Happy As Kings

Military bases open their doors to home-schoolers

An article on military homeschooling popped up, so of course I had to read it.  It's an interesting article, but one that follows the pattern of most mainstream articles about homeschooling:  cautious observation but without any endorsement.

Military Bases Open Their Doors to Homeschoolers 

Military families move on average nearly every three years. The transition can be tough for children, and home schooling can make it easier, advocates say. The children don't have to adjust to a new teacher or worry that they're behind because the new school's curriculum is different.

 

Other points in the article are how it seems that only certain people can, or should, homeschool, how military homeschooling has only recently become acceptable, and how homeschooling may make deployment stress worse.

No, homeschooling isn't for every military family. Neither is bowling, or riding motorcycles, or cheeseburgers. Preferences vary across populations, as do results of schooling styles. Whether homeschooling's "long-term social and academic effects" are positive or negative can be weighed against overall developments such as the increase in the need for remedial courses in basic studies for freshman college students. Interested readers can Google "homeschool college acceptance" for a range of results on whether college admissions staffs see homeschooled graduates as good candidates for their schools.

As for the impression that homeschooling among military families is a recently-acceptable development, some parents homeschooled on military installations (and "on the economy" in USAREUR) from the late 1980s on. There were ups and downs, but overall the situation was fairly stable and parents were supported by local homeschooling groups.

It's good that more installations support the children who are homeschooled as well as those who are schooled. I know that I appreciated the work in the mid-1990s of the Heidelberg Youth Center when the staff developed an exceptional art program featuring museum tours and lessons in sculpting and drawing.

Concerning stress during deployment, it's a good bet that the deployment caused the stress (going by all the YouTube videos of children-in-school being surprised by a returning parent) and not the homeschooling. Parents in online support groups say that they are better able to help their children weather the separation because the parents can control when to forge ahead with new material or slow down to 'go with the flow' of the child's emotions.

 

Talking through delusions

Yesterday, the family went to the local Ren Fest.  It was fun, we ate different things than usual (burnt sugar almonds!), went on rides (mine was on a camel with the 5 year old), and admired all the olde curiosities.  

One small incident stuck out.

My daughter who is a veterinarian was checking her messages.  One of the Ren Fest actors stopped to half-jokingly admonish her about using her "magic box" and thereby miss the life around her.

Okay, I understand that the participants, this one a fellow in green velvet and wearing a gentleman's hat with a perky feather waving above it, are supposed to stay in character during their interactions with the public attendees.  It's fun when they do that. The fellow probably thought she was doping off in the middle of 'his' world, created by hard work to create an amusing alternative fiction. He felt protective of his project.  Part of me can see that.

With this exchange (and thinking over others during Ren Fest visits in years past) I had an odd feeling of déjà vu, but concerning political discussions, especially recently.  Reading what some of my Facebook friends share, much of it seeming to me to be willful hyperbole, outdated information, or partisan mockery, is like talking to a Ren Fest actor.  No matter how hard I try to explain a position in real-world discussions -- politely, I might add, but probably too earnestly -- I don't have the charisma that will make them stop and look up at the machine producing the fairy bubbles.

In real-world interactions, the harder I try to provide facts that feel objective (no highly partisan links, no 'shouting,' no links to Jon Stewart), the harder they try to maintain the 'character,' to stay in the world that feels so comfortable to them.  We must all do that to some degree because that's how people 'work.'  The denial of reality, though, gets scary when some of their vigorous (and well-funded) partners-in-thought have the federal government of the United States idling while the 'actors' ride along on their figuratively white horses, ready to joust, as if the Ren World were reality.

I'd stop, in order to save each of us a lot of irritation, if it didn't feel so important.

Priests threatened with arrest if they minister to military during shutdown

Regarding a report by a website named The Daily Caller (among many).

Priests threatened with arrest if they minister to military during shutdown

“With the government shutdown, many [government service] and contract priests who minister to Catholics on military bases worldwide are not permitted to work – not even to volunteer,” wrote John Schlageter, the general counsel for the Archdiocese for the Military Services USA, in an op-ed this week. “During the shutdown, it is illegal for them to minister on base and they risk being arrested if they attempt to do so.”

Catholic priests have been in short supply for the military for some time. When my twins were baptized in 1981 in Munich, the priest was a contractor. Part of the problem of the lack of priests was because of decreased vocations, and part of it was a "main line denomination" decrease in the number of priests and pastors choosing to be military chaplains in the wake of the war in Vietnam.

The "arrest" part might be entering a controlled area during the shutdown when access might be severely restricted to control any misbehavior on the parts of people who aren't happy about the shutdown of the government by the House of Representatives' refusal to govern.  The members of Congress grandstanding over this issue can solve the problem easily -- do their jobs and govern instead of having a tantrum.

The restriction against "ministering" probably has to do with the legal ramifications of the contracts.

When I was a new employee in the military community civilian personnel office in Fulda, Germany in the mid-1970s, I was the only American in the office. The office was new to administering the personnel actions of American civilian workers in the community and the three people already in the office were Germans who administered the civilian personnel side for the German employees. German employees of the American Army far outnumbered American employees because of treaty agreements, for continuity reasons, and because there were no American workers to be plumbers, electricians, maintenance people, or fill many other jobs.

Anyhow, I was a GS-3, and as a probationary employee I wasn't supposed to work unsupervised. The wrinkle was, German and American holidays.  As an American employee I would be working on German holidays while my German supervisors would be at home, holidaying.

To try to solve the problem, I volunteered to work on American holidays when my immediate supervisors were at work, and to take off on German holidays while they were off.  The problem with my solution was that would mess with the needs of the American employees, and it was illegal, as in against existing pay regulations.

My American boss (in a community 50 miles away -- we were a satellite office) worked it out by having me call her on the telephone at regular intervals throughout the day (a solution that seemed to last only for the first German holiday). The contracts with the priests probably have similar regulatory restrictions.

I'm guessing the restriction on ministering would apply only to services held in chapels on military installations. Catholic service members are free to attend any Catholic church and the contractors are free to celebrate mass in their home church.

This has nothing to do with the First Amendment and seems to have everything to do with members of Congress making a mess and trying to fix it by special exception "bandages" whenever someone they favor is inconvenienced or the "bandage" would make a good Tweet.

 

Update:

The law governing whether employees can "volunteer" their services is the Antideficiency Act.  This law was not passed to deal with the current government shutdown (has any law been passed recently?), but is from 1884 (according to Wikipedia).  Yes, eighteen-eighty-four.  

According to the Antideficiency page at the GAO site, 

The Antideficiency Act prohibits federal employees from

• making or authorizing an expenditure from, or creating or authorizing an obligation under, any appropriation or fund in excess of the amount available in the appropriation or fund unless authorized by law. 31 U.S.C. § 1341(a)(1)(A). 
• involving the government in any obligation to pay money before funds have been appropriated for that purpose, unless otherwise allowed by law. 31 U.S.C. § 1341(a)(1)(B). 
• accepting voluntary services for the United States, or employing personal services not authorized by law, except in cases of emergency involving the safety of human life or the protection of property. 31 U.S.C. § 1342. 
• making obligations or expenditures in excess of an apportionment or reapportionment, or in excess of the amount permitted by agency regulations. 31 U.S.C. § 1517(a).

You'd think that lawmakers would know something about the laws they're tinkering with.

The Shutdown

Just as a matter of course, I'm registering my disgust at the shutdown of the federal government caused by the fit of pique in the House of Representatives.  

• The Shutdown in 10 Infuriating Sentences