Léo's Insights
A place where issues related to the Christian walk and its application to home education is discussed.
Topics are meant to challenge you to think differently, to make a difference in this world, starting with the children you have been blessed with.
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How to Cook a Ham
Every once in a while, a person can say something that finds a place of immortality in time. Such a thing happened to me over twenty years ago when I told a story to a few Mennonite families who, while very wonderful people, seemed stuck in a time warp I could not comprehend.
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Home Education Truancy
Occasionally, something so absurd occurs that one wonders what planet the idea originated on. Of all the home education issues I have witnessed, this one stands out as the most useless and illogical exercise in futility.
I received a call from a lawyer with a group called the Home School Legal Defence Association or HSLDA. They asked me to conduct an assessment of a student who had been found to be truant, that is, missing school. This would not have been so nuts if the student had not been home educating.
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Scat Test
In the past, schools operated by the district in which I was working were open to registrations from anywhere. That is, schools were not restricted to accepting students only from within their catchment area. This was especially important to high schools which were catering to an older cohort of students able to travel on their own. My high school did a few things to attract student registrations, the most extravagant being the open house every spring.
What Will You Sacrifice?
Still on the topic of providing something concrete to help teach something intangible, I often used imagery to help students understand abstract concepts. Time and space are two such concepts. We really do not know what either really is except that it is associated with the temporal rather than the eternal. In fact, the only way to describe either one is by making reference to itself, such as an hour being composed of sixty minutes, which are in turn composed of sixty seconds. This does not really tell us what time is.
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Best Teaching Practices
We are fortunate to have a great example of teaching techniques we can follow, as the best teacher who ever lived was Jesus Himself. After all, He was addressing the men He created. When home educating, parents are also addressing the ones they created so they would do well to emulate how Jesus went about teaching his flock.
Jesus employed two main techniques when teaching. The first was His use of questions, whether he was disarming naysayers or leading people to think about a topic and come to the right conclusion. Note, Jesus was not interested in indoctrinating but rather intended His subjects or students to come to the knowledge of the truth of their own volition. Questioning was primarily used to bring people to understand their error in order to provide them with a new way of seeing and understanding the world around them.
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Where To Sit
It is simply amazing what a single word or negligible action can create. I have personally taken some very harsh criticisms and serious personal insults over things so small, I had to really think hard to imagine how it could have been offensive. I have actually seen a single misplaced word completely destroy a potential or even existing relationship. Hard to imagine this is grownup behaviour, but then again, our modern society seems to celebrate immaturity over common sense and decorum.
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The Computer Issue
As previously mentioned, Education Unlimited has been at the forefront of digital technology usage since our very beginning. In fact, my wife, Faye, and I were the first to perform our facilitation duties as a couple while using one of the first laptop computers available. This presented us with the ability to complete all our reporting on site without needing to retroactively make changes or later type things into a computer. All this when the rest of the home education world was still using pen and paper.
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Who Has Your Back?
Those of us who tend to be leaders, movers and shakers often believe we are on our own. That is, we are more likely to see ourselves as loners, as the people who are with us are usually following us rather than walking beside us.
While this may be the perception we have, it is actually not true. To start, scripture says there is one who stays closer than a brother. Assuming what we are doing is in keeping with God’s design and direction, we can take that to mean the Holy Spirit is always there not only to guide us but to comfort us as well.
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Setting A Child Straight – Part 2
Last time, we discussed how student records are handled and how one can see patterns of behaviour when studying the contents of those records. By that I mean not only a student’s behavioural issues, but also those of a school which is funded at a higher rate when students are deemed “special needs.”
The particular student being discussed in this episode had gotten to a point of no return at the school he was attending. He was so bad, the school had run out of possible issues for extra funding. In desperation, the boy’s parents removed him from the school, determining to educate him themselves at home, and enrolling him with us. As a result, we visited the family and got to know why this child’s student record was such a long “rap sheet”.
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Setting A Child Straight – Part 1
Once upon a time, all student records were paper. Thankfully that is now in the past. EU had many filling cabinets full of documents no one ever read or asked for. When a student left our school for another, we obligingly packaged up all the student’s records and sent them to the new school, which likely filed the documents in a new filing cabinet without ever reading the material either. Similarly, if a student came to us from another school, we had to inform the former school of the child’s enrolment with us and request the student’s records be transferred to us. We then filed them in our cabinets, usually also without looking at the contents.