Homeschooling

Secular Homeschoolers: not quite as rare as unicorns.

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I was talking with a friend the other day, and he said ‘secular homeschoolers? Isn’t that an oxymoron?’

I didn’t know what to say. We don’t homeschool for religious reasons, and many of the homeschoolers we hang out with don’t, so to me it’s the normal situation to be secular.

The numbers sort of bear this out. In a survey by Trinity University in 2000 (one of those ‘check all that apply’ surveys), 38.4 percent of homeschooling families cite religious reasons as a reason they are homeschooling. According to the National Educational and Home Research Institute, most people homeschool for more than one reason. In 2012, 91 percent said they homeschooled because of school environment (that’d include us as well), according to the Institute of Education Sciences. The US Department of Education found that 16% of parents in 2012 homeschooled for religious reasons primarily, although far more cite religion as a second reason.

Our local secular homeschooling group has about 200 members, and is a great resource for those of us looking for non-religious materials and courses. And while we do all bump into very very vocal religious homeschoolers, most of the time everyone is very polite and understanding of our different choices. We get enough negativity from family, friends and the society at large; we don’t need to add it to each other. And those instances where fellow homeschoolers are abusive are a wonderful teaching experience for our children to learn real socialization skills. Chatting with our local secular group, it seems that it’s generally agreed that any weirdness felt from being a secular homeschooler is more felt from outside the homeschool community, rather than from within. We generally teach our children about religions as part of our schooling as well.

A concern for the secular homeschooler is finding secular curricula. While they are not as common as religious curricula, more resources are being added to the market as producers are figuring out that we exist. Places like Global Village School and Time4Learning provide complete curricula, while ALEKS and Saxon provide math, and science can be found at places like Connect the Thoughts and Khan Academy. For support, there is the closed facebook group Secular Homeschool Families, and http://www.secularhomeschool.com/.

Our personal journey includes multiple reasons for homeschooling. While we always thought we could do ‘a better job’ than the schools (one on one teacher student ratio will always be the best), a primary reason was that our son was simply not suited to the school environment. As social as he is, he gets ‘peopled out’ very quickly, and he did not react well to being forced to continue to socialize after he hit his limit. No flexibility was allowed him in school to put himself into a ‘time out’ when he needed one, so he would be very stressed. That and a school refusal to make his work more challenging were our primary reasons. If we did that Trinity survey above, though, I probably would also have checked the ‘religious reasons’ because there were multiple times our son came home loaded with Bible stories because another child had brought a comic book ‘Action Bible’ to school to read with the other kids.

House, Maintenance, Roof, Winter

Preventing Ice Dams (Part I)

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So, after last year’s ice dams, I’m working to try and avoid them with pre-emptive actions to take care of the problems. Some of these will be inside the house, and others outside.

Inside, one of the things I need to do is empty the four rafter cavities that are over our son’s bedroom closet (below the attic floor) of the blown-in insulation, and try to use some rigid poly insulation that will allow air to come up from the eaves under the roof. This will go along with replacing the plaster and lathe with drywall, to take care of the water damage we had there.

The other thing I need to do is patch the places where the previous owner had the ‘master’ bathroom replaced. In order to run some electrical wires, the contractors they used put a big hole in the back corner of the plaster of the room, which they covered with a soffit over the shower. The thing about this hole, and the hole I assume is at the bottom of the wall, is that warm air from the house goes right up behind the shower and up under the base of the valley on the back of the house where we had the worst ice build-up. I’m still debating the best way to fix this problem, either from the attic above, or from getting into the soffit from the bathroom.

Outside, I’ve worked up a plan to run heating tape/wire along the eaves, gutters, and valleys where we had problems (and in the front where we also get ice build-up). This involves running wire to outlets to the exterior in the areas the tape will be located, and installing GFI plugs in these. Luckily, the finished room in the attic contained a 20amp, 240 outlet which we never used. I say luckily, as it was wired incorrectly for a 240 outlet (no return line other than the ground!), but after disconnecting it in the breaker box, it was a nice dedicated 12 gauge 110 line available in the attic, with enough extra line up there to install a junction box.

From the junction box, I need to run two lines, one to behind the valley over the shower, and the other to the front of the house. Each of these will be placed under the eaves of the roof, which will allow for the plugs to be protected from the weather, and to give a ‘drip loop’ to the wires which will insure that if water IS running down the wire, the lowest point of the wire will be below the plug/outlet.

The back area has two problem spots, and covers 137 feet of eaves, three valleys, a skylight, a small 4’x4′ first-story roof, and three downspouts. The eaves come out about 16-18” and have a split-slope, where the two feet of roof closes to the eaves is a more gentle slope than the rest of the roof. In dealing with that, I planned for 24-28” of coverage of the eaves, full gutter coverage, and six feet (or so) of coverage up the valleys with the heat tape/wire.

Frost King has a formula for figuring out how long of a wire you need for your task, and a couple of minutes of work made it an easy spreadsheet. Not surprisingly, I needed more than one length of wire for this set-up. Frost King offers wire lengths from 250′ to 50′, so I ended up with a combination of one 200′ length and two 60′ lengths, with one 60′ length dedicated to most of the gutters and two downspouts, the other 60′ length dedicated to the short section of roof (over our son’s closet), one of the valleys, the rest of the gutter and the last downspout, and the 200′ length to cover the rest of the eaves, the skylight and the other two valleys.

In the front, there is only one little section of eaves, and a long, winding gutter with a feed from the first story roof over the entryway, so a 60′ length will take care of the area, with a loop making sure the entryway roof outflow is clear.  And all of these will need the self-regulating, temperature sensitive plugs so that they’re only on when they need to be.

 

 

(Actual installation information in Part II)

Eggs, Food

Eggs, part one. Of many.

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Eggs part 1

 

Eggs are amazing. Even merely as a foodstuff, they are just incredible.

 

They are portable, healthy, convenient, cheap, tasty, and easy to cook or incredibly showy, depending on what you do with them. And they are one of the original ‘fast foods’— when we domesticated chickens 5000 years ago a side effect was a calorie dense, protein rich, portable food.

 

They are full of the amino acids that help build muscle (leucine). They have choline which is helps your brain think, focus and motivate (wow— I think I need more eggs for breakfast!). Choline also helps your liver do its job.

 

And if you remember the scare about eggs and heart disease in the 1980’s (possibly like me you had a mother who threw them all away at that point, along with bacon and ham and whatever other food was being vilified at the time), it’s interesting to note that they are now saying that apparently there is no measurable increased risk of heart disease with moderate egg consumption (7 whole eggs a week) unless you are a diabetic. In a study of nearly 120,000 people, that’s what they came up with.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10217054?dopt=Citation

 

And actually, if you are at risk for macular degeneration and eye cataracts, you’re best to eat eggs, because eggs protect the eye.

 

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16340654?dopt=Citation

 

However, they do say that is you have heart disease already, or have already had a stroke, then you may be good avoiding more than three eggs yolks a week. That leaves you all the whites you could want, though.

 

So, as with pretty much everything you’ll see from me, eggs are great in moderation. Eat them without fear, but not all of them at once. And watch what you eat them with— They™ are thinking that since eggs are often served with high fat, high sodium foods, it could be merely that eggs like associating with trouble makes, not that they are in themselves troublemakers.

 

Right now, I will start with what makes them one of the most magical foods we can eat. The chemistry in the simple egg, that makes it into the magician it can be.

 

Let’s start with the yolk. The gooey, rich golden part that dribbles onto the potatoes or that you dip your toast into for breakfast foods. But it’s not just the xanthophyll— the yellow in the yolk that can add its color to make food pretty

 

It’s also capable of convincing acid and fat (two of my favorite things) to stick together, to get their combined flavor into your mouth in an unctuous smoothness. Every one knows that oil and water don’t mix, but we also know that things like mayonnaise and hollandaise are delicious, and most of us know that eggs are part of that. And it’s the chemistry of the egg yolk that does it. Eggs have some amino acids that repel water, and some that attract water. But it’s not just that. The lethicin, which is a phospholipid (part fat, part salt) is sort of like a tadpole, who likes sticking it’s head in water and its tail in fat. So you have your mayo and hollandaise so irresistible.

 

So when you mix that egg yolk into your butter and lemon juice combination, you get the double force of the amino acids and the lethicin working to make some parts of the yolk stick to the lemon juice while other parts will stick to the butter, and you can dip your tater tots into a little bit of heaven.
I’m paranoid about my eggs, and like them cooked, so I make my hollandaise sauce in a double boiler, although many people will say you can do it fine in a blender. If I had a friend with chickens, I’d do that, but I don’t right now.

 

½ cup of butter, cut up into dice. Reserve ½!

2 egg yolks

1T lemon juice

1 tsp minced garlic, shallot, green onion, whatever you have

black pepper

melt the ¼ cup butter in the double boiler. Add the rest of the ingredients, and mix well. When it is all melted and mixed, add the last of the butter and remove from heat while stirring. Serve immediately.

Surviving independently in a city.