Personal Update: general & on education

The various mental exercises, reading projects and the like, have all been disrupted recently. In the last month Sam finished his second year of high school at Covenant HS. We have decided to enroll him at Tacoma Community College in the Fresh Start program, and he started driver's training. Then Janie was gone for three weeks to visit her mother and attend her brother's wedding. All this activity and Janie's absence for this time period prompted me to spend some time gaming (mostly Civ.4) and real light reading, so consequently I have not taken any time to do some writing in this blog.

But, to get back to our decision to move Sam from Covenant HS to TCC, he really needed some help in some of his academics, but because our family is not a first tier family in the church, our requests for help fell on deaf ears. The community college, however, has excellent English labs and Mathematics labs that may give Sam the help that he needs. I have to ask the question, if it is so important to provide your child a Christian education, why is it that the proponents of sending your children to a Christian school are stuck in the same narrow box as the socialist public school educators in regard to the "one size fits all" false paradigm???

All of the children going to Covenant (and I suspect many other Christian schools) are expected to be of one major learning type and to have a narrow academic bent. What is there for children of other learning types and gifting? What of the artistic child? What of the mechanic child? I am so disappointed in the Christian school system as practiced. One would think that learning to walk with the Lord would be more important than mere academics. Anyway, it is sad that I have go to a secular institution to get help for my son when the Church should be leading the way in educating all children (not just the ones destined for high academics).

And another thing, why are there only "Liberal Arts" Christian schools and no Christian Polytechnic Schools in higher education and at the secondary level???

If our civilization persists, and I have my doubts that it will--another topic for another discussion, but how will the Church lead in the fields of technology and science? Or how will the Church lead in the necessary service fields like the trades or mechanics or fill-in-the-blank???

Or is the Church in America going to continue it's slow death and descent into irrelevance??

ORP: LeGuin's The Dispossessed & misc. observations about writing

In her book, Ursula uses the following few short paragraphs to describe the arrival of the main character, Dr. Shevek, as he steps foot on Urras:

...Now he and all the strangers around him were going down a covered ramp, all the voices very loud, words echoing off the walls. The clatter of voices thinned. A strange air touched his face.

He looked up, and as he stepped off the ramp onto the level ground he stumbled and nearly fell. He thought of death, in that gap between the beginning of a step and its completion, and at the end of the step he stood on a new earth.

A broad, grey evening was around him. Blue lights, mist blurred, burned far away across a foggy field. The air on his face and hands, in his nostrils and throat and lungs, was cool, damp, many-scented, mild. It was not strange. It was the air of the world from which his race had come, it was the air of home.

Not only does our author give good visual descriptions, but she also does not forget to utilize the other senses. The prose is rather unremarkable, but somehow in those few words above, we still get the moment, the impact of what it must be like to return to the planet of your ancestry, when you were born and raised on another.

Now that we have completed the first chapter, in chapter two, the author begins to flashback to earlier times in the life of the main protagonist. It's been awhile since I've read this novel (30yrs), so I have forgotten enough of the details of the story to be able to enjoy it again as if it were a new story. So far, I am still recommending this novel.

We, in our Literary Group have completed an unabridged edition of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables. It was work to get through the epic, but we are all better for our experience. May you all find truth in your reading experience, because if one has eyes to see, one can catch those glimpses of the sublime.

Novo Visum
Neue Ansicht.

PING

Subspace transmission: stardate 2295 message reads:

I am a Decentralizationist, Techno-libertarian.

Stop.

Ephemera: How Cheap Our privacy has been sold

I stumbled upon this one example of thousands such sites.

Technos: Kindle DX

Now we're talkin', check it out:
Kindle DX

I would like to have one of these, but it's more important to get those debts paid off first. (But I so want one.)

ORP: Ursula K. LeGuin's "The Dispossessed"

I first read Ursula's book, The Dispossessed, back in the mid to late 1970's. On the surface the story is about a physicist who discovers the Grand Unified Field Theory linking gravity, electromagnetism, and weak & strong nuclear force into one comprehensive theory. This scientist comes from a planet settled by a utopianist group and travels to the main planet that this planet orbits to visit other scientists etc. One does expect there to be some socio-political ideas explored in this book, but I was surprised at how philosophical and deep the novel gets right from the beginning of the story. The planet the scientist is from has as it's governmental form an Anarcho-syndicalist construct. Anarchism, in its theoretical form, is a very close cousin to Libertarianism and now that I am reading this novel to my son, Sam, I am re-reading the story for myself and I am finding the concepts in this novel resonating with my views on a number of topics.

Here is a great summary of this novel from another blogger.

Here is how the story opens (emphasis mine):

There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall.
Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.
Looked at from one side, the wall enclosed a barren sixty-acre field called the Port of Anarres. On the field there were...

Thus begins the novel. Perhaps all the concepts in the book are obvious to some, but I think that everyone should read the story as a springboard for meaningful discussion about the many ideas represented in the novel.

Novo Visum,
Neue Ansicht.

W: FW: TASion: Snapshots of the first mission at Earth0

Our warp drive rebuild being tested at our observation station on the third planet is here represented by the station manager giving the engage command to a warp drive static test.

W: FW: TASion

In the barn of this remote homestead is the hiding place for our landing craft.


In a few hours I have the opportunity to enjoy my great books literature group. This constitutes the second to last meeting before we have completed the Unabridged Les Misérables (1450-some-odd pages). I have slowed down in my other reading projects, but I have been developing details for a Traveller Campaign; to this end, I have created a blog just for the game.

Personal Update: general

Picture of me splitting a round (of wood) made it to Chris Granberry's blog from the Saturday work party.



I've been too busy to do any deep thinking and subsequent writing and posting here. I just got Ubuntu Linux installed on my Toshiba Laptop which I will take to the Linux Fest this coming weekend. I will try to post from Bellingham if I find some free wireless or ether ports to connect with. Otherwise I'll post photos and commentary when I get back.