In the news 1-30-05
 

There are so many news items I wanted to share that I am going to paste them here in this thread. All are copied for *educational purposes* and copyrights belong to the original news service.

Normally I put them in the appropriate forums but there are too many interesting items and I don't have time today,
Blessings
~Kit

Field Dressing is PE!!! // news 1-30-05
 

...or maybe it's home ec.

This type of education is what I do consulting about, in my other forums, mostly.

Parents put kids in charge of school: They decide what they'll learn, when
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http://www.freep.com/news/education/...e_20050124.htm
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Parents put kids in charge of school

They decide what they'll learn, when

January 24, 2005

BY NATE TRELA
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER

For at least one day every fall, Teagan George's classroom is in the woods or in a field. Her text is a deer, freshly shot by her father.

"She's really interested in field dressing," said John George, who stays at home with his 8-year-old daughter. "And for a little kid to be exposed to that, so she's not afraid of what she sees when an animal is being cut open or butchered, is a great learning experience."

It's been four years since the first time Teagan asked him to explain how he gutted and skinned the deer, he said, and he knows how to walk her through every step.

But he didn't expect to be talking about it the first time they hunted together.

He also didn't expect Teagan to sort oak panels by size and shape after he tore them out while building an addition to the family's Birmingham home.

And two years ago, he didn't expect a 10-mile family hike around Kauai, Hawaii, to turn into a lesson in geology and wildlife.

In fact, neither he nor his wife, Wendy, force Teagan to learn anything. The Georges are among a growing number of homeschoolers trying a relaxed approach to education known as unschooling.

While homeschoolers choose to teach their children themselves, taking control of their education from the state and the public schools, unschoolers give control over education to their children. Without fixed schedules and curriculum, unschoolers let the kids learn what they want, when they want.

The guiding belief is that children will learn more, faster, when they study what interests them.

"When my children were younger, I felt like I needed to be ... more in control of everything that was going on. I had to plan everything. I had to organize everything. I had to be the conductor of what's going on," said Renee Bricker of Detroit, a Wayne State University doctoral student who has unschooled all three of her children at one point or another.

"They just seem to learn best from the opportunities they get to learn on their own."

Unschooled students can be erratic in their educational development. Some excel across the board; some excel in a handful of subjects, and some fall far behind. The transition to a fixed schedule in college can be difficult.

But unschooling has a following in every state, and Michigan's limited oversight of homeschoolers makes unschooling easy to practice.

Michigan does not require parents to notify the state if they are homeschooling or to report their homeschool teaching methods.

Unschooling advocates say that's how it should be.

Ignoring milestones

"When I first started homeschooling and I heard about unschooling, I thought they were crazy," April Morris of Auburn Hills said of unschoolers.

She tried a variety of homeschooling approaches on her four children before switching completely to unschooling five years ago.

"My children led me to it," she said.

She said she doesn't worry about learning milestones. Her three oldest children would be considered late readers. Lisa, 15, is dyslexic and learned to read only five years ago. Karl, 13, would not look at early reader books. So Morris and her husband, Chuck, read more advanced books with him until he could do it himself at age 11.

All of them "caught up," Morris said. The oldest, Kate, 18, started college this month.

Morris said her kids will likely never take a MEAP exam, a test she "abhors."

"I don't worry about them being 'at grade level.' I mean, occasionally, I get pangs of, 'Oh my gosh, what are we doing?' But when they need to learn things, they learn them in about a fraction of the time," Morris said.

On Monday morning, her son Ben, 9, was working on a 300-piece jigsaw puzzle on the coffee table. Lisa was baby-sitting upstairs. Karl spent the morning at the gym and was making plans to learn the guitar.

"We don't try to make them learn about anything, and we don't make them try to stick with anything. They'll find what they're interested in," Morris said.

John George said he also doesn't try to lead Teagan into studying specific subjects, but they take regular trips to museums, bookstores, libraries and the family's cabin, putting her in positions to explore.

"We're not doing things thinking, 'How can I tie this into her learning something?' It's a very natural thing that when you put kids into those environments, they start asking questions, and one thing leads to the next," he said.

"And the stuff they learn through experience tends to be more meaningful to them."

Light scheduling

Still, some unschooled children have structure in their days.

Blake Hart-Negrich, 16, of Lathrup Village volunteers at the Madison Heights nature center during the day. It was a natural extension of his interest in reptiles and the collection of dart frogs, snakes and other reptiles he's had over the years.

"I was obsessed with them before I started homeschooling," he said. "I've just stuck with it."

Many unschooled children choose to take courses in subjects that interest them at a community college or through programs like Homeschool Connections, which offers instructional classes for homeschoolers in Rochester Hills and Shelby Township.

Tarla Gernert of Lake Orion, who runs the program, said, "I like unschooling, but I don't know if I agree with just letting your child do what they want to do all day. I think part of unschooling is helping them be in positions to learn."

In the Morris household, choir practice and drama rehearsals have been a part of the week for years. Each child spent time in programs like Odyssey of the Mind, which teams children together for projects that cover everything from interpreting literature to building mechanical devices.

And although Lisa Morris said she hates the structured school day, she is starting to take online classes to prepare for college.

Her sister, Kate, 18, just started classes this month at Baker College in Auburn Hills and said the transition was tough in some ways.

"I hate sitting still," Kate Morris said. "I learn better when I can walk around a little."

Emalee Baldwin, executive director of the Utica Education Association, said she had little exposure to the idea of unschooling, but that there are risks associated with letting students have complete control of how they learn.

"I guess every child has a way of learning, and to me, it feels like there would be a lot of concerns about it," she said. "It may work for certain children, but I can't imagine it would work for everyone."

Kirsti Hart-Negrich said that unschooling worked well for her son Blake, 16, but her daughter Kara, now 22, needed more structure.

"When we tried it with her, it was like that 'Simpsons' episode where the teachers were all on strike. She was like Lisa, begging to be graded," she said. "It doesn't work for every child."

Detroit Free Press
Contact NATE TRELA at 586-469-8087 or trela@freepress.com.
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Coon feed social event in WI // news 1-30-05
 

Posted for educational purposes. Copyrights belong to the original publisher or their assigns.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...b/mmmmmcritter

Mmmmm, critter!

Sat Jan 29, 9:40 AM ET

By Russell Working
Chicago Tribune staff reporter

The raccoons hunted over the fall and winter have been defrosted, cut up and soaked in brine. Choppers and dicers have hacked up apples, celery, carrots and onions to roast with the meat.

And several hundred people are preparing to crowd the American Legion post here Saturday for an annual opportunity to dine on critters that misguided urbanites might consider vermin.

Started by a barber as a fundraiser for youth sports, the Tom McNulty Coon Feed will open for the 78th year under the guidance of his widow, Lillian McNulty, and a cohort of military veterans and other volunteers.

The feed has its roots in a time before Delafield became a home to commuters working in Milwaukee, 26 miles east. Housing developments have been crowding out hunting grounds, and the ranks of the elderly volunteers have thinned. But the raccoon feed remains a throwback to an era when Al Capone hung out nearby.

"When I first heard of a coon feed, I went to my house and said, `My goodness, what's this all about?'" said Delafield Mayor Paul Craig, whose wife now volunteers at the event. "But once you partake in one, it's a fun social event. It's a jampacked room full of people just chitchatting. What a wonderful time to get out of the house and break the winter blues and meet people."

Many wild game feeds exist across the country, but few have been devoted exclusively to the masked forest bandit. Organizers of one Wisconsin game feed last year skinned and roasted a fresh roadkill bear, and many offer sampler portions of wild meat on toothpicks. But the McNulty feed has remained purist in its approach, adding only one non-game alternative, such as beef or ham, for those too queasy for raccoon.

Delafield occupies an ancient Indian settlement, said Margaret Zerwekh, a local historian. The first whites in the area were French trappers and traders, and the town was built along the United States Road, which ran from mines in Illinois and elsewhere in Wisconsin to Milwaukee. The settlement was named Delafield in 1842.

Growth of a town

Today, Delafield is a town of about 6,700 people off Interstate Highway 94 in Waukesha County. The downtown includes attractive Williamsburg and Greek revival structures built since 1990, and there are trendy boutiques, a wine bar and a coffeehouse with Persian carpets where customers surf the Web on their laptops.

In short, Delafield is quite different from the place Tom McNulty knew in the 1920s and '30s.

McNulty used to cut the hair of some notorious Chicagoans who spent time in the area, among them the gangster Jack Zuta, the former barber told the Milwaukee Sentinel in 1986. (McNulty died in 1991 at age 94, his wife said.)

In August 1930, Zuta invited McNulty to the Lakeview Hotel near Delafield to see some dancers he had brought to town.

Some mobsters from a rival gang showed up, according to the Sentinel account.

"Suddenly, five men came into the bar, Indian-style, the first carrying a Tommy gun, the rest carrying sawed-off shotguns," McNulty told the newspaper. "They each fired at Zuta, and the last one made the sign of the cross over his body. Then they got into their car and drove off."

Capone was suspected of ordering the hit, but no one was ever convicted of Zuta's slaying, the Sentinel reported.

Back in the 1920s, there were so few raccoons in the state, McNulty and his hunter friends raised the animals to "liberate them" so there would be more to shoot, he told the Tribune in 1981. But over time, the raccoon population has soared as urbanization brought more trash cans and dog bowls to raid.

There is no limit on the number of raccoons one can trap or shoot, a sign that the population is healthy, said Jolene Kuehn, furbearer assistant with the Wisconsin Bureau of Wildlife Management. Last season 214,043 raccoons were trapped or shot in the state, mainly for the sale of their pelts.



The raccoon feed began when McNulty and his pals decided to pool their meat and make an event of the end of hunting season in 1926.

"They didn't have the wives at first," added Lillian McNulty, who won't give her age but says she was young enough to be her late husband's daughter. "But the wives started asking to go."

The event grew more popular as it began serving beer and mixed drinks "for the ladies," organizers said. The record turnout was 429 people, on a bitter night when, rather than lining up out in the cold, families stayed in their cars and sent a stalwart representative to hold their place, Lillian McNulty said.

Jim Appenzeller, 72--owner of a hunting and fishing store that sells everything from guns to bottles of fox ***** used as a trapping lure--helps host an annual dinner in nearby Dousman. It started as a raccoon feed 34 years ago but expanded to include rabbit, moose, beaver (tastes like poplar bark, Appenzeller said) and "silo duck," otherwise known as pigeon. Still, he likes to attend the McNulty event, which he first went to when he was 15.

Some are squeamish

Appenzeller admits that some with limited palates have qualms about raccoon, but those who dislike game tend to be most squeamish about squirrel. "They call them `tree rats,'" he said. "They say, `Aw, I don't want to eat that!' But they're darn good eatin'. So is coon."

But what does raccoon taste like? At the Delafield Legion hall, several McNulty volunteers dispute one of their own who says it tastes like beef. Raccoon tastes like raccoon, that's all, they said. And it's so good, you can eat the leftovers cold, unlike some game.

Lately, the feed has been feeling the strain of age. World War II vets--who are prominent among McNulty volunteers--are dying at a rate of more than 1,100 a day nationwide, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs (news - web sites). In Delafield, the older volunteers have been recruiting younger folks to help with the cooking and carry on the tradition.

"There was a group of guys--World War II and Korean War vets--and we called [them] the defatting crew," Schuster said, referring to those who trim the fat from the carcasses. "We lost two of them in one month. That's why we had to bring in the kids."

Zerwekh, the local historian, said that over the decades, the feed has remained a place where old-timers and newcomers gather to ponder the future and recall the changes they have seen in Delafield.

But she added that she's not a regular at the feed.

"That's because coons are my friends," she said. "But everybody else goes."
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Gun & owner stop an assault // news 1-30-05
 

http://www.kvnews.com/articles/2005/...ews/news03.txt

Cashmere man fires gun at truck

By ANDREA PARIS


A 26-year-old Cashmere man fired several rounds from a handgun early Tuesday morning at a Kittitas County resident's pickup following an alleged vehicular assault in Ellensburg.

Ellensburg police reported a 34-year-old local resident used his 1990s pickup to ram into another car in the 1000 block of University Way, striking fear in a pedestrian who then shot several rounds at the pickup.

Police said what sparked the incident was a verbal altercation between the driver of the truck, an unnamed local man and a 30-year-old woman from Cashmere. Around 12:30 a.m. the man and woman were reported to have been in a verbal dispute when the woman got into a car driven by a fourth person.

The local resident, whose name has not been released, eventually found the woman and her companion on University Way and allegedly rammed the car with the woman and her acquaintance inside. An ambulance was called to the scene though police did not know if either of the car's occupants were injured.

A 26-year-old Cashmere man who had been standing near the car reported to police the local resident then backed his truck up. It was then the Cashmere man "felt threatened" and fired several rounds from a handgun toward the local resident's pickup. The local man then fled the scene before police arrived.

Sgt. Mike Luvera said officers are unsure if any of the shots hit their mark and said the Cashmere man had a permit to carry a concealed weapon. The Cashmere man is reportedly being cooperative with police, Luvera said.

Luvera said police are aware of the County resident's identity. He is wanted for two counts of second-degree assault.
*"Daily Record" Ellensburg, WA
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Officer, do you know who you're talking to? // news 1-30-05
 

New York Daily News via Yahoo
http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/krn...p-236263c.html
-------------------------------------------
11:45 PM 1/29/2005

http://www.nydailynews.com/front/sto...p-236263c.html

Fur flying over
cat-slay tip

BY JOE MAHONEY
DAILY NEWS ALBANY BUREAU CHIEF

A state environmental cop may be in hot water with his bosses after he dispensed advice on killing stray cats - including shooting them with a rifle.

"I'd zing them with a .22," state Department of Environmental Conservation Officer Shawn Dussault told a caller. "You whack 'em with a .22 ... They may not drop dead right there, but they're gonna take off and die within a minute or two after."

Dussault's conversation with an undercover investigator with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals was recorded by the group, and reviewed by the Daily News.

In the tape, Dussault encourages a caller who said he had a raccoon and stray cat problem to dispense of the varmints by using a trap and a catchpole - a device used to strangle critters - and, if need be, shooting the felines.

"We were shocked that a DEC officer instructed a citizen on how to drown, strangle, maim and kill cats using a .22-caliber weapon," said Stephanie Boyles, a PETA wildlife biologist. "These are methods that are clearly illegal under New York's anti-cruelty statutes."

Dussault, contacted at his office near Syracuse, said agency policy barred him from speaking to the press.

But state DEC spokesman Mike Fraser said his agency frowns on employees offering kitty-killing advice.

"DEC does not endorse the inhumane killing of cats or nuisance animals," Fraser said.

The incident involving Dussault came after the state drafted a list of nonlethal ways for getting rid of nuisance animals in 2002 in response to a Daily News report that another officer had suggested ways to drown cats.

"We thought things would get better after the Daily News brought that to their attention, but it looks like things have gotten worse," Boyles said.

Originally published on January 29, 2005
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OR state sparring over guns // 1-30-05
 

Somebody, send this "education" headline writer a 'spare' dictionary please?

11:17 AM 1/30/2005


http://www.katu.com/education/story.asp?ID=74506

January 28, 2005

Concealed weapons in school spared over in senate

By JULIA SILVERMAN
AP Education Writer

PORTLAND, Ore. - Several years ago a North Clackamas school district custodian who had a concealed weapons permit left his gun in a backpack overnight at an elementary school.

Even now, Superintendent Ron Naso says he shudders to think what could have happened if a child had found that backpack the next day, instead of a teacher.

And so Naso came to a hearing Friday in support of Senate Bill 335, which would let local school boards choose whether to prohibit concealed weapons permit holders from bringing their guns to school.

"The school is not a place for firearms, legal or otherwise," Naso said at a hearing on the bill in Portland, one of the first hearings on any bill this year to be held outside of the Capitol.

"Guns don't belong on school property unless they are in the possession of trained police officers."

But Michael Pliska, a Portland-area resident who has a concealed weapons permit himself, and opposes SB335, said Naso left out an important fact. The gun, Pliska said, was reportedly found in a service elevator that was strictly off-limits to students.

"It is not our guns you need to worry about," Pliska told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Sen. Ginny Burdick, D-Portland. "It is our votes, and our grass roots activism in the next election if you do support this bill."

No decisions were made at Friday's hearing - it was just a chance for Burdick and the six other committee members to hear public testimony on the proposal. But emotions still ran high.

The proposal is even controversial among the members of the Oregon School Boards Association, which brought the legislation to the Judiciary Committee.

"The school board in John Day will likely not adopt this policy," said Jim Green, a lobbyist for OSBA. "In Eugene, they will debate and discuss it. Some places, it may never show up on the radar. This bill is about local control, and we believe the debate about controls on school buildings lies with locally elected school boards."

But Rod Harder, a Salem-based consultant to the National Rifle Association, said letting some school boards adopt the policy while others do not would result in a "hodgepodge, with local gun owners not knowing when they are legal, and when they are not."

Gun advocates also said that the bill was "a solution for a problem that does not exist," saying that instances of a licensed handgun holder causing security problems at school were few and far between.

"I could no longer attend the football or soccer practice of one of my grandsons, because I would not be able to invoke my certified right to protect myself," said gun owner Bob Karl.

Mark Chism, a Tigard-Tualatin school board members, said he was also a gun enthusiast, calling himself "an experienced marksman and well-trained gun owner."

Still, he said the training given to holders of concealed weapons permits isn't enough to guarantee that they can be trusted to handle a weapon around school children.

"The danger represented by inexperienced people carrying guns into a school is obvious," he said. "The argument that it will mean adequate protection for students is just not credible. I do not have the training to enter my schools and defend them with a handgun or a rifle. We have people who are well-trained to act in that circumstance."

Also at the hearing, Ben Rawlins, general counsel to the Oregon University System, asked legislators to consider expanding the bill to include college campuses.

(Copyright 2005 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

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Domestic Violence may be initiated by young women// news 1-30-05
 

OK, granted some people are confused between 'violence' and raising one's voice. But still, you might know somebody or their attorney who needs to quote this study...


http://www.katu.com/stories/74517.html

January 30, 2005

Local scientists find women new aggressors in family violence

EUGENE, Ore. (AP) - A study by a group of Eugene scientists shows that young women are much more likely to initiate physical violence towards their significant other than previously thought.

The study, which is slated for publication in the Journal of Family Violence, shows that 18-year-old women are more than four times as likely as men to initiate physical aggression toward their partner.

The gap closes by age 26, when women were only slightly more likely than men to tee off.

Deborah Capaldi, a senior scientist at Eugene's Oregon Social Learning Center, spent hours watching young couples tackle problem-solving exercises in the center's lab assessment rooms. To the surprise of Capaldi and her colleagues, a partner would sometimes lash out in the midst of debating how to solve the problem - and more often then not, the initiator was the woman.

The counterintuitive findings are among a growing body of research suggesting that women may play a larger role in domestic violence than commonly assumed.

But the research is also controversial and subject to interpretation.

Capaldi contends that prevention and treatment programs for battered women often miss the mark because they fail to consider the realities of female aggression.

Women need to know, for example, that if they assault their partner, they run a higher risk of severe injury themselves, she said.

"Women engage in aggression," she said, "and we're not doing them any favors by denying they have any part in it."

Most advocates for female victims of domestic violence acknowledge that some women are aggressors and some men are victims.

But they caution that the dynamics are often very different, the options for escape much narrower, and the risk of physical injury or death far greater for women.

"The most common cause of injury for women between the ages of 15 and 44 is domestic violence - you don't see that for men," said Margo Schaefer, community outreach director at Womenspace, a Eugene shelter and support group for battered women.

According to federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, about one in three female murder victims in this country is killed by an "intimate" - a spouse, ex-spouse or boyfriend.

Only 3 percent to 4 percent of male murder victims, meanwhile, are killed by an intimate.

More than 100 academic studies, however, suggest that men and women assault their partners at about equal rates. Male victims typically fail to gain much attention, advocates say, because many men are too embarrassed to admit abuse.

There's also the notion that political correctness in which only women go to shelters, and only men go to treatment programs may be at play. "People have put a great deal of energy into establishing those shelters and treatment programs - the status quo," said Capaldi. "It's become an industry."

Capaldi's study is different from many others in that it focuses on observed rather than reported acts of aggression. Capaldi said she and her colleagues expected some verbal arguments but were surprised by the extent of slaps, pokes and kicks as partners discussed such assigned topics as planning a party, where to go on a date, or how to deal with such issues as jealousy and lack of money.

If hit or poked, the men and women were about equally as likely to respond in kind. None of the physical aggression was severe, which researchers would have halted, Capaldi said.

Some women may initiate aggression because they see it as a kind of innocent horseplay and as a way to connect in a ***ually intimate relationship, Capaldi said.

Younger women, especially, may be less sure of how to relate, and more susceptible to jealousy because they are unsure of the relationship's staying power, she said.

Many partners seemed to engage in the slaps and pokes without even consciously thinking about it, Capaldi said.

"It was almost like a way of communicating," she said.

Information from: The Register-Guard

(Copyright 2005 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

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To-Do and To Know List// news 1-30-05
 

From various news sources:

Alberta, Canada:
Washington state, USA: