What Old Dog Said

Both Old Dog and Uncle Ken made a pretty good case for home schooling, the only difference being that Uncle Ken is against it for some of the same reasons that I am for it. I don't think home schooled kids get to choose what subjects they study any more than kids in public school do. Uncle Ken may have home schooling confused with Montessori schools. Well, I suppose home school parents could use Montessori methods if they wanted to, but there are also bricks and mortar schools who do that.
I think the reason my niece usually finished her lessons by noon is that about half of the time in regular school is not spent learning, it's spent waiting. This isn't anybody's fault, it's just because there are so many other kids there. Most teachers will tell you that they could do a better job teaching if their class sizes were smaller. With home schooling, the class size is one, unless you have any siblings, and nobody has 20 or 30 siblings. Like I said, though, home schooling is not for everyone. For it to work, both the parents and the kids have to want to do it. According to my niece, though, a self motivated student only needs the parents' help until they learn to read. I don't know what grade level of reading is required, but I imagine that, if you can read a newspaper, you can read a teacher's lesson plan.

I heard something about that Scarramucci character on the TV news over the weekend and figured that was who Uncle Ken was talking about. I heard today that he turned in his resignation, so that's that. The more I think about it, the name Scarramucci sounds familiar. At first I thought he was one of the Three Musketeers but, upon further reflection, I think not. I don't think he's in the Bible, so he must be one of Shakespeare's characters. You know, a lot of those wise old sayings that people think are in the Bible really originated with Shakespeare.

Speaking of Shakespeare, I seem to remember that Old Dog is one of his fans. I just finished watching two episodes of Meeting of Minds that were all about Shakespeare. I never was a big fan before, but I got more out of those two episodes than I ever did out of studying Shakespeare in school. As near as I can tell, there are two seasons of Meeting of Minds on You Tube, 1976 and 1979. The ones I have been watching are 1979, and the last two episodes are the ones about Shakespeare. I don't know why I ended up watching 1979 first, but the 1976 season is next on the playlist. After I watch those I'll see if I can find more. It would be nice to have seen them all in order, but I'll take what I can get. I'm sure that I never saw them all when they were on TV because I was working the swing shift. Our local PBS station doesn't always buy a complete series anyway. I don't know how many years I watched The Red Green Show with multiple re-runs but, when I bought the complete series on DVD, I got many episodes that I'm sure I never saw before.