Odds and ends

There was a good article in the Washington Times on Monday from HSLDA president Michael Smith. (For those who are not home-schoolers, HSLDA is the Home School Legal Defense Association, a group that provides legal services for members of the home school community in dealing with state and local authorites.) Smith's article addresses the issue of "socialization", one of the issues that people frequently raise as a negative when people homeschool.

The accusation that home-schoolers lack "social skills" is perhaps the sharpest attack from home-school critics. Examples of social skills would be behaviors such as sharing, helping, giving compliments and having good manners. If someone does well in these areas, most people would agree that he or she is well-socialized because interactions between people are the real test of effective socialization.
Little research has been completed in this area, but two researchers have produced a comparative study on it.
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The results showed that home-schoolers were no different from their counterparts in cooperation, assertiveness and responsibility. Both groups scored higher than the national average. Home-schoolers, however, scored above their peers in the area of self-control.

Worth reading.

I've said that Danny Ainge has done a great job. This team is already significantly younger and more talented than the one that he inherited, and they finished with a better record than the play-off team he took over two years ago. I also think that Doc Rivers has done a good job through the regular season, compiling a good record while integrating rookies and 2nd year players, getting them important playing time and experience. This has been, in many ways, a better season than I expected when it started.

That said, regardless of the pre-season expectations, if they lose in Indiana tonight, it will be a big disappointment. They're a better team than Indiana. They're younger, they're more talented. They should win this series. But there have been two close games, and they've lost them both. There's reason, at this point, to be concerned about Rivers' tactical abilities, and that matters in the post-season in a way that it does not in the regular season.

They've got to win the next two, or the season finishes on a very disappointing note.

The Red Sox have now missed 1 start each from Wells and Schilling, and they've been fine. 5 innings, 3 runs from Jeremi Gonzalez, 5 innings, 2 runs from John Halama. You want more than that from your starters, but for spot starts, you absolutely take that. Both of those starts give this team a chance to win games. And Wade Miller will make his Red Sox debut on Sunday.

Tonight we have the last class before the black-belt test on Saturday. It's a closed class, just for the testers, of which there are 3 - my 12 year-old, a 9 year-old and me. (There will be more people testing on Saturday, but there are just the three of us at the North Reading school.) Churchill once said that "a fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject." I've changed the subject, so I guess I don't qualify, but I've had difficulty concentrating on anything else for the past couple of weeks. If you'd told me 10 years ago that I'd be testing for a karate Black Belt at age 41, I'd have been very skeptical...