What would you give up to stay home?
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| Sat, 08-05-2006 - 8:36am |
Hi everyone.
I have always said that staying home is so important to me that I would give up many things to be able to do that. We live in a very small home, I have no jewelry and we buy all our clothes at Walmart. I know that if I went back to work, we could afford more. But I would never trade being at home for a larger house or more luxuries.
However, after reading this board I have started to suspect that there are things I would not want to give up. If I couldn't send my kids to preschool a couple of hours a day, if I couldn't afford any after school activities like ballet lessons or if I could'nt afford any kind of summer program for them, I think I would have to find a way to go back to work. So basically, I'm perfectly happy to deny myself "things." But I would not want to take much away from the kids.
Of course I would probably have to find a new career becuase I could never work the 80 hours a week my old career entailed.

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Jennie
Jennie
Jennie
The authors of "Freakonomics" (Levitt and Dubner) also tried to wrap their heads around it. Here's their theory, quoted from pg173-174 of the book:
The quote follows a paragraph about the governor of Illinois also reading the study and deciding that the government should mail all Illinoise children a book per month from birth thru kindy. The authors wonder if this would raise school test scores overall in Illinoise (the proposal was shot down so we never found out for sure.) They say, would it have raised scores for all?
"Probably not. (Although we may never know for sure: in the end the Illinois legislature rejected the plan.) After all, the ECLS data don't say that books in the house CAUSE high test scores; it says only that the two are correlated.
How should the correlation be interpreted? Here's a likely theory: most parents who buy a lot of children's books tend to be smart and well educated to begin with. (And they pass on their smarts and work ethic to their kids.) Or perhaps they care a great deal about education and about their children in general. (Which means they create an enviroment that encourages and rewards learning.) Such parents may believe- as fervently as the governor of Illinois believed- that every children's book is a talisman that leads to unfettered intelligence. But they are probably wrong. A book is in fact less a cause of intelligence than an indicator."
So there you have it.Both kbamm and the governer of Illinois looked at the data and inferred causation between good tests scores and book ownership. But actually there is just correlation. I agree with the authors that buying the books is not the cause of the good test scores (the data merely says correlation, not causation). The good test scores don't come from buying the books.
I have a somewhat different take on all this than either the authors of Freakonomics or kbamm or the gov of Illinois. I think that it would have been a lovely idea to buy books for every kid in Illinois (if the money were there) not because it would raise everybody's score (a conclusion the data doesn't support) but because then all those kids would own books and would be able to leaf through them regardless of their own parents' finances or attitudes about reading. And leafing through them might lead to wanting to read them. Or might not- the legislature wasn't about to spend 26$million on that gamble (projected cost). But it would at least give them an option that some wouldn't otherwise have.
OT but now the very idea of owning an encyclopedia set is itself obsolete. The internet made it a waste of money and Wikipedia promotes the idea that there is no absolute authority for information since it can be freely edited.
As I said in another post, my parents were also anti-encyclopedia but coming from a slightly different angle. They were believers in going back to the source whenever possible and getting information from diverse sources (the very idea of encyclopedias is anti-diverse since it claims to be one-stop-shopping for information). Therefore they were also anti- Reader's Digest and Cliff Notes.
I agree with your dad that encyclopedias are prone to gong obsolete very fast. Wikipedia took that idea and ran with it probably farther than your dad ever dreamed possible- showing that an encyclopedia entry could be considered obsolete (or incorrect somehow, anyway) within minutes of being posted.
Sabina
Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
"Did it ever occur to you than some people view their chldren as more important than a career? After all, a career can always be resumed, but you can't stop your child from growing up and moving on"
Yes, exactly!
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