a risk that he was too attached to his own story about AI. “It’s important to know that we don’t know what’s going to happen,” he told me. “It’s also important to look at the evidence.” He said it was clear we were on an “accelerating curve,” in terms of an explosion of intelligence and a cataclysm of death. “I don’t think that these systems will care too much about benefiting people. I just can’t see why they would, in the same way that we don’t care about benefiting most animals. While it is a story in the future, I feel like the burden of proof isn’t on me.”
That evening, I sat in the Zendo for an hour of silent meditation with the monks. A few times during my visit to MAPLE, a resident had told me that the greatest insight they achieved was during an “interview” with Forall: a private one-on-one instructional session, held during zazen. “You don’t experience it elsewhere in life,” one student of Forall’s told me. “For those seconds, those minutes that I’m in there, it is the only thing in the world.”
Toward the very end of the hour, the head monk called out my name, and I rushed up a rocky path to a smaller, softly lit Zendo, where Forall sat on a cushion. For 15 minutes, I asked questions and received answers from this unknowable, unusual brain—not about AI, but about life.
When I returned to the big Zendo, I was surprised to find all of the other monks still sitting there, waiting for me, meditating in the dark.
]]>
There is a great focus on sustainable education at the moment, likely because it is so very needed to find new innovative solutions to the huge environmental problems we are globally facing. Sustainable education generally means “green” or ecologically focused education, which is naturally of great importance — but why not add a methodological dimension to green education?
Sustainable education should be schooling that can be sustained and endured, meaning that it should be adaptable and suitable for a multitude of students, not just for the “literate” ones in the most traditional, cultivated sense of the term.
Sustainable education should be democratic and be available for the masses rather than for the few fortunate ones (who attend progressive, typically expensive, private schools).
Sustainable education should teach students how to live a good life that they can sustain and justify.
And, sustainable education should allow for diversity and for novel, unrefined approaches to problem-solving, for uncultivated research methodologies, and investigations on human wellbeing in sync with nature, now and in the future — in a fruitful mix with longstanding, well-tested methodologies, of course. Because only when we learn to honour and draw on the knowledge of our ancestors and of the specialists who have worked hard to gain profound knowledge on a specific topic (the gurus, I have chosen to call them) in a combination with new approaches and unpolished practices can we create enduring solutions for the future and honour diversity.
There is much talk about disruption and innovation in our time, but how can we anticipate the creation of something new and truly innovative, when we tend to be stuck with stagnated methods and orthodox ways? How can we solve environmental issues when we still teach product development and business models fixated on consumerism? How can we honour simplicity and the beauty of thoroughly made things and systems that celebrate equality and diversity when we applaud material success and cherish quick solutions and convenience?
Sustainable education could be alike a sustainable wardrobe (which I explore extensively in my book Anti-trend): it could consist of a core of hardwearing, long-lasting items and a colourful variety of sustainable, short-lived articles made from transient, perishable materials as well as deconstructed or upcycled pieces designed from waste-products. A mix of such elements allows for durability, changeability and individuality.
Similarly, sustainable education should naturally consist of a fundament of core-skills (like e.g., reading, writing, mathematics and science as well as philosophy, arts, music and movement or well-being), plus on top hereof of an assortment of raw, uncultivated know-hows that can be place-specific, time-specific or (to continue the previous wardrobe analogy) tailored for the individual and for the land or the place — and that could even be constructed from wasted or cast-away methodologies that have been upcycled or updated to suit our time era and timely problematics and needs).
It is important for me to stress the fact though that I am not suggesting to carelessly abandon and devalue fundamental, well-tested core-skills.
Myhusband and I recently had dinner with friends; a lovely couple with three young children. They were telling us about how they have chosen a homeschooling group three days a week for their children, which sounded beautiful and nourishing: small and safe and with lots of time for creative projects and outdoors playing. The remainder of the week they basically do what is now elegantly called unschooling, which more or less means exactly what it sounds like: to do no schooling at all.
We discussed unorthodox, progressive education and the beauty of freedom to learn in different ways than the way we were schooled when we were kids and teenagers. I voiced my appreciation of my youngest son’s school and the deep fundament of empathy and community that seeps through everything there, and my oldest son’s amazing teachers, who embrace the interests and gifts of each young person in his class.
However, I also expressed my worries about my youngest son’s slow learning curve when it comes to reading. It is going really, really slow, I said, and what worries me quite a bit is that I don’t feel like his teacher is able to motivate him or encourage him by showing him the relevance of being able to read and the amazing world of knowledge that it opens up for you. He is so curious and so eager to know about anything from plants and animals to technology and space travels that being able to do his own research by reading books and looking up facts on the internet would be such a gift for him.
The couple said that their two youngest children were also not yet able to read freely and independently, and that the homeschooling group didn’t seem to put much focus on such “traditional” academic skills.
But we are not really concerned, the husband said; who knows what skills will be useful in the future? Honestly, they might not even need to be able to read or write. Our youngest daughter can find everything she needs by using siri.
I wasn’t sure how to respond. Because as much as I agree that it is next to impossible to know exactly what skills are going to be useful in the future, and as much as I therefore value children’s education that embrace this by allowing for free explorations and for innovative approaches to problem solving, reading and writing are fundamental skills that should never go out of fashion; no matter how much clever technology we have developed that can do the reading and the writing for us, and no matter how many convenient apps we have created that can enable us to take the path of least resistant (we will end up living i a world where the robots write poetry and make art, while human beings are stuck with routine based, hard labor!).
But what about when there is a blackout? I asked, not sure what else to say (this happens in Bali a lot; we often experience hours or even days without electricity due to heavy rains or damaged electricity poles). Well, then I guess siri takes a nap, and then we just do something else, he responded.
Let’s not make ourselves dependent on technology. Let’s not smoothify our lives and put convenience before all else to a degree that without our apps and without our screens and without our siris we are helpless. And most importantly, let’s not teach our children to develop and cultivate this dependency.
We are dependent on each other, on human community and interactions, and we are dependent on nature in order to establish a balanced life worth sustaining, but we are not dependent on siri, literally and metaphorically speaking. So yes, we do need to learn how to read and write, and yes that does take a long time, and yes, it is hard to make children who are used to the instant payoff of computer games and tablets understand that this process is slow and that it can be wearisome, but that it is important. Some things are worth working hard for, and this is one of them.
When renewing education and allowing for old systems to be disrupted in order to make space for innovative, novel, timely approaches to problem solving and research, we mustn’t discard the “building blocks’’ that form the basis of education.
Gaining basic insight into long standing theories and methodologies within the scheduled subject is imperative. Because, in order to be innovative there must be something to innovate!
In order to write aesthetically pleasing, thought-provoking poetry you must have a language, in order to approach mathematical equations in novel ways you must know fundamental math, in order to rewrite constitutional laws or engage in activism you must have a fundamental understanding of ethics and sociology, in order to create pioneering philosophical treatises you must understand parts of what has been written before (and hence honour the history of philosophy), in order to compose music you must be able to play an instrument and understand different music genres, in order to create aesthetically nourishing, long-lasting garments you must be able to draw and sew, and in order to create sustainable living solutions you must comprehend what sustainability means and encompasses.
Traditional shouldn’t always be a “naughty” word in progressive education.
Try building a house without a foundation! It might seem possible and straight forward at first; but after a while of hammering boards together and piling up bricks you will reach a point of stagnation and finally a point of collapse. No siri can help you and no app can support you.
There is only one thing to do; to take down your babel tower of ignorance and start from scratch by slowly creating a stable fundament — and then on top of that build your sustainable, aesthetically nourishing, well-designed, enduring house.
…
Let’s connect! https://www.instagram.com/the_immaterialist/
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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]]>For those of us homeschooling teen girls, my friend Tricia Goyer has just released a beautiful devotional to help them think through future relationships and marriage – could be a perfect conversation starter and lead to mentoring moments! (afflink)
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]]>Frank J. Stockton for the Deseret News
I
The sport was ludicrously violent, with 18 players having died in just that year alone. Almost 50 people had perished in the five years since the turn of the century. Broken backs and necks were common. Concussions were legion. One player — Harold Moore of Union College — died in November 1905 of a cerebral hemorrhage after being kicked in the head while trying to make a tackle. (Helmets wouldn’t become mandatory in college football until 1939.)
Enter Teddy Roosevelt, the president of the United States and an avowed fan not just of football but of violent play, more generally speaking. “I believe in rough games and in rough, manly sports,” Roosevelt once said. “I do not feel any particular sympathy for the person who gets battered about a good deal so long as it is not fatal.”
Roosevelt brought the presidents of Yale, Harvard and Princeton together twice in the fall of 1905 to see if they could agree on a series of reforms that would keep football going while making it safer for its participants. (The Ivy League was, at the turn of the 20th century, the center of the college football universe.)
By the start of the 1906 season, a series of new rules had been adopted — including the forward pass, which led to the evolution of modern football. Roosevelt’s interest in saving football was about a lot more than his enjoyment of the game; he believed that young men engaging in (at times) brutal physical combat was the proper training for a future as a soldier in the service of the country.
Wrote Roosevelt: “There is a certain tendency ... to underestimate or overlook the need of the virile, masterful qualities of the heart and mind. ... There is no better way of counteracting this tendency than by encouraging bodily exercise, and especially the sports which develop such qualities as courage, resolution and endurance.” (Dwight Eisenhower would put it even more bluntly: “The true mission of American sports is to prepare young people for war.”)
“The true mission of American sports is to prepare young people for war.” — Dwight D. Eisenhour
Roosevelt then is rightly understood as our first sporting president — in both the sense that he wrestled, boxed, hunted and fished, and that he understood that sports and politics had a symbiotic relationship that could be exploited by leaders. As historian John Sayle Watterson noted, Roosevelt was “the first president to use sports extensively for political purposes.”
Of course, while Roosevelt was the first president to meld sports and politics, the fact is that the two pursuits have been intertwined for thousands of years.
In 776 B.C., the first Olympics were held as both a tribute to the Greek god Zeus and a way for the various city-states of the country to prove their superiority over one another. It was a showcase for champions of each island and city-state.
“We know there was total chaos for a week because anyone who wanted to raise their profile, this was the place and time to do it,” said Paul Christesen, a professor of ancient Greek history at Dartmouth.
By the time of the Roman Empire, the notion of using sports as a way to placate and pacify the people had been officially codified into a phrase: “bread and circuses.” It comes from a line from the poet Juvenal:
“Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.”
The idea went like this: To keep the people of Rome happy — and pliant — emperors did two things: (1) they gave out free wheat to keep citizens fed; and (2) they staged gladiatorial contests in the Coliseum that slaked people’s more primal urges.
“Paying for spectacular games, blood sports, parades, religious festivals and chariot races became a standard tool for politicians to win Roman elections during the Republic,” wrote Linda Ellis, a professor at San Francisco State University. “Even in the absence of elections, Roman emperors and provincial governors continued to sponsor lavish entertainment events to demonstrate their generosity and justify their retention of power.”
Since the end of the Second World War — and especially since the advent of television — presidents have leaned more and more on sports to cast a positive image of their presidency and speak to audiences they might not be able to reach any other way.
No one epitomized that notion better than John F. Kennedy. Despite a sickly childhood — and a series of illnesses throughout his presidency — the prevailing image of Kennedy for most Americans was of him and his extended family engaged in games of touch football at their compound in Hyannis Port. That Kennedy was often barely able to walk due to back issues — much less able to fully participate in quasi-tackle football — was glossed over. He was regarded as a hale and hearty presence by the public — thanks in large part to his purposeful close associations with sports.
The man Kennedy beat in 1960 — Richard Nixon — was an awkward presence on the football field, effectively used as a tackling dummy during his collegiate years. But the future president was a rabid fan, quoting facts and figures about players and games to anyone who would listen. For the socially challenged Nixon, sports talk was a way to humanize him — and for him to talk to regular joes with whom he felt as though he had little else in common.
Since the end of World War II, presidents have leaned on sports to cast a positive image of their presidency and speak to audiences they might not be able to reach any other way.
If Kennedy was the first modern president to grasp the power of sports to make myths, it was Ronald Reagan who took the mixing of sports and politics to the next level. Reagan was, by all accounts, a decent young athlete — he claimed to have saved 77 people from drowning during his years as a lifeguard. But Reagan’s real genius was in his understanding that being next to great athletes — and, as important, winners — was just as good as being one himself.
While championship sports teams had, on occasion, visited the White House before Reagan’s term, the “Gipper” formalized the process — welcoming in winners and flashing the showmanship that had made him a successful actor. (After the New York Giants won the Super Bowl in 1987, Reagan allowed members of the team to dump a Gatorade bucket full of popcorn — one of his favorite foods — over his head.)
The best overall athlete — in terms of the breadth of the sports he played and the longevity with which he continued to play them — to ever grace the White House was George H.W. Bush. (Yes, Gerald Ford was the best football player — obviously — to ever serve as president. But Bush was more well-rounded. He played tennis. Golfed. Parachuted. Played baseball in college. Did almost any sport that could reasonably be called a sport — and did it well.)
Bush grew up playing tennis with his mother, who was a skilled and competitive player. He was a light-hitting and slick-fielding first baseman on the Yale baseball team, and even got to meet Babe Ruth just weeks before the Sultan of Swat’s untimely death.
In office, Bush’s competitive fires ran deep — so deep that he organized a March Madness-like tournament of horseshoes played by the permanent White House staff. (There were brackets and everything!) After leaving the presidency, Bush, like all the men who had held the office before and since, found an outlet for his competitive drive in sports. In addition to being an avid golfer and tennis player, Bush even laid claim to inventing the phrase “You da man!” Yes, seriously.
Barack Obama was the first — but probably not the last — baller president. Obama had a basketball court built on the White House grounds, and invites to his regular pickup games were more precious than getting asked to a state dinner. Obama viewed his competitiveness in pickup as an analog for his competitiveness in politics; once he was in the mix, he wanted to win — and was willing to do whatever it took to bring about that desired result. Obama’s rise also dovetailed with the surging popularity of the NBA. Just as Obama was redefining cool in politics, LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Kobe Bryant were doing the same on the hardwood.
Then there is, of course, Donald Trump. Like so much else with Trump, the story of his athletic prowess is exaggerated. He was a good baseball player in high school but almost certainly not, as he has often claimed, the best baseball player in the state of New York. He is a good bordering‑on‑very-good golfer, but the stories of his many club championships won require a good deal of creative math.
He spent years pursuing an NFL team, and if he had managed to buy one — or turn the USFL’s New Jersey Generals into one — he might never have had the itch to run for president. Sports and politics appealed to Trump for the same, visceral reasons: Someone won and, more important, someone lost. He liked that — as long as he was on the winning team. Always.
George Orwell once called sports “war without shooting.” And there’s no question that our modern presidents have understood that sports can be used to unite us and to divide us in equal measure. Nixon saw bowling as a way to not only court the middle of the country — his “silent majority” — but also cast them against the coastal elites who looked down on bowling as a sport for the middle class.
In the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, there were very real questions about whether sports should continue at all. They did — and, roughly a month later, President George W. Bush strode to the mound at Yankee Stadium to throw out the first pitch in Game 3 of the World Series.
Wearing a bulletproof vest — and with an air of worry palpable in the stadium — Bush threw a perfect strike, a moment that felt like a catharsis, a signal that even though we were down as a country, we weren’t out.
“At times of national triumph, we rally around them in joy. At times of national tragedy, we rally around them to remember who we are.”
And, after four years of the abnormalities and excesses of Trump, it was sports that Joe Biden reached for to make things more, well, normal. “He’s certainly going to look to sports and sports figures to help bring us back into alignment as Americans,” Francis Biden, the president’s brother, told ESPN.
Sports, like politics, hold a mirror up to us and those we elect to lead us — showing them for who they really are when all the spin, hype and hyperbole are stripped away. For our presidents, what so often is revealed in their athletic careers, their fandom, and their leisure pursuits is a raw and unbridled competitiveness and ambition in search of a target.
For George H.W. Bush, raised to always be mannerly and kind to others, sports was where he could let his inner animal out. For his son, George W. Bush, the maniacal running and biking he took up after giving up drinking was a way to funnel his energies and compulsions. For Nixon, his fanatical fandom gave him a way to connect with Joe Q. Public and appear just a little less awkward (and unathletic). Trump viewed sports the way he viewed life — a life-and-death competition where the goal wasn’t just to win but to destroy one’s opponent.
Competition is sanctioned — and encouraged in sports. It’s a safe space where these men felt unafraid to want and want and want — in ways that would have been dismissed as overly forward or arrogant in the context of politics. Sports then was a pressure release valve for many of our nation’s leaders, a way for them to sate the ever-burning competitive fires without looking too, well, extra in doing so.
But sports did more than that, too. They showed us the best of what we could be — even if they forced us to face uncomfortable political truths in the process.
Jackie Robinson’s integration of baseball led the way for the broader integration of the country. The protests of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics shone a light on inequality in America. Muhammad Ali’s refusal to fight in Vietnam forced Americans to come to grips with what we were really doing in Southeast Asia. The U.S. women winning the World Cup in 1999 redefined what “plays like a girl” meant. LeBron James wearing an “I Can’t Breathe” warmup shirt forced the country to focus on how the police treat young African American men.
“There’s a reason that every country has its sports it loves,” explained Condoleezza Rice, who served as secretary of state under Bush. “They embody somehow the nation and the national spirit and the national pride, and they rally around these sports figures. At times of national triumph, we rally around them in joy. At times of national tragedy, we rally around them to remember who we are.”
Excerpted from “Power Players: Sports, Politics, and the American Presidency,” ©2023 Chris Cillizza and reprinted by permission from Twelve Books/Hachette Book Group.
This story appears in the July/August issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.
]]>Kids start building life skills and coping strategies pretty much from birth, with each new developmental milestone laying the foundation for the next, as they learn how to relate to others and to problem-solve in evermore complex ways. As they get older and start school, kids learn reading, writing, and arithmetic. But what are the other essential life skills to teach kids?
There are all sorts of life skills for kids — some basic, some fairly complex — that require mastery in order to have the sort of social, emotional and practical wherewithal to be good at life. According to child development experts, career planners, and business leaders, here’s where to start to ensure your kids are well-prepared for whatever (and whoever) the world throws at them.
Spatial awareness isn’t just a key part of STEM education. It also prevents us from getting lost. Start by teaching your kids how to mentally map their neighborhood, school, or favorite playground. Then break out the old-fashioned map and compass and go on a hike in the woods, challenge your kid to navigate your drive to school one morning. Although every kid should be able to function navigationally without the use of a device, it’s a good idea to also have them learn to follow navigational directions on phones, a critical modern skill.
Here’s a troubling statistic: More than half of teens today use texting to regularly communicate with friends, versus only a third who consistently talk face to face. That’s a problem, because kids need to know how to carry on a one-on-one conversation not just to ace college and job interviews, but also to develop lasting, honest relationships. Help them out by banning devices from the dinner table.
Shake hands, make eye contact, listen attentively and don’t cut people off — these are skills that are more important than ever, given our many screens’ attention-grabbing abilities. Why? They instill confidence, earn trust, and are a solid foundation for a healthy social life. Start by teaching them an old-fashioned hand shake:
If a kid can’t hang with their own thoughts, alone, without friends or family, they will have serious anxiety when they are left to their own devices. Given the stratification of work and family, this is bound to happen. To change this dynamic, why not devote a nook in your house to a “quiet corner,” featuring a comfortable chair, a small work table, and a few calming toys and activities. While they’re enjoying alone time, you’ll get a break, too.
While toddler swimming classes are all the rage, the American Academy of Pediatrics doesn’t recommend swim classes for kids under 4, since there’s little evidence such programs decrease the likelihood of drowning and could lead parents to develop a false sense of security. After your kid’s 4th birthday, get them in the pool.
Caring for a pet — and keeping it alive — helps kids learn to be empathetic, one of the most important skills they can develop. If you’re not ready to give in to their pleas for a family dog, there are easier options: hermit crabs, a goldfish, butterflies, or even a house plant.
Kids don’t just have to know how to avoid dangerous content and individuals online. They also need to learn how to be sensible web consumers and creators, especially given the troubling rise of fake facts and misinformation. One recent study found that less than half of kids ages 10 to 18 say they can tell fake stories from the real deal, which is likely why only one in four of them have a lot of trust in journalistic organizations. To help your kids navigate the confusion, focus on reading comprehension and critical thinking skills. One way to do this outside of actual reading together is to play “spot the mistakes” with a Wikipedia entry or online article, then launch a family blog.
Since we yet don’t complete all of our purchases using our smartphones, kids still have to know their way around quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies. Run some practice transactions by them, with an added incentive: Every time they give you the correct coins back, they get to put the change in their piggy bank.
Saving money is hard for the best of us, so it’s important to start early with your kid’s weekly allowance. At first, allow them to spend half on anything they want, then put the rest into a piggy bank. Once they have enough saved up — say, $150 — go to the bank and start a savings account. Be sure to log into the account online, show them how to manage their money via browser, and help them build out a long-term savings plan.
Kids shouldn’t be overstimulated all the time — or feel like they need to be. Studies have shown that mindfulness practices can help kids become more attentive, respectful, and focused, while reducing stress and hyperactive behaviors. To get your kid into meditation, start easy: Ask them to sit still, relax, and focus on the process of breathing. It’s a useful education on the important art of sitting still.
Cleaning teaches kids how to value their possessions and organize their space. Let them experiment with sweeping, mopping, and dusting, but more importantly, make sure they understand how to organize their room on their own — and then to declutter.
In the era of emojis and selfies, kids’ written communication skills are in danger of atrophying. They need to know to compose a formal letter (heading, greeting, body, closing, and signature), and should learn that an e-mail, and even a text, can be written formally.
This knowledge could pay off years later at an all-important lunch or dinner job interview. Kids need to know how to navigate the dining room table: Napkin goes in their lap and then on their chair if they need to be excused. No reaching for food, no interrupting, no chewing with their mouth open. Plus they should be able to set the table: From left to right, it should go fork, plate, knife, and then spoon, with the water glass above the knife.
The days of finishing schools have come and gone, but that doesn’t mean we should be raising uncivilized bores. Start by modeling proper etiquette yourself and focus on the six most important phrases in civil dialogue:
We’re not talking about how to put on shirts and pants. We’re referring to helping kids learn how to dress nicely: picking out weather-appropriate options, mixing and matching colors, pairing prints with solids. It’s a great way to help your kid express themselves, create their own style, make decisions, and feel confident.
For safety reasons, kids should have their home address and phone number memorized. A 10-year-old should also know relevant email addresses and cell numbers. Work the information into a song, use rhyming games, or post the information prominently around the house — whatever it takes to make this information stick.
Laughter is incredibly helpful to a person’s life, and someone who can tell at least one good clean joke, really well, will never want for something to say, or lack the ability to break the ice. Here’s a favorite joke requires their full story-telling capacity:
Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson went camping. They pitched their tent under the stars and went to sleep. Sometime in the middle of the night Holmes woke Watson up.
Holmes said: “Watson, look up at the stars, and tell me what you see.”
Watson replied: “I see millions and millions of stars.”
Holmes said: “And what do you deduce from that?”
Watson replied: “Well, if there are millions of stars, and if even a few of those have planets, it’s quite likely there are some planets like Earth out there. And if there are a few planets like Earth out there, there might also be life.”
And Holmes said: “Watson, you idiot, it means that somebody stole our tent.”
Your kid doesn’t have to become MacGyver, but they should have a handle on essential first aid skills that will help them in an emergency:
Learning to cook offers all sorts of benefits: It teaches kids how to be creative, how employ real-world math, how to use sharp objects safely, and how to appreciate nutritious foods. Just make sure the first recipes they try will earn them something delicious. Here’s how to walk them through cooking a scrambled egg.
Always supervise them (there is a stove involved), but gradually allow them to take over the process until they can do it from start to finish.
We can nag our kids all we want to brush their teeth and take a bath, but if we want these concepts to stick, kids have to learn to embrace them on their own. One way to do that is to turn skin care, oral hygiene, and bathing into something fun. The shampoo Mohawk never gets old.
Being able to make up a story and imagine something impossible will be key in future endeavors. Creativity is becoming one of the top skills CEOs are looking for at major companies. There are many ways to foster this — games like “what’s in the box?”, setting aside time for drawing and creative writing, and being sure to have a free-flowing storytelling time every night before bed.
Learning to ride a bike is one of the best things kids can do. It keeps them physically fit, improves their balance and coordination, has been shown to improve mental focus, and as they get older it’s a great, environmentally-friendly way for them to get around their world. To help them learn, forget about those training wheels we all used. The best way to turn your kid into a biker is to invest in a balance bike (or remove the pedals from a regular small bike), then have them learn to balance in an area that’s flat, paved and traffic-free.
]]>Why can’t it be as easy as asking for a certain amount of money, getting approved, and buying a house? Why must there be so many lending companies, all of which have different requirements and terms?
As a first-time homebuyer, you’re likely among the 85% of buyers who will apply for a home mortgage instead of paying cash. To help you understand exactly what you’re getting into, we’ve created a comprehensive guide that answers the most common mortgage questions buyers have for lenders about the mortgage process.
Without further ado, let’s get started.
HomeLight recommended real estate agents are top-tier negotiators who understand the market data that helps you save as much as possible when buying your dream home.
A: Home affordability is pretty self-explanatory — it’s an expression of how much house you can afford to buy and still live comfortably.
However, the home a person can afford isn’t cut-and-dried; it varies from buyer to buyer. Everyone’s finances and circumstances are different.
To figure out how much house you can afford, you’re going to have to take a close look at a few different variables.
The very first thing you need to consider is your income. First, lenders will look at your annual gross income when they’re deciding how much money you can borrow. Your gross annual income includes money earned from full-time jobs, part-time jobs, and any money earned from self-employment (so long as you’ve been steadily earning this self-employment income for at least two years). It also includes alimony payments, income from rental properties, unemployment earnings, and pension payments.
However, when you are trying to figure out how much house you can afford, you should also look at your monthly net income. This is the amount of money you have after taxes and any deductions come out of your paycheck. You can include alimony, child support, and passive income when calculating your net pay.
Note: If you have a spouse, you will want to include their earnings in these figures.
After looking at how much money is flowing into your household, you’ll want to write down your monthly debts. That’s because lenders will also look at your debt-to-income ratio, or DTI.
“You would add up all of your monthly debt payments, such as auto loans, mortgage payments, minimum payments on credit cards, student loan payments and installment debts,” explains Marcus Rittman from HomeLight Home Loans.
To come up with your debt-to-income ratio, Rittman adds, “You’re going to take your monthly debt and then divide that by your gross monthly income. That number will be your debt-to-income ratio. As a general rule, the maximum debt-to-income ratio buyers should use to calculate how much house they can buy would be 43%.”
As an example, let’s say this is what your monthly debts look like:
Add this up and it equals $2,000 in monthly debt.
Then let’s say you gross $8,333 per month.
( 2,000 / 8,333 ) X 100 = 0.36 X 100 = 36%
Your debt-to-income ratio is 36%. If you wanted to upgrade to a more expensive home, and planned to go up to 43% DTI, you could afford $2,783 per month considering your other debt payments.
Typically, the lower your DTI, the more home you’ll be able to afford when you get a mortgage.
If this math is making your head spin, you can use our affordability calculator to figure out your DTI, too.
How much do you have in your savings account right now? In September 2020, the average American had $3,500 in a savings account, although the Federal Reserve released a report that stated only 61% of Americans could cover a $400 emergency in 2018.
If you’re going to buy a home, you’ll need enough savings for a down payment, closing costs, and financial experts advise that you should also have enough money left over in your savings accounts to cover at least three months of expenses in case of an emergency.
Your credit score is another big factor to consider because it helps determine whether you qualify for a mortgage, and the interest rate you’re offered on your loan.
Buyers with excellent credit are offered lower interest rates which translates to lower mortgage payments each month, while buyers with lower credit scores pay higher rates and will pay more for their mortgages.
A: Your credit score is a reflection of your ability to repay debts on time and in full.
There are three main credit bureaus: Equifax, Experian and Transunion. They collect your credit information and compile it so lenders can determine your creditworthiness.
Lenders will typically look at your FICO score, which takes the credit information from the three credit bureaus, and assigns you a numeric credit score from 300 to 850.
The higher your score, the better chances you’ll have at being approved for a mortgage with lower interest rates. Credit scores typically fall into one of these ratings:
The minimum credit score you need to be approved for a mortgage will depend on what kind of loan you are applying for. FHA loans allow credit scores as low as 580 (or even 500 if you’re putting down 10% or more), and conventional loans allow credit scores as low as 620.
Los Angeles-based top-selling agent, Alison Van Wig, works with 72% more single-family homes in her area than average agents, and she strongly recommends that clients reach out to an agent up to an entire year before deciding to buy a house.
“Sometimes, the longer you wait to call us, the harder it’s going to be to get you into a home when you are ready.” She advises that the sooner you contact an agent, the sooner they can recommend a qualified loan officer that can advise you on your financial situations and steps you might take to save a downpayment or fix issues with your credit which could take up to a year and a half to repair.
You’ll want to use the official site for requesting your credit reports from the bureaus, “and look for anything that looks suspicious or fraudulent. If you catch it early, it can be cleaned up quickly. Sometimes you can negotiate your debt and offer to pay a portion of it in exchange for a letter stating the debt has been paid in full.”
Note: Don’t worry, we’ll explain the different mortgages and their requirements later in this guide.
A: A common myth people believe is that you absolutely have to have a 20% down payment when buying a house. That’s a huge chunk of change, and for most people, it would take ages to save that much money.!
Fortunately, you don’t have to put down 20%. The National Association of Realtors reviewed homes that were purchased between July 2019 and June 2020 in its annual Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, and it found that within that time frame, the average first-time homebuyer put down 7% and financed the remaining 93%.
Repeat buyers typically have a larger down payment — around 16%.
If you’re having a difficult time saving for a down payment, there are quite a few down payment assistance programs worth looking into. Some down payment grants are matching programs, which means the grant will match the down payment amount you’ve already got saved, or possibly pay as much as four times your savings!
If you want more information regarding these down payment programs, we wrote an extensive article about them here.
Tell us a little bit about your plans (where you’re looking to buy and when you want to make a purchase) and we’ll connect you with top-rated buyer’s agents in your area. It takes only a few minutes, and it’s free.
A: Whether you’re a first-time homebuyer or you’ve bought a house before, a common mortgage question folks have surrounds the kind of mortgage they should apply for. The truth is, it really depends on what you qualify for and what terms best suit your needs.
Let’s take a look at your options.
To get a conventional loan, you’ll need to go to a private financial institution, which include banks, credit unions, and mortgage companies. The loans offered by these institutions aren’t backed by a government agency, like an FHA loan or a VA loan would be.
To qualify for a conventional loan, borrowers need to have a minimum credit score in the 620 to 640 range.
A conforming loan is a loan that cannot exceed a certain dollar limit, which is set by the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA). This dollar limit is based on the FHFA’s house price index and will vary from county to county; you can figure out what that limit is in your county by using the FHFA’s interactive map. Most counties in the U.S. have a conforming lending limit of $548,250, though it can be higher in some of the priciest housing markets. The upper limit is $822,375 for these more expensive markets.
To qualify for a conforming loan, the loan must be under the dollar limit set by the FHFA, but you will also need at least a 620 credit score, a debt-to-income ratio below 50%, and at least a 3% down payment (for qualifying first-time buyers).
A government-backed USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) loan is specifically geared toward those interested in buying property in an eligible rural area.
One of the largest draws about this type of loan is that qualifying buyers do not need a down payment.
To qualify for a USDA loan, lenders typically require borrowers to have a 640 credit score, but the USDA itself doesn’t designate a minimum credit score. Borrowers must show they’ve been with the same employer or in the same industry for two years and they cannot earn more than the income threshold for their region.
A borrower going for a USDA loan must follow the USDA’s housing-to-income and debt-to-income ratios to the T. Mortgage payments (this includes homeowner’s insurance, taxes, loan interest, and loan principal) cannot exceed 29% of the household’s monthly income, and their total debt (car payments, credit card debt, student loans, medical debt, and so on) cannot exceed 41% of the household’s monthly income.
Also, it’s important to know that although you may not need to put any money down for a USDA loan, you are expected to be able to pay closing costs.
A FHA (Federal Housing Administration) loan is another government-backed loan that can offer access to more borrowers.
To qualify for a FHA loan, you’ll need a 580 credit score and a down payment of at least 3.5%. However, if you have a credit score lower than 580, lenders will still consider lending to you if you have at least a 10% down payment.
Note: In 2020, some lenders increased the minimum FHA loan credit score to 680 for certain borrowers due to the pandemic.
A VA (Veteran Affairs) loan is a loan specifically for veterans that is guaranteed by the VA. The VA doesn’t have a designated minimum credit score but the average lender will require, at minimum, 620 credit score. Borrowers aren’t required to have a down payment, nor will they be required to have mortgage insurance on the loan.
Note: Some lenders are increasing the minimum credit score to 700 for certain borrowers due to the pandemic.
A: Your monthly mortgage payment isn’t just paying back the money that you borrowed. It’s made up of several different components.
The principal refers to the original amount of money that you borrowed from the lender.
The mortgage interest is also known as your mortgage rate, and it’s expressed as a percentage of your loan amount.
Being a homeowner means you’ll have to pay property taxes, which are based on the assessed value of your home, not how much you paid to buy it.
Mortgage insurance is typically required if you put down less than 20% on your new home (unless you get a VA loan — they forgo mortgage insurance entirely, but do charge a funding fee). It usually costs between 0.5% to 1% of the loan amount annually.
Homeowner’s insurance isn’t just a good thing to have; it’s a necessity! This insurance takes the burden for paying for repairs or rebuilding your home should you have a fire, theft, or experience damage from a covered natural disaster.
Miscellaneous fees typically include homeowner’s association fees, but other fees may exist as well.
A: If you have a conventional loan, lenders typically require borrowers to get mortgage insurance when they do not put 20% down on the house. You can avoid this by comparing lenders, as some may not require you to pay for mortgage insurance even if you don’t have a 20% down payment by offering lender-paid mortgage insurance, a piggy-back second mortgage, or by taking advantage of various down payment assistance programs if you qualify.
Fortunately, even if the best loan for you includes MI, you can remove the mortgage insurance from a conventional loan once you’ve accrued 20% equity in your house (meaning you have an 80% loan-to-value ratio).
A: Your mortgage rate (also known as your interest rate) is the interest that your lender charges you for extending you the loan, and you will have to pay it back in addition to the loan principal.
A: When mortgage rates are low, your best bet is to get a fixed-rate mortgage over an adjustable-rate mortgage.
Fixed-rate mortgages means that your mortgage rate never changes, which means your mortgage payment will stay the same throughout the life of the mortgage (note: your taxes and homeowner’s insurance — which are usually included in your mortgage payment — may rise over time).
An adjustable-rate mortgage means that for the first few years (or however long is specified in your mortgage agreement), you’ll have a lower introductory mortgage rate.
However, once that time frame is over, your interest rate will adjust to reflect the market interest rates. That could be good or bad, depending on what rates have done since you bought your house.
A: Short answer: Yes, and as soon as possible.
“If you have a good rate, don’t gamble,” Allison advises.
When interest rates are low, why would you wait to lock in your mortgage rate? Holding out for lower rates might seem like a good tactic, but there’s no guarantee that rates will fall before you buy. If you’re concerned you might miss out, you can talk to your lender about a float-down option, which will let you change your rate once if rates fall again after you lock in your rate but before you close (float-downs are not always offered for free, though).
A: The best time to get preapproved for a mortgage is before you begin the house hunt. When you have that preapproval letter, you know what your budget is so you aren’t falling in love with houses that you cannot afford.
A: When a loan originator talks about “points on your loan,” they’re referring to discount points, which can reduce your loan interest rate. One discount point usually costs roughly 1% of the loan amount (the total amount of money you’re borrowing) and decreases your interest rate by about 0.25%.
“What this does is, you pay extra in closing costs to get a lower rate, which gives you a lower monthly payment,” Rittman explains.
“The average homeowner keeps their mortgage for about seven years. So if they pay $10,000 in points, their monthly savings might be $100. They will have to be in the house for 100 months to recoup that difference.”
A: Closing costs are inevitable. These are the fees that will be paid at closing, and they can range between 2% to 5% of the loan amount. As a buyer, you’ll be expected to pay:
You can estimate how much you may have to pay in closing costs by using our closing cost calculator.
A: From the time your offer is accepted, closing typically takes four weeks. During this time, there will be a number of tasks to complete, such as the home inspection, home appraisal, negotiations, and the final walkthrough.
As much as we’d love to say that closing always goes smoothly, that’s not always the case. There are quite a few reasons closing could be delayed, but the most common reasons are issues with the mortgage loan, appraisal issues, and inspection problems.
For a full breakdown, check out this blog post where we go over the 17 reasons (yes, 17!) why closing could be delayed.
We analyze over 27 million transactions and thousands of reviews to determine which agent is best for you based on your needs. It takes just two minutes to match you with the best real estate agents, who will contact you and guide you through the process.
A: Yes, you can and usually without any penalties — depending on your loan.
Rittman explains under what circumstances there would be prepayment penalties: “A non-QM (qualified mortgage) loan is a little different because they are offered by private groups and investors who have different underwriting criteria.”
For example, he says, if someone is self-employed but doesn’t want to provide the lender with all of their earnings documentation, a lender may still work with them if the borrower has great credit and a healthy savings account.
A: If you’ve made six months’ worth of mortgage payments, you can start looking into refinancing; however, there are some lenders who will want you to pay your mortgage for a year or more before they’ll consider refinancing your loan.
Ideally, you’ll want to refinance when interest rates are significantly lower than when you purchased your home.
Let’s say you bought a house years ago with a 6% interest rate. However, if interest rates fall below 3%, that would be a great time to refinance!
You could also refinance if you need to access the equity in your home and use that money to pay for home improvements, pay off debt, or even expand your real estate empire with rental properties.
Navigating the real estate world can be intimidating, especially when it comes to getting a loan, but we hope this in-depth guide answered all of your mortgage questions!
Header Image Source: Camylla Battani / Unsplash.com
]]>Whether you own a bar, vape shop, or live music booking venue that sells alcohol, a variety of small business owners need to learn how to spot fake id photos and features.
Here’s all you need to know.
To learn how to spot a fake id, you need to know that there are variations of fake IDs.
People use fake IDs for a variety of reasons, often revolving around deceiving or circumventing systems put in place for safety, legality, or trust. Here are a few examples of why people may use a fake ID:
Businesses, landlords, and law enforcement need to be vigilant about checking IDs and understanding how to spot a fake one. Not only does this help protect against potential loss, but it also helps maintain safety and legality in their operations. As a business owner that requires ID checks, like a wine business or a liquor store, it’s crucial to train yourself and your staff on the common signs of a fake ID.
Real ids have security features. Although a fake id may look exactly like a real id, the process of creating the security features is difficult to replicate – even for accomplished, tech-savvy criminals.
Many state-issued ids use microprinting and holograms as security features. You can only see these using a magnifying glass with 10x power magnification properties. Different states locate those security features in different spots on the ids.
UV features add another layer of protection. There are certain security features that only show up when the id is held under UV light.
A typical driver’s license is thick. One way to spot a fake id driver’s license is to feel it. If it feels thin and is easily flexible, it may be fake. Those who create fake ids don’t use the same lamination process.
Another way to spot altered ids is to run you finger over the main surface, in particular, the photo area. If another photo has been placed over the photo area, you’ll feel a slight bumpiness in that area.
ID Security Features | Details | How to Spot |
---|---|---|
Holograms | Holograms are images with a special property that allows them to change when viewed from different angles. Many state-issued IDs use holograms as a form of security feature. | Use a magnifying glass with 10x power magnification to see the holograms. The exact location of the holograms varies from state to state. |
Microprinting | Microprinting involves printing small text or patterns that are difficult to replicate without the correct equipment. This text or pattern can only be seen clearly under magnification. | To see the microprinting, use a magnifying glass with 10x power magnification. The exact location of the microprinting varies depending on the state. |
UV Features | These are security features that only become visible when the ID is held under ultraviolet light. Different states use different UV designs. | To see the UV features, hold the ID under a UV light source. The UV designs will appear under this light condition. |
Feel of the ID | The feel of the ID can also be a security feature. Authentic IDs are typically thick and not easily flexible due to the lamination process used. | If the ID feels thin and is overly flexible, it might be a fake. Compare the feel of the ID in question with a known authentic ID for reference. |
Each of these methods provides a way to validate the authenticity of an ID, but the effectiveness of each method can vary depending on the quality of the fake ID. The best approach often involves using a combination of these methods.
Small business owners should have access to the Drivers License Guide. The Drivers License Guide is an ID-checking tool that explains the unique characteristics of each state’s driver’s license. Anyone familiar with bar terminology or who often needs to check IDs for purchases should be familiar with this option.
Another valuable tool is using an App that scans bar codes. Many IDs have barcodes. When the barcode is scanned, it will reveal information about the cardholder. That information should match the description on the card. Forged ids won’t include info with the barcode – it’s too expensive and difficult to use that technology.
Each state has specific security features which are located in particular areas of the license. Here are some examples of that:
On a California license, the driver’s signature has raised lettering.
In North Carolina, the holder’s date of birth is laser engraved.
When the driver’s license is tilted and held under UV light, the state name shows up diagonally on the card.
Military ids are the rarest of fake IDs or altered IDs. Of course, the wrong people may attempt to use one, especially if it gains them significant discounts.
Manufacturing, altering or using a fake military id card is a felony. This is one of the reasons that military id fraud is not as common as other types of id fraud.
To spot fake ids of this type, compare the person’s description to the person’s actual appearance. Also, ask for a driver’s license or other photo id to compare.
A common scam is creating a fraudulent ID by altering only the picture. When this is done, security features such as microprint do exist. Only the photo has been changed.
The photo quality is blurry or grainy.
The age of the person depicted on the card doesn’t match the age of the person in the photo.
When a photo is added to an existing ID, it is placed over the spot where the original photo is located. An ID card should have a smooth surface. An added photo will be slightly raised from the card’s surface. This can be felt.
Arm your business with tools such as the driver’s License Guide and a barcode scanning app. Also, train employees so that they have the skills and knowledge to handle someone attempting to use a fraudulent ID.
Certain security features will show up under ultraviolet light.
If a photo is added, that will create a discernible raised area. The photo quality may be poor.
Fake ids may contain misspellings and inaccurate state abbreviations.
Be on alert for suspected underage customers attempting to purchase vape equipment, butane, tobacco products and/or alcohol. These types of purchases are common for attempted use of fake ID.
Absolutely. Although some states treat the crime as a felony, in most cases it is a misdemeanor. Fines to the perpetrator range from $500 to $1000.
Call law enforcement. You can hold the suspected fake ID until police arrive.
Military IDs are rarely altered, possibly because that crime is treated as a felony.
An original birth certificate should have a raised seal from its state of origin. This is tough to forge.
A driver’s license may be the most common type of fraudulent ID use.
It is most often used by underage persons attempting to buy alcohol, tobacco/vaping products or butane products. So spotting fake driver’s licenses is an essential part of learning how to manage a bar.
Use your security knowledge and tools, such as your driver’s license guide, UV light and a 10x magnifying glass. Compare the height, weight and age information to the person attempting to use the license.
Also, ask questions. Don’t ask obvious questions, such as birthdate and address. Someone attempting to use the license has memorized that information. Instead, ask an offbeat question such as “What year did you graduate from high school?”
That should elicit an instant answer; someone should not be standing there, trying to do the math.
This article, "How to Spot Fake ID: A Guide for Small Businesses" was first published on Small Business Trends
]]>Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is making headlines as it explodes in prevalence across the globe. It serves as a key marker of the new technological era and promises drastic change in the future. But what is it, exactly?
AI is defined as the ability of a computer or machine to learn from previous experiences. Previous experiences include written prompts, math problems, and images. AI studies these experiences and responds to them, generating content, trends, and predictions.
There are different AI models and types. For example, AI can be categorised as a machine learning program, a deep learning program, or an expert systems program. Machine learning AI is able to learn from data without manual human programming. Deep learning AI programs specialise in high-complexity patterns and often outperform machine learning data inputs.
Expert systems are AI programs designed to copy human-level decision-making. Expert systems have been used in the medical field; for example, AI of chest X-rays can identify lung cancer type and stage by analysing the image in context with the disease.
Also Read: How Transparently.AI uses Artificial Intelligence to detect accounting manipulation, fraud
Other key terms include Application Programming Interface (API), data extraction, JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), and Optical Character Recognition (OCR). API is made up of a set of defined rules that allows various applications to communicate with each other. It acts as an intermediary layer between systems.
Data extraction allows AI programs to pull usable information from large and unconsolidated sources. JSON is a lightweight format for storing and transporting data and is used when data needs to transmit from a server to a webpage. Finally, OCR is text recognition that allows users to extract printed or handwritten text from images and documents.
AI applications can also be categorised further, leading to more terminology. Important categories include generative AI, predictive analytics, natural language processing, and computer vision. Each of these has its own uses. For example, generative AI, as seen in programs like NovelAI, creates news content through existing data. Computer vision, on the other hand, is a program that can interpret digital images.
The above terminology is important to know, as AI is predicted to continue having a massive impact on society. In fact, Ark Invest predicts that AI will contribute US$200 trillion to the global economic output by 2030. Additionally, by 2023, global spending on AI by governments and businesses is expected to exceed US$500 billion.
To further demonstrate the proliferation of AI in businesses, we can examine the number of AI capabilities used by businesses over time. In 2018, businesses used an average of 1.9 capabilities. By 2022, this number doubled, with an average of 3.8 capabilities. This number is expected to double once again in 2023. The most common AI capabilities are automating processes through robotics, computer vision, and natural language text understanding.
Also Read: Singapore’s YC-backed AI startups making waves globally with generative technology
Governments and businesses turn to AI for its several benefits. For one, AI increases efficiency and productivity, as it frees up workers to focus on more advanced tasks. It generates greater speed by shortening development cycles and cutting the time between design and commercialisation. This in turn increases ROI. AI also improves monitoring and results in higher quality and increased accuracy. Finally, AI can increase talent management by improving the hiring process.
There are five steps that businesses should keep in mind when incorporating AI into their operations. To begin, a business needs to understand its own needs and goals and how AI fits into those goals. Businesses should also set near-term goals for AI use and then evaluate the approach that will work best for them. Once businesses have established the foundation, they make sure the data is accurate and complete, then begin testing AI.
One type of AI that businesses might consider is Intelligent Document Processing. Lazarus AI provides an option for this with its RikAI program, which is an input-agnostic language model. It works with no training or retraining and can pull data from any document, even if the type, format, or language varies. It specialises in contextualising information and can help businesses find answers to natural language questions.
There are countless types of AI, and the numbers will continue to grow as technology advances. Many businesses are implementing AI into their organisations, and understanding the terminology and role of various AI models is key to navigating an increasingly-technological future.
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]]>Every June, my school district warns parents about the “summer slide” phenomenon, where kids experience learning loss over the summer. When my kids return to school in the fall, they spend weeks covering review material just to catch up to where they left off the previous year. But now with the COVID-19 pandemic, my kids — all our kids — have experienced a major disruption to their learning, like they would with an earthquake or a hurricane, and that disruption far outstrips any learning loss in summer.
The question to ask is, how long will it take our students to recover academically from the COVID-slide?
Let’s look at some numbers. The latest Nation’s Report Card, a national assessment of student’s reading and math skills in the 4th and 8th grades, shows a significant decline in scores from 2019, the year before the pandemic, to 2022. The average math score for fourth-graders fell five points, while the average eighth-grade score dropped eight points. Both scores dropped by three points in reading. Additionally, across the board, more students are performing below the NEAP basic level. Some experts estimate this equates to students, on average, being around 5 months behind in mathematics and four months behind in reading.
That’s a BIG learning gap!
Your Teen spoke with Dr. Sherry Kelly, a former educator and licensed clinical psychologist with more than 30 years of experience in the field of child development, to chat about the COVID learning gap. She gave us some simple, purpose-driven tips on how to get our students back on track. Here’s what she told us.
COVID carved out a gaping hole in our children’s education. Now students are tasked with getting their learning back on schedule, which can feel daunting for students working alone, and especially for those struggling with mental health.
Kelly encourages parents to help, and she says effective help starts with gathering information about where your student is compared to where they should be. She offers these simple ways for parents to stay focused and informed.
Below, you’ll find more details that explain Kelly’s tips.
Kelly recommends asking our students a question like: “What do you think is the purpose of this assignment?” “What did you learn today at school?” “What is this unit about?” “Can you see how doing this homework will help you understand the material better?” “How can you prove to your teacher that you know the material?” Whether assignments are meant to hone skills or memorizing concepts and vocabulary, it’s important for students to understand how smaller assignments tie in to larger goals so they can study purposefully and stay focused. Here again, remember not to grill them. Just choose one question to get the conversation started.
It’s not essential that you follow through with every single one of Kelly’s suggestions. Try a tip and see if it helps your student improve their academic performance. If it works, great! Maybe now it’s time to try adding another. If it doesn’t work, see if you find another tip more useful. You can also use these tips as inspiration to develop more ideas that suit your student and your family better. Our best advice is to talk to your student about how you can best support them, and be patient with their answers. Catching up on so much work can feel overwhelming and they might just need you to acknowledge it’s hard and that they’re doing the best they can.
Across all states and ethnic groups, 8th grade math students saw their scores decline. The concern? If students haven’t mastered eighth grade math skills, they can’t move forward in other subjects like science and geometry. Kelly further explains, “if a student’s math scores are super low, for example, these students will be lost in high school physics because they don’t have the requisite mathematical foundation.”
Here are some free online math resources that you might find helpful:
Kelly says you can go to those sites, “print off quizzes and math facts, and have students practice them on the way to and from school.” She says to try making a game of it, and doing a few quizzes with them.
Kelly says you can help your student hone their critical reading skills at home when you:
Have your student start by finding out when a book was written, who the author was, and what the book is about. “It seems straightforward,” Kelly says, “but you wouldn’t believe the number of students that think The Crucible was written during the Salem Witch Trials.” Have students identify main characters, setting, and protagonists and antagonists, and central conflicts to make sure they have a grip on the main ideas in a text.
Reading Romeo and Juliet? Google Shakespearean England, Shakespeare, and the basic plot of the story. “Many students think this sounds like too much work, but I try to remind them that it will make reading easier,” Kelly says.
The heart of critical reading is understanding the why of a story, not just the what. It’s the kind of reading that helps prepare our students for college and beyond. Kelly says, “Encourage your students to find out why the author wrote the book, what the secret meaning is, and what they are really trying to say.”
“Kids really want structure,” Kelly says. And what we saw in the early days of the pandemic is that education had to shift and adjust rapidly and students were under a lot of pressure to learn how to adapt when school structures and routines changed. Our kids are still learning how to adapt. It’s going to take time for them to bounce back.
Right now, it’s important to remind our students that what they are learning is important and then let them know why. Also, make sure they know they have control over their learning. Kelly says, “We need to keep reminding them that knowledge is something no one can ever take away from them.”
Our kids are smart and resilient. Our job is to keep reminding them that we have confidence in them, and that they have our support.
The post COVID Pandemic Learning Loss Is Real: Here’s How to Help Kids Catch Up appeared first on Your Teen Magazine.
]]>This will help our children see God’s Hand at work in all things.
God isn’t just an abstract concept children learn about in Bible or religious studies.
God is in all and works through all. God’s truths need to be interwoven with our knowledge and understanding.
By doing this, children are inspired with wonder and awe of God, which leads to wisdom and worship.
They can also look at the world through ‘biblical worldview glasses.’
Having children with a biblical worldview and gospel-centered way of thinking ultimately means we have kids who can glorify God and impact the world effectively for Christ.
Okay, let’s talk about how we can put the gospel into our homeschool curriculum subjects English, History, Geography, Science, and of course … Mathematics.
Affiliate links used in this article.
Let’s start with English.
The most obvious way of incorporating the gospel into English is through Bible Stories and Parables.
You can use the Bible to teach English to your children.
Using the Bible as a child’s primary textbook was common a hundred years ago.
As you read various Bible stories like David and Goliath or the Good Samaritan, try to go deeper than just the Bible story and instead see how David is a type of Christ and how the Good Samaritan represents Christ. Use these to lead you back to telling your children about the core of the Bible, the gospel.
Also, encourage scripture memorization. Make sure to memorize some good gospel nugget verses like John 3:16 and Romans 1: 16.
As you teach English, discuss how God uses our words to spread the gospel.
There’s a quote that’s been attributed (probably wrongly) to St. Francis that says, “Preach the Gospel at all times; when necessary, use words.”
Discuss what’s wrong with this quote – namely that this isn’t practical nor faithful to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Also, explore impactful speeches, sermons, or passages from literature that exemplify effective communication.
You can then explore the use of symbolism and metaphors in the Bible, showing how Jesus taught using parables to explain the gospel and how we can use stories to help make sharing the gospel easier.
Writing is also important.
Encourage your child to write about their thoughts and reflections on the gospel using English.
They can write journal entries, poems, or short stories inspired by their understanding of biblical principles and how these practically inform and shape their behavior.
If your child loves discussion and debate, talk about moral dilemmas or ethical issues in the Bible.
For example, was Rahab’s lie morally acceptable?
Why did a good God destroy whole cities?
Encourage them to express their opinions, support their arguments using narration skills, and consider different perspectives (as if they were on the opposite side of a discussion in a debating team).
This debate can improve their critical thinking, speaking, and persuasive writing abilities while exploring the principles of the gospel.
Encourage children to clearly narrate and present the gospel verbally.
Many adults don’t know how to clearly explain the gospel – that we are sinners who need a savior because we can’t save ourselves.
God sent His son, Jesus, to be our savior. We need to repent and turn to Jesus as our King.
And that’s the gospel.
Simple, but well worth learning.
What about History?
Well, history is maybe the easiest way to teach about the gospel. And that’s because you can anchor other historical events to what happened in Israel or the church throughout history.
Discuss the historical significance of figures like Abraham, Moses, David, and Jesus. Help your child understand the historical setting in which God’s redemptive plan unfolded.
In history, you can show how faithful God has been through His providence.
Highlight how God’s hand can be seen throughout different historical periods, shaping events and working through individuals and nations to fulfill His purposes.
Point out instances in history where God’s providence is evident, such as the spread of Christianity or significant societal transformations.
Then, of course, there’s Church History.
Start with the early church (I love Eusebius The History of the Church and Foxes Book of Martyrs), then move to the Reformation and modern missionary movements.
You can also discuss the lives of figures like Paul and Martin Luther or missionary pioneers like Hudson Taylor.
Talk about the Martyrs of the faith.
Highlight how their faith and actions shaped history and how God used them to spread the gospel.
Discuss their sacrifices, unwavering convictions, and the enduring impact of their witness.
Talk about how the gospel has impacted Christian values and shaped history – think of the abolition of slavery, the fight for civil rights, or the establishment of humanitarian organizations.
Help your child understand the positive impact of the gospel on individuals and communities.
Try to reflect on God’s plan of salvation and how that intersects with historical events. Think about the significance of Jesus’ birth, life, death, and resurrection in world history.
Help your homeschoolers understand the profound impact of these events on humanity and how they are central to God’s redemptive plan.
If you can go on field trips to see significant sites, museums, and artifacts, this is great!
Why?
Because seeing physical remnants of the past can help your child develop a tangible connection to historical events and gain a deeper appreciation for the gospel’s impact throughout time.
How do we connect the gospel in Geography?
Well, there are many ways.
If you can, one of the best is to visit the Holy Land. You can do this in person, but you can also do this virtually these days or with a map.
Check out old maps (usually found in the back of your Bible) and see how geography has changed over time.
Then talk about the significance of various locations like Jerusalem, Bethlehem, or the Sea of Galilee.
Help your homeschooler understand how these places’ physical geography influenced the events of the Bible and the ministry of Jesus.
Also, trace out the missionary journeys of the early apostles as they spread the gospel.
Talk about the challenges they faced, their impact on different regions, and how the geography of the place played a role in shaping the spread of Christianity.
Take out a global map to visualize the spread of the faith across continents and countries.
Discuss how the gospel transcends cultural and geographical boundaries, bringing people from diverse backgrounds together under the common belief in Christ.
You can use your global map to pray for the people of the nations. Help your homeschooler develop a heart for intercession and compassion for those who have not heard the gospel.
You may also want to talk about how the message of salvation is understood and lived out in different regions, showcasing the richness and diversity of God’s Kingdom.
Okay, let’s move on to putting the gospel into your science homeschool curriculum.
God’s creation is evident to every man who looks at nature.
As a parent, you can highlight examples of intricate ecosystems, complex biological systems, and the beauty of nature.
Consider how these observations reflect God’s handiwork and emphasize the importance of stewardship, caring for the Earth as part of our faith.
Science is where you want to encourage your child to ask questions about nature. This might be an excellent place to discuss Creation vs Evolution.
No matter your perspective, it’s good to familiarize your child with the views out there so they won’t be bewildered when they hear the other side and have no answers to give!
Also, discuss miracles and natural phenomena as you think about exploring God’s world and how there are specific natural laws like gravity.
Discuss how these events challenge our scientific understanding and can be seen as demonstrations of God’s power and intervention in the natural order.
Think about why Jesus did miracles.
Was it to proclaim himself as the sign of the savior? Were there other reasons?
Talk about it.
Also, talk about scientists of faith, like Isaac Newton.
Introduce your homeschooler to notable scientists who were also people of faith.
Share stories about scientists who contributed significantly to their respective fields while maintaining a strong belief in God. This can help your child see that science and faith are not mutually exclusive but can coexist harmoniously.
Okay, we’re almost there.
But what about Math?
This is probably the one you’ve all been waiting for!
Mathematics is an incredibly ordered study.
Explain to your child that just as mathematics reveals order and design in the world, the gospel teaches us that God created the universe with purpose and order.
You can discuss how the precision and structure in mathematics reflect God’s divine design – mathematically, consider how impossible it would have to orchestrate events so perfectly to fulfill Isaiah 53 in Jesus’ time – let alone have the rest of the biblical prophecies fulfilled.
Also, think about how God is the Ultimate Mathematician.
Discuss with your homeschooler how God’s wisdom and knowledge are limitless and how mathematics is a tool that allows us to explore and understand the patterns and complexities of His creation.
Show them examples of how mathematical concepts, such as Fibonacci sequences or the golden ratio, appear in nature, highlighting the beauty of God’s design.
You can also use mathematical concepts as analogies to teach biblical principles.
For example, you could relate the concept of multiplication to the story of the loaves and fishes, where Jesus multiplied the food to feed the multitude.
Help your child see how the story illustrates God’s ability to provide abundantly in times of need and how he ultimately looks after us, as shown in the gospel story.
Also, think about stewardship and sharing. Teach your homeschooled child about the importance of using mathematical skills responsibly and for the benefit of others.
Discuss how the concept of giving, sharing, and being good stewards aligns with:
Talk about how we are good stewards because we want to obey God because he has saved us.
Our good stewardship doesn’t come from feeling we need to do something to earn our salvation; rather, it overflows as a result of how thankful we are for what God has already done in our lives.
Have you caught the homeschooling bug?
Eager to delve deeper into the realm of unconventional education?
Well, my curious comrades, rejoice!
There are splendid avenues awaiting your exploration.
Firstly, hop on over to my YouTube channel, where a treasure trove of homeschooling wisdom awaits. From practical tips to delightful anecdotes, I unravel the mysteries of homeschooling with a touch of wit and wisdom.
Subscribe, hit that notification bell, and embark on an enlightening journey with me.
For those yearning for a comprehensive guide to homeschooling, look no further than my Homeschool Parenting Program.
This illustrious online course will equip you with the knowledge, strategies, and confidence to navigate the exhilarating world of homeschooling like a seasoned pro.
Enroll today and unlock the door to extraordinary educational possibilities.
I have to admit, I find it hard to get the gospel into all my subjects all the time. I’m thankful for various homeschool curriculum programs that do that for me so I don’t have to reinvent the wheel – because I feel my child can’t hear enough of God’s plan of redemption! If you want to check out some great gospel-centred homeschool curriculum programs, you can do that by watching checking out this post on the Best Curriculum Programs with a Biblical Worldview.
The post How to Put the GOSPEL Into EVERY Subject (Including Math!) appeared first on How Do I Homeschool?.
]]>What makes a good elementary teacher, and how can teaching systems support this?
Ontario has a generalist teaching model at the elementary level, meaning elementary teachers have a foundational understanding of most subjects. A 2014 report commissioned by the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario noted there was “increasing pressure on public elementary teachers to be generalist practitioners in all areas of a highly specialized and progressively complex elementary curriculum.”
In April, Ontario’s minister of education announced funding to “boost math skills” by hiring more school math coaches in classrooms, identifying a math lead per board and “enhancing skills of new teachers.”
China’s elementary teachers are primarily specialist teachers with expert understanding in specific fields. Chinese teachers are trained to focus on content knowledge and basic skills, and around 60 per cent of their post-secondary study courses are subject knowledge courses.
However, Naiqing Song, an education scholar, proposes that more than 90 per cent of Chinese elementary teachers should be trained as generalist teachers in the next decade.
It is essential to understand generalist and specialist models of teaching through reciprocal learning. These approaches need not be treated as dichotomized or opposed to each other.
Shijing Xu, Canada Research Chair in International and Intercultural Reciprocal Learning, and one of the authors of this story, and Michael Connelly, an education professor emeritus at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, research reciprocal learning. This is “a concept and an approach for international and cross-cultural teacher education and school education for bridging the West-East dichotomy….”
Their research has addressed harmonizing eastern learning and western knowledge with mutual respect and appreciation, and determining what generalist and specialist teachers can reciprocally learn from each other. A book series, Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education, shares findings from this work.
Chenkai Chi, the lead author of this story, is doing doctoral research as part of Xu and Connelly’s research project, titled Reciprocal Learning in Teacher Education and School Education Between Canada and China.
This research is based on intensive six-year fieldwork in a Windsor primary school and a Chongqing primary school, a Canada-China sister school pair that is part of the larger study.
Policymakers sometimes stress essential differences in curricular and teaching approaches, depending on the policy paradigms they embrace: “accountability” paradigms (often using language of “back to basics”) or student-centred paradigms. Some scholars highlight that such framings may exaggerate differences in curriculum or what teachers actually do.
Still, there are lessons that teachers and teaching systems can share. One important lesson that Canadian generalist teachers can learn from specialist teachers in China is teachers’ collaboration with each other, seen, for example, in collective lesson planning.
Education researcher Linda Darling-Hammond has outlined some examples of what she observed in Shanghai about teacher collective lesson plans, and has highlighted the importance of teacher mutual support.
Specialist teachers in China should also learn how Canadian generalist teachers develop the whole child. This approach focuses on priorities such as children’s social emotional learning needs, developing a growth mindset, and the importance of transdisciplinary thinking.
Generalist and specialist teaching both have advantages and disadvantages. Mutual and appreciative learning and sharing should be based on trust.
Educators need to uphold the spirit of reciprocal learning. We need educators who can dedicate themselves towards harnessing diversity in a variety of academic disciplines.
By highlighting appreciative learning, educators can gain insights across cultures to understand how to focus on urgent issues of today for sustainable development.
As education scholars Yishin Khoo and Jing Lin argue, people need to see themselves as citizens of Earth to solve the issues with “we-togetherness” thinking.
We human beings should think beyond anthropocentrism, and our own comfortable cultural frameworks, and act collaboratively in a harmonious way. In so doing, together we can find ways to address climate change, racism and prejudice, and equity, diversity and inclusion. We can then significantly positively impact people’s lives and the next generations.
With mutual appreciation and through relationships, school teachers, teacher educators and policymakers can work collaboratively to build an education system that is holistic, inclusive, reciprocal and equitable.
Chenkai Chi is a research assistant in Xu and Connelly's SSHRC Partnership Grant Project and has received a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship and an Ontario Graduate Scholarship.
Shijing Xu has received research funding from SSHRC Partnership Grant and Canada Research Chair Program for research in international and intercultural reciprocal learning in education.
]]>The Sacramento and American Rivers wind through the capital of California, separating North Sacramento from Downtown and Midtown, Arden Arcade from East Sacramento, and Land Park from West Sacramento.
These lush waterways flow out into the countryside to nurture one of the most fertile agricultural areas in the country, giving life to Sacramento’s famous farm-to-fork restaurant culture. In addition, the rivers provide endlessly beautiful vistas throughout the city and offer plenty of opportunity for outdoor adventures.
If you are buying a home in Sacramento, you are always going to be in relationship to one or the other of these spectacular waterways, so let’s take a look at the neighborhoods they cradle.
We looked at the data and spoke with Jenny Rosas, who works with 79% more single-family homes than the average Sacramento agent, to learn about the housing attributes of some of the most sought-after neighborhoods in Sacramento, plus their amenities and character.
Sacramento is considered quite the hidden treasure of California for many reasons. The city enjoys plentiful sunshine, acres of waterways and other natural areas to explore, mountain views with access to winter sports not far away in Tahoe, plentiful historical and cultural sites, and a fabulous restaurant scene.
As the capital of California, the city is home to many state landmarks, museums, and parks, including the Crocker Art Museum, the oldest public art museum west of the Mississippi River. And because Sacramento isn’t as high-profile as Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, or Silicon Valley, it has traditionally offered more moderately priced housing.
The escalating housing prices in San Francisco, combined with the coronavirus pandemic, sent young professionals streaming north to find housing, some to work from home and others to make the commute back to Silicon Valley. Headed into 2023, however, prices have started to decline as the market rebalances, making it easier to afford some of these top Sacramento neighborhoods.
Sacramento is divided into approximately 10 major areas with nearly 100 unique neighborhoods and suburbs. Here are a few areas to consider.
If you like the hustle and bustle of the city and proximity to great jobs, then start your house-hunting in Downtown or Midtown. This is where you will find many of the cultural and historical sites of Sacramento, plus great restaurants and bars for after-work gatherings. In Downtown, Prelude Kitchen & Bar is one of the most well-known quintessential farm-to-fork Sacramento restaurants with a fabulous cityscape patio.
Midtown is especially known for its trendy nightlife with more than 200 restaurants to choose from, and its central location makes it transit heaven, with plenty of public transportation to get you wherever you want to go.
One of the most attractive features of both Downtown and Midtown is the range of housing available. You will find plenty of historical housing here, especially in the Victorian style, but there are some modern accommodations as well.
However, be wary of sticker shock if you think you are going to find something super cheap here! That said, at a median price of $290,400, it still beats the overall median price of $465,000 for the Sacramento area.
“I resided in Midtown for a while, and at a time when prices weren’t as intense,” Rosas said. “It was the place to be for young professionals. Now, you are competing against multiple offers, and while it is still attractive to many new buyers coming into the city, pricing has made it impossible for some to afford.”
West Sacramento is right on the outskirts of downtown and is kind of the quintessential Sacramento neighborhood. When people think of West Sacramento, they think of that farm culture that Sacramento is famous for and an area that is more spacious. But like many areas of Sacramento, it has a lot of diverse pockets of more or less affordability. For instance, in the north area of West Sac is much more affordable for first-time homebuyers, whereas the southern area is more expensive.
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Just across the river from the Downtown area is West Sacramento, home to Raley Field, where the Sacramento River Cats play, and popular breweries such as Bike Dog, Drake’s The Barn, and Jackrabbit.
“West Sacramento is right on the outskirts of downtown and is kind of the quintessential Sacramento neighborhood,” Rosas said. “It gave rise to the ‘City of Trees’ slogan.
“When people think of West Sacramento, they think of that farm culture that Sacramento is famous for and an area that is more spacious. But like many areas of Sacramento, it has a lot of diverse pockets of more or less affordability. For instance, in the north area of West Sac is much more affordable for first-time homebuyers, whereas the southern area is more expensive.”
Although there are apartment complexes in West Sacramento, most of the neighborhood is made up of single-family homes, listing in a range of $200,000 to $500,000 as of March 2022.
Located on the south-central edge of Sacramento, Meadowview is an urban neighborhood that offers a lot of conveniences for commuters — with a 15-to-30-minute average driving commute — and a family-friendly and affordable environment.
“Meadowview is closer to downtown than some of the outlying communities, like Elk Grove, and more affordable than many of the communities,” Rosas explains, noting that the neighborhood is a bit older, with homes built primarily between 1940 and 1970, and it is made up of small to medium-sized single-family homes.
Rosas adds though the median price point of $336,000 puts it well below the Sacramento median, you will find pockets within the subdivisions in Meadowview where you may find even more affordable options.
Meadowview is well known in the Sacramento area for its schools, including its elementary schools, Edward Kemble, John Bidwell, and Susan B. Anthony; its middle schools John H. Still and Rosa Parks; and West Campus High School, one of the top-ranked schools in Sacramento. West Campus students have ranked in the top 10% statewide for consistently high achievement in reading and language, as well as math proficiency.
Let’s step away from affordability for a moment to talk about one of the most charming neighborhoods in all of Sacramento.
Tucked in between Downtown and Midtown, Boulevard Park is considered one of the best places to live in Sacramento. With a median home price of just over $1 million — and many homes topping out over $2 million — this area is not for the first-time homebuyer.
“It’s actually a little section of the downtown area that is just very charming, featuring the older historical homes,” Rosas said.
If you love a great urban neighborhood, this is the place to look. The Boulevard Park Neighborhood Association, formed in 1991, strives for “the preservation of old values and traditions but also values individuality and new ideas,” and regularly organizes beautification projects, holiday decorations, yard sales, and annual events, such as a Fourth of July picnic, National Night Out, and progressive dinners.
Although there are restaurants aplenty in Downtown and Midtown, Boulevard Park is home to the Italian and French cuisine of The Waterboy, the flavorful Spanish fare of Aioli Bodega Espanola, and the seasonal American menu of Mulvaney’s B&L, located in an historic firehouse built in 1893.
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Just southeast of Midtown is the North Oak Park area. What’s not to love about this area for young professionals? Easy freeway access makes it ideal for commuters to reach any area of the city in a reasonable amount of time.
With a median home price of $231,729, the neighborhood offers traditional ranch houses as well as condominiums and bungalows.
“Oak Park has seen a lot of regentrification, especially North Oak Park,” Rosas said. “There have also been some newer developments in that area. It’s a very cute area, and attractive to singles and young professionals because it is so affordable.”
The Oak Park Farmers Market is one of the most popular attractions of this area, along with the historic Guild Theater and McClatchy Park, a children’s playground mecca.
With a population of just over 7,000, Land Park is one of the smaller communities in Sacramento — and like Boulevard Park, one of the most upscale, with a median home price listing at $732,000. The area features Tudor-style homes and smaller cottages, as well as condominiums.
Its proximity to Sacramento, just over two miles south of the downtown area, make Land Park a short commute and within easy reach of the city’s amenities. But its main attraction is that it is a true suburb, offering a quieter environment for families and seniors.
The community is known for its amenities, including William Land Park, Funderland Amusement Park, the Sacramento Zoo, and Fairytale Town. It is also home to Sacramento City College.
During the week, there’s no need to wander out of Land Park to find tasty food. On the north side of Land Park is an international food mecca, strung along Broadway like jewels on a necklace. Land Park’s most iconic restaurants include Chada Thai Cuisine, Kyoto Sushi Bar Grill and Ramen, New Station’s authentic Chinese cuisine, Queen Sheba’s spicy and flavorful Ethiopian fare, and Tower Cafe, featuring specialties from around the globe.
Many of the young professionals, especially those with families or families on the way, are increasingly moving into the Rancho Cordova area.
“When I speak to clients relocating from the Bay Area or Southern California, they initially gravitate to some of the more well-known areas, like Natomas, Roseville or Folsom,” Rosas said.
“I recently had a client who I invited to visit in Rancho Cordova. They identified a home they liked there and just recently closed.
“They absolutely love it. They didn’t know this place existed. The attributes of Rancho Cordova just worked for them. There is quick access to the interstate, and cleaner, wider streets because it’s a newer area.”
You can expect about a 30-minute commute if you choose to live in Rancho Cordova, but on the weekend, you can hop on your bike to get your errands completed, or enjoy 26 miles of bike and pedestrian trails. Six miles of the beautiful American River forms the northern border of Rancho Cordova, and the town enjoys 70 acres of creek channels and tributaries, so you are never far away from a serene nature experience.
With a population of nearly 80,000, Rancho Cordova is one of the most populated neighborhoods of Sacramento. And although the median home value in Rancho Cordova is $476,300, this large suburb offers a fairly wide variety of housing options. The school system has earned high ratings, and over the years, Rancho Cordova has been home to a wide array of hometown events, making it an enticing place to live.
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With more than 90,000 residents, Natomas is one of the largest of the Sacramento areas, and one of the most modern. Since the 1990s, there has been ongoing residential, office park, and retail development, with more than 1,000 acres of undeveloped land still available for additional housing.
The area is home to the Sacramento International Airport, making it an ideal location for business professionals who travel regularly.
“Natomas is another community like Rancho Cordova in a sense, but it’s more established,” Rosas said. Like other areas of Sacramento, such as Oak Park, there are distinct differences between the northern and southern areas of Natomas.
“North Natomas is a newer community, with a lot of tract homes and newer development,” Rosas said. “South Natomas has more of the older type homes and is closer to the Downtown area.”
The homes in South Natomas are more moderately priced, with many current listings falling in the range between $300,000 and $400,000.
South Natomas is also home to one of the jewels of Sacramento — Discovery Park. The 302-acre park is located at the confluence of the American and Sacramento Rivers. It has one of the best boat launches in the city, giving avid boaters easy access to miles of scenic waterways.
Just east of Midtown is East Sacramento, featuring a mix of homes ranging in price between $600,000 and $2.7 million. Home prices are up approximately 4% year-over-year from 2021, with the average home listing at around $800,000.
Here you will find mostly colonial-style homes, except when you wander into the Fabulous Forties. This stunning section of East Sacramento, once home to Ronald Reagan, features an eclectic and architecturally fascinating series of homes built mostly in the early part of the 20th century.
Like many of the neighborhoods, East Sacramento is bordered by the American River. The neighborhood’s most popular park is Paradise Beach, located not far from California State University, Sacramento. A bend in the river forms a cove, where you will typically find swimmers and skimmers enjoying the beautiful natural area.
Located close to downtown, this walkable neighborhood offers an easy commute to work and access to all of the amenities of the city. The university definitely adds to the charm of this area, infusing the neighborhood with a vibrant and youthful vibe.
You can’t tell the full tale of Sacramento neighborhoods without talking about Pocket. More than 55% of the 26,295 residents who live in Pocket are over the age of 40 years, with 35% of them retired.
“It’s a beautiful area with a mid-century feel,” Rosas says. “You are close to the delta, so you get a lovely breeze. Also, it’s great commuting because you are so close to downtown, with quick access to the interstate.”
Rosas explains that there is a mix of properties there, and many of the older properties have been renovated — so it is not an inexpensive place to live with home prices often hitting in the $700,000 range.
“In addition to the renovated homes, you have a lot of older, beautiful homes with larger lots,” Rosas notes. “A lot of folks gravitate towards this area because of the private schooling, the location, and the beautiful tree-lined streets.”
The neighborhood got its name from its shape and the way it is tucked into a curve of the Sacramento River that runs along its western border.
The scenic area along the river is one of Pocket’s chief attractions and provides copious hiking and biking trails so residents can take advantage of Sacramento’s wonderful climate all year round.
Sacramento is an eclectic mix of historical neighborhoods and new developments, offering plenty of variety to homebuyers looking to relocate here.
An experienced real estate agent can be especially helpful in pointing you in the right direction to meet your particular budget and lifestyle. Ask lots of questions if you are hunting in Sacramento! There are gems everywhere in this great American city.
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]]>The class was ending its second week of Summer Summit, a 15-day program designed to introduce students to what they’ll be learning about in the fall and prevent them from “sliding back” on their academic progress during the summer.
“I like making new friends,” fourth-grader Samriddhi Sigdel said about the benefits of attending the program. “You’re not just bored at home doing nothing and just watching T.V. You get to be with a group and learn how to work with people. I improved in math and reading and writing.”
The Boulder Valley School District has redesigned its summer school program for elementary and middle school students, switching from a half-day model over six weeks to a full-day model over four weeks. Students are attending four days a week in June, for a total of 15 days, at five sites.
Another change is the program’s focus. The previous focus on math and literacy interventions was switched to previewing fall academic content while also adding electives like art and STEM.
“Instead of being more remedial, it’s giving students a preview to build their confidence going into the next school year,” said Cameo DeDominces, who is overseeing Summer Summit as the district’s extended learning coordinator.
She said the changes solved several challenges. Almost half the students enrolled didn’t continue with the program after the July 4 holiday, while a six-week program was less attractive to teachers who wanted a longer summer break. A full day, even though it ends mid-afternoon, also is better for working families than a half-day option.
“There just wasn’t enough time in that half day,” DeDominces said.
At the elementary level, the schedule includes a half hour of social and emotional lessons followed by literacy, math, social studies and science. Students rotate to a different “special” — art, music, P.E. or STEM — class each week, while they attend an all-school assembly each Thursday for their social and emotional lesson.
“It’s to build that belonging and community,” DeDominces said.
Middle school students attend a five-period day that includes a block for intervention or enrichment, allowing them to work on missing skills or move ahead using online programs. They also have time for independent reading and for individual conferences with their teachers during that block.
This year’s summer school version remains free for families, with free transportation, breakfast and lunch also provided. The district pays for the program using a combination of federal coronavirus relief money, state grants and general operating money. The district provides the curriculum for teachers so it’s consistent across the sites, along with teacher training before the program starts.
“It’s definitely an investment,” Deputy Superintendent Lora De La Cruz said. “This is the kind of comprehensive summer experience we’re really proud of. Kids are really enjoying it. It’s not something kids have to do, but something kids get to do.”
Most of those leading the sites are teachers in programs to become future principals. And while the district needed to hire teachers, aides and tutors from outside Boulder Valley last summer, all of this year’s 130 staff members are district employees during the regular school year.
“The targeted instruction and having a full day is so much better,” said Lafayette Elementary fourth grade teacher Carolan Covington. “I love that it’s a regular school schedule. It really gives you time for conversations with students. They are glowing. They know that they are learners and are feeling good about themselves. We’re having a blast.”
DeDominces this year changed the invitation process to include teacher and principal input in deciding which students to target, with about 5,000 students initially invited. About 1,270 of those students enrolled, with enrollment then opened to all students.
The goal was to enroll about 1,300 students, similar to past years, but enrollment swelled to 1,500 students with a wait list.
The district for the first time also is integrating its longstanding extended school year summer program for students with disabilities with its regular summer classes. Depending on their needs and goals, students with disabilities now can participate in some of the Summer Summit classes with their typical peers.
Plus, with funding from Impact on Education, Boulder Valley is offering a summer program for incoming kindergarten students for a second year. The program expands a previous Impact on Education early education program called Summer Shuffle, which was held at three Boulder Housing Partners sites.
The new version is an opportunity to offer the program to more students, including those outside Boulder. Boulder Valley invited preschool students who needed a little extra help with kindergarten readiness skills, while community partners suggested incoming kindergartners who didn’t attend a district preschool. Some skipped preschool altogether.
Ben Douglass, who’s an early childhood special education teacher during the school year, read the soon-to-be kindergartners an alphabet book before asking them to write the first letter of their names. Before reading, he led them in a song about using quiet voices and listening ears, then gave the sometimes wiggly students reminders to reinforce classroom skills.
“We sit in our spots and use our big looking eyes,” he said.
Along with working on classroom routines and social skills like sharing and taking turns, he’s teaching letters and letter sounds, counting to 20 and recognizing written numbers.
“It’s some basic skills to help them be successful,” he said. “They’ll have a step up when they start school.”
In fourth grade, the students spent the week learning about STEM topics in their specials class. Thursday, they built solar ovens to make s’mores using pizza boxes, foil, black paper, plastic wrap and lots of tape. Angevine Middle School eighth grade science teacher Heidi Reeg is teaching the summer STEM class, saying she was surprised by how much she’s enjoyed working with younger students.
“I’m having so much fun,” she said.
Fourth-grader Carmen Lopez said the STEM class is her favorite so far.
“We got to make mini airplanes and shoot off a rocket and do explosions with Mentos,” she said. “Summer school really pays off.”
]]>Are you on the lookout for some awesome workbooks to amp up your fifth grader's learning experience?
I totally get it—sometimes getting kids to focus on new concepts can be a bit challenging. But fret not! I've got just the solution for you. I've compiled a list of super cool fifth grade workbooks that are not only approved by teachers but also guaranteed to make learning a blast—whether you're in the classroom, homeschooling, or looking for some extra support.
These workbooks are aligned with the curriculum and current state standards, so you can be confident that they cover all the important topics.
And hey, the best part? They've received fantastic reviews! So, let's check out this ultimate collection of teacher-approved workbooks that'll make your fifth grader's learning journey a whole lot more exciting. Are you ready? Let's dive in!
Let's talk about why workbooks are like superheroes in the 5th grade classroom! These bad boys bring a ton of advantages to the table. First off, they're like skill reinforcement experts. They swoop in and bridge those pesky knowledge gaps that students might have, helping them master important concepts.
Workbooks are the secret sauce to making learning fun and exciting. With their vibrant illustrations, interactive activities, and mind-bending puzzles, they turn studying into an adventure. It's like leveling up in a video game, but with knowledge as your superpower.
By bringing workbooks into the mix, teachers and parents can create an atmosphere where students can learn at their own pace, explore independently, and feel like they're conquering the world, one page at a time. Who said learning couldn't be a thrilling ride?
Alright, let's dive into the fascinating world of 5th grade math! Math skills hold major significance in the 5th grade curriculum because they build a strong foundation for future mathematical adventures. We're talking fractions, decimals, geometry, and more!
Now, to make that math journey a breeze, I've handpicked a stellar list of top-rated math workbooks for all those 5th graders out there.
Oh boy, do I have a math gem to share with you all! Get ready to meet my absolute favorite math companion: "180 Days of Math: Grade 5." This book has been my go-to since 2015, and let me tell you, it's been a game-changer. If you want to supercharge your math skills, this is the one to grab. It's jam-packed with 180 days' worth of math activities, exercises, and problem-solving tasks that'll turn you into a math whiz. And hey, it aligns perfectly with the 5th-grade curriculum, so you're right on track. From number sense to geometry, every topic is covered in a fun and engaging way. Oh, and did I mention that it's my absolute favorite?
IXL | The Ultimate Grade 5 Math Workbook
This bad boy is like a secret weapon for mastering math in 5th grade. It covers all the important topics like fractions, decimals, geometry, and even algebra. With clear instructions and a layout that's super easy to follow, this workbook is your go-to guide for acing math. It's got tons of practice exercises, mind-bending problem-solving tasks, and interactive activities that'll keep you engaged and boost your understanding.
This workbook is like your student's own personal math coach, guiding them through the fascinating world of 5th grade math. With Spectrum, they'll tackle all the essential math skills and concepts like a pro. From multiplication and division to fractions and decimals, they've got it all covered. The best part? This workbook is packed with colorful illustrations, fun activities, and real-world examples that make math come alive. They're like a ticket to a math adventure that will boost your child's confidence and sharpen their skills.
This book covers all the important math topics your 5th graders need to conquer, from numbers and operations to geometry and algebra. It's like a comprehensive math guide wrapped in a fun and engaging package. Plus, the explanations are clear, and the examples are practical, making it easy for both teachers and parents to guide their students through the math journey.
Packed with interactive activities, colorful illustrations, and step-by-step explanations, it's like having a math wizard right by your side. This workbook covers all the essential math topics for 5th graders, from numbers and operations to fractions, decimals, and geometry. Say goodbye to math frustrations and hello to confident problem solvers!
Let's chat about the power of English language skills in the magical realm of 5th grade! English skills are like the key to unlocking a world of communication, comprehension, and creativity. From reading captivating stories to writing captivating essays, English is everywhere! So, to help your students become language wizards, I've rounded up some top-notch English workbooks that come highly recommended.
This workbook is designed to help students enhance their reading comprehension abilities through a variety of engaging exercises and activities. With carefully curated passages and questions, it focuses on important skills like identifying main ideas, making inferences, and understanding text structure.
This book is packed with 180 days' worth of writing prompts and activities, covering a wide range of topics and genres. It's like having a writing workshop right at your fingertips! Whether it's persuasive essays, descriptive narratives, or informative pieces, this book has it all. It provides step-by-step guidance, engaging exercises, and helpful tips to spark creativity and improve writing skills.
This book is a treasure trove of grammar goodness, specifically designed for 5th graders. It covers all the essential grammar concepts like parts of speech, sentence structure, punctuation, and more. With clear explanations, fun activities, and plenty of practice exercises, it ensures your child grasps the ins and outs of grammar in a snap.
This resource is jam-packed with carefully selected reading passages and thought-provoking questions that will engage and challenge your young learners. Each day, your child will delve into a new passage and practice vital skills like understanding main ideas, making inferences, and analyzing text structure. With its user-friendly format and diverse topics, this book makes daily reading practice a breeze.
This book contains spelling and word study activities, specifically designed to engage and empower 5th graders. With 180 days' worth of carefully curated lessons, your child will explore phonics, vocabulary, word patterns, and so much more. Each day brings a new opportunity to reinforce spelling skills through interactive exercises, games, and word puzzles.
I've got a treasure trove of workbooks that cover not only math and English but also a whole bunch of other fascinating subjects! Check out these awesome workbooks that align perfectly with the curriculum and have garnered rave reviews.
This gem is like a secret weapon to keep your students' minds active and prepared during the summer break. Designed to bridge the gap between 5th and 6th grade, this workbook offers a wide range of engaging activities and exercises across subjects like math, reading, writing, and even science. It's like a mini summer camp for continuous learning! Not only does it provide an opportunity for students to review and reinforce what they've learned, but it also introduces new concepts to give them a head start in 6th grade.
This book will make science come alive for your young explorers. It’s filled with hands-on activities, inquiry-based lessons, and engaging experiments that will ignite your child's curiosity about the world around them. With 180 days' worth of carefully planned lessons, your little scientists will delve into topics like physical science, life science, Earth and space, and more. Each day presents a new opportunity to spark their scientific thinking and foster a love for STEM.
With 180 days' worth of engaging lessons, your child will journey through the rich tapestry of human history, geography, civics, and more. Each day presents an opportunity to delve into captivating topics, analyze primary sources, and participate in thought-provoking discussions.
We’ve explored a remarkable collection of books that are essential for 5th grade teachers and parents. These books are invaluable resources that will empower young learners in various subject areas. Whether it's developing language skills, enhancing reading comprehension, mastering grammar, igniting scientific curiosity, or diving into the realms of history and culture, these books offer engaging activities, thought-provoking lessons, and targeted practice. So, grab a few of these gems and embark on a journey of educational growth and excitement with your 5th graders!
And here's an added bonus: If your 5th grader needs extra support beyond these incredible books, I'm here to help! As an experienced online tutor, I offer personalized sessions tailored to your child's specific needs. Together, we can reinforce concepts, tackle challenging topics, and ensure their success. Feelfree to reach out for one-on-one tutoring sessions that complement the resources mentioned in this post. Let's unlock your child's full potential and set them on the path to academic excellence!
In the lab of Giovanni Traverso, associate professor of mechanical engineering, McLymore and her fellow researchers were able to test their ingestible radiation-sensing capsule in vitro and in live pigs, finding that its abilities worked within the pigs’ stomachs — a demonstration that could be helpful in radiation therapy used to combat cancer in humans, where precise targeting and minimizing damage to the GI tract can save lives.
“The in vivo study was the best part,” says McLymore, pointing out that pigs are large mammals with digestive systems similar to human digestive anatomy. “Our device can actually be an asset within living people.”
McLymore, 29, was raised by a single mother in Raleigh, North Carolina. Growing up, she found she could do calculations very quickly and liked the certainty of math. During her eighth- through 10th-grade summers, she took STEM classes at Duke University as part of Duke’s Talent Identification Program, which introduces high school students to advanced academics and to other talented students.
Just before McLymore’s senior year in high school, she was approached by the U.S. Naval Academy, where she decided to pursue an undergraduate degree in applied mathematics. She commissioned as a Navy officer upon graduating.
About five years later, McLymore was given an opportunity to attend graduate school through the Navy. She chose mechanical engineering, hoping to study biomechanics because she had always wanted to contribute to the medical field. With her excellent record in the Navy and academic abilities, she was offered a two-year fellowship to attend graduate school full-time, and she chose to apply to MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE), even though she says she was daunted by the 6 percent acceptance rate she faced.
McLymore says her mother told her, “You’ve got to apply. Let them tell you no.”
In fact, MIT told her yes, and once she was accepted, she contacted Traverso, who thought her background as a nuclear officer was a perfect fit for the ingestible radiation detector project. For her part, McLymore says the project aligned with her interests and also had good potential for military application, in that service members such as those working on nuclear ships run a heightened risk of being exposed to radiation.
Being in an academic program was a big change for McLymore, if only because her schedule was entirely her own, she says. At the same time, the problem-solving skills she had developed in the Navy — where “you’re in charge of a whole bunch of people, there’s always going to be problems, and you have to present your boss with solutions” — worked well with the problem-solving aspects of biomechanics research.
McLymore did so well on the radiation detector project that she recently walked away with a “Best Oral Presentation” award, having presented the research alongside more than 500 international experts and students at a major engineering conference in Jeju, Korea.
“I was like, OK, everyone here is smart, of course. Everyone has good ideas, and this is my first conference, so I don’t have many expectations. I’m just here to learn and absorb,” McLymore says about the IEEE Nano/Micro Engineered and Molecular Systems conference.
When her name was called out as the presentation award winner, she says she was shocked. “Then, after walking up on stage, I was proud that I had this sort of validation that what we’d done was recognized.”
Traverso, who has been McLymore’s faculty advisor at MIT, says her unique background and her stamina were assets to his lab’s research and helped propel her to success.
“We aim to bring together team members with diverse skill sets to tackle major challenges. Crystan is an extremely effective team member and drives forward while integrating knowledge from across a range of areas,” Traverso says. “As someone who started her research career only two years ago, to reach this level is a testament to her dedication and drive and incredible perseverance throughout her degree.”
McLymore was also recognized with a Keck Travel Award to attend the conference in Korea and a Wunsch Foundation Silent Hoist and Crane Award for excellence in a graduate student.
Now, following her graduation from MIT, McLymore is committed to another five years of sea duty with the Navy. She is unsure of what will come next.
“Then I’ll be at another crossroads,” McLymore says. “I’m open to whatever career path or opportunity comes my way.”
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