Setup #2: All of the kids are on a Calvin and Hobbes jag right now. They have all of the books out from the library and they quote the strips and explain their favourites all the time.

Today I came up from work for dinner and my son Joshua had an invention to demonstrate for me:  The Thinker 3000. It’s based on the Cerebral Enhance-O-Tron from Calvin and Hobbes.

YouTube – The Thinker 3000.

In an interesting essay, David Orr argues that the current system isn’t producing the type of people that the world needs:

The plain fact is that the planet does not need more “successful” people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every shape and form. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these needs have little to do with success as our culture has defined it.

The originals were in OpenOffice format, and were quite large, so here the are in PDF format:

I Am, I Can, I Ought, I Will: The Ideas of Charlotte Mason

Organizing The Chaos

We were touched by the number of people who were grateful to get information about Charlotte Mason, and the personal stories of people who also struggle with home organization were very moving.

Thank you to those who attended and made the effort worthwhile.

If you were there, please let us know you were here by commenting!

EDIT TO ADD: THE “CONTACT US” FORM WAS BROKEN AND WASN’T SENDING US MESSAGES. If you tried to use the “Contact Us” form recently, please do it again because we didn’t get your message. It works now.

I looked around on their website, and there is a tonne of information on how to use the Homeschool Edition on a network with “SMS”, their management program. It allows you to track users and lesson progress, and allows users to log on on and use the software from any machine on the network. The explanations and instructions are very clear, and are updated as of a few weeks ago. Yay! We have a home network and a number of machines around the place, this will be great!

Rosetta Stone French comes in the mail. I open the box. I take the CDs downstairs to install on the server. I look in the box again because there is no SMS disk.

I call tech support. I wait 10 minutes. They tell me that it’s all built in now, I don’t need a separate SMS install.

I try again. I beat my head on the desk. All of this beautiful documentation and none of it seems to match what’s on my screen or in the box.

I contact tech support via email. Their submit form is VERY broken, so it won’t allow “return” characters in the explanation of your question. I have URLs and references and multiple questions, and it takes me literally 10 minutes to figure out why this form won’t take my request. The error message I get cunningly neglects to mention that CR’s aren’t allowed. Grrr.

The response I get is this:

Hi [MrPages],

Rosetta Stone Version 3 Homeschool edition is not network-able. I apologize for the inconvenience. You may install the software on two computers.

Let us know if you have further questions.

Um. Hang on a sec.

I reply with a list of articles that seems to contradict this directly.

Hi [MrPages],

Those articles are for the Version 2 product. You have the Version 3, the newest Homeschool product. Version 2 is no longer available for the language you are studying as a homeschool version. The Version 3 Homeschool product is not compatible with home networks. I apologize for the inconvenience.

If you would like to return your product, please contact Customer Care.

I reply again, pointing to documentation that specifically mentions version 3, pointing to the fact that none of the documentation is labelled as version specific, and indicating my displeasure at the removal of functionality without any documentation of such, and in fact, with documentation out there that contradicts the removal.

Then I get this wonderfully concise summary of the issue:

There are two versions of the SMS, Version 2 and Version 3. There are two versions of homeschool products, Version 2 and Version 3. The Version 2 homeschool product works with both versions of the SMS. The SMS and Version 3 do NOT work together. The Version 3 product is an entirely different setup, and is not capable of networking.

So. You’ve used the same version numbers for two separate products that used to be bundled. Now they aren’t bundled, the old version of one works with the new version of the other, but the new version of the same one won’t work with the new version of the other.

Thanks. That’s brilliantly clear. Wonderful marketing, guys.

And, like suckers, we kept the program because it’s still the best way to learn a language. It’s so frustrating to be stuck in a position like this, trapped by incompetent documentation and marketingspeak into accepting less that we ordered. And just smiling and taking it.

Rosetta Stone, you have a good product, but you suck at customer service.

MrsPages presented our take on the Bluedorn’s model. We’ve rearranged the 10 things to reflect our priorities, and basically made them our own.

In a nutshell, get your children’s hearts close to you, let them explore their world, and expose them to great literature as much as you can. If you do that before they are 10, then you really don’t have to do much else. Once they turn 10 (or 11 or 12) then moving into formal schooling should be a breeze.

Here are the notes from the seminar, as we promised the people who came after we ran out of printed copies.

Thanks to the 50+ people who attended (you can’t see the other half of the room in the picture) and stayed afterwards for questions and discussion!

10 Things To Do Before Age 10 Handout in PDF format
10 Things To Do Before Age 10 Handout in OpenOffice format
10 Things To Do Before Age 10 Handout in Microsoft Word format

Our Family Schedule in PDF Format
Our Family Schedule in OpenOffice Format
Our Family Schedule in Microsoft Word Format