tomlittlejohn.com

Lately, I hear people use an expression that sounds very reasonable on its face, but after further review is pretty silly. The expression is, “they have more important things to do.”

It typically is used regarding the action of some government institution - our legislature, local law enforcement, etc. For example, I get pulled over by a policeman for speeding. The policeman was hiding over the hill, late at night, and I wisk by at 10 mph over the speed limit. Later that day, still stinging from my $150 ticket, I tell my co-workers, “with all the soaring violence in our community, there must be something better for the police to do than hide and catch hard-working people who might be going a little faster than the law allows.” While that sounds reasonable on its face, the logic doesn’t hold water.

Let’s dissect this. Following this logic, how many things should the police or government be doing? Well, even if the police have 100 things to do, this logic would have them forsake priorities 2 through 100, because those are ALL less important than number 1.

The fact that I have more important things to do than action X, doesn’t mean that I should not do X. For example, I have more important things to do every day than brush my teeth. But somehow - every morning - I find time to brush my teeth. Am I wrong to do it, because there are more important things to do? I don’t think so. There are more important things for our government to do than regulate financial institutions. I’d rather have security to know that foreign governments are not about to invade and attack and kill me. But that doesn’t mean I want my bank to lose or steal my savings account either. Somehow, I expect the government to both protect me from foreign invasion AND regulate financial institutions.

We need to ditch this expression once and for all, and say what we mean. Instead of, “don’t the police have better things to do than hide out looking for speeders?”, perhaps we should say, “I don’t believe we should spend so much of police time or resources enforcing traffic laws”, or “I don’t like the fact that the police caught me speeding.” (Most likely the reason I feel the urge to re-prioritize police resources in the first place.)

I’ve been preparing for a few months to teach a class to highschool students in our homeschool cooperative.  This morning was the first class. We have a good group of students, and I’m excited about this opportunity.

Because we only meet 1 day a week, yet have homework and activities on other days, we are using Moodle to deliver homework, quizzes, other resources, on-line. Apart from the convenience for the class, I think this ability to work with a class on-line is important for these teens, as they prepare to go off to college.

Before Christmas, my son took the written test and received his learner’s permit. As we were out of state for most of the Christmas break, we couldn’t start the learning process.

Today, we plan to start the ball rolling. This should be interesting. Having read a little about teaching someone how to drive, and having spoken to a few parents who have done it (and survived it), I am cautiously excited about the opportunity. Probably the biggest excitement is the certainty of running into many unknowns that I can’t expect up front.

Driving is so intuitive and automatic, once you learn how to do it. You don’t think about all the steps you do when approaching a green light to make a left turn; you just do them. So teaching them to someone else can be a problem.

So why am I doing this? Because it is such a unique challenge, and if our relationship survives this, I’ll be able to look back on this with my son and the rest of my family, with (hopefully) fond memories.

My son will do fine. I’m just not sure how dad will do.

Stay tuned.

This is a start with an unknown end.

I set up tomlittlejohn.com to deliver some on-line education using Moodle.   The Moodle site is here.

This blog will at least deal with the use of technology in education, homeschooling resources, and other stuff.

Welcome!