Helping Children Succeed In School

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In 2010 I was asked to go to China to help parents and children become more united.  While there, one question kept coming up, no matter whether I was speaking on the radio, or speaking to parent or school groups.  “How do I help my children succeed in school?”

Studying education has been a passion of mine for years, but I didn’t feel like spouting off my knowledge of the proper learning environment and usage of belief based materials to enhance character development was really what these families were asking.  They wanted to know how to get their children to listen to them.  They wanted to know how to get their children to care as much about their academic success as their parents cared about it.  To answer this question, I had to ask myself some other questions. “What is the parent teaching the child, and how is the parent relating or connecting to the child?” 

 

Every Parent is a Homeschooling Parent Really

It is no secret to most people that I homeschool my children.  The BBC showed the world my homeschooled family in 2009 and ever since then people have wanted to know about homeschooling as well as our principles and beliefs.

All parents are homeschoolers.  Yes, you read that right.  I believe that all parents are homeschool parents no matter where they choose to have their children learn math or science.  The only issue is many parents don’t know they are homeschool parents. 

The narrow definition of a homeschool parent is someone who is replacing the instruction given at school with instruction given at home. 

The broad definition of a homeschooling parent, which I am focusing on today, is a parent who knows it is their responsibility to inspire, direct, lead, and teach their children what it means to live a fulfilled life and to accomplish the purpose of their existence.  In short, the parent knows it is their job to prepare their child to become the person God intends them to become.

Good homeschooling parents teach their children despite the fact that the child might have other professional teachers. The parent sees themselves as the lens the child needs to see the world through and discusses everything possible at home.  These homeschool parents take their child along the journey of life and don’t consider it a burden.  Gardening, cooking, working, projects and stories are all part of the journey of these deliberate families. 

The  good homeschool parents surround their children with truth, goodness, and virtue, which will be their protection in the socially wayward world they live in. Every moment in the life of a good homeschooling parent is discussed and valued as an educational experience.  Life is exciting for these children.  They love learning and develop a sense of purpose and passion to make a difference early on. All children (and people) want purpose.  The question today, is often who gets to instill this purpose.  Clearly, by virtue of how children arrive to this world, parents are the intended leader for a child in his pursuit for life’s meaning and their personal missions.

Many families now days are choosing to officially follow the more narrow definition of homeschooling and conduct academic instruction at home. In fact, in the United States approximately  1,475,282  kids were homeschooling two years ago. But, every single parent is still a homeschooler.

 

Bad Homeschooling Parents

The bad homeschooling parents do not really know that they are a teacher.  These are the parents who teach their children that the meaning of life is pleasure or distraction by electronics.  These parents often disconnect from their children and allow society to be the primary influence in the lives of the children. 

Children still learn from bad homeschooling parents.  They learn laziness, selfishness, disconnection, distraction, entitlement, greediness, comparisons and often times even dishonesty. These lessons are powerful lessons for an impressionable youth.  They see these things as the way life is, the way adult life should be.  If only the bad homeschool parent knew they were teaching such influential lessons to their young ones.

 

Good Homeschooling Parents

Good [homeschooling] parents know that their time with their children is important.  They realize that they have a sacred stewardship to teach, influence and nurture the children God gave them. So, they take their jobs seriously.  Fortunately, now days there are more and more parents who are falling into this category.  Good homeschooling parents turn the TV and media off.  They play, work and learn as families.  They discuss together and schedule regular time to have family time.

Remember those two questions I asked myself in China? “What is the parent teaching the child, and how is the parent relating or connecting to the child?” 

The Chinese parents were working hard and sacrificing everything to make a good life for their children, but many of them didn’t know they were homeschool parents.  Not only were many of them not teaching the children important lessons of life, family and relationships, they were often not even able to be with their children.  Many Chinese see their children only a few times a year.  Some parents, only one time a year.  Lucky families get to have parent time on the weekends. And a select few, are choosing to raise their children the old fashioned way and see their children every day and live full time as a family unit. 

So, the most important lesson I felt I could teach the Chinese families was to have weekly family activities together.  Some of the parents were shocked that the family should need to get together every week.  But, I assured them that if they put the family time as a priority the children would do better in school.

 

The Facts About Academic Success

People learn through connection and conversion to truth. This means that a person needs to connect to a person a book or a digital device etc. to start the learning process.  What person do you think the deepest connection should exist with?  The parents of course.  If the connection to truth isn’t the parents, then the child will become distant from parents and possibly even be confused as they draw closer to friends, teachers or media that they are connecting to.

Often times when people hear about the meetings our family has each week they think we are talking too much and making life too organized.  I am not a really organized person by nature, but I have a commitment to our Sunday, couple’s meeting, family meeting and the individual mentor meetings with the children.  I have seen the proof, the impact, of good family communication and connection and will not stop now. 

When children get the opportunity to talk deliberately about academics, relationships, goals and their individual progression it is life changing.  These conversations lead to conversion and commitment to succeed.  They get inspired to accomplish more and achieve more.  I see it every week.

Life changing conversations like these happen in family and mentor meetings as well as when the family is working and playing together.  If having meetings sounds hard, start with weekly family activities.  Put them as a priority.  Connect with your family and they will learn from you and excel in school. 

 

The Current Change

This month is the beginning of the official school year for most of the country.  It is a time when children and parents renew their schedules with excitement and get back to the business of academic learning again.

This is not to suggest that learning hasn’t been happening all Summer long though.  Indeed, learning never stops. We learn lessons every day no matter what we are doing. There are teachers all around us.

Friends, teachers, media, people in the community, books, family members and parents are all teachers.  Of this list of influences on our learning and living, the parents are the only teachers who have a life-long mentor relationship. In fact, parents are the most influential teachers for children.  

Whether they want to be or not, parents are homeschoolers.  We need to support and empower each other in this grand, God-given calling.  As we see ourselves in this light, we will act differently and connect with our children more deeply.  Go ahead, enjoy teaching your children. Any good homeschooling parent will tell you teaching their children and connecting deeply with them is the most rewarding thing they have ever done.

Feel free to use my format for our weekly meetings here.  (additional Instructions are in the book Parenting A House United. ) 

Read Educational Success a book that teaches parents how to help their child take ownership of their education at the different levels of academic development.

 

 

Faith Through the Sieve of Education, transcript from WOW’s annual meeting

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     Today I am addressing faith and public education, and I hope to show how the latter often serves to undermine the faith of our children. Right out the hatch, this is an emotional and controversial topic and with good reason. Institutions that hold the obligation to pass knowledge and truth to the next generation exist to reach us at our core. So I am going to start at the seat of our core, conscience.

     Conscience at the time of our Nation’s founding was defined as Internal…judgment of right and wrong; or the faculty, power or principle within us, which decides on the lawfulness or unlawfulness of our own actions and affections, and instantly approves or condemns them…Webster 1828

This is important because the idea of the right of conscience lay in the heart of our nation’s founding and in determining a just form of constitutional government.

     James Madison wrote an essay called “Property” which was circulated through a national paper of the times. In it, he defines property and explains the proper role of a just government with respect to an individual’s property. Foremost on this property list is an individual’s “conscience” to which he ascribes it “the most sacred of all property.” He illustrates that “other property possessions depend in part on “positive law,” but states that “the exercise of that (meaning conscience) is different in that it’s “a natural and unalienable right.” He emphasizes that government “can give no title to neither invade a man’s conscience “nor” withhold from it that debt of protection, for which the public faith is pledged, by the very nature and original conditions of the social pact.” He charges that any government that directly or indirectly violates the property which individuals have in their opinions (free speech), their religion (morality), their persons (rights), and their faculties (conscience); is not a pattern for the United States and is not a just government. He concludes that the protection of these (free speech, morality, rights, and conscience), is alone the end of just Government.  

     It is important to note also that “moral” was culturally and legally understood as the exercise of conscience in guiding the external conduct of the individual and “applies to actions that are good or evil, virtuous or vicious, and has reference to the law of God as the standard by which their character is to be determined.” Webster 1828. Thus, the two were connected.

     Because conscience is property and man has been endowed with it by His Creator (Declaration language), it can be assumed as something we must steward, and stewardship implies an obligation by the individual. As property, it is also understood that in individuals lies the power to neglect or oppress, pervert, and even destroy. And although all come into this world in possession of this faculty, it remains largely informed by our environment, via parents, religion, school, culture, or other.

     As women of Faith, we understand the moral imperative of guiding our little one’s hearts and minds to the assenting of truth and our major role as mother is to carefully train, nurture, and guard over our children’s faculty of conscience as a child’s morality is developing. We remain on the same page as our founding forbears.

      I think we could all agree on the cultural moral invasion that incessantly lures upon our youth, and I think we understand the negative peer influences that can exist at school, but do we realize the extent of how the child’s education itself in public school serves as the child’s major source of conscience misinforming, neglect, oppression, and even destruction, and that schools are not the neutral institutions they claim to be?

     Our public school system is the sieve most American youth have to legally pass through during their formative years.  Legal assumptions, language, standards, and doctrine defined or upheld in our Supreme Court directly and indirectly effect the operation of schools from administration to curriculum. This makes sense because public schools are legal institutions governed by law. It follows that to understand modern public education, an understanding of the legal reality in which it now operates is essential.

     The Supreme court in the last hundred years or so has exchanged legal assumptions, originally based on a vertical recognition and upholding of God’s moral authority, for modern legal theory based technically on this horizontal plane which relies on man’s authority and limited to what is observable, and a whole reliance on what is supposedly scientifically not even proven, but probable. A whole course or more could be given on this subject, but I’ve tried to briefly summarize a few key points.

     In Teach the Children, Neil Flinders explains some of the major legal effects. First, was the Courts’ “abandoned idea of a constitutional recognition of a Deity that bestowed upon man inalienable rights as expressed in the Declaration of Independence.”  From this rejection, two significant legal doctrines have arisen. First that “rights are to be perceived as based in government, not God, and hence subject to the Court’s interpretive protection,” and the court also changed what was accepted as permissible evidence essentially to only that which can be observable by man or scientifically explained. This rendered old, definitions used in founding documents and previous law useless or obsolete, so in trying to establish standards for a nontheistic legal basis for court consensus and continuity, it had to modify its contextual framework, which of course would also result in modifications of word definitions.  Words like equality are now defined not in terms of all men are of equal value individually in the eyes of God, but “in terms of tangible possessions or government granted privileges.  “Natural law” is no longer defined as allegiance to a higher, theistically based set of principles or laws—natural law is now considered compliance with social consent, existing law, or custom.” And going back to the word “conscience,” it is no longer legal, nor its former role recognized as a connection of obligation between man (and this would have included the court) and Higher Law, but “considered simply the individual’s reflection or social consensus. 

     In short, people of faith now stand in many ways legally disadvantaged because literally our Supernatural theistic views do not appear to legally exist.

     So what begins in the courtroom ends in the classroom. It isn’t a new claim that public schools are legally godless institutions (and many may argue they should be), but because schools, like the courts, didn’t used to be Godless, there remain theistic vestiges in them. These vestiges kind of lull much of the public, which by the way are a theistic majority, into a false security where undeserved trust is often placed into public education.  In addition, we often know personally many of the people who are directly involved with our youth. And thankfully, these are the ones who have direct contact with our children, are people we can trust, and one reason why local control is so important. But there are active forces unseen by the public in education like curriculum producers, test companies,  behavioral specialists, groups, committees, organizations, individuals, etc.,  that produce and dictate much of the educational material that impact instruction. In an opaque process they have systematically worked to remove any remaining theistic vestiges while creating  new educational assumptions. They are not like the religious populace majority, but are in opposition to it, and if you untangle the institutional web, and individual connections, you’ll find far leftist, secular humanist, and sexually progressive groups in control. Educational institutions like our courts have been and still are undergoing this systematic theistic unweaving.

     This is accomplished not by accident or slow cultural drift, but by careful and deliberate strategy launched in combination by the above-mentioned group-types as they have obtained legal sanction almost every step of the way. (See the work of Felix Wittmer, Judith A Reisman,  and B.K. Eakman. A Wikipedia analysis of the Scopes trial discloses its deliberateness.) Dishonest use of language purposely changed between generations is one classic technique. Also take note of the words “social consensus,” because this is also a root of their success and active in public schools. Words in education like “constructivist,” “collaborative,” and “cooperative learning” sound civil enough, but they are methods used purposefully in education to train our youth to submit to social consensus. It pushes what’s agreed upon as if it were truth. The Latin root of consensus actually means, “feel together.” You see it is the process, not the outcome, that is the important factor. The main rule is that everyone has to participate, and consensus a reached. The group may not have constructed a truth, but at least everyone feels good about it. It can be a form of group manipulation. In college, I had to read a 300 +/- page book on these methods. At the time, I could not wrap my brain around the ridiculous detail of process, of what I thought the purpose was just in helping the children to work together. I was naïve. Evidence that this teaching has been largely successful is that those who stand rigid in truth are often labeled divisive. To the public, this feels bad. The appeal is to feeling, not logic or reason. Groups in opposition to truth need to work constantly in building a strong (or at least the appearance of) social consensus, and always push and pull law so as to gain social and legal authority in the matter, thus legitimizing falsehood.

     What is included and excluded in education is also telling. I find it astounding that while comprehensive, an educational term meaning K-12 “sex education” is vigorously accepted and pushed as essential in modern education, while truths of our nation’s founding and principles of liberty are largely neglected. What is the logical premise for comprehensive sex ed? Think about this for a moment, the idea that somehow man had yet to figure this one out. All societies at large have successfully kept at bay negative social, economic, and health consequences by reserving procreation to the natural family. Furthermore, there has never been a time in history when man has stopped procreating nor has there ever been some epidemic public ignorance where knowledge of the act has been lost. Compare that to the idea of a comprehensive (K-12) curriculum of liberty and ask why this has this been largely abandoned.  It used to be carefully tended to. Consider, the securing of liberty was not something easily figured out and obtained by man, but is historically rare and an anomaly in man’s recorded existence. By using legal methods of observation and quantifiable evidence, it is easily determined the negative social, economic, and health results of the former. The real intent of education is exposed by including one and excluding the other; it is neither logical, nor reasonable, nor is it neutral, therefore it must really be moral.

     There is an active effort in parts of our society working to demoralize our children and pervert conscience while over sexualizing them. Worse, it appears modern education desires greatly to follow suit. Whenever you hear “comprehensive sex education” beware, and get your child as far away as possible. I’ll briefly acquaint you with SIECUS, Sexual Information and Education of the United States. The tangled web of groups, individuals, and organizations behind SIECUS would nauseate most parents. This tax-funded group has formed national educational standards for sexual education curriculum. Self- touch, exploration, and homosexuality are introduced in primary grades, and masturbation and safe sex methods for adolescence where they can sexually fulfill one another without intercourse are all part of the curriculum. All parents should read SEICUS’s position statements and the curriculum itself. Once children and youth get repeated exposure to this type of moral shaping, it is not easily undone.

     The material is disturbing enough, you can view it for yourself online, but they have been targeting UT, and pressuring us toward implementing their comprehensive program for a long time; and I think we have recently caved on this one; I need an update.  They abhor Utah’s “abstinence only/responsible choices” state-created material. Each state is individually tracked by SIECUS, whether or not their curriculum is used. They periodically issue reports on each individual state. Each state report in addition to statistics includes a list of organizations that oppose their curriculum, (WOW should be on there), those for it, and media outlets with contact information. So, Utah does exceptionally well, somewhere within the top 5 of teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and actual knowledge about such topics. One statistic that stood out on their 2011 document for UT was the number of AIDs infections age 19—24. Utah had 0 per 100,000. Compare that to the national average of 30 per 100,000.  States which have fully implemented their curriculum do not fare so well. Where is the logic? They should be looking to Utah for a model, yet they pressure Utah to conform to theirs. But that’s the point; they are masters at confusing the logic.

     Another false claim by schools is that they remain neutral in the God arena, but is it even possible to position neutrally on something that doesn’t legally exist or is straightway banned?  Once an institution abandons a theistic morality, there are gaping holes, or moral vacuums, now attracting all types of counter conscience and morality. Philosophies like moral relativism are concocted, tried, and fitted, then validated by claims of social consensus, along with frameworks built to make up the gaping holes. Arbitrarily, you may end up with laws or curriculum that aligns with theistic morality, but it is just as possible that you don’t; this is double-minded government and citizenry in action. Such a foundation will never build a strong, secure, just, or protective government or citizenry, but a weakened one. The reality is  our national foundation once steadfast,  and purpose-filled, where protections of rights were secure, now rests on sand and subject to constant flux by individuals or groups, ideas or force, subject to random and arbitrary protection, making our inalienable rights insecure.

     Parents and grandparents must educate themselves so as to cut through all this sophistication.  Then  these skills need to be passed onto our children. WOW can help parents in this area by suggesting and possibly endorsing, principled resources that can assist with this and help equip citizens to unify and rally for their protections.

      In education, a first start is in learning the history of the United States’ founding, which is moral and theistic, using primary source documents which are full of truths. I was not taught this in my public school education, but was led to it later. Realizing the waste of it not being taught made me feel so cheated, underserved, and angry, but it also served as a turning point, opening my mind to the possibility of educational malpractice. This area of study will not undermine or confuse a child’s conscience or morality, but enlighten it. Being in alignment with WOW’s principles, one direction WOW could take,  as well as parents, grandparents, and citizens, is in working to inform and influence local or state school boards and the legislature in adopting a comprehensive curriculum that teaches our national heritage based in founding documents, definitions, and primary sources .

     When grounded in truth, our reason cannot be easily confused, nor our conscience be hardened or misinformed. As people of faith, we have been handed the means to do this. The Bible gives the formula. You have to keep in mind three things, and this also needs to be taught to every child of faith: Origin, Purpose, and Boundaries. WOW’s 14 principles actually summarize proper Origin, Purpose, and Boundaries.  Anything else is a counterfeit idea and leads a population to double-mindedness if it is not recognized and exposed. Once you start applying an analysis of origin, purpose, and boundaries in any academic subject, you will discover what is or isn’t theistically neutral. Education has filled the theistic moral void, or vacuum with its own construction of origins, purpose, and boundaries, this is where neutrality ends.

     For lack of time, I’ll throw out an obvious example, Darwin’s theory of evolution-open season on me. How many have had their faith undermined permanently by this one? Or has this theory promoted a double-minded citizenry? How many of us have been asked about this one from a child? Were you prepared to place the child on solid ground with your answer? Could a simple teaching of origin, purpose, and boundaries expose the counterfeit? What about teaching the horrific outcomes this counterfeit idea helped to perpetuate in justifying atrocities committed in the holocaust and a perpetuation of denial of rights based on race? The science community at large is not neutral, and the predominant thinking is as represented in the Richard Dawkins Foundation Mission statement, which they say is, for Reason and Science to support scientific education, critical thinking and evidence-based understanding of the natural world in the quest to overcome religious fundamentalism.

      As a side note, two world wars, the revealed horrors of the holocaust, and various war crimes apparently scared the industrialized world into action, and the UN charter was initiated and ratified. Expressions of goodwill and peaceful relations between member states, the recognition of the dignity and worth of the human person, and the belief in fundamental human rights filled its preamble, which ironically clings to principles that are the fruit of a theistic belief, yet they stopped short of putting God in the charter, and Darwin’s ever-popular social philosophy of survival of the fittest was quietly swept into the dust bin of history. 

     Leaving the origin and purpose of language aside, I will conjecture that the boundary for language is truth. Thus the deliberate flux and confusion of definitions as stated previously is a form of perverting the language, but there is more subtlety in the employment  of a language  arts curriculum toward misinforming and hardening the conscience through the framing of questions. This is an extreme example, but it illustrates the method. One suggested English literature module for 9th grade went as follows: Students are to read “Mother of Monsters” by Guy de Maupassant. The story introduces a peasant girl who gets pregnant and boards up her stomach to hide the pregnancy. The result is a deformed child. She is offered money for the child to display in a type of freak show. She is offered more money by showmen and continues to have more deformed children in this manner, allowing her to live a “bourgeois” lifestyle. In the same story a “Parisian” woman does the same thing with corset to protect her figure, producing several deformed children.

     Aside from this being extremely age-inappropriate reading, the students are instructed to write an essay explaining how the characters display their individuality. There are a lot of things to write about with a story such as this, but individuality? An assignment like this does not try to reason out any truth, but instead is demoralizing and confusing. Marketed curriculum (meaning not teacher produced) is filled with this sort of non-reasonable framing of questions, and so is the mandated testing.

     Parents and Grandparents, you are the experts on your children. Don’t be intimidated by the legally-sanctioned experts. I’ve gone through University with a year of graduate work in education, and the truth is, much of what I was taught was just classroom management, child psychology, social development, lesson planning, and how to align it with state the framework mingled with some methodology, which some new wind of doctrine is always influencing. What I’m saying is there was no great mystery unveiled. The best way still for a child to develop reading skills is to read, read, and read some more and so on. When public schools intimate they are the experts, it probably means you’re making headway, because truth is powerful and does influence a conscience. Facts are pertinent and necessary when opposition stands before us, but we also need to stand firm in our faith, and say outright this is undermining my role and obligation to protect my child’s conscience and is interfering with their moral development. (Add that it’s your constitutional right and l have a few lawyers to back you up.)

     Unfortunately, on February, 2007 a motion was proposed at a WOW board meeting to abandon its FBO face, and it was voted by a majority in favor. In this one vote WOW changed from theistic to non- theistic.  This vote was not due to loss of fortune, possessions, torment or peril, but to political correctness.  Is this the example we want to set for our children or grandchildren?

     Our principles of faith were not given to us for private life, but for public life, and we cannot plagiarize by not acknowledging where our faith-based principles come from; we must acknowledge the Author.  That is what this nation was founded on, the continuation of liberty must rely upon, and these are the principles WOW and the new board will advocate for, educate to, and celebrate. 

 A presentation written by Yvonne Averett and given at the October 26, 2013 WOW annual meeting. Yvonne Averett is a former California public school educator.

TEACH YOUR CHILD TO LEARN BY PRINCIPLE NOT PRINCIPAL

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Are you teaching your child to play the “grade game”? If you are…you’re not alone. Everyone in the educational institutions from the principal, to the teachers, to the students themselves have been doing the same thing…teaching your child to play the “grade game”. While grades are important as a rule, they should not be the main reason a student attends school or seeks to know something. The idea that the grade will get you where you want to go in life is flawed.  

Many parents continually harp on the idea that the student must get good grades so that he can go to a good college or university…and that graduating from a good university will guarantee him a good job. This focus on grades during the school experience of course will ultimately make for a good life. Sounds like a solid way to view education doesn’t it? And statistics relating to grades have seemed to generally bear this out prior to the last decade or so.

It seems, however, that we may have over-sold this idea to the detriment of the current and coming generations of children. Grades are focused on what you know of what you have been taught, how well you test or how well you have been prepared for the test, and how well you game the system. We even have a program coming from the Federal Department of Education called Common Core to “help” students “game the system” even more. (Common Core is a topic for another time.) Suffice it to say, it is another form of the “grade game” handed to you and your child so as to affect more control of your educational lives.

The real goal of educating ourselves should not be to obtain a grade by the least amount of effort possible. It should not be to obtain a grade at all. The real goal of our education should be the acquisition of the knowledge we can use to earn ourselves a future that is to our liking and of service to mankind. We need to understand that some knowledge is preparatory to understanding other knowledge. Students need to seek knowledge with the idea of using it for purposes known or yet to be discovered. It is the knowledge that is important…not the grade.

You must also add to the knowledge a work ethic that will use well the knowledge you have gained. In his New York Times article of May 28th 2013, Thomas L. Friedman put it this way; “Underneath the huge drop in demand that drove unemployment up to 9 percent during the recession, there’s been an important shift in the education-to-work model in America. Anyone who’s been looking for a job knows what I mean.

It is best summed up by the mantra from the Harvard education expert Tony Wagner that the world doesn’t care anymore what you know; all it cares “is what you can do with what you know.” And since jobs are evolving so quickly, with so many new tools, a bachelor’s degree is no longer considered an adequate proxy by employers for your ability to do a particular job — and, therefore, be hired. So, more employers are designing their own tests to measure applicants’ skills. And they increasingly don’t care how those skills were acquired: home schooling, an online university, a massive open online course, or Yale. They just want to know one thing: Can you add value?”  

Knowledge is key. Not grade. Focus and emphasis need to be on the gaining of knowledge and a work ethic to use it productively. As a friend of mine, Col. Eldon Bodily pointed out to me in an email relating to this topic, “it is related to the question of a coal mine owner in PA when interviewing local job applicants. “If you want to work come and see me, if you want a job go elsewhere.”

By Nicholas Pond