Does anyone else notice the issue here? She’s making the argument that homeschooled kids are normal while not being quite normal herself. I would flip the stats and say that about 80% of the homeschooled kids I’ve met are weird.

Also, she’s listing off “cool” people that were homeschooled, and names mostly historical figures instead of people we know that are alive today. Who knows if they were weird or awkward? Not me. Though I’ll bet Darwin was a weirdo. Plus, weren’t most people pre-1900 homeschooled in some form anyway? So using them as examples makes no sense.

I have a theory, though: the fact that homeschooled kids are weird usually (not always) has something to do with their parents, not the homeschooling itself. In other words, the kind of parents that prefer to homeschool are going to have weird kids whether or not they actually homeschool them, just by the environment they’re raised in.

There’s absolutely no way to prove that, of course. Just a theory.

Hey. Hey you. The one that gets up in arms when people say they need Internet on their phones. If you keep that up, in five years they’ll be the ones that appear smarter than you because their brain will be in their pocket when you left yours at the office.

Reading on the web is almost certainly affecting the way we process information, but it’s not making us stupid. Instead, it’s changing the way we’re smart. Rather than storehouses of in-depth information, the web is turning our brains into indexes. These days, it’s not what you know — it’s what you know you can access, and cross reference.

[Your brain is an index via Joshua Rothhaas]

Also, this is an appeal to change education systems that still test people on how well they can memorize crap. Yes, there are professions where that will still be useful, but what fourth-grader really needs to know the names of all her bones?

Ever have one of those moments where you feel like someone is writing about you? Just had one of those. Thank you, Leslie Jensen-Inman:

Most of the relevant folks in the industry today don’t have graduate-level degrees in web design or development. Why? Because web design and development programs didn’t exist when we came through school. Most of us stopped going to school as soon as we realized the schools weren’t teaching us anything relevant.

From the A List Apart article Elevate Web Design at the University Level

There still really isn’t a notable accredited web development program. It’s part computer science, part graphic design, with sprinklings of a hundred other things but never wholly one of them.

Most people I come across seem to come from a graphic design background and — in my experience, anyway — have to be untrained of bad habits they gained from the three web design classes they were taught in college from an art professor who read a couple HTML books.

I was just rereading my notes from Pastor Tim‘s sermon from Sunday, specifically the section where he was discussing what it looks like to be a people connected. The text we were looking at (Romans 12:9-18) spoke of the many ways in which we are to have love for one another: sincerity, devotion, sacrifice, humility. But the one that stuck with me was passion.

Passion is something I’ve been exploring in a big way lately. My passion for music is evident, but it wasn’t until the last few months that I began to wonder where my passion for music comes from. That’s a whole book in itself so I won’t go there. But, through all my wondering, I’ve begun to understand my faith in a new way.

Understanding one’s unique passion further solidifies the idea that God makes each of us as individuals, not as cookie-cutter images of people that came before us. To understand one’s passion is the foundation required for one to understand what God made him to be.

I see a widespread lack of passion in my generation, in the church and in the population as a whole. So many kids are getting caught in the go-to-college, get-a-job, start-a-family mentality — or, in the church’s case, kids feeling forced into some facet of full-time, part-time or “volunteer” ministry before they understand their own spiritual gifts — that they never have a time where they come to understand their passions. Especially in college, students must decide on a major, which dictates their course of study. Heaven help the students whose passions span multiple subjects or cover ground that no university will ever teach about. (Had I stuck with school and finished a degree in computer science, I’d probably not have had a chance to stop and wonder about any of this myself.)

I don’t know the solution to this issue, but it’s frustrating to see so many people living unfulfilled, passionless lives because they haven’t ever had the opportunity to explore their own passion.

Anyway, I’m ranting. Coming back to Tim’s message: If we cannot understand our own God-given passions, how can we ever hope to understand how to be passionate about the people we are supposed to be so closely connected with?