Maidens of Virtue: Chapter Nine

Chapter Nine begins a series of chapters that extol the virtues of loving siblings.  The main drift of "Dwelling in Unity" is that since childhood friendships generally don't last until adulthood young maidens should spend time with their siblings instead.

This is so "modern" and "feminist" of me - but I have good relationships with my siblings and friends who are not family members.  The two are not mutually exclusive. 

Stacy McDonald starts with examples from her life as to why non-sibling friends are a waste of time:

I recall vowing to several different friends in high school that we would never ever lose touch. Even if we moved thousands of miles apart, we would talk on the phone every day and visit each other at least once a year. Guess what --we lost touch. We pursued different interests, vocations, and educational choices. When a maiden weds, she dons her husband's name to signify the "leaving and cleaving" of marriage, and new last names can make it nearly impossible to locate old girlfriends.

The truth is that we probably wouldn't have a thing in common anymore anyways. The memories we made together were frivolous, sometimes sinful, and almost always separate from activities with our own families. Incredibly, many of these memories are slowly fading from my remembrance all together. (pg. 88)

Before the advent of internet and low-cost, high usage cell phones, situations like the first paragraph were more common.  I graduated from high school in 2000 and communicated with high school friends who moved away by email which was much slower than it is now.  I did lose track of some friendships - but I did keep up with friendships that were very important to me.  I remained in contact with my best friend Jessica from when we met in first grade until she died in a car accident at age 29.  Our friendship survived living in different states and different countries.  My mother keeps in contact with a woman who she met 36 years ago while my twin sister and I were in a NICU on the far side of the state.  That's a far longer relationship than the young women who make up the potential audience of this book will have when they graduate home schooling.

Cheap, instant connectivity has completely changed the amount of effort needed to maintain contact with old friends.  Thanks to Facebook, I am more aware of the events in the lives of people I went to high school and elementary school with than I was when we were in school together.   If Stacy McDonald wanted, she could easily search the name of her high school and graduation year and find former classmates.  Yes, she might not instantly know everyone's married name - but lots of women cross-reference their maiden name and a profile picture often jogs a memory of which Amanda, Brandy, or Karen goes with the new name.

Mrs. McDonald implies that she's too holy now to interact with her old friends - but it does open the can of worms of if her old friends would want to associate with her.  Based on some dropped hints in the book, she had a normal fairly carefree teenage life in the 1980's.  She wore jeans,  went to a traditional school, and racked up some "sexual sins" which probably means she dated a guy or two.  Since then, she's gone off the deep end into a fertility cult and has earned her living doing speeches and writing a book slut-shaming everyone who is not like her.    That's not a person I'd want to spend any time with.

The next weird snippet shows that Mrs. McDonald and I have different criteria for a fun game night:

One of my favorite board games is Taboo (TM). I love to play it with the children as a family. Even more, I love to play it when another family is visiting. I especially like to watch my children team up against another sibling group because it is such a wonderful reminder of the way God works unity in families.

You see, the reasons sibling - groups work so well in this game is because to successfully help your teammates guess the correct answer, you must really know each other. The most successful teams have made the same memories together, have shared the same jokes, know the same songs, and recognize each other's expressions. Sometimes while playing, one of the children will need only give a one word clue or even look and the other child immediately guess is the answer correctly. The other group is usually astonished - - unless it's another sibling team that is just as close-knit. I love the fact that my children know each other so well! I pray that it is always so, and I pray that it is so in your family. If it's not, I have good news: it can be! (pg. 89)

Taboo (TM) is a game where a person tries to get the people on their team to guess a word without using 5 or 6 words commonly associated with the target word.  For the word "father", the person can't use the words "family", "man", "parent", "husband" or "work".  There are two ways to win.  The first way is to use verbal fluency and common events to cue teammates to the word.  For "father", I would say something like "When a baby is born, this person can cut the baby's cord."  The other way is to make an inside reference to a shared experience.  In our family, the clue "Dad's favorite outdoor hobby" would elicit the response "trains".  That's the type of "close-knit" expression that Stacy McDonald is talking about.

The problem is that shared experiences with friends don't preclude shared experiences with siblings.  I have a whole bunch of internal references with my family and friends and colleagues. Winning a game of Cranium with the clue "disproved Lamarck" for the word "Darwin"  while at a field station in Puerto Rico didn't destroy my ability to elicit the answer of "mosquitoes" to "the reason the first girl at that camp session we were called the walking wounded had to see the nurse after a night hike" from my sister. 

The fact is, most families today are in trouble. Part of the problem results from rarely being around one another. Group schooling, sports clubs, and church youth groups have all contributed to the fragmentation and breakdown of the family. Simple activities such as eating dinner at the table together are a thing of the past in most families. They all seem to have their own busy and very legitimate sounding activities that keep them apart from those whom God has given them. (pg. 89)

I don't buy that massive home-schooling families have more "together" time than smaller traditionally schooled families.  Stacy McDonald has 10 children. Spending 15 minutes of one-on-one time a day with each kid takes 2.5 hours of time outside of home schooling, cooking, cleaning, writing and the chores involved in keeping small children alive.  Teri Maxwell included her homeschooling schedule for multiple years in the book "Managers of their Schools" where she had one-hour blocks for her three or four school-aged kids once a week to play an educational game with Mom.  I remember this because that's way more time a week with Mom than most home schooled kids in large family gets.   Kimberly at Raising Olives had about 1.5-2 hours a day during the week available for time with her kids outside of school. 

As a teacher, it's hard to get to know someone well while teaching or tutoring - even in small groups.  Oh, you do have bits of small talk every now and again, but both the teacher and the student are busy either working or analyzing the other person's work.    I got to know my students - but mostly by utilizing time before school, after school, during lunch or passing time and while on out-of-school trips.

Why do you think children on sports teams and in youth groups become close friends? They are typically working together towards some sort of goal --winning a game or washing cars to save up for a special event. The same thing happens on mission trips and in dorms. The people we eat, work, sweat, and travail with are those with whom we become close. Why isn't this happening more in families instead of with perfect strangers? (pg. 90)

Working together is helpful to making close friends - but it's not required or a given.  I have had to do lots of group projects during my educational career.  Most group mates become nodding acquaintances; a few became friends and a few became people I avoided like the plague. That's a side of enforced sibling time that CP/QF families don't often discus because not all siblings' relationships are improved by spending a lot of time together.  My dad is one of 8 siblings; he's close with four of them.  The other three tend to be abrasive so they talk monthly about non-confrontational things. 

The last quote recapitulates Mrs. McDonald's theme that good Christian women remain loving and cheerful in the face of nasty treatment by family members:

Remember to create a habit of speaking kindly to your siblings. Even if you've been spoken to harshly, you can respond in gentleness (Proverbs 15: 1). If you have been treated cruelly, remember Paul's call to the elect of God (Colossians 3:12-13). You may find that you have won a brother or diffused an argument before it even starts. You will have also benefited by establishing a wonderful habit of understanding and mercy that will carry over into your marriage and into motherhood. Remember also to forgive just as you wish to be forgiven. (Mark 11: 25-26) (pg. 90)

See, this is especially bad advice in a home schooling family.  Kids who are in traditional schools are surrounded by peers who can choose freely during recess and lunch who they want to be around.  Kids who are angry, rude and cruel tend to learn that their choices of friends are greatly restricted because no one wants to be friends with someone who is mean.  In a home school, your siblings are going to be there tomorrow regardless of how badly a sibling treats them.  When this is combined with the especially toxic theological ideas espoused by ATI and Vision Forum that wronged people need to look at what in their life caused the sin, the set-up is ripe for creating psychopaths.

Next chapter is a saccharine tale of a young woman who learns that she treats her sister badly.  The story is sickly-sweet - but it has some of the funniest and incisive passages in the whole book.

Buying a Home Debt Free: Financial Privilege

One theme I've noticed across CP/QF blogs is a tone-deafness around financial privilege.  Every family has different levels of wealth and income.  Families that have higher levels of assets and income can give their children financial benefits that put the kids into a better starting position than people with fewer assets.  My concern is that many CP/QF voices extol the virtues of hard work and saving without ever tallying up the large amount of wealth that is transferred from one generation to the next.   Without that accounting, people can be overly judgmental about how poorer families "just don't work hard enough" - and I have problems with that attitude.

Steven Maxwell posted a two-part testimonial written by a young man who built his own house when he was engaged at age 19.  I'm glad  that he was able to do that - but the main reason he was able to do so was that he received a lot of direct and indirect transfer of assets from his family and friends.  I'm going to pull out the sections that discuss input from other people and do a rough estimate on the amount of asset transfer that occurred. 

I grew up on a dairy farm. My siblings and I helped on the farm a lot, and Dad paid us by giving us portions from the sales of cows or by giving us calves. I used some of this money to buy beef cattle and thus got more funds. One of my brothers and I also had a lawn mowing business, and I tried never to spend money. I lived at home, used my parents’ vehicles, and didn’t buy myself hip clothing, coffee, or gadgets. I had thousands of dollars in savings by the time I got engaged.

• Depending on how the market is doing, a dairy bull calf runs between $50.00 and $150.00.  
• Beef steers do great on left-over dairy cattle feed so the costs of raising the beef steers was pretty negligible for the kid. 
• A grown cow eats around 30 pounds of hay a day; the steer would start out lower and end up higher because the amount of hay eaten is roughly dependent on body mass.  Assuming the steer needs ~30 pounds of hay a day for 5 months out of the year that grass forage isn't available for the two years it takes to mature him, that's 9,000 pounds of hay.  Round bales of hay vary a lot in weight - but I'll give a generous estimate of 1,000 pounds of hay per bale - so he'd need to buy 9 round bales per steer per year.  The price of hay moves around a lot, but $100.00 a bale is a good average.  
• That's $900.000 over two years in feed.
• I doubt the brothers had to buy their own lawn mower for the business to start with.  A walk-behind gas lawn mower runs between $100-$300 dollars while a riding lawn mower runs between $1,000-$5,000.
• Living at home and using his parents' vehicles means that his parents were willing and able to pay for his food, cleaning supplies, health insurance and automotive insurance plus the amount that utilities increased from him living at home.  (I'm assuming he was purchasing his own clothing and work consumables.)  This amount varies a lot by family and geographic location - but that's probably between $500 - $1500 per month of expenses for his parents.

When I got engaged, it was obvious that we’d need a place to live, and it seemed most sensible to build a house. My grandfather owned a number of pieces of farm land, and he offered to give me the land to build a house on. My grandfather got power put in to the property and set up a submersible pump in the well. He also dug a trench with his backhoe to bury the pipes and main wires to the house.

I've decided I would like his grandfather to be my honorary fairy grandfather - because I would really like having a grandfather that can give that amount of assets to a grand kid!

• If Grandpa was handing him a standard 180 acre Midwestern farm, that's around $1.5 million dollars in assets.  More likely, Grandpa was giving him a lot that was "split" off of an active farm.  Agricultural land runs at between $4,000-$7,000 per acre.  
• The cost of bringing a power line onto a plot of land varies quite a bit from utility to utility - but that's between $1,000 - $6,000.
• The cost of a submersible well pump is between $150 -$300 plus labor.
• Backhoe rental for one day: $300-$500 plus labor.

Dad and Grandpa dug a basement with tractors, and then I rented forms for basement walls from the concrete company so we could set them up ourselves and save hiring labor. We put old scrap metal in the forms instead of buying rebar. The company I bought the cement from also sold me a used concrete septic tank! My dad negotiated a good deal on lumber from a building center. I bought whole pallet loads of OSB and agreed not to return any boards from the loads they delivered. For framing the walls, I bought used boards from a man who was tearing down some old buildings. The boards were rough cut and only had four or five usable feet but they were still solid. We nailed these 4’ 2”x 4”s together to make 12’ 4”x 6” studs which were spaced every two feet.

• Cost of bulldozer rental: $500 dollars per day plus labor.
• Rebar costs ~$0.75 a foot.

Good ideas:

• Using scrap metal instead of rebar if they've got it laying around.
• Cutting a deal on lumber and OSB.

Possibly a good idea:

• Saving labor costs by placing basement wall forms - but there's a trade-off of lost wages that we don't have enough information to determine if it was a good idea.
• Re-purposing used lumber to make studs IF the boards were glued as well as nailed AND the author lost no wage earning time to doing this - or counted it as a hobby. 

Don't buy used septic tanks.  It's not worth it to risk polluting your well when a new concrete septic tank costs between $600 - $1,000.  

I got a used water heater from a neighbor, which is still serving us 10 years later without trouble. I bought windows and a used door from another person. My grandpa procured some interior doors that the company he worked for was getting rid of. Some friends of my wife’s family gave us their used (but working!) washer and dryer. I also got a used fridge and stove. Instead of cabinets, I made shelves from some plywood crates I tore apart but eventually I replaced these with normal cabinets.

• I'm assuming that the word "got" means "bought" - so he probably spent around $50.00 each on the water heater, fridge and stove.   
• The used washing machine and dryer is another $100 dollars saved.  
• A cheap interior door retails for $35-$40 dollars so let's give the doors that Grandpa scored a value of $30.00 a piece.

I traded a calf to a carpenter from our church for a couple days of help, and he loaned me a book on general contracting, which was very helpful. We didn’t have high speed internet then, and I don’t recall googling how to do anything. We did all the plumbing ourselves and the wiring too.

Dude, you massively unpaid your carpenter friend if you traded him a $150.00 calf for two days of work.  That's less than $10.00 per hour if he worked for 16 hours across those two days - which is in the lowest 10% of carpenter's hourly wages in the US.   A fair trade would have been two calves for a weekend's work - or a feeder steer for a week's work.

If the general contracting book was helpful, he should have hired an electrician and a plumber.  There are a lot of projects in a house that can be completed by relatively inexperienced people without health and safety issues; electricity and plumbing are NOT in that category. 

On the other hand, if "we" is short-hand for "Dad and Grandfather who have kept a dairy farm running for x years", they were probably okay.

The week before I headed to my wedding, some friends from a few hours away drove up and helped finish mudding and painting the drywall on the main floor. The second story had no inside walls framed yet and no insulation in the roof so we lived on the first floor for a while. When I was gone on my honeymoon, my family laid some flooring and finished getting things livable. The house was only covered with house wrap, but a couple years later I put on siding.

That's a lot of labor costs saved by friends and family. 

I grew up in an older suburb of a medium sized Midwestern town.  There's no way a person could get away with having only house wrap on the outside of a house for years in a more population dense area.  People do not take kindly to having an eyesore like that dragging down property values.  Likewise, I've enjoyed mentally following all the same things that Amos' family has done at my parents' house.  We'd have had the cops called when there were cows, when someone started running excavation equipment out back and especially we started building an entire house my parent's 1/4th an acre of land. 

Why does this matter?  Most CP/QF families don't have the amount of assets available to a multi-generation dairy farm family.  Most CP/QF families don't have fathers who worked as electrical engineers.  Most CP/QF families are raising large families on (ideally) the income of the father alone - but the anti-intellectualism of CP/QF greatly limits the potential income of the men. 

Amos and his family did nothing wrong or anything immoral - but they are not the average CP/QF adherent.

Preparing Sons for Single Income: Chapter Three

The title of this chapter is "What is his REAL earning potential?" - but an equally valid title is "Find out what Steven Maxwell REALLY thought about his co-workers - and how greatly God favors him!"

The gist of the chapter is that a son's earning potential is mainly affected by his view of work, his character, his willingness to learn, God's Blessing and God's Discipline.  A hard-working, ethical, eager man will make more money than a lazy, cheating, dullard will - unless the eager beaver is being punished by God.

Since three sentences do not make a chapter, the rest of the section is fattened out with anecdotes about co-workers Steven Maxwell disliked and vignettes from his life.  To keep readers' eyes on the final prize - and shove some more humble-brag down their throats - the chapter begins with a reminder of how great Nathan is:

Who would have ever believed that a young home school graduate might make as much money as his college degreed father? Who might guess that the same son would be paid to write an instructor's manual for college professors teaching computer security? This is exactly what happened in our family! (pg. 29)

Nathan has had a remarkable career trajectory, but we don't need to be reminded of it every chapter.  Nathan did successfully write a book about computer security - but that was a one-shot deal.

I've noticed an interesting paradox in the Maxwell Family writings.  Steven Maxwell is extremely against college education for his children - but he brings up his college degree frequently and brags about Nathan making money by writing a college textbook.  No matter how far he's turned away from advanced degrees for his offspring, he continues to use the prestige of colleges to showcase his family's achievements.

The next anecdote is where Mr. Maxwell shares his dislike of a former co-worker named "Jerry".  Hopefully, that's a pseudonym.

When I worked for Boeing, Jerry was on my team. He was close to 60 years old and held a four-year engineering degree. Jerry was a genius. Unfortunately, no one wanted him on their team, as the man would not complete a task. Normal, mundane work was an incredible bore to him because he had a multitude of side interest that were always more important than his work. As a result of his poor work habits, Jerry only received token wage increases. He viewed work as a necessary evil to be put up with in order to receive a paycheck. His check was a ticket to the toys that made his life worth living.

At one point, it sounded like Jerry was going to be fired. However, as a last-ditch effort, Boeing transferred him to a job that involves solving problems for production lines. Finally, they found a job that interest Jerry enough to keep him motivated. As a result, Jerry and everyone around him were happier. If Jerry had viewed work is a gift from God and something to be greatly prized, he wouldn't have come so close to being fired. Plus, he would have been receiving pay increases through the years like others. (pg. 30)

How close did Jerry really come to being fired?  If he was as completely useless as Mr. Maxwell portrays him, I highly doubt he would have been employed for Boeing for any period of time.  I'm also curious how Mr. Maxwell knows all this information about Jerry.  Was Jerry a coworker on equal footing - and the gossip mill kept everyone up-to-date - or was Jerry Mr. Maxwell's subordinate?  The fact that Mr. Maxwell knows that Jerry received "only token" raises is a bit strange if they are coworkers.  How embarrassing would it be professionally if a worker who has been branded as unenthusiastic and problematic under Maxwell turned into a shining star in a different department?

Most likely, though, Steve Maxwell and Jerry were coworkers.  In that case, Jerry's biggest sin in the eyes of Maxwell is that he had the audacity to have enjoyable hobbies outside of work.  On page 44, Jerry's hobby purchases include "rifles, pistols, cameras, metal working machines and amateur radio equipment".   Later in the book, Mr. Maxwell discusses some of the hobbies that he's renounced over the years and at least one is more expensive than any of the items that Jerry bought.   On a side note, a skilled metal worker with engineering background may well have a side career making specialized parts for custom orders.  Which makes me wonder again - is Jerry's sin sloth - or making money in an enjoyable fashion without "God's Blessing"?

Men who are diligent, honest, resourceful, dependable, and responsible workers will do well. These days there are so few such people in our society that employers are hungry for them. From talking with several employers, I have learned that character is often more important than skills and qualifications. Employers are willing to train a person who has good character as long as certification and degrees aren't a mandatory requirement for the job (for example, an engineering job). (pg. 31)

I love that qualifier of "excluding jobs that require degrees and certifications" attached at the end of an ode to the importance of character.  Let's see, that caveat includes all but the lowest levels of medicine, education, law, engineering, social work, most professional ministry positions,  and science/technology jobs.  Jobs that do fit that criteria include food service, hospitality, entry agricultural jobs, customer service jobs, and janitorial work.   For men who are planning to be a single-income breadwinner for a large family, the careers that require degrees or certifications have a larger income as well as more constant availability of jobs. 

Eddie had worked with Tommy for about a year. Eddie was aware that Tommy fraudulently recorded his time on the job, and later Eddie had to confront Tommy on some other ethical issues. Eddie naturally assume that Tommy would have some hard feelings towards him after the confrontation. Tommy ended up leaving the company and going to work somewhere else. Months later, Eddie was totally amazed to receive a job offer from the new company for which Tommy was working. Even more surprising was the story behind the offer. Tommy's new boss asked him to recommend a person who the boss to be able to trust explicitly. The job would involves sensitive computer security, and ethics were a great concern. Tommy told the boss that he could wholeheartedly recommend Eddie as that person! (pg. 31)

I'm willing to bet one Whopper Junior that "Eddie" is actually Nathan Maxwell - and that the actual situation was completely different than reported here. 

My assumption that Eddie is Nathan Maxwell is based on the fact that Eddie's career revolves around computer security. 

For the rest of the story - none of it matches good business principles.  Eddie's not describe directly as Tommy's boss so I don't understand why Eddie would have to confront Tommy about ethical issues; generally, co-workers report job performance issues or crime including time fraud to their supervisors.  Confronting a co-worker about ethical lapses is treading on thin ice; that's moving close to harassment if the accusing person is wrong and shows questionable judgement in failing to report the issue to an actual manger if the accused person is doing something actionable.  Tommy heads off to a different company and offers up Eddie's name as a good hire for someone who is highly ethical.  I suppose that is possible - few things are truly impossible - but that doesn't mean it is prudent for Eddie to take that job.  In this situation, Tommy is BAD NEWS.  He's shown previously that he's okay with time fraud and some other workplace issues - and now Eddie is connected with him because Tommy recommended him for a job.   All of this is assuming that Tommy is acting in somewhat good faith - Eddie might be being set up as a fall guy for the next scheme that Tommy's running. 

I'm often skeptical as hell - but I bounced this story off of a lot of friends and colleagues; there was universal agreement that Eddie should run away from that job offer as fast as possible.

This next section was memorable for me because Steven Maxwell was trying to make his new home business sound like a major risk:

After 20 years of corporate engineering work, I came home to start a family business. It was an agonizing decision because I wanted to be certain it was God's will. As much as I desired to work from our home, I was scared to do it if it wasn't God's explicit will for my life. When I was confident it was His will, I came home. At first I only had a vague idea of what I might do. I felt God was leading me to sell printing and computer forms. Christopher, who was 18 at the time, was going to work with me.

We knew absolutely nothing about selling computer forms and printed materials, yet God led and blessed us as we went. The Lord provided a friend in the same line of work who is living in another city and was willing to give us some ideas about starting a print brokering business. He also provided us with a list of companies that did wholesale printing for him, something of great value to us. Then we were on our own and probably should have failed miserably. We have no training, no experience, and no skill, but God blessed mightily by bringing work. We have now been in business four years. There have been many changes since we began. We experience times without abundance, but our God has met every need. What a wonderful testimony to God's faithfulness! Yet, if we believe his word, it should not be surprising at all. (pg. 33)

Starting a new business takes guts - but not all new businesses are equally risky.  Steven Maxwell did plenty of good preparatory work by talking with someone in the same field who wasn't a direct competitor.  He also had a deep network of contacts from his years of corporate work and could tap into Nathan's budding contact network as well.   The fact that the company that employed him had reduced its workforce by 75% in two years could potentially be beneficial to the new business as well since the movement of coworkers to different companies would increase the number of companies that he had contacts in.

I find his attempts to argue that they were untrained, inexperienced and unskilled disingenuous.  He was not a Daisy Scout selling cookies for the first time; he was a mature, experienced businessman with previous job experience in marketing, sales, and engineering.  That doesn't guarantee that the business will succeed - but it reduces the risk of failure greatly.  He also had a huge benefit in that he had a young adult son who was willing and able to work with him as well as Sarah who was scheduled time to do projects for his company as she got older.

Finally, the relative risk of the times where the business wasn't making money isn't the same for all families.  Maxwell had been working in the corporate world for 20 years and as an electrical engineer should have been making above average yearly salary.  Yes, raising eight kids is expensive - but I've had extended family who raised larger families on much smaller incomes.  By the time Maxwell started his first business, he most likely owned a home, owned one or more cars, and had most of the clothing/home goods as well as home schooling materials for his family.  Compare that with a CP/QF couple who are in their mid-20's with two small children and a third on the way;  a time where the business fails to support the family is much, much harder.

In 1985, we moved to Washington so I could become a salesman for my company. My previous job had been at the company's headquarters doing marketing, but I wanted a sales position because the money was far better. However, after a year of hard work, everything that could go wrong had! I began calling out to the Lord to show me what was wrong. Out of the blue, a vivid memory popped into my mind. It was of the test I took to qualify for the sales position. This test was designed to compare my personality with the profile of the company's top salesmen. I recalled asking myself, as I completed that test, how the ace salesman would answer each question. Then I would write that answer down. It never occurred to me that I was being dishonest and, in effect, cheating.

My heart sank at the realization that I, as a child of God, had lied on a test. I felt awful and ask the Lord to forgive me. I knew that I needed to resign, because I had obtained the job deceitfully. Immediately I began looking for another job, but God soon convinced me that I needed to quit my sales position first. I definitely did not like the idea of being without a job but knew that I had to obey and told my manager that I had to quit. It brings tears to my eyes as I remember her looking at me and saying I could take two full weeks with pay to look for a job. I didn't even need to come into work! I was flooded with such incredible joy and knew in my heart that I was back under God's provision. Within a short time, I was employed by Boeing and again experiencing God's blessing in my vocation. (pgs. 34-35)

Well, I guess blaming "God's punishment" for lying is one view of the story.  My view is slightly different.  Lying on a personality test is a bad idea; the company thinks that certain personality traits make good salespeople and apparently Maxwell didn't have those traits naturally.  Having said that, Maxwell was going into the new position with his eyes open; the company gave him a test that laid out what skills make conventionally good salesmen.   The net outcome was that Steven Maxwell was a poor salesman - regardless of how God felt about the situation.  To me, blaming God for the natural consequence of a series of poor career choices is immature and childish.

Likewise, "God's blessing" of his manager allowing him two weeks of paid time to look for another position reads a bit differently for me.  The details of his position are missing, but most sales positions have a combination of salary and commissions as income.  For a skilled salesperson, the ability to earn commissions greatly increases their income; for an average to middling salesperson, the total income is around average for a person of their educational level.  A poor salesperson has little income - and is a financial burden to their company if they are not making enough sales to cover their salary.  Presumably, his manager was under pressure to keep sales up and costs down.  If a weak salesperson came to her and offered to quit, covering two weeks salary to encourage them to find another job is a winning proposition for the company.

The last oddity that I've noticed about the Maxwell family is that many of their financial and in-kind benefactors over the years have not been described as saved Christians.  The simple fact that his manager was a woman contradicts CP/QF teachings that all women should live at home under their parents until marriage and then raise a flock of little ones at home.  With the exception of Titus 2 Ministries and portions of Christopher Maxwell's photography business, the Maxwells work in secular industries.  One foray into online technology education that was geared toward helping home schooled, Christian students study for technology certifications failed miserably; combining test prep with an exhortation of how exactly to be saved would send most potential clients running. 

Economics is one of the structural issues that I am not sure how CP/QF society is going to manage.  Adherents are asked to separate themselves from non-believers except for when they are converting them so that leads to businesses that serve other CP/QF members.  The problem is that CP/QF theology rejects most advanced forms of education while advocating very large families which greatly limits the amount of money available for commerce.  I don't see how that's going to work out - but human creativity is endless.

Homeschooling Badly: We don't give grades in our school!

Sorry I'm running a bit late this week.  The baby is working on erupting two or three top incisors, the wild swings in temperature/pressure are wreaking havoc with my migraines and I keep breaking out in eczema patches.  Plus, it's January so the wonderful break I had for nearly of month of no doctor's visits for the baby is over.

I've been upfront about the fact that I am a traditionally schooled pre K - 12 graduate who jumped into a traditional college and then went back to the trenches of 9-12 education as a teacher.  From that perspective, I'm going to lay out why parent-teachers need to figure out a way to give coherent and comprehensive grades to their students by the end of elementary school at the latest.

I'm going to expound on two reasons that home-schooling parents opt-out of grading their kids for conscious or unconscious reasons.   Grading is a tricky task that requires a lot of practice.  Teachers have to create grading criteria - and that's not as simple as it seems.   The easiest set-up I can think of would be a text-book based system like the Maxwell Family uses.  Even there, the parent-teacher has to make some choices.  Do the classwork assignments count toward the final grade?  How about quizzes?  Are different categories of assignments weighted differently?  Grading independent study or project-based learning courses is even harder.   What does an "A" assignment look like in creative writing or paleontology or mandolin lessons compared to a "B" or a "C"?

The first issue can be overcome when parent-teachers learn how to pre-determine what each grade category looks like for each course.  I don't have a good solution for the second issue because grading your own child accurately is so much harder than grading a random student.  When I taught, I felt bad when a student failed my class - but I also had at least 80 other students who had passed that exact same class so student failures didn't feel like a personal reflection on my teaching. By comparison, when my son has a slight delay in his gross motor, fine motor or speech skills, I feel like I've failed somehow as a parent.  The feeling passes quickly - but the feeling alone is an intense enough experience that I know that Jack's better off having an unrelated professional determine his "Ages and Stages" skill level.  Even with my teaching experience, I would be tempted to justify passing him in skills - mainly by giving him points for other skills - to avoid feeling bad.

Why do we grade students?  Grading students describes their performance against an age-appropriate standard, helps students learn how much procrastination they can get away with, and gives students practice with managing emotional responses to negative outcomes.

In a traditional school, students are surrounded by peers within a few years of age of them.  Students generally get a feel for how they compare to their peers within each subject simply by comparing how much effort it takes and by seeing what grades other students get.  When a student transferred into our school from another district, students were pretty accurate in their personal assessment of their skills in language arts, science, math and social studies.  Students who transferred in from home schooling were a more mixed bag.  Some students were very aware of which areas they had received little or no instruction in; other students believed that they were above average in a subject - but after testing and placement in a class it became clear that the student was working at markedly below grade level.    Why is this important?  Throughout life, people need to be able to assess their strengths and weaknesses compared to other people in their lives.  As a teacher, I was middling-to-average at dealing with chronically angry students while above average in working with severely anxious students.  When I had a chronically angry student, I would get support and tips from the teacher across the hall who was great with that student group - and I'd give her support and tips when dealing with anxious students.

Grading helps students learn time-management skills.  For traditionally schooled students, the number of subjects they take in a day increases markedly from early elementary through junior high.  As the number of classes scale upward, the students learn how to deal with conflicts like a project due the day after a math exam.  Students learn the benefits of planning ahead and working at a pace that works for them.  On the flip side, students learn about the drawbacks of finishing a paper at 2AM and being exhausted the next day.  Chronic procrastination makes it much more difficult for students to earn "A" grades; few students can complete a high-school level project at the level of required difficulty if they don't start the project until the night before.

Finally, grading helps students learn how to manage the disappointment that comes from a poor grade - which I'll define as any grade lower than the one they wanted to get.   That feeling of disappointment is intense and students learn how to release that emotion and continue moving towards a goal.  After all, the vast majority of jobs involve periodic reviews by supervisors and some reviews include times where the supervisor gives the person a lower review than the person thought they were going to get.  That sucks - but knowing how to manage negative feelings helps the person to move away from the feelings and into planning on how to improve their performance.

Maidens of Virtue: Chapter Eight

I found this chapter contained some of the most repugnant views of the whole book.  Mrs. McDonald makes her inability to separate physical issues from spiritual issues abundantly clear for the whole world to see.

The chapter is titled "The Bath" and is superficially about how much Stacy McDonald loves a good bath - complete with lots of scented lotions, perfumes and bath soaps.   Personally, the descriptions make me itch vicariously since I have dry skin that is highly reactive to most scented products, but I don't begrudge anyone a bubble bath if they enjoy it.

The problem comes when it becomes clear that Stacy McDonald assumes that physical cleanliness is a sign of spiritual health - and that poor hygiene is due primarily to sin.

My husband and I once attended church with a man who had a truly offensive body odor. He came to church and filthy clothes, greasy hair, and he smelled... bad. You could see the pained expression on the faces of the poor souls who are stuck sitting beside him during service.

We knew him personally, and he was neither handicapped nor poor (though soap and water are fairly cheap). In fact, other than his grooming habits, he seem to be a fairly strong Christian. Unfortunately, he earned a reputation for not being very pleasant to be around, simply because of his apparent refusal to take care of his physical body. I always wondered what it would have been like to see him with a decent haircut, clean clothes, and without the fog of two-week-old perspiration engulfing his body. (pg. 80)

The difference in morality between how I was raised and how CP/QF doyennes live boggles my mind.  My parents expected a certain level of rebellion in us kids; moaning and groaning about being dragged to church at an ungodly hour of the morning irritated my parents - but it wasn't the end of the world.  Having a "pained expression" because of the body odor of an unfortunate soul at church would have brought an immediate reprimand to "stop that now!" followed by a scolding about not being rude to people who are struggling.   A major theme in my family's morality is "Don't kick someone when they are down.  People deserve respect - and people who are struggling or oppressed deserve more respect, not less."  We learned to control our facial expressions and urges to stare as children and pre-teens; pulling that kind of shit as a teenager or an adult was unconscionable.

Stacy McDonald - who is currently a pastor's wife - apparently couldn't take the step of behaving like a Christian.  She knew he needed a haircut, clean clothes and hygiene products.  Maybe he struggled with depression.  Maybe he wasn't as well-off as she thought.  Perhaps he had a mild cognitive impairment or a physical issue that interfered with his ability to care for himself.  I have to speculate on what he was struggling with because Mrs. McDonald couldn't be bothered to ask him herself in a spirit of helping another human being. 

I have also known married women who attend church or social gatherings with dirty, unkempt hair, a disheveled appearance, and no apparent attempt to look or smell nice for their husbands. They most likely developed poor grooming habits as young maidens and failed to honor their family or others by paying attention to their outward appearance. (pg. 80)

I have no idea what percentage of women at my church have messy hair.  My parents would have killed me if I had been spending time at Mass judging the appearance of other people.  To be clear, my parents could care less if I had day-dreamed my way through a Mass - but they would have been horrified if they raised a child who sat around judging people at church. 

On an unrelated note, the fact that Stacy McDonald knows -and judges - how other women smell is creepy as hell.   Judging people's looks is catty, childish, and unchristian,  but at least it can be done from a safe distance.  Was she wandering around sniffing people during church or at the social afterwards?  Either way - gross.

James 2:1-4 warns us of our sinful tendency towards partiality of those who are richer, dress nicer, are more beautiful, smarter, or have higher rank in society. We are not to be respecters of persons. Scripture teaches us to treat others the way we wish to be treated, to love our neighbors as ourselves, and to prefer others over ourselves (Romans 12:10). Grooming ourselves, cleansing our bodies, and presenting ourselves to others in a comely way, is all part of loving your neighbor as well as glorifying God (pg. 81)

*blinks*

Look, proper gas-lighting requires some preparatory work or at least a coherent transition; when an author half-asses it, it all falls apart.   

James 2:1-4 states that Christians shouldn't favor rich, well-clothed people over poor people in dirty clothes.  It's the best rebuttal to the previous quote that I've ever seen.  Romans 12:10 is about how Christians should strive to show love and honor to others; it's the polar opposite of how her church reacted to her "friend" who was struggling.   The sentence that begins "Grooming ourselves, ...." is a non-sequitur that reflects Stacy McDonald's personal obsession with hygiene as a sign of Christianity.   

Can't have a CP/QF book without some humble-brag:

For as long as I can remember, my mother enjoyed taking hot baths in the evenings. I have tried to follow her example and take some time in the evening for quiet retreat with scented bubbles or bath salts. Sometimes I simply use a few drops of various essential oils. As my precious husband and children bless me on birthdays and Mother's Day with special gifts, I indulge the use of scented bath powders and light perfumes.

Aside for my regular morning shower, I admit I don't always have time for more than a quick sponge bath and fluff of scented powder at night. But when it's possible, not only is a nice bath a relaxing treat for me, it is a blessing to my husband and children as well. When my husband retires for the night, he is greeted with the smell of lavender, rose, sandalwood, or ylang ylang! (pg. 82)

*sings*  "Money, money, mon-ney!  Money! Money, money mon-ney!  Money!" *stops singing*

"Soap and water" might be cheap - but essential oils, scented bubble bath, scented bath salts, scented bath powders and perfumes add up quickly.

If I followed that regimen, my husband would be greeted by the scent of lavender, the sight of a wife attempting to claw off her own skin, and the sound of pitiful whining as I thrashed around on the bed trying to get the itching to stop.  Two deep soakings a day plus lathering myself with scented stuff would give me systematic eczema severe enough to require oral steroids in .... oh..... let's say  two weeks in the summer and one week during the winter.

But - you know - it's really a blessing for my husband and son to have a raw, oozing itchy wife and mother.

Just in case the girls who read this haven't been brainwashed enough yet, we have the "Share Your Heart Section"

Discuss ways that physical cleanliness can be an outward sign of inward purity. (pg. 83)

I think  Matthew 23:27  made the connection the most clear: "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!  For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are fill of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth."   Amazing how many Gospel verses directly contradict CP/QF teachings, isn't it?  I know I always find it heartening.

What are some common sins that could cause someone's neglect habits of cleanliness or good grooming, including regular hair washing and brushing, dental hygiene, and the washing or maintenance of her clothing? (pg. 84)

Let's see. The main reasons I can think of that people neglect personal hygiene include severe illness, disabilities, poverty and depression - but none of those are sins.  Right, Mrs. McDonald? 

Side note: I wonder what she would have said about me if she had seen me the day my son was born.  I looked terrible - oily, disheveled hair, dark circles around my swollen eyes, no make-up, and a ratty cardigan thrown over a hospital gown.  I know I smelled odd if not outright bad; I hadn't been able to shower in 72 hours and had been sweating like a stuck pig.  I'm sure that all the deodorant in the world can't quite cover that.    Of course, most human beings would have realized that I was severely ill, recovering from surgery, attached to an IV, and visibly exhausted and felt some compassion for me.   It was all for the best that I was surrounded by caring professionals - rather than a severely judgmental pastor's wife.

Preparing Single Income Sons: Chapter Two

Chapter Two - "What is his earning potential?" - is where Steve walk adults who are home schooling children through the three characteristics that determine how much income a person will generate as an adult: vocation, education and skill level.

Frankly, I needed to pause and suspend my disbelief to finish the chapter.  This is not a book marketed for children or pre-teens.  This isn't a book for teenagers or even young adults.  This book is marketed for adults who are actively home schooling one or more child.  These people KNOW what leads to a well-paying job and what does not already.

The first characteristic that Steve leads off with is "vocation" - and his anecdotes give more insight into his mind than anything else.

A man's vocation is generally what we think determines how much money he makes. If you meet a visitor at church and find out he is a doctor or a lawyer, you will likely think, "Here is someone with few financial difficulties." On the other hand, when we think of firemen, pastors, policemen, and school teachers, we don't picture them making huge salaries. (pg. 21)

When someone tells me their job, I don't immediately think about the person's financial status - but Steven Maxwell does.   Truthfully, it's none of my damn business.   Plus, there's such a huge range in amount of educational debt, personal debt, personal financial obligations and amount of salary that a lawyer might be struggling financially while a pastor is doing fine.  My extended family has raised families of between 3-9 children on careers like nursing, fire fighting, teaching, social work, and engineering; it's more about planning and budgeting to use the money a household has.

Every family has that person who makes statements that sound deep - but the ideas are patently obvious to adults who can think for more than 10 seconds.  Steve Maxwell is in that class:

It seems like every son wants to be a fireman, policeman, or bulldozer operator at some point in his young life. Then as he matures, other jobs catch his interest. Just because a person is interested in a profession doesn't mean it is right for him. (pg. 21)

So deep! 

I planned to be a ballerina when I was in kindergarten. The fact that I couldn't put my heels down to the grounds due to severely tight calf muscles from cerebral palsy was (in my assessment) a benefit; I was already on my toes all the time.

What did I want to be next?  I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom, a teacher, a naturalist, and a microbiologist.  Oddly enough, I've worked as three out of the four of those (if I can count work in cellular biology as microbiology) and all four if I can count the hundreds of nature walks I took campers on as a "naturalist". 

Yeah, we all have crazy career ideas - but listening to the career interests of kids can help parents and teachers figure out what a kid wants in a career. Key points for me turned out to be "likes providing education", "deals with science", and "has relatively high daily autonomy within a structured organization".

Let's take a look at how Steve handles a vocational interest of one of his sons:

Christopher, my second oldest son, was near the point of making a commitment to a vocation. He was very interested in pursuing EMT credentials to become an emergency medical technician. I wondered if his engrossment was mostly do to an excitement factor connected with EMT work. In addition, Christopher has a very strong leading toward raising a family someday. Christopher and I discussed and prayed about his vocation decision. We also discussed the fact that EMTs have to work odd shifts, and it is very common for a man and woman to be paired up. Having to work alone with a woman all day or night can lead to unhealthy temptation. The odd shifts also bring added difficulty to a family and would disrupt a daily schedule. Over time, Christopher could see the raising a family and being an EMT might bring problems to his marriage and family that would be prudent to avoid. ... I was pleased the Christopher saw the wisdom of pursuing a different career, even though it might be less exciting.

Please don't misunderstand me. Through my illustration, I am not saying a Christian can't have an EMT type job. I am saying that it is wise to count cost beforehand. (pg.22)

An overarching theme in the Maxwell publications is that Steven Maxwell hates the idea of paying anyone else to educate his children - regardless of the outcome for the kids.   Although he doesn't state this theme here, I doubt he was excited about the idea of Christopher paying around $2,500 for classes, textbooks and exams to become an EMT.

Maxwell does make important points about the drawbacks of working as an EMT.  The shifts that a EMT works change drastically from week to week.   Christopher would be exposed to a working partner who was not a member of the Maxwell Family; I know Steve dresses the situation up as a potential source of "temptation" - but Christopher's world might be more upended by a Christian male colleague who just talks with him on a regular basis about life.

The "temptation" factor hides another tricky point: I'm not certain that Christopher Maxwell could keep up in an EMS class.    These classes are heavy on medical terminology and the Maxwell home school structure lacks advanced sciences like chemistry or human anatomy physiology.    He'd be under a much heavier academic load than he'd ever been before - and some people can't do it.

My last concern - and it's the least important one - is that EMTs do not make much money.  This isn't the end of the world; some take second jobs while others get advanced training to facilitate career moves from low-paying entry level jobs with private ambulance services to being employed by government entities or through hospital systems.   For the Maxwell Family, all of these options would be considered second-rate and a rejection of the ideal of owning a home-based business.

I included this last quote from the "vocation" section because I find the thesis hilarious
.

A child may also express interest in a career that Christians should not even consider such as owning a nightclub, movie rental store, abortion facility, or liquor store. It is possible his spiritual maturity is insufficient to realize something is wrong. That is where a parent can help him see God's will more clearly. Take him directly to Scripture to support your claims. The versus you use would make excellent Bible study topics for you and your son. (pg. 23)

If a family has strong feelings against alcohol, x-rated movies, or abortion and lives their lives to make those beliefs clear, why would one of their kids all of a sudden declare that they want to be a strip-club owner?  Steven Maxwell is categorically against movies, television, the vast majority of books, professional sports, participating in team sports, most precious jewelry and recreational vehicles.  How likely is it that one of his kids would seriously declare that they wanted to be an actor, a bookstore owner, or a scheduling manager for a local stadium?  I grew up in a family that was highly involved in the pro-life movement; none of my siblings or cousins ever spontaneously opined that they really, really wanted to do abortions when they grew up. 

The Bible isn't a great career study book.  It's solid enough for things like moral precepts - but your kid should be pretty clear on moral job choices LONG before their teenage years.

Steven's second characteristic for income is education.  The gist of the section is that only parents or students can be trusted to educate themselves.  Outside educational programs will lead students astray.  It's not a new idea and it's not terribly interesting so I'm going to skip the main section and move into the bits where he jumps completely off the rails:

Remember Steve, mentioned in Chapter One? That is me. If I had wanted a larger income, should I have pursued a master's degree? Yes, if I was to believe the commercials on the radio. However, that was not God's leading and not consistent with my abilities. Would I have made more money had I earned a master's? Only the Lord knows for sure, but with my limited math and science abilities, I doubt I would have justified the higher wages that a master's degree would have brought. As a result, I might have been discouraged, and the company employing me would not have felt they were getting their money's worth. (pg.24)

Oh, my goodness!  The Steve in the first chapter who is an electrical engineer whose eldest son out earned him is the author?  Who have thought it?  There are SO many electrical engineers who home school their kids then write a book about it.

Whether an advanced degree is useful depends on the discipline that the person works in,  the career path that are interested in, and the amount of experience the person has.  Right now, the average income for an electrical engineer in Michigan with a bachelor's degree is around $55,000 while a master's degree job averages $79,000 a year.  Generally, bachelor's degree science jobs have relatively little autonomy while master's degree jobs tend to expect more independent work.  Master's degrees are also the lowest expected degree for people who want to do managerial level work. 

I think Steve is trying to appeal to the anti-intellectual element of CP/QF life - but declaring that he's bad at math and science beggars belief.   The starting mathematics course for a bachelor's degree in engineering is calculus 1 - and progresses through calculus 2, calculus 3 and  differential equations.  Steve may not be the best math guy of the engineers he graduated with - but he's easily in the top 2-3% of all Americans.   

On a purely picky note - I've never heard a radio ad that promotes a Master's degree program in engineering.  That's a horrible way to attract potential candidates. 

Something else to consider is that those with higher degrees may experience difficulty in finding jobs. The workforce is like a pyramid and that the higher you climb the education ladder, the fewer jobs you'll find requiring those skills. That is why it is imperative that parents know God's direction for their child. Overconfidence may lead to disappointment when a degree does not bring the anticipated salary. In fact, I have heard people calling Christian radio talk shows complaining about how difficult it is to repay their student loan based on the amount of money they are currently making. They had expected a higher salary upon graduating with a degree. (pg. 24)

Steven is completely and totally backwards on how education affects the availability of jobs. 

My first job was as a utility worker at a grocery store.  This job was open to any person who was at least 16 years old and could legally work in the United States which means that about 73% of the US population could apply for that job.    Locally, it was in an area where many people didn't go to college so roughly 80% of locals could apply for that job.

When I graduated from college with a bachelor's degree, I could still apply and get the utility worker job - and I could also apply for jobs that require bachelor's degrees like a laboratory technician and a variety of teaching jobs.  Additional education credentials adds more jobs to a person's options.    The specific job of "high school teacher with a BA or BC certification" was much less frequent - but there were very few people who could apply for the job and even fewer who actually applied.  At the school I taught at, we were lucky to attract 20 applicants of which roughly 3-6 were interviewed.

Even his argument that the number of jobs that require a college degree are fewer is specious in certain locations.   In the county I grew up in, there are many, many more teaching jobs than there were utility worker jobs; school systems were the largest employer and "teacher" is the most common job within a school system while the number of jobs that are available to people with a high school diploma as their highest completed schooling is tiny.

People do need to be careful about how much money they take out in loans while attending college.  A good rule of thumb is that college students shouldn't take out more than they expect to earn during their first year out of college.  On the flip side, college graduates on average out-earn people without college degrees throughout their career - a basic fact that Steve ignores.

The last category is personal skill level.  That's a no-brainer - and thankfully, Steve restricts himself to a quick attack on a doctor he didn't like two decades ago:

When Joseph was a toddler, he developed a cough that wouldn't go away. We had just moved to Kansas, so we took him to a doctor we picked out of the telephone book. The physician was in his sixties and very personable. However, he had great difficulty looking in Joseph's throat as Joseph was not being very cooperative. After several attempts, he appeared to give up but said he'd seen enough to give us a prescription. Teri and I were confident he had not been successful in seeing Joseph's throat, and we felt he was guessing at a diagnosis. After a couple weeks with no improvement, we took Joseph to another doctor who promptly diagnosed and successfully treated him. Later we spoke with others who had tried the first doctor, and they too had opted for someone else.

Here was a doctor, with plenty of credentials and schooling, who should have been making a good salary. However, his skill level was poor. I don't know what his actual income might have been, but if the condition of his office and the lack of patients was any indication, the man was not making much money at all. (pg. 25)

Psst!  Let me give you a hint: the doctor had been practicing successfully for 25-30 years!  Let's assume that he was making enough money to get by. 

Honestly, I have far more questions about the Maxwell parents' choices at this point. 

• Steve had a job that presumably had coworkers.  Joseph's cough had reached a chronic point so surely making the appointment could wait 24 hours for Steve to ask someone who lived in the area for a recommendation for a pediatrician or family practitioner.
• It's not like the doctor needed to do a detailed throat inspection;  he was looking to see if the kid had post-nasal drip.  All he needed was to see the throat for just long enough to see if it was reddened.  
• Did the Maxwell parents fill the prescription?  The story is not clear about that point.....
• Every drug I've ever taken for a cough says that if the cough doesn't improve in between 3-7 days to call the doctor for a follow-up.  I feel terrible for poor toddler Joseph who has been hacking for around a month by the time his parents decided to find another doctor.

The next chapter is about a person's "real" earning potential.  I can't wait!

Homeschooling Badly: Grade levels? We don't DO that!

I stumbled across a home schooling blog called the Hmmmschooling Mom that I really enjoy.  Amy's posts show the type of level-headed thinking skills that benefit teachers of all stripes. 

The first post I read dealt with why homeschooling parents should know what grade level their kids would be in if they were still in public schools - and why they need to stop acting aggrieved when anyone asks.  Amy argues that grade level is a simple method of grouping children by age and ability level - and not a sideways attack on home schooling methodology.

I agree with that.  It's  also a safe question to ask kids who you have just met that allows for a short conversation about what they are doing at school.

Taking her idea one step farther, home schooling parents need to know at roughly what grade level each of their kids are working at in math, language arts, speech and social skills for pre-K through 2nd grade, for math, language arts, science, and social studies for 3rd-8th grade, and for math, language arts, science, social studies, physical education and foreign language in 9th-12th. 

Before someone tells me about how they don't measure their kid's progress against artificially contrived benchmarks again, let me explain the two major reasons these pieces of information is important.

First - this information makes moving back into the traditional education system much more simple for the student.  Hopefully, the student will be returning to traditional education as an adult in the collegiate system where having a detailed, accurate transcript will saves the student a great deal of time and money.  I've also had more than one student who returned to a public high school with no educational records from their homeschooling period because of their home schooling parent died, suffered a major disability or separated from the family.   When a student is dealing with a major stress event at home, having to test into or out of classes is a crap-shoot. 

Second - parents who have taken over the academic education of their students are morally obligated to assess when their kids need more support.  A kid who is working within the range of one year behind to two years ahead of their grade level most likely doesn't need outside support.  (Another way to think of this is that in the average 2nd grade class room most kids will be reading at 1st, 2nd or 3rd grade levels - and the teacher can probably deal with a 4th grade reading level easily.  Or that I often had 9th graders who could read at 12th-college levels - but I only had two kids who had maxed out the lexile levels at post-graduate.)  Students who are far behind - or far advanced - bring a different set of challenges that tax experienced teachers.  How do you find books that cover reasonably age-appropriate themes without being at the wrong reading level?  How do you teach a kid to read who is dyslexic or math to a kid with discalculia? 

Parents can be lead astray by assuming since a student is "researching" a higher level subject that they are learning the material at a higher grade level than they actually are.  I was volunteering at an agricultural demonstration when a parent overheard that I had taught high school chemistry in the past.  She introduced her fourth grade  public schooled son - who was in no way interested in talking to me - and shared with pride that he loved chemistry and was learning really advanced material on his own like hydrogen bonding.  I asked the kid to tell me about hydrogen bonds and he gave me a partially accurate definition of hydrogen bonding being when hydrogen and oxygen atoms are attracted to each other.  I asked if hydrogen bonding only happens with hydrogen and oxygen.  He said yes.  I smiled and said something like "Ok."  I asked what causes hydrogen bonds.  He shrugged and started digging in the dirt.   I gave him some recommendations for finding a worm (which was his goal) and dug with him for a few minutes.  When he had warmed up a bit, I asked him what his favorite part of an atom was.  He looked massively confused and said "Atoms have parts?".  Meanwhile, his mom had been telling me in great detail how the two of them had watched videos on YouTube that showed how hydrogen bonds formed in water.  I asked her if she knew how that benefited life on earth - and she looked at me if I grew another head. 

Part of teaching high school chemistry is knowing what material a student should be aware of on a topic.  The high school level answers to the questions I asked the kid included:

• Hydrogen bonds occur between molecules that have strongly polar covalent bonds.  Hydrogen and oxygen are common examples - but many of the elements in the same family as oxygen will form hydrogen bonds.
• Hydrogen bonds occur because some atoms share electrons unequally in bonds.  This unequal sharing causes the atom that holds on to the electron longer to act like it has a slight negative charge and the atom that get the electron less to have a slight negative charge.  A hydrogen bond occurs when two molecules are attracted to each other because the slightly negative atom aligns with the slightly positive atom.
• Life on Earth has benefited from hydrogen bonds because hydrogen bonds cause water to freeze into a less dense solid form.  IOW, hydrogen bonds are the reason that ice floats on water; most chemicals have solids that sink to the bottom of the liquid while freezing.  Since ice floats, it acts as an insulator so that bodies of water take much, much longer to freeze solid that an equivalent size body of liquid without hydrogen bonds.  This gives aquatic organisms the ability to survive in the liquid portions of ponds, rivers, lakes and oceans during the winter.

I was happy the kid was learning about chemistry - but he was learning about chemistry at a 4th grade level of understanding.  There's nothing wrong with that at all - except that his mother was assuming that her son was a budding prodigy when he was simply a very normal boy.  (He found two worms - which made my day and his :- ) )|

Every state has a series of standards and benchmarks available for K-12 education in (at least) math, science, social studies and language arts - and many have additional ones for foreign languages, physical education, health, and arts.  Start when your kid is young; the standards are cumulative and the earliest grades tend to have very concrete standards that are pretty easy to understand.  As students grow, the standards get more complicated - but a parent-teacher is only adding one new level per year; that gives them a full year to decipher what next year's courses need to have.

My next post in this theme will be on the home school boogeyman - grading students!

Maidens of Virtue: Chapter Seven

The last chapter was a denouncement of the evils of jeans.  Clearly, jeans cause sexual harassment and should be outlawed - or at least worn under shapeless dress.

In this chapter, we learn that Stacy McDonald thinks all teenagers are goths and that goths are terribly unhappy inside.   Oh, she wraps up the chapter by declaring that even Christan women are not visible markers of purity any more - but it's mainly about what Stacy McDonald thinks all teenagers are like.

Oddly enough - I worked with quite a few students who were a lot like the "Modern Mandy" she derides.  I found them to be delightful and easier to be around than the average neurotic CP/QF adherent who has been taught that everything is a sin and that they are corrupting every male simply by being alive.

Mandy spends hours "texting" friends during the day; and, at night, she spends hours on various online social forums. She and her friends post hundreds of photos of themselves, all striking seductive poses for their ever changing profile pics.

Since Mandy's hair usually hangs in her face, it may be difficult to notice that she rarely smiles - smirking doesn't count. But, regardless of her hairstyle, her general look of disrespect, defiance, and boredom is unmistakable and clearly reveals the misery in her heart. (pg. 70)

I am fascinated how parents of home schooled students apply realities of home schooled life to traditionally schooled teens willy-nilly.  Most traditionally schooled teens don't have hours during the day or night available for texting.  Oh, some kids furtively - or not so furtively - send messages during class periods - but that gets in the way of taking notes, doing classwork, or finishing homework from another class.  Sure, some kids use the passing and lunch periods as a frantic time of texting - but they've also got to get to another class and sometimes even talk to other students around them.

Likewise, traditional schools take up time in the evenings with homework and with after-school activities.   If Mandy is not on a college-prep track, she will still have math homework most nights along with occasional writing assignments from her other classes.  If she's on a college prep track, she's probably got several hours of homework to fit around activities like a Writer's Club, sports, music, theater or a job.

I worked with students who had dropped out or been kicked out of traditional high schools.  We were not supposed to assign homework - but kids who had a lot of absences ended up needing to work on missing work after school.  Other students were trying to make up lost credits by completing entire classes in their spare time.  Many kids had children of their own - but even kids without babies had younger siblings or cousins who needed to be watched and tended while their parents were at work.

On a unrelated note, get an editor, please!

• Mandy probably smiles in those seductive poses she takes for her profile pic; smirking doesn't really fit the expected expression.
• Why would Mandy look disrespectful, defiant or bored when she's hanging out with her friends in real life or online?  

I know the CP/QF standard motto is "People who aren't like us are really frantically miserable deep inside" - but that's not coming across in this synopsis at all.

Anytime her mother asks her to help with household chores, Mandy rolls her eyes and stiffens her neck. (Jer. 17:23) Even simple tasks like cleaning her own room or doing her school work throw Mandy into fits of exasperation.

Sadly, Mandy considers her younger siblings a "nuisance". Her youngest sister is always "snooping in her stuff," and her little brother constantly makes the "most annoying noises." None of Mandy's friends get along with their brothers and sisters, so she considers it normal. Besides, rather than spend time with her family, she would much rather watch television, go to the mall, or hang out with her friends. (pg. 70)

The Bible verses shoved in the middle of the description of Mandy are disconcerting and weird.  Most people do not have a compulsion to justify everything they do with a Scripture quote; I assure you that Mandy does not care that she's behaving in a way denigrated in Jeremiah.

Apparently, being told to clean your room and do your homework should be taken with a light heart and bouncy step.  Never mind the fact that most parents have given up on enforcing their level of cleanliness on a teenager's room and that most teenagers are more than capable of doing their homework without nagging.  The term, by the way, is homework.  Mandy did school work while she was at school.

Notice that the problem with Mandy is that she tells the truth about her younger siblings.  Her younger sister is nosy and gets into Mandy's personal items - but the problem in Stacy McDonald's mind is that Mandy wants to enforce a boundary that her sister needs to respect her stuff.   Younger siblings often make annoying noises; children are noisy.  Instead of teaching the little brother to respect the rules of the house - like using "indoor voices" and that some toys are "outdoor toys" - the problem is that Mandy doesn't shut up and let the kids do whatever they want.

Interesting fact: neither watching TV nor going to the mall excludes spending time with family.  In my family, both of these activities are large group activities that involve talking, discussions and time with family members.

Denigrate teens spending time with other teens at your own risk.  Having teenagers participate in fraternal, sororal, or mixed gender groups of age-mates is far more universal and historical than forcing teens to remain in "family-integrated" or "age-integrated" groupings.  Other teenagers are the people Mandy will be forming businesses with, finding a romantic partner from and raising their children along side - not the random older people her parents like to be around.

Mandy is good friends with a lot of guys. One boy in particular follows her around a lot. She finds herself strangely amused when she catches him staring at her. She even made a game of catching his eye and purposely making him blush. Of course he's just a friend to her - if he can't control himself, that's his problem (Proverbs 6:25-26). (pg. 70)

Boy - only CP/QF can make flirting lead directly to sexual sin without any stops along the way.   

Guess what?  Mandy is wayyyy farther along on the track of romance than most married CP/QF adherents.  She's accurately assessed the interest of a peer, decided she's attracted to him and communicates her attraction using nonverbal body language.  Her boy friend managed to get her attention and communicate attraction, too.

The Proverbs quote doesn't apply to this situation.  The Proverb is to avoid an adulterous woman who is propositioning you.  Mandy's not having an affair; all she's done so far is bat her eyes at another teenager.  That's not even fornication let alone adultery.

What stands out even more than Mandy's gloomy makeup and depressing appearance is her lack of dignity - self-respect. She may momentarily enjoy the negative attention she gets from her revealing dress and forward behavior, but it doesn't satisfy her. Instead it leaves her with an empty gnawing in the pit of her stomach. She yearns to feel clean and truly loved. (pg. 70)

Is Mandy supposed to be a "Queen of the Night" style goth - or what?  She's in gloomy makeup, wears her hair over her face, looks generally depressed and is also wearing revealing clothing.  That's a relatively rare look for teenage girls in my area of the US - which is pretty close to Mrs. McDonald's section of the US.

In my experience, teens who dress like goths generally have plenty of dignity and self-respect; it's not a style that brings a ton of positive feedback from others in the world.  It's a clothing style that they like and take a great deal of time and energy to achieve.   I've had two "Goth-like" students who I had for multiple years and developed good rapport with; neither of them ever implied they felt miserable, empty or dirty because of their life choices.  Instead, they had a healthy level of spunk, an ability to hold their own opinions while disagreeing respectfully with others and a fondness for death metal that I found adorable.  The students were also well loved by their family and circle of friends - and actually were the least likely to have children before leaving high school.

Some may agree that the behaviors of girls like modern Mandy is a bit destructive, but is it really that big a deal? After all, isn't it natural for a girl in her teens to want to get away from her family; and isn't everyone irritated by their younger siblings? Isn't this all apart of growing up? "" If it feels right do it!" Isn't that normal? (pg. 70)

None of Mandy's behaviors are destructive.  Posting a flirty, fully dressed picture on the internet is normal.  Spending time with friends in a peer group is normal.  Having romantic interests is normal.  Dressing to fit your peer group is normal.  Believing that no one understands you is so normal.   Finding your siblings annoying is normal.

 What kills me is that CP/QF teens do all the same things - they just do it with a slight twist to fit a different peer group.  Their pictures are in nice Sunday clothes playing with a sibling or niece to show what good parenting material they are.  They do "projects" through their church or home school association.  They gossip incessantly about who is courting whom and who is dressed immodestly.  They make or buy flouncy tea-length skirts with shirts that are tailored - but not showing skin or a figure!  They spend inordinate amounts of time figuring out how they are going to do something amazing for Christ that is completely and totally different than anyone else has done before.  They practice sweeping family conflicts under the rug rather than using communication to change habits.

When push comes to shove, I'd rather spend an afternoon working with Mandy on her science homework than an afternoon with Mrs. McDonald.

Preparing Single Income Sons: Chapter One

A good sales technique involves leading off with an inspirational story that the potential clients can aspire to using the good or service being sold.  Steven Maxwell starts off "Preparing Sons To Provide for a Single Income Family" with an inspiring story about "Troy".

We have known Troy for many years. As a homeschool student in high school, his first job was as a two-week temporary assistant to the most junior employee in the company. Troy was hired to move heavy archive boxes in the basement. Since this was his first real job, Troy determined to do is best regardless of how menial the tasks. Hauling boxes doesn't sound like an impressive start to a career, does it? However, it was amazing to see how God was working. While doing his work assignments, Troy was diligently learning the archiving system of the company. He also tried to perform each task quickly so he would be available to do other "little" things for his boss. (pg. 13)

Translation: Troy had the grunt-level go-fer position that is the best job that most high school students can aspire to.  Oh, sure, it's been dressed up in nicer terms, but I had roughly the same job as a "bagger" or "utility worker" at a local grocery store.  The job pays minimum wage and consists of doing random menial chores like bagging groceries, collecting carts out of the parking lot, and cleaning the bathrooms.

Troy may have been a Christian home schooled dynamo - but any ambitious teenager would behave the same way.   While I was a bagger,  I volunteered to learn any and all tasks that baggers could do.  I used my strong memory skills to learn where items were in the store so that I could work as the floating bagger who would get replacement items when an item had broken in someone's cart.  Additionally, my bosses knew that I was able to work independently on chores without goofing off.   My work ethic and skills impressed my bosses and I was given more responsibilities like working at sorting returns (which is more complicated than it sounds) and sitting in on job interviews.

His temporary position was extended, and after a couple of months, he replaced his " boss" as archiving manager for the company. Throughout the next year or so, he completely redesigned the archive system from the bottom up. This included designing a new database and tracking system for more than 4,000 boxes of information. (pg. 13)

This paragraph made me curious about the size of the company that Troy worked for.  The company has over 4,000 boxes of archived information - but Troy took over the archives department after only a few months on the job.    Was Troy in charge of turning over the archival documents as they were not needed any more?  Was anyone doing that - or is this 20 years worth of old financial records that are taking up space and being a potential security risk?

Designing a new database and tracking system takes a few hours to a few days of work maximum even in the old days of computer systems that weren't as easy to use as modern programs.  The majority of the time involved in changing over an information retrieval system is coding the archives with the new system.   It's tedious as hell - and assuming that the previous system was accurate - can be done by someone with minimal training for fairly low pay.

This is another area I have some personal experience.  I took over a project for a professor that two undergraduates had worked on for several years.   The undergraduates had had excellent lab skills - but their organizational skills were sadly lacking.   On this single project, there were three separate and contradicting coding systems being used on different plant species, tissues and slides.  Equally exasperating for me was the lack of any kind of organizational system for the pucks of paraffin wax that had the plant specimens.  (There were over 300 wax pucks stashed in moving boxes.)

Sorting out the three existing code system took me around 20 hours total.   Creating a code system that did not add any new contradictions while resolving the old contradictions took about 2 hours total.  Planning the system to store the pucks and slides was less than an hour's work.  Cataloging the slides and plant parts in the paraffin along with assigning a code for relative quality of the slide or remaining part took several weeks of full-time work.

What level of work was Troy doing?  Was he sorting the plant bits or archive boxes into the right area - or was he reviewing the material and determining its value?  The first example is a low-paying job that can easily be replaced; the second is the type of skill that can build a career.

Computers have always interested Troy, and he found himself helping various people in the company with small projects in his spare time. While not an expert in formulas or the financial aspects of spreadsheets, his desire to learn enabled him to create, fix, and modify spreadsheets. Thus he began to be used in the process of the converting the company spreadsheet from Lotus 1-2-3 to Microsoft Excel. After a while he was doing spreadsheet and database consulting full-time. He completely redesigned the company's largest financial spreadsheet (which was made up of 17 inter-working spreadsheets) in a 3-month long development project.

Troy began working for minimum wage, and while still in high school his hourly rate had climbed $25 per hour. Our experience has been similar. I have seen that if a young man is prepared properly, he will excel in the workplace. (pgs. 13-14)

The important bits of a spreadsheet are those formulas that help a company keep track of those financial aspects.   If Troy wasn't able to correctly translate the formulas from Lotus 1-2-3 to Microsoft Excel,  that means he was doing basic data entry.  Anyone who can type can do the data entry between two programs - and nowadays there's probably an online file converter that can do the data entry in a tenth of the time.

 I'm confused by the statement that Troy  "redesigned" an entire company's financial spreadsheet when the same paragraph states that Troy's not an expert in business finance.  He may have successfully changed programs or simplified the design somehow - but I'd be very hesitant redesign an entire system in an area that I know very little about.

So - at about Troy's age - I was in college taking an instrumental chemistry class.  The labs for that class often took a month's worth of lab time (and lots of outside of class time) to complete.  To keep track of the data that we collected required spreadsheet documents that contained 20-30 separate inter-working pages.  The main difference is that the spreadsheet was the final project for Troy; for me, the spreadsheet was a tool used to analyze an experiment and make conclusions.   I bring this up because there is a huge hole in Troy's business plan.  He is extremely vulnerable to being replaced by someone who has Troy's computer skills AND business experience as well.

So ends the parable of Troy.  The next two pages are about how nervous parents are about raising sons and how hard it is to make choices about how to educate their sons - but Maxwell has a lot of answers in this book! 

The chapter wraps up with a bunch of character vignettes based off of people Steve really knows.  Three of them stuck with me:

Larry tried college after high school but then quit. He worked in his parents business for several years until it closed. His income averages $100,000 a year as a self-taught programmer. His wife is home full-time with their large family. They give everything that he earns over their needs to missionaries. (pg. 16-17)

This - without meaning to be - is a mirror to what the average CP/QF student faces - and hopes for.  The percentage of Americans who have earned a bachelor's degree by age 40 has been stagnant at around 33% since the end of World War II.  The change has been that far more women and people of color now receive bachelor's degrees than was the case in the 1950's.  Another change is that far more people start - but never finish - undergraduate degrees. 

Many home school students are well-prepared for college - but many CP/QF students face major educational hurdles as well.  Extreme sheltering of teenagers from "controversial" or "humanist" literature means that these students have far more reading to do to keep pace in English or humanities classes.  All of the CP/QF approved science curricula I have seen are lacking the depth and rigor that is expected of a college-prep science curriculum.   Far too many blogs have very detailed explanations of why their kids don't really need advanced math during high school; that kind of thinking leads to students needing multiple remedial courses in college.

This is the first place that noted something about family businesses; roughly 50% of new businesses close within the first five years.  The Maxwell Family has redesigned their business model once and has one defunct business; that's better than the average business odds since they have at least three working businesses by my count.

I'm very curious about how Larry became a self-taught programmer.  Was it something he studied on the side while in college and working in the family business?  Did he take classes?  Did he use his local library? 

I'm also have lots of questions about Larry's business.  How long did it take Larry to reach a point where he averaged $100,000 per year on programming business?  What's the range of his yearly income?  Is that income net or gross?  $100,000 of income sounds like a lot of money - but my total benefits package when I was a teacher was estimated at $64,000 because of the cost of health insurance for my husband and I.  A large family could easily reach $30,000 a year in health insurance costs alone.

I find the mention of giving their "extra" money to missionaries grating.  There's no reason to go telling the world how a family chooses to give to different non-profits.

Eric had his own graphic design business for 2 years. He loved throwing his heart into making it successful. Unfortunately, he would have starved had he not been living with his parents. His father wanted to teach Eric programming, But Eric only had eyes for graphic design and wasn't interested. (pg. 17)

Pretty sure "Eric" is Steven Maxwell's second son Christopher.  From what I've read on the Maxwell's blog and books, Nathan does everything correctly while Christopher does nothing right.   Nathan transitioned smoothly from home school to a career to a business of his own; Christopher refused to follow the exact same path and hasn't been as successful career wise.  Nathan (and eventually Joseph and John) managed to save up enough money to buy a home within walking distance of Steve and Teri's house in their early to mid-twenties.  Christopher put off buying a house until the geriatric age of 29!  Near as I can tell, the only thing his parents have approved of is his choice of wife who has provided them with about one grand-kid every 18 months since they married.

Steve has an electrical engineering degree. He spent 20 years in good corporate jobs. The last three years of his corporate work, Steve's oldest, homeschooled son, who have not gone to college, earned a significantly larger salary than his father. (pg. 17)

The effect Steve's story is supposed to have on a reader: "Wow!  My kid can out-earn an electrical engineer right out of college if we follow Steve's advice!"

The effect the story had on me the first time I read it: "What the hell happened to Steve's career?  Something went seriously awry for him if his degree-free kid was out earning him..."

In the last post, I laid out what I think happened based on information available online.  Steve Maxwell worked for an aerospace company that lost a major defense contract.  By the time Nathan graduated home school, Maxwell's employer was in a death spiral.   It's completely possible that Steve Maxwell wasn't working full-time by the time that Nathan started working at Western Auto; a part-time compromise would have saved his employer a great deal on salary and benefits while allowing Steve to start his fledgling printing and computer forms business.  With Maxwell's experience and contacts, starting a business in the Kansas City area would have allowed his growing family to avoid another cross-country move.  Being self-employed would also burnish his growing credentials as a leader in the CP/QF movement.  (I can never remember if the Maxwell's are ATI, Vision Forum or independent....)

Well, that's the end of the first chapter.  Next chapter talks about the qualities that determine the earning potential of a job.