Reporting and Opining

Living on the Family Farm involves rainfall reporting to all interested parties.  Knowing this sometimes necessitates a trip to the rain gauge early in the morning, in my nightgown, after first checking for traffic.

Lowell calls to see if the hay got enough moisture to grow again.  He rents all the tillable acreage except the 20 or so acres around the buildings that Shane now owns. Lowell's 60 acre field is planted to alfalfa.

Shane calls to see if his forage crops (sudan, currently) planted in the "patches" around the buildings will have enough moisture to provide grazing for his cattle.

Dad calls because he has always wanted to know such things, and because he still has an interest in his farm.

This morning we had a few drops shy of 2 inches in our rain gauge.  Lowells (about 3 miles NW) had almost 3 inches, Shanes (about 5 miles SW) and Dads (3 miles S) had a little over 2 inches, if I remember correctly.  This reporting thing goes two ways, you see.

Since the wheat harvest is over, we were all, without reservation, praying for rain.  All the crops and landscapes were getting very dry unless they were being irrigated.  It's easy for all of us to smile this morning, and to offer thanks to our Heavenly Father Who provided this blessing.

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If you're my neighbor, and you don't have children, you can thank me that the college student selling educational books for children by Southwestern Publishing Company will not be coming to your door.  He was here this morning, and asked if we had school age children.  I told him our children are grown and gone, but we have often purchased their books in the past.  That  must have given him the courage to ask me some questions.  Peering hard at the township directory, he read off names and either crossed them out or circled them, based on whether they had children at home.

Maybe he was Japanese and had the courage to ask because he immediately recognized our last name as being Japanese.  He appeared to have Asian ancestry, and asked if our last name is Japanese.  At the end of the conversation he thanked me for saving him a lot of time and asked for my name and my husband's.  I briefly wondered whether he was going to use our names to try to convince other people to buy because "Hiromi and Miriam Iwashige did."  I decided I didn't care if he did.  We liked their books and admired the willingness of these students to do the hard work that door to door selling can involve.  He said his name is "Homi" if I heard him right.

If he comes to your door, don't buy anything you don't want, but don't shoo him off just because he's a "peddler" you don't know.  Be courteous and thank him for working to earn a living.

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Put on your fast ears if you're privileged to hear Joel M--tin's presentation on a Bible translation/church planting project he's promoting.  Packed and powerful, it's definitely worth listening to.  The organization he's part of idealizes a team approach to Bible translation, a chronological approach to establish priorities for the first efforts ("Firm Foundations" is a familiar model.), and emphasis on reaching first the largest populations that have no part of the Bible in their heart language--around 2000 of them.  I was happy to hear of at least one local young person who already has an interest in just such a project.  Studying Hebrew and Greek and getting specialized linguistics training are required for anyone who wants to be directly involved in translation. Many others in the support team can fill a vital role without such training.

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A local ministry is being launched that will  make use of the old Broadacres facility for a re-entry program for  offenders who have been incarcerated.  Edward M., an Amish bishop who owned the farm land next to this facility, bought the retirement home campus at auction and has made it available at a reduced price to the newly-minted ministry.  Local board members currently include people from at least three different churches:  Richard G., Abner S., Glenn M., Sr., and Dan Peter--n.  Many different kinds of assistance are being  entertained.  Providing a temporary home in a supportive atmosphere where vocational skills can be acquired and other kinds of instruction can be given is part of the vision.

When my brother was released from prison, he was headed to a halfway house in Wichita, except that the spot he had been promised was already taken because there was a two day delay in his getting there, until a bit of "old business" was resolved in the local courts.  He would have had to go back to incarceration if my father had not volunteered to provide a home and re-entry point for him.  No local program offers a halfway house, to my knowledge.  Yet this county is home to a large state correctional facility, and certainly many, many people are released here who have no support to help them make it outside the prison.  Think about it: upon release, almost no money, likely no job and no home, perhaps far away from family (if there is contact with a family), and minimal  job skills.  What are the chances that these offenders will make it?

My brother has kept a job ever since his release, lives in his own apartment, and cleans my parents' house every week.  Sooooo much better than being confined at state expense.  He is still on parole.

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This year's school fund needs a cash infusion to end the fiscal year in the black.  I don't know how much any teacher gets paid (although I could easily find out how much I get paid if I studied my paperwork a little more carefully and could remember it afterward).  I do know, however, that if longevity in the profession, and training are given any financial weight, (I'm sure they are.) our program is costing more because we have quite a few people with professional training and a number of years' experience as teachers.  Perhaps thinking about this will help provide a balanced view of the "problem" we have.

If we ask whether inexperience and lack of training, which would result in lower expenses, would be preferable to what we have now, maybe it will be easier to cough up the necessary funds.  Also, if every homeschooled child were added to the classroom schools, the expenses would escalate markedly. Facility and staffing needs would double immediately, with a budget increase needed to cover the capital and ongoing expenses.  Homeschoolers are presumably paying their share of the total expenses, but are adding their own teaching "labor" to the program, without asking for monetary compensation in return for their labor.  Let's give thanks for the savings these hardworking parents are providing for all of us.

I've often pondered the financial dilemma of homeschoolers.  They pay taxes to fund public education, which they do not benefit from, by choice, of course.  (All families who send their children to private schools are in the same shoes.)  In addition, local homeschoolers contribute to church offerings to pay for classroom schools, which they largely do not receive services from, although I'm happy to say that there is a level of cooperation here between the classroom schools and homeschools that is absent in many other places.
In our church's program, they do receive the benefit of having curriculum paid for out of the church's education fund, and they sometimes attend individual classes away from home and can participate in standardized testing.

Having curriculum paid for saves homeschoolers from the situation that occurred earlier, when they paid for two other programs they did not significantly benefit from, and then paid all their own expenses in a system in which they provided all the labor as well--early on, under a significant cloud of suspicion as well.  To summarize:  By the time they were ready to start any given school year, homeschoolers had paid for three "systems" and then provided all the labor for the system that was actually implemented.  Not fair.   I applaud these pioneers' courage and sacrifice.

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Perhaps our school budget would benefit from more emphasis on facilitating homeschooling.  I personally think a stellar place to begin would be to accept only students in classroom schools who already know how to read. (I hear those gasps.)  I didn't suck this idea out of my own thumb.  I first considered it after I heard of a school in Pennsylvania who did just that.

If you have never observed what happens in a kindergarten or first grade classroom, and never gone through a teacher education program that detailed all the reading readiness activities teachers are told are necessary, you may have no idea how much time is spent in the first year of school simply trying to keep students busy until they can read and do more to keep themselves busy.  I believe that teaching children to read, one on one, at the point at which the child is developmentally ready (That way you can skip all those readiness exercises.), is one of the most efficient educational uses of individualized instruction.  The corollary is defensible also--that teaching children to read is one of the least efficient uses of classroom instruction. (More gasps noted.)

Some of us have read about Susanna Wesley's teaching each of her children to read on the day of their fifth birthday.  A few of them needed more than one day.  I won't pretend that what worked for her would work for everyone, but I believe we have convinced ourselves that it is a far more laborious process than it actually is.  Trying to keep a group of unevenly ready children on the same track is part of what makes it take a long time in a classroom.

Until a child is ready to read on their own, they usually will happily listen when someone else reads to them.  If that's what parents do, they can very easily transition into answering questions and pointing things out on the page with no pressure for the child.  With this approach, learning to read can happen in a matter of a few weeks.

Children memorize some of the most familiar stories anyway.  If you develop the habit of simply pointing to the words as you say them, they will soon learn to associate certain words with their printed form.  Leave out a word here and there and point to the omitted word on the page and have the child say it aloud.  No, this is not decoding, but it is a step toward reading.  If you must do the whole phonics thing, you can often do it after a child is reading well--in a fraction of the time it would take if you're trying to use it as a learning-to-read method.

Some who struggle inordinately to learn to read in first grade would not do so if they were more developmentally ready.  True, some children who have a disability will not "recover" during a delay of reading instruction, but for some children, it really is as simple as waiting watchfully.  Pouring language into them in the form of read aloud stories is more help than many parents realize in teaching children proper expression, syntax, and morphology--all those big words Joel Mar--n used last night in talking about Bible translation.  Children who learn to read later rather than sooner are not educationally disadvantaged in any way that I know of, if they are busy interacting with language while they wait.

How would all this save money?  Mainly, you would not need to hire a first grade teacher.  Through mentoring between adults, the child's parent-teacher could get the support they needed to become an effective teacher.  I believe there would be further savings down the line also, because some parents who try teaching a child to read will discover that they have skills they didn't know they possessed and the educational process is pleasurable enough that they aren't interested in delegating it to others and risk missing out on the pleasure.  The key is to validate what parents are able to do and to provide assistance and support to maximize their efforts.