I'm curious about the volunteer work... I've never been aware of volunteer work that involves parents to supervise. I suppose I have seen family type volunteering when they clean up gargabe along the highways and another time I recall families got together and cleaned out a local stream.
I would have thought a better option for children under the age of 12 would be signing them up for Brownies or Girl Guides, where they could be independent from their parents and learn to work as a group. It's amazing what kids can learn in this type of enviroment.
Go Linda, Go Linda, Go Linda.... :)) Sorry, but I just HAVE to respond to THIS ONE. As I was reading your response, I was thinking 'funny, I don't remember writing this'! Lets see, 40 something, working different shifts, karate 3 nights per week, dealing with un-well parents in their
80s, but wait! I don't have a 23 year old son! And you left out the part about 2 DDs, and Irish Dance once a week and travelling to feissanna all over the country! Aside from that, you could have been writing MY life here! lol So what it boils down to is, we all have lives that run pretty much parallel to each others, and it's all about choices. :) But hey Karen, the kettle's always on at my house if you want to come for supper sometime in beautiful B.C.! :)
Maureen > I'm sure what you say is true, but as another "40 something", can I > put in my 2 cents?
I hope you don't mind if I abbreviate things in an attempt to wind this down and just address what appear to be the crucial issues.
snipped-for-privacy@actcom.co.il (Mirjam Bruck-Cohen) wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@ar.news.verio.net:
My children have learned from other people. I don't have a problem with another adult teaching my child in general. I just have a problem with my child learning something that will conflict with their home training.
You are passing judgment on me as a person based on your misunderstanding of what I am saying.
No, not necessarily. Some people's differing religious beliefs do not clash, and other people's differing religious beliefs *do* clash.
Well, I'm not writing a Masters thesis here, just having a conversation. And that statement would apply more to the Sunni Muslin neighbors we had more than to the Conservative Jewish family.
Maybe because I express myself the way I do and not necessarily the way someone else does.
I have a daughter and 3 sons. There were daughters and sons in the other families as well.
I said what I meant. There have been and still are a large number of children in our neighborhood who are left to shift for themselves and get no home training at all. That means they are being raised with no values at all. This has nothing to do with any claim to being a person of faith.
That is not correct. I was only giving one example.
They learned that Judaism is the fundamental building block for Christianity, for one. They learned some about Muslim and Afghani holidays.
But it is an old and well-known saying as opposed to something I made up myself.
I don't know what you are saying by leaning on someone's saying, but if you are trying to insinuate that if I like one thing someone says, I should embrace it all, I reject that notion out of hand.
snipped-for-privacy@actcom.co.il (Mirjam Bruck-Cohen) wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@ar.news.verio.net:
No! I said that I reserve the right to educate my children at home as part of my rights as a parent, and I said that all parents need to be teaching/training their children but that they can still do it if their children are in public or private school.
What I said is that if they have to put their child in public school, they can still accomplish home training (teaching by parent, primarily character and life issues as opposed to the 3 Rs) when school is out if they make training their children a priority.
Most places won't let children volunteer to work anywhere before they are
Part of that is probably for liability reasons, but it was explained to me by several places that they found that even children age 13 did not do well working by themselves. So since I believe that part of the responsibility of a citizen is to try to give back to the community, and since I wanted my children at learn that at a young age, we worked together so they would learn that value as a child.
Do you know what proofreading is? Proofreading is checking written material for grammatical errors, and in my case I was also doing quality control checking on formatting to make sure the format of the book was consistently correct as specified.
Then it's not 100% wrong for a parent to home school?
We don't snub them. But the *police* (as in, this was not *my* idea but the *police's* idea) have told my children that this gang is involved in trouble and that my children would be wise to steer clear of them, because if they were in the group of kids when the police came to address their behavior, then my children will be included as part of the gang. Prior to that my boys would do things with them when they are not trouble-making and would steer clear of them when they weren't. Now they are only allowed to do things with them within view of my house and can't wander the streets with them at any point.
LOL. Most of the kids get a slap on the wrist if they can get caught at anything. A number of us have tried to get something done with the big ringleader, and it never worked.
They are not home 100% of the time. My 13YO spends 10 hours a week at a community gym taking several different classes, which he could not do if he were in a regular classroom, and my 17YO has taken fencing and competed in tournaments, been in a model railroad club, helps senior citizens with moving lawns, heavy work they cannot do, simple home repair projects, etc. We did 4-H for a number of years when they were younger.
It is a wrong impression that home-schooled children stay home 100% of the time. Many of them are even more socially active than public school children and home-school because it frees their time up to be more active.
If a child has no religious belief but has a good sense of morals, to me they are a better person than a child who professes a religious belief but has no morals.
Nope. Not in public school. Public schools are really big on mainstreaming all children and putting them in regular classes as much as possible. But an underachieving child is not a disabled child, which is what it sounds to me that you might be thinking. An underachieving child is one who would be perfectly capable of achieving the same levels as anybody else but due to being economically or emotionally disadvantaged or due to not having any support from home, they don't have the opportunity to do so.
Oh, dear. I am truly and most contritely sorry that I hit a hot button with you.
Linda D. wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:
Families can get together and organize volunteer work that they do as families. And that's what we did. Sometimes it's helping individual people and you wouldn't see it, though.
We did okay with 4-H. They were less snobby than Girl Sprouts and Boy Sprouts because they were all focused around a common interest.
That's not part of the constitution. At least not what I read, and I do freely admit I skimmed because it is a *very* dry document to read thoroughly. I believe you are quoting from "The Declaration of Independence."
Remember that Jefferson was a deist. Many of the framers were not religious people. "Creator" is "whatever". Since we don't know how we were created, that could be anything from a concept of god to a concept of the big bang. Much like AA's mantra is "higher power" . . . whatever that is for any individual. It is not a religious statement, nor does it intend to be read in that manner.
You said that our constitution was rife with examples of religion. It is not. I've heard this from a lot of people over the past two years (since 9/11). I really don't get where this is coming from, which is why I took the time to look up the constitution. I listen to public radio every day and am just amazed the number of people who claim our founding documents are filled with references to god. That's simply not true. Obviously there is references to something other than common man. But this should not be inferred as religious dogma. And in particular, the way it has been conscripted by fundamentalists. Dianne
Dianne Lewandowski wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@individual.net:
Neither is "separation of church and state."
And I consider being a Deist to be a religious belief.
The principles are there even if the words aren't. They may not be strictly Christian in adoptation, but just like Christian principles guided the founding of AA even though they aren't mentioned, Christian principles guided the writing of the D. of I. and the constitution.
Article 1: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
In my mind, that means separation of church and state. If you read the writings of the founders, they pretty much wanted to avoid any semblence of having a theocratic government, or having religion enter the frey. For exactly the reasons that is now happening. It's getting muddier and muddier.
You stated that the constitution was rife with religious thought, and I said it wasn't. I proved it wasn't. I read the darned thing and submitted a URL for others to check.
It's a belief system, but not necessarily a religious one. I'm an atheist. That's a belief system. No one would ever claim it has any religious overtones. :-) Also, other framers/founders had similar or "other" types of belief systems, not necessarily christian, such as "free thinkers". And some were non-practising christians.
No. They are "moral/ethical" principals which do not belong to any particular religious belief. Religion is built upon these foundations, not the other way around. Many cultures lived by these same moral principals, but they certainly weren't/aren't christians.
I think we're learning where, exactly, this schism is. It's called justification. There's absolutely NOTHING in the constitution that implies anything of a religious nature. Our form of government was borrowed from many sources of "thought", including the American Indians.
Dianne Lewandowski wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@individual.net:
Well, what it originally meant was that the government may not establish a national religion, such as England has and many other countries have.
The term "separation of church and state" is found nowhere in the constitution.
Well, I am personally not in favor of having a theocratic government, seeing what I have seen of what theocracies are like. It might work for a small already-unified people group, but not for a country as big as the US.
It is not rife with quoted religious doctrine, but it is full of principles that were placed there due to religious beliefs.
Atheism is a religion. So is secular humanism. It is not a theistic religion, but it is a religion nevertheless.
I think we are both right here. A.A. was started by a man who felt that Christian principles were the way to escape alcoholism, but he knew that cloaking them in Christian terminology was an offense to people, so he took the Christian flavor out of it and presented it as a non-Christian thing. So yes, they are moral/ethical principles that do not belong to any religion, but they were crafted by someone who had in mind making a model that was parallel to Christianity. So in one sense someone might say it's not Christian, but in another sense someone else might say it was.
This must just be a semantic thing or a difference in perspective. I certainly think that allowing freedom of religion is something of a religious nature and I don't see how anybody can argue with that. If they were to be absolutely free of any religion, they would have something like the old Communist regime did.
It's unfortunate you had to add in the name callling, as Girl Scouts (Girl Guides here in Canada) and Boy Scouts have done some tremendous work with young people over many, many years.
Did you do 4H with your kids? I had hoped it would be just the kids involved. The reason I say this is that I really feel kids need to be away from their parents in order to become independent thinkers.
ROTFLOL!!!! It certainly *is* about choices :) And I'm pretty happy with all aspects of my life, it would be perfect if my Dad wasn't ill, if I could manage to fit in a little more stitching time, and not have to work any Sundays. I really dislike working Sundays...(pout)
...L>Go Linda, Go Linda, Go Linda.... :)) Sorry, but I just HAVE to respond
Linda D. wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:
They were not meant to be derogatory terms. My dad always called them that, and he worked with Boy Scouts when his daughters were grown helping them with model airplane flying.
Because the only way she knows of to tape anything is to push Start two minutes before it comes on. I offered to tape it on my machine for her, but she didn't want to wait till the next night to watch it, and didn't want to stay at my place long enough to watch it on my TV.
In my neighborhood, "kids" are not an excuse for not socializing. None of us have any. Not "none of us have any living at home", but none of us ever gave birth. Most of us don't have nieces/nephews in town whose ballgames we're expected to attend, either. It's just, pure and simple, they'd rather interact with their TV than with the neighbors.
Or big cities versus small towns. None of the neighbors work in this neighborhood (except those of us who work at home), so we're not even running across each other in the course of running errands.
One of my colleagues couldn't figure out when I had time to do so much needlework, she used to love crocheting but never had any time. Given that my husband lived with me, and her husband spent half the year out with the Navy, I could not figure out how she had less time than I did
-- the baby wasn't old enough to be messing up the house, the diapers were disposable so she wasn't doing tons of laundry. I asked what on earth she was doing after she put the baby to bed at 8 PM. "Watching my shows." And it never dawned on her that she could crochet and watch TV at the same time.
Yeeha! I know this end of Calif is a long way from where you're going, but if you want to come up for a couple days, Seanette and I would be glad to have you. (MelissaD is up thisaway, too.) We can take you on the Shop Hop. :) And if we're going to Elegant Stitch, we're going the extra 12 miles to the Hershey factory, so you can take home a suitcase full of chocolate!
True. When I was spending a lot of time on the phone at work, the last thing I wanted to do was spend the evening talking on the phone. I was OK with talking F2F, though.
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