CarrieIsaac.com

I have an impressive list of things I'm busy with.

Why We’re Learning American Sign Language

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We’ve recently begun incorporating a foreign language into our homeschool agenda: American Sign Language.  I never particularly thought we’d be doing a foreign language in first grade, but several months ago, I felt God laying it on my heart to refresh my knowledge of ASL and begin teaching it to my kids.

In short, I don’t particularly know why I feel that God wants us to learn (or in my case, re-learn) ASL.  Will our next child be deaf?  Will there be an accident that causes one of us to lose our hearing?  Will someone enter our life that is deaf?  Are we supposed to reach out to the deaf community?  All of those thoughts swirl around in my head as we learn ASL, and I have no idea which one may be true, or if any of them will ever be true.

Immediate Benefits of Learning ASL

But for now, we’re learning ASL and I’m seeing some immediate benefits to both me and the kids:

  • Thinking about different cultures.  I’ve been able to to explain that deaf people are normal, they just need a special language to communicate.  It’s been valuable to even briefly consider what it might be like if we couldn’t hear or if someone in our family couldn’t hear.
  • Coordination and attention to detail.   Most ASL signs require somewhat precise finger positions and motions.  Careful that you sign orange and ice cream just right or you might be saying something totally different than you think!  This is helping all of my kids with their finger dexterity and preciseness.
  • Non-verbal communication.  ASL seems to depend a lot on facial expressions to properly communicate.  If you’re asking a question, you certainly want to have a questioning look on your face.  If you’re signing “angry”, you wouldn’t do it with a smile on your face.  This comes naturally, as most people use their facial expressions to reinforce what they’re saying in any language, but it’s been a good reminder for me and my kids to be expressive with our body language as we sign (or speak).  Secondary drama class, perhaps?
  • Understanding English better.  ASL doesn’t have a sign for every single word in the English language.  As a result, you either fingerspell (slow!) or otherwise translate the English word into a word that ASL does have a sign for.  I’m now much more tuned into the songs we sing at church, thinking about what the words really mean and how I would translate them for a deaf person.

What We’re Using To Learn ASL

We’re not using a formal curriculum for learning ASL: the kids have really enjoyed watching the Signing Time DVDs from the library and it’s piqued their interest enough that they frequently ask what the sign for ________ would be.  (I usually do a Google search for the word + ASL on my iPhone and find a video of the sign.  SigningSavvy.com is one of the first sites that usually comes up and their videos are great!)

At some point, we will need to start learning more of the “grammar” of ASL and become better at understanding others when they sign.  I may be looking for a more formal curriculum in a year or two, but for now, we’re having a blast learning signs and communicating with each other in sign language!

“Partial RSS Feeds Always Make Me Unsubscribe!”

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Mention partial RSS feeds to another blogger and you’re likely to send them off on a tangent about how they always unsubscribe to a site that doesn’t publish a full feed and they would never use a partial RSS feed on their site.

Partial RSS feeds are annoying – most of the time.  But there are good reasons to use them, too, and I believe that, if used correctly, you can utilize a partial feed in such a way that neither annoys people nor causes unsubscribes to your RSS feed or newsletter.

Why you’re annoyed by partial feeds.

Here’s a few reasons why partial RSS feeds are annoying.  Don’t skip this part: understanding why is crucial to learning how to use partial RSS feeds wisely.

Most partial RSS feeds feature just the headlines plus a very small excerpt of the article.  The excerpt is usually unformatted, without paragraph spacing or images – and sometimes, it even strips the excerpt of links (yuck!).  The feed rarely gives enough of the article to pique the reader’s interest and entice them to click over, and even if the first few words seem marginally interesting, many readers will abandon the post because it’s hard for the eye to track a six-line paragraph (which is probably not a paragraph on the site itself).

Some partial RSS feeds utilize an actual excerpt, where the writer of the post crafts an excerpt to be published in the feed.  This could be OK, but rarely does the writer take the time to write a catchy excerpt after having taken the time to write a gripping title and a quality post.

Most partial RSS feeds don’t include any sort of a link to read the full post – instead, you have to click on the post title.  Problem is, people’s eyes will scan the title and then the excerpt.  They might click a “read more” link at the end of the partial feed – if there was one there – but there’s nothing to click and most people won’t revert back to the top to click on the post title.

Some sites publish truncated feeds of very short articles, so that when you click over, you realize there were only about five words left that weren’t included in the feed.  Annoying, and this very much discourages people from ever clicking through again.

It’s these things that I believe make partial RSS feeds so frustrating to so many.  Now that we know why people hate partials, we know what things to avoid when we are creating a partial RSS feed that doesn’t annoy.

Here’s how to do that:

How to use partial feeds without ticking anyone off

First, set your feed to publish in full – you may need to check your WordPress settings, as well as your feed service, such as Feedburner or Feedblitz.  Most of the problems outlined above are caused by automatic generation of partial feeds.  You want to truncate your feed in a way that makes sense to humans.  No human would ever choose to end a partial feed mid-sentence, but that’s often what happens with the automatic partial feed settings.

Then, I recommend using the RSS No More plugin that’s on WordPress.org.  This will allow you to choose to cut the feed wherever you want.  It will leave your links, images, and other formatting intact so that you can give your subscribers enough of a preview to be interested enough to click over, rather than being annoyed at not knowing whether or not the article is worth it.

You can choose to cut your RSS feed at the more tag or insert the shortcode [rss-cut] wherever you want to break the feed.  If you already use the more tag on your site, you’ll probably want to set the plugin to cut the feed with the shortcode since you’ll sometimes want to break the feed in a different place than you might put the more tag.

You can also customize what appears at the bottom of your partial feed – I would recommend using a call to action such as “Click here to read Name Of Article” and even inserting the arrow character (→) to draw attention to the link.

Where to cut the feed

I love the fact that you can choose to use or not use a partial feed on posts with the RSS No More.  If you publish a short post, you can do nothing and it will publish the full post in your feed.  When you publish a longer post, insert the proper tags after the first paragraph or two and an image.  This is much less likely to annoy your readers when you only use a partial feed some of the time.

You can also use the plugin to cut the feed to make people click over for functionality that doesn’t work properly in RSS.  For instance, my sites of Denver Bargains and Springs Bargains using a printable grocery shopping list feature that doesn’t work in RSS – you have to visit the site for it to work.  So, I’ve chosen to truncate my RSS feed after my intro paragraphs so that people aren’t frustrated by trying to use a feature that will never work in their RSS reader.

Using custom text to let users know about functionality that's not available in the RSS feed

I also truncate my RSS feed before giveaway entry forms.  Periodically, companies will sponsor giveaways on my sites and I use an entry form that I’ve designed in Gravity Forms to accept entries.  I publish the post in full in RSS until you get to the entry form, and then manually truncate the feed using the RSS No More shortcode [rss-cut]  to require that people click over to complete the form to enter the giveaway, which solves a whole host of problems.

If you have a particular functionality that you want people to click over to the site for, you can customize your link at the bottom of the RSS feed to say something like “Click here to continue reading this post and create your printable shopping list!” so that they understand that there’s a very specific reason they need to click over.

Partial feeds can be used wisely

Partial feeds don’t have to be annoying.  They can engage readers rather than turning them off if you understand why people are usually turned off by partial RSS feeds.

A few minutes of setup with the RSS No More plugin (or a similar one, if you can find it – though I’ve been unsuccessful at finding any other options) and you’re on your way to preventing content theft or driving RSS readers to your site without frustrating anyone!

My Homeschool Education: A Homeschooled Homeschooler

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Well, I’m now a homeschooled homeschooler.  Somewhat of a “pioneer”, I think: mine seems to be one of the first generations of those who were homeschooled who are educating their own children at home.

I never really thought about it much until we started getting closer to the point of having school-aged children, but I really love that I was homeschooled.  It was all I knew at the time, and though I never disliked it or wished to do anything else, I didn’t realize what a unique opportunity I was given or how I would benefit from it later in life.  Now that I see the lessons I learned, specifically as a result of opportunities I had as a homeschooler, I’m becoming passionate about educating my own children at home.

I once thought that I primarily wanted to educate my children at home in order to teach them from the perspective that all truth comes from God.  The more I consider my own homeschool education, the more I realize that learning that all truth is God’s truth was a great benefit of being homeschooled, there are so many other “non-religious” reasons that I believe homeschooling is the best way to prepare my children to live in the uncertain world in which we live.

Here are some of the things that I feel were great benefits to being homeschooled, and benefits that I hope to be able to give to my own children.

An abundance of time

Our actual school day truly took very little time – perhaps three or four hours.  (If I was doing school after lunch, it seemed like pure torture.)

Because the actual bookwork took so little time, I had lots of time to be able to do other things: whether it be reading (I loved to read), creating items to sell at my parents’ craft fairs, building websites, working part-time jobs, or a host of other things.  I had time to develop skills and talents in areas that I was interested in – time that most other students spend in the classroom or doing homework.

I want my children to have plenty of time to devote to the things that interest them, to build their own creativity and develop their own dreams and ideas.

Lack of age segregation

Very little about our homeschool was segregated by age.  Even in activities with our homeschool group, we were divided into groups of elementary and high school, so I learned to interact with other kids of all ages.

Because I had opportunities to work in my parents’ business, I learned how to relate to adults.  I often played tennis with my grandpa, and we had a weekly lunch outing with my grandpa, so I was comfortable with the elderly.

I certainly generally preferred doing things with the people my own age, but because I was often in situations were there were a variety of ages, I learned how to respect those who were older and lead those who were younger – and learn from all ages!  I want my children to know how to act among people of all ages, just like they will need to for the rest of their adult lives.

Self-directed learning

As I’ve written about before, there wasn’t a lot of class time in our homeschool: my parents taught me how to teach myself.  They guided me along the way, and made sure that I was actually learning, but I primarily went through my schoolwork independently.

Just like everyone else, there were gaps in my education, but I have no doubt that should I ever need or desire to learn more about biology, I would be able to do that because my parents taught me how to seek out knowledge on my own.

In today’s constantly changing world, we can no longer be assured that the skills we learned in high school or college are the skills that we need to thrive twenty years from now.  I want my children to be equipped to know how to learn more about anything they desire, without having to take a class or be assigned a lesson.  I want them to be able to decide they want or need to learn something, and just do it.

Well, that’s my homeschool background.  It wasn’t perfect, but I firmly believe that my parents gave me the best education possible for me.  I can’t hope to perfectly educate my own children, but I can strive to equip them to be prepared for the rapidly changing world in which we live.

My Homeschool Education: My First Websites

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High school was busy for me.  Between teaching piano and working a waitressing job, I still helped out with my parents’ business, and was also very active in our church’s youth group.

There were organized homeschool sports in our city, but I never had a huge desire to spend four mornings a week at practice and three nights at week at games.  Our homeschool group had a volleyball class on Fridays, which was one of my favorite extracurricular activities.

During my senior year in high school, I took two classes at a community college: Introduction to Macromedia Flash and College Algebra With Review.  I didn’t learn much in either class, but I now have eight hours of college credit so I can now answer “some college” on surveys.  It was my first time being graded on a curve!

On a whim, I figured out how to create a website.  This was back in the early days of the internet, when most of us were on AOL. I used AOL’s website builder to build a site of my own with links to some of my favorite websites, and then I decided it would be fun to create a site for my church’s youth group.  Hello, black backgrounds and white text!

Around this time, I started chatting online (remember AIM?) with a friend from youth group – who later became my husband.  He was thinking of starting a web design business and wanted to know if I wanted to be his graphic designer.  It sounded like fun, and I happened to think he was a great guy, so we collaborated on a couple of sites.  I purchased Macromedia Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Flash, and taught myself how to use those programs.

September 11th happened, and somehow a friend (now my husband Jeremy) managed to purchase September11.net in the hour or two following the attack.  We created a site and updated it frequently for the next couple of months as new information was released about what had happened.

Social studies may not have been the strongest part of my homeschool education, this event and the work we put into researching what had happened was a crash course in current events.  It was not official part of my homeschool assignment in any way – it was just our response to what had happened.

I was thrilled when I discovered the site, which had long since been let go, has been archived in the Library of Congress’s September 11 Web Archive Collection.  It’s kind of cool to see something you did on a whim in high school be considered significant enough to be archived by the Library of Congress!

My Homeschool Education: A Real-World Job In The Restaurant Industry

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About halfway through my stint as a piano teacher, I began working as a server at a local restaurant.  As strange as it may seem, I really liked this job, and continued working there for over two years (a long time in the restaurant industry!).

Though there were always those people that never tipped, or tipped poorly, I found that serving was performance-based pay, and I was motivated to serve better so I could make more.

The restaurant that I worked at was a locally-owned chain that was, frankly, dying.  (I didn’t actually quit; the restaurant closed and I didn’t want to transfer to a new location.)  As a result, they kept as little staff as possible, so we were almost always busy.  We often served sections of five to ten tables at a time, and I learned a lot about multi-tasking!  The staff was usually limited to two or three servers, a manager, cook, and dishwasher.  We prepped our own salads, desserts, drinks; and bussed our own tables.

The restaurant had a lot of regulars, and I enjoyed building relationships with these mostly-older people.  Seniors tend to be very particular about their food – it must be the exact same way it’s been for the past thirty years – so learning their likes and dislikes and who was easygoing and whose order you did not want to mess up was a big part of making your shift go smoothly.

I never felt unsocialized or cut off from the real world during my homeschool education, but my life primarily revolved around church and homeschool activities, so working in the restaurant industry was an eye-opening experience.  There were an awful lot of words I’d never heard before, some of which might have been nice to know what they meant so I knew whether the remark was funny or nasty, but overall I’m glad I wasn’t constantly exposed to vulgarity growing up.

I was offered a manager position at one point, but knew I didn’t want to work the crazy schedule of a restaurant manager so I kept waitressing until the restaurant closed.  I certainly never had trouble communicating or getting along with my coworkers, and was well-respected by those I worked with.  They knew I was different, but that was primarily due to the fact that I was a Christian and acted like it – not really because I was homeschooled.

My Homeschool Education: Teaching Piano At 16

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Other than working in my parents’ craft business and doing odd jobs here and there, my first real job was teaching piano.  At the urging of my mom and piano-teacher sister, I began teaching on my own when I was a little older than sixteen.  The students I taught were mostly people that I knew from church, and many of them were referrals from my sister, whose own piano studio was full.

My piano studio grew to about ten students, and their ages ranged from kindergarten to junior high.  Most were homeschool students, but I had a couple of public school students as well.  My sister was my teaching mentor, and while I was teaching I had several opportunities to attend college classes and music teacher groups with her.

During my piano teaching stint, I learned a lot from my sister about teaching.  Rewards, incentives, deadlines, motivation, creativity, building relationships, letting relationships go, working with parents, enforcing policies…  The lessons I had the opportunity to learn at this time were huge for a high schooler.

Teaching piano was a fabulous opportunity for me, but it wasn’t a passion.  Perhaps the biggest lesson that I learned from teaching piano was this: in order to teach others, you have to have a passion for the subject yourself.  I enjoyed playing the piano, but didn’t have a passion for it.  There were parts about teaching piano that I enjoyed, but I didn’t have a burning desire to teach this particular subject.

After a year and a half, I held our final spring recital and quit teaching.  I had given my students a quality education, but couldn’t continue trying to motivate my students to do something that I wasn’t motivated to do.  I had learned a valuable lesson: in order to transfer passion, you must be passionate.  It’s something I’ve remembered for the rest of my life.