Yes You Can! Teach Your Own Kids By Homeschooling | Black and ...

Photo Credit: jimmiehomeschoolmom via Flickr

Teaching your own kids by homeschooling is something many parents have considered. A few years ago, we considered doing so. Four years later we are homeschooling our twelve and seven year old children, while our three year old is following right after them. In addition, we also serve as directors and tutors of a community of 15 homeschooling families.

We had many concerns early in our decision process. One of our biggest was, ?Are we capable of effectively teaching our kids?? Some subjects we expected to be easy to teach, but what about those subjects we didn?t like in school, or just weren?t very good at?

We learned this was common for parents considering homeschooling. Some of you may have similar concerns now, and doubt the fact you can teach your own kids. I am here to encourage you by saying, yes, you can! You are more than capable of teaching your own kids by homeschooling. Below I?ve shared a few ways you can?get over your own insecurities in teaching your kids by homeschooling, in addition to some practical steps you can take.

1) Realize you are already teaching your kids

Our children are gifts from God that He entrusted us to nurture, guide, and to teach. We teach them almost every other thing in their life, but for some reason we don?t think we can teach them certain subjects in school.

I?m guessing you had not changed a pamper or nursed someone, but you did because it was necessary for your child. Every parent has learned to teach and guide their child to master various skills. And very few of us have given them over to someone else to do it, because we felt we could do it in their best interest. It is no different in homeschooling.

2) Dispel the myths of the traditional school model

If you choose homeschooling, you have to break your mind of the traditional school model. That model is not the only way to teach our kids. If you are continually trying to make your homeschooling look like regular school, and measuring your kids development the way traditional schooling does, you will be missing out and might become discouraged.

You don?t have to be Mrs. ?So and So,? the fourth grade teacher at your child?s traditional school. You do not have to have a paper (degree or certificate) that says you are qualified to teach your own child. If that is the case, then you aren?t qualified to do anything mentioned in point #1 either.

When you get over making homeschooling like traditional school you will give yourself the ability to make mistakes (inevitable), to learn from them (a must), and for things to not look perfect (they won?t). This helps from being discouraged and questioning yourself so much.

3) Take complete ownership of your child?s education (and yours)

The scary part of homeschooling can be the most exciting part. By choosing homeschooling you are taking complete ownership of your child?s educational development. I don?t know how many times I?ve heard parents complaining about the quality of education at their child?s traditional school, or what the school and teachers should be doing. You now can address this and fill in any gaps your child was missing in traditional school.

I will not lie and say it is easy. But is definitely doable, and when a family takes ownership of their education, it is amazing! You may have to change some habits. You want to turn everyday happenings into learning opportunities. In doing so, your kids will grow to love learning, and will do so even when school stops.

So, if you are watching Maury in the morning, Dr. Phil in the afternoon, reality TV at night, and on Facebook in between, then don?t expect your child to pick up a book and read on their own. ?However, if you read to them, read with them, have them read to you, and pick up a book instead of the TV remote, then you are helping them by modeling those habits.

4) Practical Steps You Can Take

There is no 1-2-3 step process to homeschooling, but there are some things you can do to help in your decision making, build your confidence to teach, and actually teach. Here are some practical steps you can take to address those things:

1. Determine why you are considering homeschooling. When you have a solid ?why,? it helps you make decisions, focus, and keep going when it gets tough. ?Homeschooling can get tough!
2. Research state law and homeschooling regulations. Knowing that you are within the law and your rights gives you peace of mind to focus on what is important, educating your children.
3. Research homeschooling curriculum. A curriculum will provide you a guide, the lessons, the how-to, the tests, and pretty much everything you need to teach and measure your child?s progress. You don?t have to start from scratch.
4. Go to a convention or attend a parent practicum. ?A practicum is a training for homeschooling parents. ?You can learn how to teach from those who have done it, and are doing it. ?Conventions are great places to learn about all things homeschooling, as well as purchase homeschooling curriculum and supplies.
5. Connect with other homeschooling families in your area. You do not need nor should you take this journey alone. ?There are homeschooling co-ops, communities, and groups all around. Get connected and involved.

Teaching your kids by homeschooling can be scary at first, but you can do it, and do it effectively. Our homeschooling experience has been amazing. We have experienced things with our kids that we may have missed had we stayed with the traditional school model. In addition our kids are thriving.

I encourage those who are considering homeschooling. You were specifically chosen to raise, love, provide for, guide, and educate?your children. You are fully equipped, and nobody is more qualified! Yes, you can teach your own kids by homeschooling!

BMWK ? What questions about homeschooling do you have, that you?d like to see addressed in future posts? ?Please share those questions, and your thoughts in the comments section below.

About the author

Jackie Bledsoe, Jr. is a husband, father, writer, blogger, and entrepreneur. He shares his experiences at JackieBledsoe.com, writing about Family Leadership in his quest to GET better and help you GET better in leading your family. Read more articles like this on his blog, ?Follow? him on Twitter, and ?Like? him on Facebook.

Source: http://blackandmarriedwithkids.com/2013/02/yes-you-can-teach-your-own-kids-by-homeschooling/

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The Origins of 'Big Data': An Etymological Detective Story - NYTimes ...

Words and phrases are fundamental building blocks of language and culture, much as genes and cells are to the biology of life. And words are how we express ideas, so tracing their origin, development and spread is not merely an academic pursuit but a window into a society?s intellectual evolution.

Digital technology is changing both how words and ideas are created and proliferate, and how they are studied. Just last month, for example, the Library of Congress said its archive of public Twitter messages has reached 170 billion tweets and rising, by about 500 million tweets a day.

The Library of Congress archive, resulting from a deal struck with Twitter in 2010, is not yet open to researchers. But the plan is that it soon will be. In a white paper, the Library said that social media promises to be a rich resource that provides ?a fuller picture of today?s cultural norms, dialogue, trends and events to inform scholarship, the legislative process, new works of authorship, education and other purposes.?

The new digital forms of communication ? Web sites, blog posts, tweets ? are often very different from the traditional sources for the study of words, like books, news articles and academic journals.

?It?s almost like oral language instead of edited text,? said Fred R. Shapiro, editor of the ?Yale Book of Quotations? and an associate librarian at the Yale Law School. ?It?s the way of the future.?

The unruly digital data of the Web is a big ingredient in what is now being called ?Big Data.? And as it turns out, the term Big Data seems to be most accurately traced not to references in news or journal archives, but to digital artifacts now posted on technical Web sites, appropriately enough.

To our modest tale of word sleuthing: Last August, I wrote a Sunday column about 2012 being the breakout year for Big Data as an idea, in the marketplace, and as a term.

At the time, I did some reporting on the roots of the term, and I asked Mr. Shapiro of Yale to dig into it. He scoured data bases and came up with several references, including in press releases for product announcements and one intriguing use of the term by a now-famous author (more on that later).

But Mr. Shapiro couldn?t find anything as crisp and definitive as he had done for me years earlier when I asked him to try to find the first reference to the word ?software? as a computing term. It was in 1958, in an article in ?The American Mathematical Monthly,? written by John Tukey, a Princeton mathematician.

So, without a conclusive answer, I didn?t write about the origins of the term Big Data in that Sunday column. But afterward, I heard from people who had ideas on the subject.

Francis X. Diebold, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, got in touch and even wrote a paper, with the mildly tongue-in-cheek title, ?I Coined the Term ?Big Data? ? I had not thought of economics as the breeding ground for the term, but it is not unreasonable. Some of the statistical and algorithmic methods now in the Big Data tool kit trace their heritage to economic modeling and Wall Street.

Mr. Diebold staked a claim based on his paper, ?Big Data Dynamic Factor Models for Macroeconomic Measurement and Forecasting,? presented in 2000 and published in 2003. The economic-modeling paper was first academic reference found to Big Data, according to research by Marco Pospiech, a Ph. D. candidate at the Technical University of Freiberg in Germany.

By then, I had heard from Douglas Laney, an veteran data analyst at Gartner. His said the father of the term Big Data might well be John Mashey, who was the chief scientist at Silicon Graphics in the 1990s.

I replied to Mr. Diebold that I thought from what I had seen he probably had plenty of competition. And I passed along the e-mail correspondence I had received. Mr. Diebold said thanks much, and added that he had a University of Pennsylvania research librarian looking into it as well.

The term Big Data is so generic that the hunt for its origin was not just an effort to find an early reference to those two words being used together. Instead, the goal was the early use of the term that suggests its present connotation ? that is, not just a lot of data, but different types of data handled in new ways.

The credit, it seemed to me, should go to someone who was aware of the computing context. That is why, in my view, a very intriguing reference, discovered by the Yale researcher Mr. Shapiro, does not qualify.

In 1989, Erik Larson, later the author of bestsellers including ?The Devil in the White City? and ?In The Garden of Beasts,? wrote a piece for Harper?s Magazine, which was reprinted in The Washington Post. The article begins with the author wondering how all that junk mail arrives in his mailbox and moves on to the direct-marketing industry. The article includes these two sentences: ?The keepers of big data say they do it for the consumer?s benefit. But data have a way of being used for purposes other than originally intended.?

Prescient indeed. But not, I don?t think, a use of the term that suggests an inkling of the technology we call Big Data today.

Since I first looked at how he used the term, I liked Mr. Mashey as the originator of Big Data. In the 1990s, Silicon Graphics was the giant of computer graphics, used for special-effects in Hollywood and for video surveillance by spy agencies. It was a hot company in the Valley that dealt with new kinds of data, and lots of it.

There are no academic papers to support the attribution to Mr. Mashey. Instead, he gave hundreds of talks to small groups in the middle and late 1990s to explain the concept and, of course, pitch Silicon Graphics products. The case for Mr. Mashey is on the Web sites of technical and professional organizations, like Usenix. There, some of his presentation slides from those talks are posted, including ?Big Data and the Next Wave of Infrastress? in 1998.

For me, looking for the origins of Big Data has been a matter of personal curiosity, something to get back to someday and write up on a weekend.

When I called Mr. Mashey recently, he said that Big Data is such a simple term, it?s not much a claim to fame. His role, if any, he said, was to popularize the term within a portion of the high-tech community in the 1990s. ?I was using one label for a range of issues, and I wanted the simplest, shortest phrase to convey that the boundaries of computing keep advancing,? said Mr. Mashey, a consultant to tech companies and a trustee of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.

At the University of Pennsylvania, Mr. Diebold kept looking into the subject as well. His follow-up inquiries, he said, proved to be ?a journey of increasing humility.? He has written to two papers since the first one.

His most recent paper concludes: ?The term Big Data, which spans computer science and statistics/econometrics, probably originated in the lunch-table conversations at Silicon Graphics in the mid-1990s, in which John Mashey figured prominently.?

Tracing the origins of Big Data points to the evolution in the field of etymology, according to Mr. Shapiro. The Yale researcher began his word-hunting nearly 35 years ago, as a student at the Harvard Law School, poring through the library stacks. He was an early user of databases of legal documents, news articles and other documents, in computerized archives.

The Web, Mr. Shapiro said, opens up new linguistic terrain. ?What you?re seeing is a marriage of structured databases and novel, less structured materials,? he said. ?It can be a powerful tool to see far more.?

Source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/01/the-origins-of-big-data-an-etymological-detective-story/

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NJ Governor Christie still not showing his hand re online gaming ...

Governor Christie was asked today about my report on the meeting Tuesday between Pokers Players Alliance executive director John Pappas and a top administration official.

Speaking at a press event in East Newark, Christie told my colleague Melissa Hayes and other journalists: ?Listen, my staff takes meetings with people all the time and you shouldn?t read anything into their meeting with folks to signal whether I?m going to sign a particular bill or not.?

?We try to make ourselves accessibly to everybody who has an interest in legislation that?s on my desk, when appropriate, and then my staff comes to me with their views based upon in part those interviews and other policy considerations,? Christie added. ?So we?ll make those decisions when we make them.?

In this case, the decision will be made by Christie by Thursday, which is the deadline for Christie to sign or veto the online gaming bill on his desk. He vetoed a similar measure in 2011, but it seems he may approve it this time ? or do a conditional veto that might lead to online poker only being approved.

Meanwhile, a key Atlantic City labor union leader, Bob McDevitt of Local 54 of Unite-HERE, on Thursday endorsed the bill.

The significance there is that Christie has expressed concerns that even if the casino companies might make more money via online gaming, it might not be worth it for the state if jobs would be lost in the process. Now he has a labor official backing the idea, which might make Christie less queasy on that front.

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Source: http://blog.northjersey.com/meadowlandsmatters/4853/nj-governor-christie-still-not-showing-his-hand-re-online-gaming/

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New stroke gene discovery could lead to tailored treatments

Jan. 31, 2013 ? A study led by King's College London has identified a new genetic variant associated with stroke. By exploring the genetic variants linked with blood clotting -- a process that can lead to a stroke -- scientists have discovered a gene which is associated with large vessel and cardioembolic stroke but has no connection to small vessel stroke.

Published in the journal Annals of Neurology, the study provides a potential new target for treatment and highlights genetic differences between different types of stroke, demonstrating the need for tailored treatments.

Approximately 152,000 people in Britain have a stroke each year, costing the UK over ?8.2 billion. While there are thought to be 1.2 million stroke survivors in the UK, more than half have been left with disabilities that affect their daily lives.

A stroke occurs when the blood supply to the brain is cut off, often due to a blood clot blocking an artery that carries blood to the brain, which then leads to brain cell damage. Coagulation (blood clotting) abnormalities, particularly easy clotting of the blood, are therefore common contributing factors in the development of stroke.

Dr Frances Williams, Senior Lecturer from the Department of Twin Research and Genetic Epidemiology at King's and lead author of the paper, said: 'Previous studies have demonstrated the influence of genetic factors on the components of coagulation. The goal of this study was to extend these observations to determine if they were further associated with different types of stroke.'

The research was carried out in three stages. The first consisted of a genome-wide association study (GWAS) in 2100 healthy volunteers which identified 23 independent genetic variants that were involved in coagulation. The second stage examined the 23 variants in 4200 stroke and non-stroke cases from centres across Europe (Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium 2 and MORGAM collections) and found that a particular mutation on the ABO gene was significantly associated with stroke.

Stage three of the study used the MetaStroke cohort, a project of the International Stroke Genetics Consortium which comprises 8900 stroke cases recruited from centres in the Europe, USA and Australia, whose DNA has been collected and undergone GWA scan. It was confirmed that a variant in the ABO blood type gene was associated with stroke, a finding specific to large vessel and cardioembolic stroke.

Dr Williams said: 'The discovery of the association between this genetic variant and stroke identifies a new target for potential treatments, which could help to reduce the risk of stroke in the future. It is also significant that no association was found with small vessel disease, as this suggests that stroke subtypes involve different genetic mechanisms which emphasises the need for individualised treatment.'

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by King's College London.

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Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/CUVQUtsy4uE/130201090853.htm

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Danny Gokey Introduces Son Daniel Emanuel

"It's been fun adjusting to having a new baby in the house," Gokey tells PEOPLE. "We're a little sleep deprived right now, but we really love him a lot! He's pretty cute - it's okay to brag, right?"

Source: http://feeds.celebritybabies.com/~r/celebrity-babies/~3/lghFg9-O1KQ/

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Study finds parasites and poor antenatal care are main causes of epilepsy in Africa

The largest study of epilepsy in sub-Saharan Africa to date reveals that programmes to control parasitic diseases and access to better antenatal care could substantially reduce the prevalence of the disease in this region.

Epilepsy is one of the most common neurological conditions worldwide and it is well known that it is significantly more prevalent in poorer countries and rural areas. The study of over half a million people in five countries of sub-Saharan Africa is the first to reveal the true extent of the problem and the impact of different risk factors.

The study, conducted at International Network for the Demographic Evaluation of Populations and Their Health (INDEPTH) demographic surveillance sites in Kenya, South Africa, Uganda, Tanzania and Ghana, screened 586,607 residents and identified 1711 who were diagnosed as having active convulsive epilepsy. These individuals, along with 2033 who did not have epilepsy, were given a questionnaire to complete about their lifestyle habits. The team also took blood samples to test for exposure to malaria, HIV and four other parasitic diseases that are common in the developing world.

The team found that adults who had been exposed to parasitic diseases were 1.5-3 times more likely to have epilepsy than those who had not. Epilepsy has previously been linked with various parasite infections but this is the first study to reveal the extent of the problem.

Professor Charles Newton from the Wellcome Trust programme at the Kenyan Medical Research Institute (KEMRI) and the Department of Psychiatry at Oxford University, who led the study, said: "This study demonstrates that many cases of epilepsy could be entirely preventable with elimination of parasites in Africa, some of which for example onchocerciasis have been controlled in some areas. In some areas the incidence of epilepsy could be reduced by 30-60% with appropriate control measures."

In children, the greatest risk factors for developing epilepsy were complications associated with delivery and head injury. Interventions to improve antenatal and perinatal care could substantially reduce the prevalence of epilepsy in this region, say the authors.

The study focused on people with convulsive epilepsies as they are the most reliably detected and reported and there remains a substantial stigma attached to patients with the disease.

"Facilities for diagnosis, treatment and on-going management of epilepsy are virtually non-existent in many of the world's poorest regions and so it's vital that we take these simple steps to try and prevent as many cases of this debilitating disease as possible," Professor Newton added.

More information: A.K. Ngugi et al. Prevalence of active convulsive epilepsy in sub-Saharan Africa and associated risk factors: cross-sectional and case-control studies. Lancet Neurology, 31 January 2013.

Journal reference: Lancet Neurology

Provided by Wellcome Trust

Source: http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-01-parasites-poor-antenatal-main-epilepsy.html

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Video: Are online classes key to higher ed?

>>> we are back now as promised with what could be the key to higher education and perhaps even brils for a lot of folks who don't necessarily have the time or money for college. say nothing of an ivy league school. online learning is hardly new. it's been around for a long time. but open-access to classes at some of this nation's most prestigious institutions is new. and people of all kinds and all ages are signing on. our report from our chief education correspondent, rehema ellis.

>> reporter: the college classroom is changing. courses from some of the world's most elite universities are now available to anyone for free. at a furious pace, schools are participating with start-up companies like courseera to deliver online courses .

>> much faster than any of us were expecting. we reached our first 1 million users faster than facebook.

>> reporter: physics, poetry, astronomy, even guitar, all just a click away. university of virginia retooled his modern history course for this semester's online debut. the class usually open to 120 students saw enrollment soar.

>> 42,000 students around the world.

>> reporter: to put it in perspective, in order to reach the same number of students, this professor would have to teach his course here at the university of virginia for 350 years. since 2011 , some 2.5 million students from hundreds of countries have signed on, even though many are not offered for credit and completion rates are low, some educators say the potential exists to revolutionize higher learning . 38-year-old dawn smith was looking to change careers.

>> i wanted to go into health care communications. but i needed some textbook knowledge. and i felt that in order to be taken seriously as a candidate, i needed to show that i was doing something proactive.

>> reporter: there are concerns, however, about measuring student progress. the lack of student-professor interaction, even the sustainability of moox.

>> imagine taking a university and removing all of the really fun stuff and all you're left with is me talking to you through a camera. that's not that good for anybody.

>> reporter: still, universities are experimenting with new ways to expand learning and potentially revenue, as well. rehema ellis, nbc news, charlottesville, virginia.

Source: http://video.msnbc.msn.com/nightly-news/50659145/

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