Rolfe Schmidt

Obviously posting has been slow lately.  It’s about to get slower.

I’m retiring this blog.

The kids are doing well, learning a lot, and all of that.  We are traveling, trying to sell our house,and dealing with other tedium.  I’m appalled at the way our government is handling the economic situation.  And so on and  yadda yadda.

I’ve just gotten tired of writing about it.

I’d like to spend my time writing better researched posts, polishing them more carefully, and tying them together more coherently.  I also want to spend some time thinking about how we can use technology to improve the education process, and start building tools and content directly targeted at students and teachers.

Of course I can do much of this by just making this a better blog, but I’m choosing not to do that.  “Coherent” and “polished” would ruin the spirit of this blog anyway.  This blog is about picking fights over homeschooling, calling people on their hypocrisy, and cute little “kids say the darndest things” posts.

It is also about learning — both me and the boys.  The Mathematics posts are still my favorites, especially the ones collected here and the little series about the Riemann zeta function (which I really should continue).

So what is in the future for the Schmidt family?

We’re moving to Seattle where I will start working on a Ph.D. in Computer Science at UW.  I am excited about getting started, and once I get established there I’m sure I’ll have plenty to say about it.  In the meantime, we’ll be on the road most of the next four months, we’ll have spotty internet access, and I will squander much of that access on facebook and runsaturday.  I’ll still pester some of you with my comments too, and do my best to keep up with your posts in my reader.

I do want to thank all of you who read this blog and all of you who left a comment or two or twenty.  I had a lot of fun with some of the discussions and was genuinely surprised at the response I got.

BTW, if you want to buy a house in Texas, I’ll give you a good deal

Tschüss!

I’m still here. Barely.

I’m spending all of my time clearing out the house and sorting through our belongings. Since we are downsizing from a 2800 square foot house to a minivan I have to be pretty vicious about it. When I look at something I have to decide “Would I take this in the car?” and “Would I pay to store it?”. Usually the answer should be no.

Still, I’m not doing a good enough job. We’ve packed 22 boxes for storage so far, and seeing them all stacked up is a little overwhelming. I thought we were going to start traveling light!

What is so important that we’ll pay to store it? 14 boxes are full of of books. Most of these are technical books that I really don’t want to part with, and all the books we kept are really good. I still have about 30 books on my shelf that I just couldn’t seal away yet: Fulton and Harris, Davenport, Weyl, Chalmers, Plato, etc.

I have a box of winter clothes that I plan to open in the fall, and I have a box of ski clothes and accessories for all of us that I hope to use again one day. I have a box of summer clothes that I didn’t like enough to pack for our travel. I should probably just take this box directly to the Salvation Army. We have some linens and comforters, shoes, old records, rollerblades, and more.  So much stuff, and we don’t really need much of it at all.  We just want it.

One of the most interesting things I’ve done in this process was to sort through my old grad school notes. I dumped most of them, but only after I scanned through each page. When I found something interesting I tore it out, labeled it, and filed it. It amazed me how much of my time was spent on completely mundane problems like “how can I get this paper published?” or “how can I convince my advisor to let me graduate?” Less than five percent of my notes were interesting, but they were really fun to read. I was trying to model the way our brains recognize and reproduce hand movements. I was playing with self-assembling DNA tiles (look here to see how it’s really done). I was exploring how zeta-functions popped out of physical systems as thermodynamic quantities.

As I looked through all of this, I realized how much time I had wasted. I should have been doing stuff that was interesting instead of making stuff I had already done look interesting. I was putting more value on the degree than I was on the study. No wonder I got bored and dropped out. Ah well, all those old drafts and notes are now being recycled.

But now I should get back to work. I have a few carloads of stuff to give away and I lot more packing to do.

How did I not know about Tom Lehrer? I discovered him a few weeks ago when JJ gave me a link to The Elements. Now I go over to Vlorbik’s and found out that he’s a well known old favorite. Have a look at New Math and other links at atdotde. And find even more links from Vlorbik back in July.

I also got pretty excited about the Animated Atlas a little while back, and the boys still love it. Well, I was looking at Lynn’s homeschooling resource page — An Ant on the Internet — and I found it there, along with loads of other great links. I need to pay closer attention in the future. I’m sure I’m missing out on a lot.

[I just added a permanent page describing what has been working for us as new homeschoolers. A lot of it will be familiar to those of you who have been reading this blog for a while, but I wanted to put my thoughts in one place. I'm putting the content of the page in this post, and I'll leave it unchanged here. I plan to edit the page as we keep changing our mind about things.]

We are just starting out as homeschoolers, so it’s pretty amazing how much our attitude toward education has already changed. So many of our preconceived notions about education are out the window, and not all of them went easily. We decided to try homeschooling about a year ago, mostly for these reasons:

1. We wanted a learning environment that allowed our kids to focus on subjects they love, not subjects where they are falling behind.
2. We wanted our kids to know that there are no limits to what they can learn, but the learning is their responsibility.
3. We wanted to be free to travel when fares are cheap.

There are other reasons too, but that captures most of it. We had no thoughts of unschooling — we hadn’t even heard of it — and we expected to run an efficient, personal school at home.

Over the last year, our experiences have changed our perspective entirely. Some of the incidents have been dramatic, like the time I reduced G to tears by trying to “help” him read a phonics book. Mostly they have been subtle and cumulative. At this point we have given up on anything like “seat work”. We listen to the kids and try our best to help them. They have learned so more than we would have ever tried to teach them, even though they haven’t learned all the things we thought we needed to teach them.

Now it looks like we are unschoolers of one stripe or another. We still like our original reasons for homeschooling, but as we’ve been converted to unschooling we see many more. Mostly, we’ve learned that kids can be wildly happy and be learning more than you ever dreamed at the same time. Of course it’s not all smiles and prizes, but it is pretty good. Here are a few of the things we’ve learned that seem to make it work.

Be the person you want your kids to be

The most important lesson I’ve learned is that I’ll never teach my kids the most important lessons by talking to them. You can’t just tell someone what to value or how to live and expect them to care. If you want your kids to be interested in things, you need to be interested in things too. If you want your kid to have goals, you need to set goals too. If you want your kid to work hard pursuing those interests and goals, then you need to work hard too. You are one of the few adults that your kid sees living life. Watching you is how they know what it means to be an adult. Even if they are rebellious and break all of your stated rules, when they get out into the uncharted waters of adulthood they’ll be using what they saw of your life as a guide.

Of course this also means that if you sit on the couch watching TV and tell them to go read a book, they will learn to sit on the couch, watch TV, and tell other people to read books. (Nothing against TV here, just hypocrisy.)

This sort of teaching as a role model is powerful. Sometimes it seems like the only teaching I can do reliably. But occasionally it gets even better: kids will want to imitate their parents. When this happens you have a rare opportunity to teach a receptive and eager student. Never pass it up.

Listen to your kids and take their ideas seriously

While you can’t always get your kids interested in thinking about the things you want them to learn, you can always listen to them, understand what they are thinking, and help them run with their ideas. One of the things I’ve learned teaching Math is that when students try to answer a question and get it wrong, there is usually the germ of a good idea in their head that was just not applied in the right context. One of my most memorable incidents like this happened when my oldest boy and I were talking about place value. You can read the long story, but here is the short one: he was doing it wrong, but his mistake led us to “discover” a new number system. This left him excited about place value, proud of his ideas, and I’d like to think it helped him realize that it takes a bit of work to turn a good idea into something that gives “right answers”.

So many benefits, and to think I almost told him “No, you’re doing it wrong. Do it this way…”.

Expose them to all the ideas you can, but don’t worry that many don’t stick

I’ve really given up on thinking I can find the best way to present a subject. All such hubris was wrested from me when I tried to help my oldest boy learn fractions. He was asking a question that needed fractions to answer: when we walk to the library and back it is three miles, so how far is it just to go to the library? He thought maybe it was one mile there and two miles back, but that couldn’t be right. He was stumped. I tried all sorts of manipulatives and explanations but he never felt comfortable with the answer. Finally one day after I’d given up, he announced that he figured it out. It was three-half miles. He figured it out using a space-time diagram. I’ll just quote my post about that incident:

I would never have thought to explain fractions this way. I still would never explain fractions this way to anyone other than G. I have no idea why this helped him, but it did.

The only thing I can do is keep exposing him to as many different ideas as I can.

That pretty much sums it up. Forcing lessons doesn’t work for us. Relaxing does, even though it took a while to realize it.

Don’t worry about other people’s tests and timetables

People learn things at different speeds and in different ways. They tend to really learn about subjects they’re interested in, and there’s a good chance that those subjects aren’t going to make up the core of your favorite standardized test. Just remember that there’s also a good chance that the person who aces that standardized test has no clue how to be a productive member of society. I’m not saying my kids will be productive when they leave home — they probably won’t be. But I do hope that they’ll know how to learn — and to learn whatever they want, not just what they are told. Then they’ll be able to figure out how to carry their own weight in the world.

It can be hard to ignore society’s values. I know we’ve run into some trouble with the way people overemphasize the importance of reading. People fawn all over our son who can read, but don’t pay much attention to his older brother who doesn’t. This has caused some heartache, to be sure. But if I’m ever going to be an over-protective parent, this is the sort of thing I want to protect my kids from.

Relaxing doesn’t mean doing nothing

One of the big misconceptions people have about unschooling is that they think unschoolers don’t do anything. This couldn’t be further from the truth for us. Every hour of every day has the potential to be a learning experience. My wife and I are always on the lookout for those great moments when the kids ask questions or need help with something — they don’t always happen at the most convenient times. Our kids are usually in to something, even though it doesn’t always seem educational. For us, life is school and we’re always on call.

Read about how other people do it

As happy as I am with our approach to homeschooling, the doubts still creep into my head every now and then. One of the best ways to deal with those is to talk to people who have already been there or to read their stories. The internet is full of great resources, but if I could pick just one I’d recommend reading as much as you can at Joyce Fetteroll’s site.

This weekend we’ve packed in the activity.  On Friday afternoon we went to the San Antonio Zoo to look at some bears and snakes for an hour or two, then we walked by the river a bit in Brackenridge park.  G asked us if we could head across the park and go to the Witte museum, but it was already closed.  He also told us that we should have brought his bike.

We were really just buying time and dodging traffic on our way down to the Magik Theater to see A Bug Opera.   On the way home, we stopped by the Scobee Planetarium for their free telescope viewing.

Yesterday we went downtown again, strolled through the accordion festival and the riverwalk on our way to the Children’s Museum.  On our way out G spent some time making chalk art on Houston street, his contribution to Artpace.  We had wienerschnitzel and sauerbraten at Schilo’s and worked our way back home.

We’re enjoying our little town.

I still remember the first season of Survivor. I didn’t watch it, but I heard more than enough about it. Apparently some jerk who should go to a gym or put some clothes on was giving America a lesson in morality.

The lesson was this: If you win, you are right. If you’re nice, you will lose.

What really disturbed me was that so many people around me seemed to be taking the lesson seriously. It’s as if they wanted to hear it so badly, they didn’t stop to think that the TV show really had nothing to do with reality.

In real life, 40 people stuck on an island would cooperate and they could all live, not just survive. Depends on the island of course, they might be toast. But you’d be hard pressed to find an island that comes with a guarantee that it will demand the life of one person a day by popular vote.

I can see how Survivor’s morality lesson was appealing: it seems liberating, right? Why be saddled down by old-fashioned values? Live your life for yourself — it’s not greedy, it’s the only right thing to do!

This takes the virtue of selfishness to a level that would even make Ayn Rand squirm. She valued selfish productivity, but with our new ethic even selfish destruction was a virtue. Get rid of the strong so there is more room for you!

This seems liberating, but it is a trap.

Let’s say we all accept this new Machiavellian way of life. Let’s say, hypothetically of course, that you are not a “winner”. Someone else — maybe a person, maybe a company, maybe a government –hurts you for their own benefit. Who’s fault is it?

It is your fault. You didn’t win.

Now you can stop and think a little bit about whether or not you are likely to win the 5-billion-people-stuck-on-a-planet game. Do you like the new rules?

Probably not. This kind of freedom is slavery. I don’t know if Ingsoc would be proud.

I’m off to southern California today for two weddings and a baptism, so posting may be light.

My wife and the boys went yesterday, and when I was dropping them off at the airport I had one of those moments that just stick in your memory.  When they were about to go into security, I gave my wife a kiss goodbye.  G saw us, then ran up to me with a very sincere expression and gave me a hug and kiss.  I feel rich.

Pharyngula has a great list of commenting crimes, plus a list of commenters that have been convicted. You might find it amusing, I know I’ve seen a lot of these crimes committed and I recognize a few of the names.

I’ll start looking at this to form my own commenting policy, but for now I’m moderating everything.  I want reasonable people to feel free to speak, and that is going to mean banning others.  Well, I guess I should find something interesting to write about or the whole point is moot.

Thanks for pointing this out JJ. Just trying to spread the word.

OK, so I haven’t been writing much lately.  Well, I have a big pile of good reading to do, a few problems I’d like to think about and … the Tour de France is on TV at least 6 hours a day.

I swore I wasn’t going to watch it after Floyd Landis was treated so unfairly last year.  His stage 17 ride was one of the greatest athletic feats I’ve seen even if he did use steroids (and I’m far from convinced — read here for some balanced information).  Come on, you take whatever drug you want and see if you can single-handedly leave the peloton in the dust over the greater part of an alpine TdF stage.  He seemed superhuman — both his legs and his strategy.  And it has all been smeared in the mud.  Disgusting.

Well, I just can’t say no to it.  The drama, the politics, the unreal endurance.  So many intertwined stories turn a plodding mass of bikes into excitement even our best authors struggle to match.

This is my first meme, and already I’m going to break the rules. You see, I’m sort of new to blogging and I just don’t know 8 people to tag. If you want me to tag you, let me know and I’ll do it. Thanks to Lynn at Bore Me To Tears for tagging me.

Maybe I’ll start an “I don’t tag” policy, but I haven’t decided yet. Actually I just decided: my policy is that I’ll write when I want to and tag when I want to.

So here we go. Eight random things about me:

1. I was raised Lutheran, but now I’m Catholic. I go to church every weekend, so put me on your educational abuse watch lists!
2. I am a Texan, born and raised. I got out and went to California as soon as I could (I was 16), but now I am back, living one mile away from my parents, and it is great.
3. I drive a minivan and I like it.
4. I would have laughed in your face four years ago if you told me I would live in Texas, drive a minivan, and like it.
5. The most convenient place I ever lived was Los Angeles. My wife and I worked at Cedars-Sinai and lived a 15-minute walk away. We walked everywhere — to get groceries, to go to the park, to go out to eat. When we lived in San Francisco I commuted 2-3 hours a day.
6. I’ve dropped out of grad school twice.  I’ve gone through three advisors. I always feel pulled toward academics, but am put off whenever I get too close.
7. My boys names are Gunnar, Søren, and Niels. My wife and I have no Scandinavian ancestry, but we liked the names. I don’t use their names in my stories because I’m saving that job for them. I might change my mind about that, it is awkward writing without their names.
8. I’d like to take up alpine mountaineering as a hobby. I love the sublime feeling of standing on the edge of a precipice I just climbed. I feel much more alive when I’m stripped of the safety of civilization and even little decisions can be matters of life and death. And mountains are pretty. But I’m a little short on time and money, and Texas isn’t the ideal base camp. So maybe this will have to wait.

The Rules
1. Post eight random facts/habits about yourself and these rules.
2. Choose eight people to tag and list their names with your post.
3. Leave a comment for each person letting them know they’ve been chosen.